The Kites

by Romain Gary

It was all that disdainful superiority, hereditary as syphilis, of people who had possessed the privilege of disdain since birth.

Nothing is harder to vanquish than prejudice, and favorable prejudices are no less tenacious than the others.

That I had been taken as a readymade victim by Hans, with what credibility my humble origins might lend me the natural role of the guilty party, plunged me into a state of frustration and fury that, in history, has always caused the roles of the victim and executioner to flip back and forth on a metronome of hatred.

The presence of happiness was almost audible, as if hearing had broken with the superficialities of sound and finally penetrated the deepest parts of silence, which before had been hidden by solitude. Our moments of sleep had that kind of warmth where you cannot tell the dream from the body, the nest from the wings. I can still feel the imprint of her profile on my chest — perhaps invisible, but my fingers find it faithfully in the leaden hours of this physical error that is one body alone. My memory seized every instant, setting it aside. Where I come from we call that a nest egg; there was enough for me there to last a lifetime.

In his gaze was more pain than is really strictly necessary to make a man look like a man.

A kitchen with no fire is like a woman with no ass. Fire is our father, the father of all the chefs in France. But some of them are switching to electricity now, and with automatic timers, no less. That’s like making love and checking your watch to see when it’s time to climax.”

I rarely saw her without a pack of Gauloises in close reach, and without a cigarette dangling from one corner of her mouth — so much so that her face, in my memory, remains wreathed in smoke.

I was confused by this mix of courage and defeatism. I was also too young to understand such a will to survive.

I felt a rush of sympathy for this woman. Perhaps I was starting to sense that when people speak disdainfully of “whores” and “madams,” they’re locating human dignity in the ass, to make it easier to forget how low the rest of us can sink.

“A woman in whom there was a total absence of illusion, born no doubt of the long exercise of her profession.

Don’t worry. You’ll see her again.” “How can you know, Madame Julie?” She hesitated, as if she didn’t want to hurt me. “It would be too beautiful, if you didn’t see her again. It would stay whole. Things rarely stay whole in this life.”

“Let’s just say you’ve got what it takes. When a guy knows how to love like you do — to love a woman who’s not there anymore — then chances are you know how to love other things, too … other things that won’t be there anymore either, when the Nazis start in on them.”

“Good, Ludo. Germany won the war. The whole country’s about to be overrun by good sense, prudence, and reason. You’d have to be nuts to keep on hoping and believing. To me, this means only one thing.” He looked at me. “We’ll have to be nuts.”

I didn’t yet know that other Frenchmen were beginning to live as I did, from memory, and that what wasn’t there and seemed to have disappeared forever might remain alive, and present, with so much force.

I tenderly loved these flashes of gaiety in his gaze, the hint of a wry smile behind his gray mustache: an old gaiety that emerges from the furthest reaches of our past, brushing lightly over a face in passing as it makes its way into the future.

One fine morning — I still say “one fine morning” because words have their own habits, and the presence of a few German tanks shouldn’t make them change — one fine morning, then,

He truly loved her and, in helping me, was coming to the aid of the very thing that gave meaning to his own life. I could detect the signs of his devotion to remembrance in his haughty air, in the supercilious glance he cast over the faces of my accusers: it wasn’t me he had come to defend, it was our shared memory.

Johnny Cailleux was as blond as if he’d been rubbed from head to toe with a sheaf of wheat,

The country was beginning to change. The presence of the invisible grew steadily. People who seemed “reasonable” and “sane” risked their lives to hide English aviators who had been shot down and Free French agents who had parachuted in from London. “Sensible” men — bourgeoisie, working class, farmers, people it was hard to claim were pursuing the blue yonder — printed and distributed papers in which they spoke of “immortality,” a word they employed frequently, despite the fact that they were always the first to die.

“How much more time, Ludo?” “I don’t know. There’s always that old saying, ‘We’re living off hope,’ but I’m starting to think hope is the one living off us.”

Waking up is our best time: a warm bed is always a little bit of a wife.

think it was on that day that I understood Marcellin Duprat’s desperation and furor, but also his faith: that very Norman mix of flair and hidden fire, the fire he had once told me was “everyone’s common ancestor.”

Sénéchal was seated on the bed, caressing his spaniel. He was a big blond guy. I always try to remember, to bring it back to life — the hair color, if nothing else, of this man of whom, a few months later, nothing would remain.

intransigent

childhood. He would tell me that in his youth he’d dreamed of becoming a novelist, then he’d add that the only work of imagination he had ever successfully produced was his wife. Madame Pinder would laugh, roll her eyes heavenward, and fill our cups. There are some older women who in a single gesture, a laugh, become young girls again.

“Nothing is worth the experience if it isn’t a work of imagination above all things — or the sea would be nothing but a lot of salt water … Take me, for example, for fifty years I’ve never once stopped inventing my wife. I haven’t even let her age. She must be riddled with faults I’ve turned into qualities. And in her eyes, I’m an extraordinary man. She’s never stopped inventing me, either. In fifty years of living together, you really learn not to see each other, to invent and reinvent each other with every passing day. You do always have to take things as they are, of course. But only because that’s how you grab onto them to drag them into the light. That’s all civilization is, really — continuously dragging things as they are into the light …”

Unbeliever that I was, I thought of God frequently — now, more than ever, it was a time when man needed to keep all his most beautiful creations around him.

The inhumanity of it is what makes Nazism so horrible — that’s what people always say. Sure. But there’s no denying the obvious: part of being human is the inhumanity of it. As long as we refuse to admit that inhumanity is completely human, we’ll just be telling ourselves pious lies.”

I was calm. I was, with millions of other men, crossing over on a path along which each of us would gather up his own supply of sorrow.

it seemed to me that we were indissolubly linked by what made us different from one another, which could be upturned at any moment to make us cruelly similar.

But dreamers have a kind of ill repute; there’s an everlasting and organic link between dreaming and rebellion.

The Nazis were human beings. And the thing that was human in them was their inhumanity.

Le Chambon-sur-Lignon was a village where, under the leadership of Pastor André Trocmé and his wife Magda, and with the help of the entire population, several hundred Jewish children were saved from deportation. For four years, all of life in Chambon revolved around that task. I’ll write once more those names of great faith: Le Chambon-sur-Lignon and its inhabitants. And today, if any forgetting about this subject has taken place, let it be known that we, the Fleurys, have always been prodigious rememberers. They say exercise is good for the heart, so I recite their names often, without forgetting a single one.

He rose. I knew I was seeing him for the last time. And that I would never forget the light playing around the face of my “enemy.” Cursed memory. It was one of spring’s most beautiful days, with a serenity and warmth that transformed nature into a foreign power.

What counted was the act of faith. There is no other key to survival.

“But that’s exactly what it is. When things explode, there’s always fallout. They even say that’s how the universe was made: an explosion, and then fallout. Galaxies, the solar system, the earth, you, me, the chicken soup with vegetables that must be ready right about now. Come on. Let’s eat.”

The only question was whether, after all that I had seen and experienced, I might be lacking in inspiration. A kite requires a great deal of innocence.

The embassy of the new Polish People’s Republic could give us no information concerning Tad. We never got any. To us, he is still alive, and still fighting in the Resistance.

He hadn’t changed. He hadn’t aged. His mustache was as long and thick as ever, and his eye just as solemn in its gaiety. There isn’t a thing they can do about that. I don’t know what I mean by “they.” The Nazis, maybe. Or simply anyone.

translation is the most intense form of reading there is; it gives you an intimacy with the text unmatched by any other form of reading, an intimacy you are loath to leave behind.