Simply his father’s affirmation when he had set off one fine morning to declare his birth to an employee at the registry office? Did it all really lead on from there? And if on that fateful day his father had been too happy and too busy celebrating the child’s arrival, would that child exist today? They say no one slips through the net but do the rare exceptions come out and show themselves?
He had not been born to unknown parents in some distant country where the archives could have been burned in a civil war. He really was Thierry Blin, he had an identity card, a passport, a voting card, a private health plan and account books, taxes to pay and an official partner. What could he do to retrace his steps, to shout out loud that there never had been this Thierry Blin that everything referred to? Cross it out? Strike it off? Burn it up? Go back to the registry office in Juvisy and rip the relevant page from the great founding document? Even if that were possible, it would not be enough. He would have to find definitive ways of shrugging off Thierry Blin.
With one eye on Nadine as she grappled with her wardrobe, he lay down on the sofa with a calendar of saints’ days in his hand.
“You made fun of me when I bought that thing,” she said, amused.
As he ran through the names of all the saints on each successive day of the calendar, he made instant, unconscious and instinctive summaries of the thousand connotations, reverberations, references and prejudices attributed to each of them. It was a pleasing exercise and the choices imposed themselves. By the end he had ticked:
Alain, Antoine, François, Frédéric, Julien, Jean, Paul and Pierre.
He liked plain, elegant names, the ones that had always been there but were not given to everyone. By the same token, he felt a certain admiration for those who bore them. Discreet, well-bred people who had the delicate task of being the umpteenth variation on the theme of Pierre or Paul. The man he would be from now on could very well be called Pierre or Paul. He liked the hint of ruggedness in Pierre, the fact that it was the word for a stone counterbalanced its biblical resonance. Blin would have loved to have been spoken to with a: “What do you think of it, Pierre?”
Or to have been told: “Oh, Pierre, you’ll always know how to please me.”
No one had ever told him: “Oh, Thierry, you’ll always know how to please me.”
If he had been called Paul for forty years, he was in absolutely no doubt that his trajectory would have been different. Perhaps he would have painted pictures instead of framing them, who knows? A Paul was bound to have an artist’s soul, or perhaps even the stuff of an international spy. On the women front, his whole life would have been littered with Take me wherever you want, Paul or Paul, do that thing again in the small of my back! The tall blonde at the tennis court would unquestionably dream of coming across a Paul in her life.
He could not explain it to himself, but Blin felt he was becoming a Paul. He must have been famous as a Paul in a previous life, perhaps he had even been the apostle in person. In a few minutes Paul had definitely won over Pierre.
“Two more minutes, and I’ll be ready!”
He put the calendar down and, pen in hand, stretched out his arm to reach the telephone directory without getting up from the sofa.
What surname was perfect for a Paul? After running through whole columns of names, he realized that Paul went with everything. Nagel, Lesage, Brunel, Rollin, Siry, Viallat, the list was endless. Paul was no longer a criterion for selection, which made the choice even more dizzying. Blin no longer knew how to proceed and very soon felt out of his depth. He tried to cling to a few principles which he felt were rational, to help him move forward. Prerequisite number one: the name must have a minimum of two syllables, ideally three, to put paid once and for all to this scarcely audible Blin which had been belittling him since his childhood. Besides, Paul called for a longer name with a slightly Nordic but still gentle ring to it, something undulating and peaceful. Prerequisite number two: the first letter had to fall between R and Z. A belated revenge but a just one. All his life he had been one of the first on the register, every teacher’s designated victim, the first to be given chores, the volunteer who does not even have to step forward. Blin, to the blackboard! How often he had loathed that capital B! The time had come for him to be at the bottom of the list, safe and warm. He leafed through a few pages of the directory again, waiting for a miracle which did not come, then, still lying on the sofa, he cast an eye over the bookshelves. In amongst those dozens of books, those encyclopedias and the heaps of reference works he no longer consulted, there must have been, squeezed somewhere between two pages, a Nordic sounding name with three syllables which began with U, V or even W – or why not Z? He intuitively made for his dictionary of Flemish painters, opened the last third of the book, and quietly pronounced names that had always struck him as elegant while still familiar. Rembrandt, Rubens, Ruysdael, Van der Weyden, Van Eyck, ending up with the most prestigious of all, a name which on its own conjured harmony itself: Vermeer.
No one was called Vermeer, but it was a good starting point. He set about making variations on the name by distorting it, combining it with different suffixes and trying to find a different ring to it. At last it became self-evident.
From now on he would be called Paul Vermeiren.
Nadine was ready, pretty, perfumed, smiling. Thierry displayed unfailing gallantry that evening. During dinner he was both eloquent and discreet, attentive to each person at the table. On the way home, Nadine watched him driving, touched by just seeing him there, reassured because he was beside her. She could even see herself, one day, as Madame Thierry Blin.
She could not possibly have imagined that she had just spent the evening with Paul Vermeiren.
Nicolas Gredzinski
God knows, Gredzinski knew a bit about worrying. His anxieties could be sneaking, hesitant or conspicuous, he had experienced them all and could even name them when he felt them first prickling in his entrails. This morning’s was of unknown origin and it stopped and questioned his every move. It was accompanied by disturbances which, in this instance, he must have been the only person not to recognize: a dry mouth, a vice over his skull and general tiredness. He identified them by cross-checking: a hangover. Nicolas lacked the inner strength to survive such bleakness; the first drinking binge of his life would be the last. He had never needed any help reaching such a shadowy place, his natural pessimism directed him there anyway: for him, coming back to life every morning was like a piece of bad news he eventually had to accept, but a hangover turned it into a sentence with no chance of an appeal.
The two aspirins he took as soon as he got up refused to take effect; he was going to have to put up with it. On the way to work, he closed his eyes for a moment to locate the nerve centre of this migraine which had stopped him feeling himself since the moment he woke up. He identified an area between the left lobe and the sinciput, perhaps the very seat of guilt, the place where all moral decisions – and, therefore, all punishments – originated. How could he know if this really was a punishment? Had he asked too much of a body ill-prepared for so much liquid corrosive? Doctors would tell him that you should not drink more vodka in one evening than you have drunk in an entire lifetime, but they would also say that we are not all equal in the face of human vices. Some live for nothing else, others die from not having experienced any. Nicolas still did not know which wood he was carved from.
At the time when his neurons usually went into fibrillation at the thought of a coffee, he would have given anything for a bit of sparkling water. Water, cold and bubbly. He intuitively felt that this combination of three elements represented the only means of battling this unbearable chemistry of remorse. As he walked into the atrium of the Parena Group, he stopped briefly at the coffee shop to buy a tin of iced Perrier before taking the lift. With his eyes half closed he said hello to Muriel, the switchboard operator on the fifth floor, and went to take refuge in his office. He drank his can down in one and gave an animal groan; the chill of the water dispelled t
he horrible feeling that his tongue had swollen and stuck to the roof of his mouth.
Still nowhere near over the worst of it, he opened a couple of letters, leafed through one of the reviews his department subscribed to, picked up the Vila file which he had been trying to finish for the last three days, and closed it again just as quickly. Nothing could take his mind off a dull ache which made him more than usually pessimistic about the future of the planet and his own future in particular. He crossed his arms on his desk, rested his head on them, closed his eyes and saw himself, the previous evening, onto his umpteenth vodka, ready to take on the world; the image struck him as so unbelievable, so excessive that he thought he would never be able to file it alongside his own memories.
*
On that wretched day, as he stood with his tray on the rack at the self-service canteen, he surprised himself by replying, “I don’t know” to the question “Basquaise chicken or shepherd’s pie?” He tried but failed to allay the suspicions of the other people at his table. None of them tried to find out more, and they each talked about what they had watched on television the night before. Then they moved on to the coffee dispenser, where Gredzinski took a last-chance double espresso before going back up to his office.
The building site he could see from his office – destined for the Group’s Telecommunications department – was coming on extraordinarily quickly. Parena was consolidating its position from month to month, gaining ground and driving out others in every sector with a ferocity cited as an example in business schools. Nicolas spent half his life at 7 Allée des Muraux in Boulogne-sur-Seine, a quaint address which disguised an empire on the banks of the Seine. Three buildings: an oval one which housed the Environment department and the administrative offices, another one which contained the Electronics department, and a more modest one for Communications, to whom Nicolas was answerable. On the tree-lined esplanade in the middle of these three glass buildings there was a café, the Nemrod, a mini-market and a newsagent. A huge footbridge ran over the Paris ring-road, providing a link for most of the personnel to get to the RER train station. With Distribution and Waterways, Advertising, Cable, Satellite, Energy, Computing and now Telecommunications, the Group’s Paris offices had 3,200 employees, including one small, depressed man who had done nothing to deserve all this. Magda came into his office to ask him for his holiday dates. Caught unprepared, Nicolas said he would have to wait for his manager to get back. Nicolas’s holidays depended, as they did every year, on when Bardane took his, and he was a man who liked to decide at the last minute: one of the privileges of being a client manager.
“Can’t you ring him?”
“If I disturb him just to talk about holidays, he’s going to think I’m an idiot. He’s with a client in Avignon.”
In Gordes to be more precise, in a friend’s magnificent country house: the official opening of the swimming pool. Bardane had left with a day’s notice, leaving his assistant with only a fraction of the necessary information on the Vila file. Just a slip of the mind or a deliberate withholding of the facts – Nicolas did not try to understand. For three years he had been playing his part as the interface between Bardane and the team of graphic designers, rereading contracts, checking mock-ups, overseeing projects, giving quotes and so on.
“Come back tomorrow morning, Magda, he’ll be back. He’s got a management meeting at 4 o’clock.”
“Where are you planning to go this summer?”
“If I get a couple of weeks in August, I think I’ll accept an invitation from some friends who’re taking a house in the Pyrenees.”
“Like last year?”
Magda had a good memory, and he commented on it. The minute she had left, Gredzinski closed his eyes tight shut to try to make out the little monsters which had been fluttering in his head since the morning. They were tiny nebulous things, but very real, very noisy and very determined to take a hold. He was woken by the telephone ringing.
“Monsieur Gredzinski? I’ve got a Jacques Barataud asking to speak to you.”
“Jacques who . . .?”
“Barataud. It’s personal.”
“Thank you, Muriel. Put him through.”
Nicolas recognized Jacot and was annoyed with himself for being caught out like that. How could he have forgotten his name was Jacques Barataud?
“How are you, Gred?”
The question was well meant, the reply impossible. How could you talk about a headache to a man with cancer? Jacot had nothing in particular to say, he was only calling to talk about it.
A few months earlier, Jacques Barataud, barrister-at-law in Paris, had had enough natural authority to reassure his clients and unsettle his adversaries. He had plucked Nicolas from the clutches of injustice in a civil responsibility case which was trying him unfairly. The scene had unfurled like a gag in a film, but no one had laughed: Nicolas is riding his bicycle along a dirt track and comes out on to a small road, taking every necessary precaution. A car comes along travelling very fast, overtakes him and, being extra cautious, gives a slight swerve, which frightens a family of cyclists pedalling in the other direction. The eldest son brakes sharply, his little brother knocks into him and falls, head first, into the ditch. The car is already far away by the time the panicking parents have intercepted Nicolas and called the police, their insurance company and their lawyer. This worthy collection of people work their way back along the chain of guilt and, for want of anyone better, all eyes turn to Nicolas Gredzinski himself.
It marked the beginning of a Kafkaesque period which his fragile nerves could have done without. The child had a big bump on his head, but the parents dramatized the event to the point of claiming exorbitant damages. As the scapegoat for the whole thing, Nicolas was caught up in the machine. No one thought to question his “terrible mistake”, and he saw the gates of hell opening before him, the gates of prison in this instance. He did not know any lawyers but remembered a school friend he had bumped into by chance many years later: Barataud. He was summoned to the county court, the trial took place a year later, and Barataud succeeded in incriminating the driver and the older brother’s overreaction, which had caused the boy to fall. The nightmare came to an end for Nicolas. In that year his anxiety had gained a little more ground every day, to the point of taking priority over everything else, over life itself; a depression which dared not speak its name. Barataud, who had become Jacot, had known just when he was needed; his words had the power to calm a mechanism of anxiety which could be set in motion at any time, especially at night.
“Jacot? Did I wake you? I know it’s late but . . . Do you think I’m going to go to prison?”
“. . . No, Nicolas. You won’t go to prison.”
“I can hear it in your voice, you really want to reassure me but you don’t believe a word of it.”
“It’s the voice of a man who’s been woken at three in the morning.”
“Well, will I or won’t I?”
“No. It wouldn’t be possible, not in a case like this one.”
“And what if the judge is some man whose son was a victim in a car crash? He’d want to take his revenge out on me.”
A baffled silence from Barataud.
“You’re not saying anything any more . . . You hadn’t thought of something like that.”
“No, I hadn’t thought of something like that. But that doesn’t change anything. You won’t go to prison. Even if you get the maximum anticipated sentence, you won’t go. Do you trust me on this?”
“. . . Yes.”
“I’ve got to hang up. I’m in court tomorrow.”
“Jacot! One last question: are there different kinds of prison?”
Now, however indebted Nicolas felt, he was terrified at the thought of talking about it. He knew neither how to reassure with words nor how to listen intelligently. Behind his silences, you could feel the discomfort, sometimes panic.
“I had some results yesterday. The leucocytes are good, the haemoglobin’s good, it’s the platelets.�
�
“. . . Really?”
“They’ve been going down since the beginning of the treatment, there’s a risk of haemorrhaging, they’re going to give me a transfusion.”
Silence.
“I was meant to be going to the country for a couple of days to recover from the chemo, but I think I’m going to stay. Are you here this weekend?”
“I don’t know yet.”
“If you’re free, shall we go for a coffee?”
“I’ll give you a buzz.”
The hangover was lingering, and this surge of cowardice at the end of the day did nothing to help. Instead of making the most of the balmy June evening, Gredzinski left his office with the firm intention of getting to bed before nightfall. Once outside, he took a deep breath to drive out the miasma of air conditioning, and headed for the footbridge to the left of the esplanade. On the terrace of the Nemrod, José, Régine, Arnaud, Cendrine and Marcheschi invited him to join them for an aperitif. This daily drink had become a relaxing ritual: the place had a happy hour – two glasses for the price of one between 6 and 8pm – and the members of this ultra-select little club, to which Nicolas belonged, were no longer doing any recruiting, as if the perfect balance had been established.
“You must have five minutes to spare, haven’t you?”
Nicolas felt that he ought to resist and leant towards José’s ear.
“I had a bit to drink yesterday and I’ve been paying for it all day. I’m going home.”
“That’s the worst thing to do! You need the hair of the dog! Sit down.”
Nicolas Gredzinski had never learned to say no; it was one of the numerous perverse effects of his anxiety.
“What did you drink yesterday?”
. . . What had he drunk, the day before, to put him in such a state?
Someone Else Page 4