The Incorrigible Optimists Club

by Jean-Michel Guenassia

  Igor spoke French with a slight accent. He was often taken for an Alsatian. He came from a background where people learned French before Russian. His father rented a villa every year in Nice and he remembered his summer holidays there when he was a child. This was before the war, the first one. Igor didn’t like recalling his memories. He had made a great effort to begin a new life and he did not wish to be reminded of his past. His family was wealthy. His father was a well-known surgeon who had a private clinic in St Petersburg. Their life had been swept away by the revolution from one day to the next. But he had had no regrets. A new world was beginning. Everyone joined in to build socialism. After his degree, Igor had worked as a doctor in a hospital, but had not succeeded in becoming a heart specialist. He no longer had time to continue his studies and he had to provide for his family. They were happy. And then, the Earth had stopped turning and had then exploded. Late one Sunday afternoon, he had lifted the veil slightly: ‘During the siege and at the front, I acted as surgeon. I even performed a caesarean during the bombing of Gostiny Dvor. For anaesthetic, all we had was vodka. The mother and the child came through. You’ve no idea of the operations. If anyone had told me beforehand, I would have sworn it was impossible. And yet I coped. I saw nurses amputating limbs with white-hot instruments. You don’t need degrees to operate in wartime. The important thing is to survive, isn’t it?’

  The war had destroyed his city. He had fought as a doctor in the Red Army, miraculously surviving the siege, after which he had taken part in the German campaign. He had worked for six months as a labourer rebuilding the hospital. That was what stayed with him for ever. The destruction of Leningrad. Rubble everywhere, as far as the eye could see. Hordes of half-starved skeletons in rags fighting with one another to eat a stray dog or the bark from trees. The streets, the avenues and the canals had disappeared. They were going to rebuild them. As before. Even better, larger and more beautiful. A vast building site worthy of Russia. Igor didn’t want to talk about this period any more. You had to force him.

  ‘Why did you go over to the West?’

  ‘If I hadn’t fled, I wouldn’t be alive today.’

  ‘Why did you leave? Tell me.’

  ‘If I explained, you wouldn’t understand. It’s complicated. Come on now, it’s your turn. You’re like an old woman with all your chatter.’

  I started to play again. A little later, I asked him another question. He pretended to be engrossed by the game. Occasionally, he would come out with snatches, bracing himself against his memories. It was up to me to put together the pieces of a puzzle in which the main bits were missing. He had left a mother over there, a wife, a son of my age and a daughter who was younger. He had had no news of them for eight years.

  ‘I’ve lived several lives that I’ve forgotten.’

  ‘You don’t just decide to forget with a click of your fingers.’

  ‘You do. You forget or you die.’

  He had decided not to think about it any more. His life, the only one which he was prepared to recall, began with his arrival in France. Igor was warm-hearted, relaxed and bore no ulterior motive. He had a spontaneous manner, which put people at their ease. I never heard anyone speak ill of him. On the contrary, everyone liked and respected him. He was a good-looking man who, with his impressive build, his wavy hair, his blue eyes and friendly smile, did not go unnoticed. He looked a little bit like Burt Lancaster. People never stopped teasing him about that.

  ‘You should become a film star.’

  ‘Impossible, I don’t know how to lie.’

  Igor taught me how to play chess. He was the first person to approach me and suggest a game: ‘Do you know how to play?’

  ‘A bit.’

  ‘Sit down there.’

  I found myself looking at a chessboard with the white pieces in place. I had never played before in my life. At random, I moved a pawn forward two squares as I had seen others do. He placed his pawn in front of mine. I made two foolish moves, then I moved my knight as if it were a pawn.

  ‘You don’t know how to play!’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘I’m going to teach you.’

  He was a good teacher. After a few days, I mastered the rules and began to get the hang of it. I didn’t understand when he said to me: ‘There, you know how to play chess. Now, you need to become a player. That will take longer.’

  ‘How long?’

  ‘That depends on you. Five years, ten years, more? Look at Imré. He’s fifty years old and he’s been knocking the pieces around the board for thirty-five of them. With a little practice you could beat him. Remember: lots of concentration and a bit of imagination.’

  We would meet in the early evening for one or two quick games. Most of the time we played in silence.

  ‘If you want to talk, go to the café next door.’

  We spent hours barely speaking to one another. He always won. However much I thought until my head ached, made plans, tried to position my pieces, devised a strategy and concealed my moves, he read my game like an open book. He could see my little plan a mile off. My attempts at tactical play amused him.

  ‘It’s right to want to open up your rook, but be careful not to leave the diagonal free for my queen, otherwise you’ll be checkmate in three moves.’

  ‘How did you know that I wanted to move my rook?’

  ‘There’s nothing else you can do. Don’t move so quickly. You attack in a disorderly way. Protect your position. It’s easier to defend.’

  ‘If I don’t attack, I won’t win.’

  Igor looked aggrieved and shook his head.

  ‘You’re nothing but an ass. And that’s not fair on asses, they’re intelligent animals. Not like you. You don’t listen. You ought to take notes.’

  To improve, he told me, I needed to follow games, copy out each player’s moves and replay them on a pocket chess-set. From time to time, Igor dived into his little notebook. He managed to reconstruct games just from his notes, and a string of moves such as: 1.e4 c5 2.Knf3 e6 3.g3; 3…d5 4.exd5 exd5 5.Bg2 Qe7 6.Kf1; 6… Knc6 7.d4 Knf6 8.Knc3 Be6 caused him to say things like: ‘He hasn’t improved at all, Vladimir. Still just as over-elaborate.’

  ‘He won.’

  ‘It’s Pavel who lost. If you want to get better, watch Leonid. He’s the best. Simple and effective.’

  For two years, he was my one and only partner. Those who knew how to play or thought they did had no wish to waste their time with a beginner. When I suggested a game, they replied: ‘We’ll play with you when you know how to play.’

  They accepted me because Igor had accepted me. Anyone who wanted to could come in and play at the Club, but it was he or Werner who decided who should be a member. There was no other criterion apart from their good will. When an unsuitable person sought to join, they knew how to dissuade him or get rid of him tactfully: ‘It’s a private club. We’re not taking any more members. You’ll have to go on the waiting list.’

  After two years, we played a game which reached a stalemate. It was a draw. There was neither a winner nor a loser. For me, it was a victory. Igor sensed this.

  ‘Another two or three years, my lad, and you’ll manage to win a game.’

  It took me a year to beat him. He had an excuse. It was a day when he was doubled up with sciatica. He found it hard to sit in his chair. When he arrived in France, Igor had tried to establish himself as a doctor. He had been turned down because his degree was not recognized in France and there was no way of obtaining an equivalent one. He had left Leningrad in a hurry, without any official papers or documents, with nothing that could prove his assertions. His service during the war as a military doctor and his medals were of no use. The only solution, as a member of the medical association had amiably suggested, was to start at the beginning. But it’s not easy to start studying for seven years when you are aged fifty. As well as being penniless, Igor had to endure a dreadful problem: he had been an insomniac ever since his flight from the USSR in March 1952. When he arr
ived in Helsinki, he went eleven days without sleeping, hoping that he would eventually collapse from exhaustion and be able to break this curse. His body had resisted beyond what is possible. He continued to be wide awake, with a wild look in his eyes, and his head in a fog. He began having attacks of delirium in the middle of the traffic, walking around bare-chested in temperatures of minus ten, and singing at the top of his voice. He had been injected with a sedative. When he woke up, he had refused to take the sleeping tablets he had been prescribed, until a doctor who had himself suffered from interminable insomnia gave him the solution: ‘If you’re not able to sleep at night, it’s because your biological clock has been reversed. The reason? We don’t know, but we have our suspicions. How can you start sleeping again? No idea. Go back to Leningrad perhaps? The cure is likely to be worse than the disease. Do as I do. Sleep during the day. Work at night.’

  Igor had followed his advice and rediscovered a regular pattern of life. When he arrived in Paris the following month, he had worked as a packer at Les Halles for a fruit and vegetable firm, while awaiting a reply from the medical association. Then, because his back hurt him, he had found a job as a nightwatchman at a hotel near the Madeleine. He was bored to death. For two years after that he had been a night porter at La Pitié Hospital. He was wondering what terrible sin he could have committed to deserve this fate when, that very night, he met the two men who were to change his life.

  Count Victor Anatolievitch Volodine was driving his gleaming Simca Vedette Régence like an aristocrat and exercising the noble profession of chauffeur, second-class – which is to say he was a qualified taxi driver. On rue de Tolbiac, he had picked up a blood-stained vagrant who had been beaten up and left for dead. He had almost run over his body, but had braked in the nick of time. During the civil war, Victor had had occasion to see many wounded people and corpses. He had cut off the nose and ears of several Reds. He knew about such things. This dying man looked pretty bad. People could say what they wanted about Victor Volodine, that he was a prig, a rascal and a liar, that he had never been a count, nor had he served the Tsar of Holy Russia, and nor was he the cousin and close friend of Felix Yussupov, Rasputin’s murderer, as he related with such conviction and force to his astonished customers. His yarns explain the errors in certain books by historians of repute who had taken his flagrant lies at face value. Victor had merely had the opportunity to be the prince’s driver when he was in Paris. Yussupov refused to give his views about Russia, but he agreed to speak Russian with a compatriot, convinced that the conversation would be about the inevitable and speedy collapse of the communist regime and of their own triumphant return to their homeland. Victor Volodine had just been a simple soldier in the Tsar’s army and Staff Sergeant in the White army under that idiot Denikin and then under Wrangel, who was no softy. Then, in the middle of the night, he had dropped off the two passengers whom he had collected from the Folies-Bergère in Pigalle and picked up the future corpse in order to deposit it at the nearest hospital.

  At twenty-five past one, Igor, the porter, was helping him carry the wounded man out of his taxi when he heard Victor let out an expletive on discovering that the white seat of his car was spattered with blood. Even if you have lived in France for thirty-three years and speak the language like a Parisian, when you hit the roof and let out a stream of abuse, you do so in your native tongue. And when two fellow countrymen who have been thrown out of their native land meet in a foreign country, they are happy to get together and the past is no longer of any importance. Igor and Victor were programmed to loathe and destroy one another, but they fell into each other’s arms. It was good to hear one’s patronymic. In France, people just used the first name. Suddenly, it was as if a little of the smell, the music and the light of their homeland had returned, even though one was a White Russian, a practising Orthodox, an anti-Semite and a misogynist, who hated the Bolshies, and the other the former enemy, a keen, committed and enthusiastic Red, who had been involved in establishing communism. These sorts of differences that made you tear out one another’s throats at home vanished here. Especially where two Russian insomniacs were concerned.

  18

  For the first time in my life, I skipped school. The idea would never have occurred to me before. Even when lessons were deadly boring, I endured them resignedly. But there was no question of leaving Cécile on her own. I left the flat as though nothing were the matter and set off to the Cochin Hospital. Anyone can just walk in. There were only three patients in her ward. I asked the nurse which department she had been transferred to. She looked at me as if she did not understand and hurried off into the ward. She looked dumbfounded as she stood there in front of the deserted bed and the empty cupboard.

  ‘She’s gone!’

  She grabbed the telephone and, in a panic, notified security of Cécile’s disappearance. She gave a brief description. Nobody had seen her. A professor arrived with a group of students who followed him like his shadow. With a crestfallen expression, she told him the bad news. A quarter of an hour earlier, she had been passing through the ward, she was still asleep and then… She did not finish her sentence. The professor called her every name under the sun and was unbelievably aggressive, insulting her without her reacting. He turned towards the students and yelled at them: ‘What the fuck are you doing here, you bunch of idiots, eh? When are you going to get a move on?’

  The professor went into a room, slamming the door behind him, without even glancing at me. The students and the nurse dispersed like a flock of sparrows. They questioned visitors and patients, but Cécile had vanished into thin air. I left the hospital. I searched for her in the cafés opposite. I asked the waiters, nobody had seen her. I walked down rue Saint-Jacques as far as the Seine, peering inside the bistros. No sign of Cécile. I had the insane hope that I might bump into her. I went to her home, on quai des Grands-Augustins. The apartment was in the same state as the previous night, after the emergency services had arrived. I felt ill at ease, rather like a novice burglar. I waited a long time for her, walking round in circles. Surely she would not be long. In an alcove, there was a Franche-Comté type of clock. I told myself ‘She’ll be here at ten o’clock.’

  When the chimes struck, I turned towards the entrance hall, convinced she was about to appear, as though by a wave of a magic wand. Nothing happened. Through the window, I searched for her among the crowd. At half past ten, the grandfather clock caught me off guard, with my nose glued to the window-pane. ‘She’ll be here at eleven o’clock. She can’t not come.’

  On the eleventh stroke, my hope vanished. She wouldn’t come. I had been foolish to believe she would. I left the flat, placing my bunch of keys under the doormat. I had the unpleasant, gnawing feeling that she would not be coming back here. If she did anything foolish again, I wouldn’t know. On a piece of paper that I slipped beneath the door, I’d scribbled: ‘If anything happens, inform me: Michel Marini’, and I gave my telephone number. I scoured the neighbourhood, the cafés and shops she used to go to, rue Saint-André-des-Arts and the area around Saint-Sulpice. Nobody had seen her. Head down, I skirted the railings of the Luxembourg. Back to square one. I turned in the direction of Henri-IV. There was nothing to feel cheerful about. I searched for an excuse to give Sherlock. Something indisputable, cast-iron, which would be the spitting image of a genuine one, and which no head supervisor, even a crafty one like him, would think of questioning or checking up on. In this eternal game of cat and mouse, I was a small, panic-stricken creature with a pitiful imagination. For every cause of absence I dreamed up, it would only take a second for the old tomcat to catch me out on. I was getting ready to be crucified when I arrived at the park gates near the Odéon theatre. I was a few yards away from the Médicis fountain. I risked missing the two o’clock bell. I continued on my route. I stopped. ‘If she is not there, I shall never see her again.’

  I turned around. Another five minutes won’t make much difference. I ran towards the fountain. All I saw were readers and the usua
l pairs of peaceful lovers. No Cécile. Suddenly, I noticed two patches, green and white, like a casket, in the midst of the fountain. Without being able to say how or why, I found myself entranced too. I couldn’t take my eyes off Polyphemus, so fine and so monstrous, so pitiful when he surprises Galatea and Acis and is about to kill the shepherd. An obligatory yet pointless crime. As I arrived at the edge of the pond, I was full of compassion for this poor, desperate and despised one-eyed man. Then I spotted Cécile, in a secluded corner. She was asleep in a chair, her head tilted back and her arms dangling. She looked extremely pale, her cheeks were hollow, and her skin was waxy. No breath stirred in her chest. I placed the palm of my hand on her forehead. I felt her warmth. I covered her with my jacket and sat down beside her. Cécile opened her eyes. She wasn’t surprised to see me, she gave me a shy smile and held out her hand to me. I took it and clasped it in mine.

  ‘You took your time,’ she murmured.

  ‘I looked for you everywhere.’

  ‘I was frightened you wouldn’t come.’

  ‘I’m here.’

  ‘Please don’t leave me.’

  ‘Don’t worry. Do you want to go home?’

  She shook her head. We stayed sitting beside the fountain. I did not know whether she was sleeping or resting. I stared at Galatea, draped over Acis, alone in the world and blissfully happy. Cécile watched me carefully.

  ‘They’re beautiful, aren’t they?’

  ‘They’re unaware of the danger that threatens them.’

  ‘They’re happy to be alive. They love one another. Nothing else is important. Danger doesn’t exist for them. They will remain in love for eternity. Have you any money?’

  ‘A little.’

  ‘Will you buy me a coffee?’

  She got to her feet with difficulty. She moved forward in small steps and leant on me. After twenty yards, she no longer needed my support. We went and had a café au lait at the Petit-Suisse, the bistro opposite. We sat at an outside table.