The Incorrigible Optimists Club

by Jean-Michel Guenassia

  ‘It’s not for lack of trying, believe me, Monsieur.’

  ‘I get the impression he’s more gifted at baby-foot.’

  ‘Ah, baby-foot’s over, it’s chess now.’

  ‘Chess? How very interesting, my dear Michel, you must show me one of these days.’

  We left to go and have a drink at La Chope, in place de la Contrescarpe.

  ‘What’s all this about an accident?’

  ‘Just a story I told him to justify my being away one day.’

  ‘You’re out of your mind!’

  ‘Oh, I’m careful.’

  ‘You could be expelled from Henri-IV for a prank like that! Can you imagine our parents?’

  ‘Are you worried on their account?’

  ‘It’s for your sake I’m saying this. You’ve got to stop playing the fool and think about your future a little. You’ve got to swot if you want to make it.’

  The waiter put a half of beer on the table for Franck and a really weak lemonade shandy for me.

  ‘What about you, do you never fool around?’

  ‘I’ve got my degree. I do as I want. What’s all the hurry about? If it’s for the parents, there’s no point.’

  ‘Cécile… Have you forgotten her already?’

  ‘What’s the matter with Cécile?’

  ‘The matter is she’s unhappy. You told her you’d ring her back. You didn’t ring her back. For weeks, she’s not heard a word from you. She doesn’t understand what’s going on.’

  ‘What’s it got to do with you?’

  ‘I thought you loved her.’

  ‘Mind your own business.’

  ‘She’s an extraordinary, wonderful girl… “I love a girl who’s got a very pretty neck, very pretty breasts, a very pretty voice, very pretty wrists, a very pretty head, very pretty knees…” Do you remember?’

  ‘Stop it! What’s your game? Did she ask you to come and find me? To preach at me?’

  ‘She’s convinced that you’re with someone else and that you haven’t the guts to tell her to her face!’

  ‘These are old wives’ ravings. I’m not with anyone.’

  ‘Are you ditching her?’

  Franck didn’t answer me. His head dropped. He shot me occasional dark glances. He took out a Gitane and lit it before realizing that there was already one alight in the ashtray. He stubbed it out.

  ‘Are you able to keep a secret?’

  ‘You’re not going to join up too.’

  ‘I’ve brought forward my call-up. I’ve enlisted. I’m leaving for Algeria.’

  ‘You’re a student.’

  ‘I’ve withdrawn my reprieve.’

  ‘You’re crazy!’

  ‘Try to explain to a woman that you’re leaving her to join the army. You could spend years trying. I haven’t said anything to her. There was no point. Beyond my capabilities.’

  ‘She thinks you’re deserting her for another woman!’

  ‘I did that deliberately. So that she could free herself from me.’

  ‘Why didn’t you explain that to her face to face?’

  ‘Because I love her, you stupid bastard! I wouldn’t have been able to. I don’t want her to wait for me. I don’t want to be tied down. I’d decided to leave without talking about it.’

  ‘And so why are you telling me?’

  ‘You’ve alerted the whole of Paris! I thought something serious had happened.’

  ‘Something did happen!’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Fuck off! You don’t deserve her!’

  I stood up and left the bistro. Franck caught up with me at the square. He grabbed me by the lapels of my jacket and yelled as he shook me: ‘What has happened, for God’s sake?’

  I had never seen him looking so tense. We sat down on a bench. A tramp was sprawled at the side of the road, asleep. I told him everything. He allowed me to speak without asking a single question. He looked distraught. By the end, he was deep in thought, his shoulders drooping. He was crushed. His head nodded gently.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said feebly. ‘Has… has she come through it all?’

  ‘It would have been better had she spent a day or two under observation at the hospital. She doesn’t listen to anyone.’

  We heard a sepulchral voice coming from the ground: ‘You’re a real bastard!’

  The tramp was sitting up, he had listened to what was being said and, sitting on the edge of the pavement, he was gazing at Franck with a look of disdain and pointing his finger.

  ‘Got to be a complete moron to join the French army and ditch your girlfriend. The guy’s a nutcase! Ah, you can be proud of yourself!’

  Franck was furious. I thought he was going to hit him.

  ‘Mind your own business! Go on, get lost or I’ll give you a hiding!’

  The tramp picked up his bags and his bottle of wine. He wandered off, grumbling to himself and taking his sour smell with him.

  ‘Morons! They’re all morons!’

  He disappeared down rue Mouffetard, shouting and insulting the passers-by.

  ‘Are you going to see her?’

  He shook his head.

  ‘Franck, it’s Cécile!’

  ‘It was a difficult decision. Face to face with her, I wouldn’t have had the courage.’

  ‘She could have died because of you!’

  ‘I’m sorry and I feel bad about it. It’s too late. I’m leaving in four days time. When I get there, I’ll write to her to explain myself. When I get back, we’ll see.’

  ‘Do you think she’ll wait for you? She loathes you!’

  ‘It’s my life, Michel! I have to do it.’

  ‘Bloody hell, Franck, you’re a real arsehole!’

  ‘I beg you not to say anything to her. Not before I leave. Let me deal with it.’

  ‘You’re out of your mind. You’ll regret it all your life.’

  ‘Give it a rest! Come on, let’s go and get a bite to eat.’

  ‘I don’t want to. I’m going home.’

  I hesitated about leaving him standing there. He seemed confused. I still hoped to be able to persuade him.

  ‘I’ll phone and say that I’m staying at Nicolas’s place for dinner.’

  He took me to the Volcan, a small Greek restaurant where the owner cooked as they do in Salonika. We went into the kitchen where we lifted up the lids and chose according to the aroma. The dishes smelled of aubergines, courgettes and peppers stewed with caramelized onions, cumin and bay leaves. That evening, Franck told me the history of our family, our parents’ meeting, the war, his birth, their five years of separation, their reunion and their forced marriage. He needed to get things off his chest. I didn’t utter a word. Children don’t know about their parents’ lives. When they are young, they don’t think about such things because the world only began with them. Their parents have no history and have the bad habit of only talking to their children about the future, never the past. It’s a serious mistake. When they fail to do so, they always leave a gaping hole.

  ‘She hates me. It’s taken me a while to admit it. Because of me, she was obliged to marry our father and she’s made a mess of her life. Had I not been born, she would have made a good marriage, to a man from her own background.’

  He was right. I could raise no objection.

  ‘And me, does she hate me?’

  ‘With you, it’s not your fault. Later on, she wanted a family. For her, you’re a Marini, not a Delaunay. Don’t forget that. I don’t say it to turn you against her. I’m not angry with her. You needed to know.’

  Now there was an even greater difference between us. But I didn’t feel concerned. There was nothing I could do to change anything. I was only interested in Cécile.

  ‘Why did you join up?’

  ‘If you don’t do anything, you leave the path wide open to the fascists. It may be too late. At least I shall have tried.’

  ‘Do you think you’re going to be able to change society on your own?’

  ‘I’m not alone
.’

  ‘And Papa? … He doesn’t hate you. You can’t leave without telling him. It’s not fair.’

  ‘Papa, I agree. But not a word to Cécile!’

  I was shocked and powerless. To conceal his enlisting from her struck me as disgraceful. But if I let her know about it, I lost my brother. He had made his choice and it wasn’t Cécile. I felt besmirched, trapped and full of anger. Had I been stronger, I would have smashed his face in. I have a problem with logic. I’ve never understood how people can say one thing and do the opposite. Swear they love someone and then hurt them, have a friend and then forget him, claim to belong to the same family and then treat one another like strangers, hold lofty principles and then not practise them, profess that they believe in God and act as though he did not exist, think of themselves as heroes when they behave like bastards.

  21

  Igor did not like to drink. He couldn’t cope with alcohol. When he did happen to drink, he made up for the bottles he had missed and he started to philosophize, even though he loathed philosophy and philosophers.

  ‘You’ve got to keep your feet on the ground,’ he would say. ‘Every time you raise yourself up a bit, you fall from a height.’

  The night he met Victor, he returned reeling to the La Pitié Hospital and was told off by the matron, who was greatly admired by her colleagues for the impressive height of her back-combed chignon. She didn’t give a damn about his having met a fellow-countryman and she was going to have him reported for leaving his post and drunkenness while on duty. Igor laughed out loud in her face. He went to collect his belongings from his locker and was about to leave the foul-smelling world of the hospital when, in the corridor, he noticed the man whom Victor had brought in. He had been lying on the stretcher ever since he arrived. No one was bothering to look after him. No duty doctor was available. The department head would not be there until eight o’clock and the man was going to die. He was unconscious. Igor examined his pupils, took his pulse and checked his blood pressure. His nose had been crushed and it was preventing him breathing, his lower jaw was fractured, several teeth were broken and his face was covered in blood. Igor tried to open his jaws. The man groaned. Igor thrust his hand into his mouth, removed the broken teeth and unblocked the windpipe. He grabbed a pair of scissors and cut through the man’s clothing. He palpated the thorax. One particular spot was hurting him, at the level of the plexus. A protuberance indicated a thoracic fracture. The nurse arrived.

  ‘What are you doing? Stop this! You’re mad! You’re not allowed to do this!’

  ‘I’m a doctor! This man has a haemothorax. He’s going to die unless he is given a pleural drainage. Find me a drain, and quickly. I need some iodised spirit and some xylocaine.’

  ‘I’ve no anaesthetic.’

  ‘We’ll manage without.’

  Igor had difficulty undressing the injured man. The nurse returned with a semi-rigid drain on a mandrel and a flask of iodised spirit.

  ‘It’s all I could find.’

  ‘Help me to lift him up. Hold him under his armpits and lean against him.’

  They lifted up the man, who was unconscious. Igor made him sit down, cleaned his shoulder blade with spirit, located the second intercostal gap and swiftly thrust in the needle. The patient recoiled. The nurse held him down. Igor removed the mandrel, fitted the needle, thrust it in and tapped the blood with the syringe. The drainage lasted several minutes. Igor withdrew the needle smartly and cleaned up the man’s numerous wounds. The nurse rushed into the waiting room and started shouting down the telephone, threatening the person she was talking to that she would call the police and sue him for failure to assist a person in danger if he did not arrive within five minutes. What’s more, she swore that she would scratch his eyes out. Igor went over to her.

  ‘He’s continuing to bleed. We have to operate, perform a thoracotomy. Either they operate immediately or else I’ll do it, with or without anaesthetic.’

  Two housemen arrived five minutes later to take over and had the man wheeled to the surgical block. The nurse turned to Igor, who looked pale and exhausted. His clothes were stained with blood.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me you were a doctor?’

  ‘I’m a porter.’

  ‘Don’t worry, I won’t report you.’

  Igor hesitated for a second, then shrugged his shoulders.

  ‘I’m through now. Good luck.’

  He left the hospital, tossed his white coat into a dustbin and went to have a last café-calvados at the Canon d’Austerlitz. When he paid, he came across the telephone number that Victor Volodine had scribbled on a packet of Gitanes. It was a dark night. He asked the cashier for a token and, from the payphone, rang Victor, who had just arrived home.

  ‘It’s to tell you that I’ll take the position. When do I start?’

  ‘To begin with, I’ll show you the ropes. You’ll come with me for a few nights, if that’s OK.’

  ‘No problem.’

  ‘Let’s meet tomorrow, or rather this evening, at seven o’clock. Do you know Le Royal, on place de la Nation?’

  ‘I’ll find it. Good night, Victor Anatolievitch.’

  ‘You too, Igor Emilevitch, sleep well.’

  Igor gave up his career as a porter without any regrets. As he removed his white coat, he swore to himself that he would never set foot in a hospital and never attend to anyone again. He began his new life as a taxi driver that same evening, and he felt quite happy about it.

  Victor was a chatterbox. With him, you never had to wonder what you were going to talk about. He kept the conversation flowing himself. Sitting in the front, Igor listened to him recounting to an astonished English passenger how he had narrowly missed taking part in the murder of Rasputin with his cousin Felix Yusupov. How he had caught violent bronchitis because of the icy cold and the secret meetings in the draughty, badly heated corridors, and how his wife, Countess Tatiana, who was the daughter of Archduke Orlov, and was related to Rostopchin, had forbidden him to leave their palace on the banks of the Neva to join the conspirators. They were parked in place Vendôme, outside the Ritz, with the engine turned off and the meter ticking over for one hour and twenty minutes. It was not his record. Merely enough time for a magical story. Victor Volodine was not an inveterate liar. He was a raconteur. He added unexpected and little known details, morbid and obscene information, which conferred an aura of truth to what he said. When his customers merited it – they had to be English or American – he took out from the glove compartment a piece of mauve velvet embroidered with gold thread, which he unfolded religiously and, as though he were revealing a secret, displayed to the fortunate tourists the Cossack dagger, encrusted with diamonds, that had slain Rasputin and which Yusupov had given him as a token of friendship. The Englishmen had paid the largest taxi fare in their lives without batting an eyelid and had given this impoverished aristocrat, a victim of the Bolsheviks, a princely tip. Nothing could fluster Victor. He had a cheek that no one British could resist.

  ‘What age were you at the time of Rasputin’s murder? You can’t have been very old?’ asked the man, without meaning any harm.

  Victor put on his best smile. Meanwhile, he worked out the dates.

  ‘How old would you say I was, sir?’

  ‘About fifty-five, which would mean that you were about sixteen at the time of Rasputin’s death, in 1916, I believe.’

  ‘I thank you for your kindness, my lord. Life has not spared me. I’m going to be seventy-one in two month’s time and am still obliged to work to feed my family.’

  ‘Good heavens, you don’t look it.’

  The weather was like summer in this month of April ’56. Victor Volodine wound down the window of the Régence and breathed in with pleasure. He was just fifty-six. No Englishman, be he a lord and peer of the Realm, was going to catch him out.

  ‘Look how fine it is,’ he said to Igor.

  The place Vendôme belonged to them.

  ‘You would think we were in St Petersbur
g.’

  ‘For me, it’s called Leningrad.’

  ‘If you want us to be friends, never utter that word in my presence.’

  Igor was not going to quarrel with his boss on his first day of work over a matter of vocabulary. Whatever its name was, they had the same town in mind.

  ‘Tell me, Igor Emilievitch, is it true that the city is destroyed?’

  ‘There was a siege that lasted nine hundred days, and there were almost as many bombing and shelling attacks. A million dead, at least. Look at Hiroshima. It’s the same thing. They’re rebuilding it. It will be more beautiful than before.’

  Victor offered him a Gitane. They smoked, dreaming of the Winter Palace before the war. Igor was spellbound and disappointed to learn that the Cossack dagger in the glove compartment had not killed Rasputin. It was a Berber knife and Victor had bought it for the modest sum of three hundred and fifty francs during the 1931 Colonial Exhibition. Ever since, he had acquired his supply from a Moroccan shop in Montreuil where he bought them by the dozen and gave them to his friends for their birthdays. Victor had sworn to a quiet couple of dumbfounded Bordeaux winegrowers, on the heads of the children he did not have, that he had set eyes on the Archduchess Anastasia. There was no doubt or mystery about her. She was, beyond all dispute, the last descendant of the Romanovs. May God protect her. They had played as children in the gardens of the Petrodvorets Palace where his family was often invited.

  ‘It’s not complicated, you see. The more far-fetched it is, the bigger the tip.’

  ‘It’s the way I’ve been brought up. I don’t know how to lie.’

  ‘I don’t lie. I tell them a story.’

  ‘I’m not sure I could manage it.’

  ‘Well then, say goodbye to large tips, and too bad for you. I’m not surprised with that fucking commie education.’

  That first night, Victor was so pleased with his takings that he decided to stop work earlier than usual. Igor found himself dumped, at about four in the morning, not far from his little hotel near the Bastille. He was not sleepy. He thought again about the man he had treated the previous night, wondered whether he had survived and, even though he had sworn never to set foot there again, he returned to La Pitié. When she saw him, the matron thought he was coming to ask for his job back. Igor wanted news of the wounded man.