The Incorrigible Optimists Club

  ‘I will not apologize. It’s the absolute truth.’

  ‘You will take back what you have just said or you will leave!’

  Franck stood up, his chicken thigh in his hand. My father made a final attempt: ‘All right, let’s calm down Listen, Hélène, there’s no point in getting angry. If he doesn’t wish to go to this opening, it’s his bad luck, he won’t have any champagne.’

  ‘I’ve no intention of feeding a viper. You will apologize immediately!’

  Franck hurled the chicken thigh across the kitchen.

  ‘You won’t be seeing me again in a hurry!’

  He rushed off to his bedroom and filled a bag with clothing. He left, slamming the door behind him. We tried to come to terms with what had just happened. At moments of tension, one has to learn to keep one’s mouth shut. The first person to speak has lost. My father grumbled: ‘You shouldn’t have said that to him!’

  She exploded. It was my father who took the brunt of it. The neighbours heard everything. That he had gone badly wrong, that we were now paying the price for his poor education and the Marinis’ political views. Say what you will, but you would never hear a child speak to his mother in that tone at the Delaunays, and his father just sit there like a vegetable, without reacting. Then an unusual thing happened. Instead of grinning and bearing it, and waiting for the storm to pass, my father beat his fist on the table. So hard that the Baccarat crystal vase fell over. The water spilled on to the wooden floor. No one dreamed of intervening.

  ‘Shut up!’ he yelled. ‘You’ve driven your son out! Are you satisfied?’

  ‘Don’t worry, he’ll be back.’

  ‘Idiot!’

  My mother remained speechless and so did we. My father returned to the bathroom. He did not sing.

  One hour later, we were all together again in the entrance hall. My father had put on his best suit, made of black alpaca, and had sprayed himself with cologne. Juliette was waiting, sitting beside him on the sofa in the corridor, swinging her feet. She was holding my father’s hand. I joined them. They pushed up to make space for me. I took his other hand. My mother arrived in her Chanel suit. She walked past us without a glance. We stood up.

  ‘We’re late,’ my father remarked in a neutral voice.

  We didn’t look as though we were going to the opening of our new shop, but to our own funeral. We were out on the landing when the telephone rang. My father rushed to take the call. We thought it was Franck. He held out the receiver to me.

  ‘It’s for you.’

  It was Cécile. Her voice was hoarse.

  ‘Michel, I beg you. Come!’

  ‘What is it?’ I shouted.

  ‘Come, I’m going to die!’

  She didn’t need to tell me twice. I shot off down the stairs. I could hear my mother cry out: ‘Where’s he going?’

  I ran like a lunatic. I jostled those who didn’t get of the way quickly enough. I hurtled down boulevard Saint-Michel without stopping. I reached quai des Grands-Augustins. I bounded up the stairs three at a time. On the landing, my lungs were ready to burst. I rang and hammered at the door as I recovered my breath. No one answered. I opened the door with my key. The lights were on in all the rooms. I began to call out her name as I made my way around the vast apartment. I found Cécile on the bathroom floor, unconscious. I yelled, I shouted her name. There was no reaction. She looked pale. I shook her vigorously. She was as limp as a rag doll. I put my ear to her heart. It was scarcely beating. I was bewildered. I was expecting her to stir, to stand up. She lay there unconscious. My legs were trembling. A voice inside me said: You little bugger, this is no time to panic. I rang the emergency services. A man asked me for the address and told me that they were on their way. They were the longest twenty minutes of my life. I placed a flannel rinsed in cold water on Cécile’s forehead. I kissed her hand. I stroked her face. I murmured a prayer in her ear: Don’t go, Cécile, stay with me, I beg you. I pressed myself to her. I took her in my arms, hugging her as tightly as I could, to keep her, to stop her from going under. I cradled her like a child. It was then that I saw the small bottle that had rolled under the washbasin. The ambulancemen arrived and put an oxygen mask on her. I gave them the bottle. They rummaged through the medicine cupboard, which was crammed with boxes of pills. The older of the ambulancemen asked me whether she was ill. I wanted to say no to him, but I couldn’t speak. They gave her an injection. He took out a plastic bag and emptied the contents of the cupboard into it. They carried her downstairs on a stretcher. We crossed Paris at a crazy speed. The siren was making a deafening noise. I sat up front, and through the window I could see Cécile, who was swaying about, held in place by two ambulancemen. At the Cochin Hospital, she was taken to casualty. A young doctor in a white coat, accompanied by a nurse, came to ask me questions. I was not able to tell them anything useful apart from the fact that I was a friend and that she had telephoned me. If I understood correctly, she possessed loads of medicines at home that she shouldn’t have had. I stayed sitting at the entrance to the casualty department. The ambulancemen and the police deposited their sad cargo of dying or wounded people covered in blood, before setting off again in a constant shuttling to and fro. A nurse gave me a hospital admission form to fill in. There was a mass of information required that I couldn’t supply. A man brought in a woman who was screaming, her stomach streaming with blood. From what I heard, she had tried to perform her own abortion. I closed my eyes.

  Down an endless dark corridor, I set off in search of Cécile. I pushed open the doors. The hospital rooms were empty. In some of them there were smears of blood on the walls. Loud cries of pain guided me along this deserted labyrinth of corridors and staircases and ceased the moment I stopped to work out where they were coming from. A vile smell overwhelmed me. I was horrified to discover that my hands were covered in shit. All of a sudden, a dazed-looking man passed close to me, without seeing me, his arm torn from his shoulder. Cécile was yelling and calling for me. I could not find her. At the far end, I noticed the green light of an emergency exit. I rushed down it so as to get away. But the more I ran, the more the light withdrew. I could hear Cécile’s cries and I turned my back on them. I arrived at the emergency exit. I pushed open the door to get away. An enormous hand grabbed me by the shoulder and shook me. I jumped and came to my senses, numb with sleep. The young doctor peered at me, with one eyebrow raised.

  ‘Monsieur, Monsieur… Your friend has pulled through. For the time being.’

  ‘Is there a problem?’

  ‘She had taken enough pills to put an elephant to sleep. We’ve given her an enema. We’ll see when she wakes up.’

  ‘Are there any complications?’

  ‘She’s as well as she can be.’

  ‘May I see her?’

  ‘No. She’s sleeping. Come back tomorrow.’

  ‘I won’t leave without seeing her.’

  The doctor let out a long sigh to let me know that I belonged to the category of bloody nuisances. He turned and walked away without a word. He held open the swing-door for me. Cécile was in a ward with five other patients. An old woman was tossing about deliriously on the next bed. Cécile was asleep, her breathing regular, her expression calm. Her right arm was connected to a drip.

  ‘What time will she wake up?’

  ‘In the late morning.’

  I got home at four in the morning. I rang the bell and the door opened immediately. My father took me in his arms.

  ‘Are you all right, son?’

  My mother pestered me with questions. Where had I come from? What had I been doing? Did I realize how worried she had been? What had she done to the Good Lord to deserve such sons? My father told her to be quiet and leave me alone. She went on like a machine. Why had I left? Was I with Franck? With Cécile? Why had she phoned me? What had happened? I told her in a calm voice: ‘Nothing has happened.’

  I went to my bedroom. I closed the door. They were behind it, listening out for every move and sound that I made.
I heard them walk away. I wasn’t sleepy. I remained sitting on my bed with Néron pressed against me.

  It had been one of those bleak and bitter days when your life topples over into absurdity, when it runs away from you like sand through a fist. A bit like my parents’ disastrous wedding day when they heard that Uncle Daniel had died. This day had been just as gloomy, not merely on account of the ruined opening and Cécile’s suicide attempt, but because of the quarrel between my mother and Franck. Nobody had really taken much notice of it to begin with, my disappearance having distracted them from their row. Even though it had been the worst altercation ever, they thought that it would all calm down. It had been a ridiculous argument of the kind that occurs in every family: a bit of tension, irritation, tiredness, raised voices, an unpleasant remark, unpardonable words which one doesn’t really mean and then the great reconciliation scene in Act III. But my mother and Franck are very intense characters, neither of them prepared to make concessions. They did not see or speak to one another for twenty-five years. During that lost life, they must have thought about that day and asked themselves how and why things had reached such a point and whether it was worth bearing such a huge grudge on account of trivialities, things you’ve said that you eventually can’t even remember. Our memory is made in such a way that it wipes out unhappy recollections and only preserves the best of them. Twenty years later, while chatting to my father, he asked me what the cause of the argument had been because he had forgotten. I had to make an effort to remember. Had they known, they would have patched things up, but no one is capable of predicting the future. We live from day to day. Our expectations, our best-laid plans turn out to be pathetic and vague. My mother’s little schemes proved to be disastrous. This opening, which should have been a day of celebration and hope for our family, turned out to be one when the fine building began to show cracks.

  17

  Igor Markish had lived in France for the past seven years. He had left Leningrad in circumstances that he refused to describe. Like the others, it appears to have been for political reasons. When I raised the subject, he put on a distant smile. Along with Werner Toller, he was one of the founders of the Club. The two of them provided an information service on administrative matters. The members of the Club had just one purpose in mind: to have their papers, not to be arrested during a straightforward identification check, not to be deported, to be able to lay down their bags at last, leave the past behind them, begin a new life again, and to work. To be in order, that was their obsession. Only those who have been in an illegal situation can understand the permanent anxiety of the refugee who, after having saved his own skin, has to do battle with this mysterious adversary: the clerk of the Préfecture. The members often discussed their respective authorities in order to find out which was the most fussy, unpredictable and nightmarish. Each of them passionately promoted his own country as deserving the unenviable title of the most foolish administration in the world. They told quite incredible stories about what they had witnessed or suffered: having to prove that you were not dead or that you were not related to someone of the same name who was a traitor to his country, or that you were not guilty of innumerable charges was endless. A Czech would recount an unbelievable case that earned him first prize until a Pole or a Hungarian stole it from him. In the end they decided that the Russian administration was the worst of all.

  Leonid Krivoshein, in the most solemn voice imaginable, told of an incident that happened to him: ‘I found myself in a cell with two other Russians who did not understand the reason for their arrest. “I arrived five minutes late,” said a fellow from Kiev, “I was accused of sabotage.” “I was five minutes early,” explained a man who came from Novgorod, “I was accused of spying.” “I arrived on time,” Leonid asserted, “and I was accused of buying my watch in the West.”’

  We burst out laughing. Leonid swore that it was not a joke, but a true story. As proof, he showed us his watch, a Lip Président with a magnifying glass case, which he had been given during a stopover in Paris when he was flying the Moscow–London route. De Gaulle and Eisenhower wore the same one. He looked upset that we didn’t believe him. That was part of the game. Leonid never stopped joking. You could never tell with him when he was telling the truth.

  ‘You’re making fun of us,’ Tibor asserted. ‘You’ve never been arrested in your life. I don’t know whether you’re an utter liar or an utter dimwit.’

  Leonid stopped laughing, drained his glass and stared at Tibor, his eyes gleaming.

  ‘If you ever say that word again, I’ll kill you. I promise you. I’ll strangle you with these hands. Believe me, I won’t be playing games.’

  The Palme d’or for exceptional absurdity had been attributed by this jury of connoisseurs to Tomasz Zagielovski, who had been a reporter on a mass circulation national paper and who held the enviable title of victim (first class) of the Polish authorities. He had been summoned to his local town hall, in the Warsaw suburbs. A woman civil servant had asked him suspiciously who he was. When he had refused to identify himself, she had treated him as an impostor. It turned out the real Tomasz Zagielovski had been held for three months in the Bialoleka, the State prison. Tomasz realized the police had mistakenly arrested instead of him an unfortunate fellow who had protested his innocence in vain, and who had claimed his name was Piotr Levinsky. There had, in actual fact, been a terrible misunderstanding: this Levinsky was a good communist. Tomasz thought he was finished and was expecting to be arrested when the civil servant, who was not immune to his charms (he had been told to behave as though he were irresistible to women), had revealed to him that Zagielovski had eventually confessed his errors and had been sentenced to ten years in prison for treason! Tomasz got away with it by telling her that he was the real Piotr Levinsky. Occasionally, he went by the name of Tomasz Zagielovski. He lived at the latter’s home, being his wife’s lover. The civil servant had slight doubts, but Tomasz’s case was black and white: ‘If I were Tomasz Zagielovski, do you think I would have risked coming here, knowing that I was guilty of treason? Look at me, do I look like the sort of idiot who would throw himself into the lion’s jaws?’

  She could say nothing in the face of such irrefutable logic. He would even prove it to her by going home to search for his papers. The civil servant had allowed him to leave. He took the opportunity to flee immediately, with just the clothes on his back. As soon as he arrived in France, Tomasz had written to the Polish authorities to point out the mistake. He did not know what repercussions his letter had had, and the members of the Club were certain that his initiative had been pointless.

  The authorities hate to admit their errors and to lose face. And as Jan Paczkowski, a former Warsaw lawyer, had observed, when a sentence had been pronounced there was no second chance, it was irreversible, especially in a communist country. This story sent a chill up my spine. I imagined the wretched Piotr Levinsky, who had not merely been convicted for his errors, but had had his name taken away from him. I could not understand why he had confessed to another’s offences. Igor had explained to me: ‘For us, a suspicion is a certainty. It’s the underlying basis of the system. You’re guilty because they suspect you. This Piotr had something to feel guilty about.’

  ‘He was innocent!’

  ‘That’s not enough. We would have needed a bit of luck as well. It’s what we’d been lacking. Piotr didn’t have any luck either.’

  After his epic flight from Poland, Tomasz had found work as a salesman in a clothes shop on the Champs-Elysées where he made a good living. A fine-looking man, who dressed elegantly, and an inveterate charmer, he spent his Sundays in the dance clubs in rue de Lappe and he never failed to tell us of his conquests, even though we never saw him with anyone.

  By common consent, the French authorities were a model of clarity and simplicity compared to the Eastern-bloc countries. But woe betide anyone who encountered a wily enemy lurking in the shadow of the administrative woods: the communist clerk who loathed the traitor de
nigrating the USSR and its brother countries, the land of happy workers.

  The supreme objective, the key, was to obtain political refugee status. Logically, it should have been the simplest document to obtain, given that you came, as they did, from the other side of the iron curtain. But there was an unforeseen obstacle and one that it was impossible to overlook: the appalling Patrick Rousseau, the unctuous head of the bureau that worked on behalf of the political refugee. His warm smile and apparent compassion were deceptive; weapons deployed in order to destroy you more effectively. Vladimir had come across him reading L’Humanité at the bar of a local café and, taken aback, Rousseau had told him that the only political refugees worthy of that name came from Spain or Portugal, where fascist dictators were in power. This pervert took it upon himself to block or reject the files from Eastern Europe ‘whose delinquents and outcasts were dumped on us’, as he described it. There was always a paper or a rubber stamp or a certificate missing and when, after twenty attempts, you thought the file was completed, a document was lost or no longer valid, and you had to begin over again. Rousseau had even succeeded in causing the calm and phlegmatic Pavel Cibulka, who would have strangled him had Igor not been with him, to lose his temper. Rousseau demanded a certificate of civilian status from him (something which was impossible for an exiled person to obtain), simply because he had been born in Bohemia and the status of political refugee was not granted to gypsies. For a former ambassador to Bulgaria, this was a deadly insult that earned Rousseau a monumental slap and meant that Pavel had to wait three more years to obtain the status. Igor knew every department of the Préfecture, the town hall and certain ministries, the papers that needed to be acquired and how many copies, the names of the clerks to avoid and those who could be bought. To judge by the difficulties encountered in obtaining their papers, they concluded that the clerks in the resident permit department of the Paris Préfecture were virulent trade union members.