The Incorrigible Optimists Club

That morning, I had rung the bell for ten minutes in order to drag her from her bed. I had made her a very strong café au lait. She appeared in lemon-yellow woollen leggings.

  ‘What do you reckon?’

  ‘They’re original.’

  ‘They’re American. I paid a fortune for them. Where are your things?’

  ‘I thought we were going to go for a walk in the Luxembourg.’

  ‘You’ll need some clothes.’

  She dragged me off into Pierre’s bedroom. Ever since his departure, fourteen months ago, I had not set foot in there. It was in the same state he had left it in. The bed unmade, the blankets rolled in a ball, two squashed pillows, ten or more piles of books, a record player on the floor with 45s lying everywhere, clothing strewn about and, on the table, a bottle of brandy with its cork removed and two empty glasses. This clutter and the dust that covered every object gave the impression of a room that was dead, as if Pierre had not lived in it. Cécile opened the cupboard and pulled out masses of pullovers and shirts, which she piled on the floor. She grabbed hold of a pair of white shorts with violet trim and handed them to me like a trophy.

  ‘You’re not expecting me to wear those?’

  ‘They’re Pierre’s shorts. Stop sniffling, it gets on my nerves.’

  ‘I’m trying to get better. Two of me could fit into those.’

  ‘They’ll be fine, with a belt.’

  I found myself kitted out with these white shorts and an enormous white, mud-stained Paris University Club rugby shirt with a violet collar, with the number 14 on the back. When I saw myself in the mirror I looked like a clown.

  ‘You look like a real rugby player,’ she announced.

  ‘Wouldn’t you prefer us to do housework? I could tackle his bedroom.

  He’ll be glad to find it neat and tidy on his return.’

  ‘We’ll do it later. I must sort out his books.’

  The doorbell rang. It was the concierge bringing the post. There was a letter from Pierre. Cécile tore open the envelope eagerly and started to read it. Her smile vanished. Her eyebrows knitted and before I could say a word, her face had turned crimson, she had torn up the letter and had thrown it in the dustbin.

  ‘What’s it got to do with him? Do I involve myself in his affairs? He’s another one who pisses me off!’

  She left the room in a fury. I picked up the torn pieces and, with some difficulty pieced the letter together again on the coffee table, like a jigsaw puzzle.

  My dear Cécile,

  Nothing to report since my last letter. It’s damned cold, just as it is in Paris. We spend our time glued to the radio, trying to follow events in Algiers. You probably know as much as I do. I’ve resolved none of the questions I posed myself. Time doesn’t matter here. I don’t know whether it’s the landscape that is affecting me, but I’m becoming fatalistic. I explained my theory to my three friends with whom I play belote. They consider me a lunatic. In between games, I have long discussions with them. I’ve read several passages of my book to them. I thought they would praise and encourage me. They don’t understand a thing I’m saying, nor why I’m busting my gut working on a theory of revolution. They just don’t want to know. It’s all the more interesting because they’re workers, peasants, or guys who have no jobs. Before immersing myself in writing the final part, I’m going to conduct an enquiry in depth. I think I’ll manage to do this because my men regard me as an exceptional NCO, and because I don’t insult them and don’t yell at them from morn till night. I’m expecting a great deal from this full-scale survey to clarify what I do next.

  How’s your thesis going? I’d like you to tell me a bit about it. I’m waiting impatiently to see how you tackle the question of Aragon, surrealism and his break with Breton. You may have to ask yourself what the historical basis for surrealism was and who betrayed what or whom. Send me a few pages. You’ll have to buckle down to it. I know you. You’re going to want to make a change. That would be a great mistake. Your thesis is the priority. You must pass with distinction. You could do psychology afterwards. Doing so now would be the height of stupidity. You haven’t the right to sacrifice years of effort on a whim. With psychology, you’re not sure of finding work, whereas with your doctorate, you would get a position as a teacher and even though you may grumble, it’s a real job. You’re made for it…

  There was almost a page in the same vein. Pierre wasn’t exactly subtle. I was in the process of deciphering the rest of it when Cécile came back in like a fury.

  ‘Was it you who told him?’

  ‘No!’

  ‘You’re the only one I’ve talked to about it!’

  ‘I haven’t said a thing. I haven’t written to him.’

  ‘How does he know that I want to give up my thesis?’

  ‘I really don’t know.’

  ‘I don’t believe you, Michel. You’re lying!’

  ‘He’s talking about it in the conditional tense, as if it were a hypothesis.

  The proof of it is that you haven’t made up your mind. You’re thinking of stopping. It’s normal for your brother to give you advice.’

  ‘He and his lousy advice can get stuffed!’

  ‘Pick up your pen and write and tell him that. It would please him.’

  ‘What’s it got to do with you? Did I ask you for your opinion? I’m sure it was you. You’re a sly little rascal who does things sneakily.’

  ‘How could I have mentioned it to him, I haven’t got his address?’

  ‘Swear to me that you didn’t write to him.’

  ‘I swear to you!’

  ‘Word of honour? Look me in the eyes.’

  ‘You have my word, Cécile. Whether you do literature or psychology, it’s all the same to me.’

  ‘He’s pretty sharp, the kid brother.’

  ‘He knows you.’

  ‘He hasn’t got a hope of reading my thesis. Come on, let’s go for a run.’

  On the bench, I got my breath back. Cécile was retracing her steps.

  ‘You’re not going to keep stopping every five minutes.’

  ‘I’m exhausted. And these shorts keep slipping down.’

  ‘I’m fed up. You’ve spent the entire time moaning!’

  ‘And you’re nice to be with, are you? You’re a pain in the neck! A real bitch! If you want to go running, go on… have fun. Without me!’

  ‘Pierre’s right, you’re just an arsehole!’

  In a fury, I made my way out of the park. We had occasionally clashed before, but never to this extent. I reached the gates without hearing the sound of her voice. I turned round. Cécile had disappeared. I couldn’t go back home dressed like this. I’d left my things at her place. I was obliged to go there. I waited for her for a good hour, sitting on a stair. She was surprised to see me.

  ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘My clothes are inside.’

  ‘Come on, let’s go and have a coffee.’

  ‘I don’t want any.’

  ‘Shall I make you a chocolate, then?’

  ‘Listen, Cécile, I’m going to change and I’ll leave straight away.’

  ‘Aren’t you my little bro’ any more?’

  I didn’t feel like fighting. She knew it.

  ‘You’ve become a real bore.’

  ‘I’ve stopped smoking.’

  ‘It’s not true! Since when?’

  ‘I haven’t touched a pack for a week. You’re the only one I can take it out on.’

  She swept up the scraps of Pierre’s letter that were on the table, put her foot on the dustbin pedal, and threw them in. We found ourselves sitting down facing one another with our café au lait. She had run out of chocolate.

  ‘Couldn’t you have told me?’

  ‘Why do you think I started doing sport? I’ve put on over a kilo.’

  ‘You’re looking flabby.’

  ‘I’m going to put on seven kilos. Definitely. I’ve got a friend who’s put on ten. I’m going to have a spare tyre. Do you find that att
ractive?’

  ‘Maybe it won’t show much.’

  ‘There’s no way!’

  She disappeared. She returned with a photograph album. She took out a photo.

  ‘That’s my mother, before her marriage. She weighed forty-eight kilos.

  She flipped through the pages at speed, stopped towards the end of the album, and pointed to a black and white photo in which her mother was posing in a fur coat somewhere near the Acropolis.

  ‘Fifteen years later, weighing thirty kilos more. I don’t want to become like her.’

  ‘It’s not automatic.’

  ‘Yes it is, girls end up looking like their mothers and boys like their fathers. That’s why we have problems.’

  ‘I don’t have any problems with my father.’

  ‘You will have. Pierre tried to escape from them. Few boys have put so much effort into driving their families to despair. He was drawn to misfortune like a magnet. They couldn’t agree about anything, and yet they thought alike. The same mechanism, but in the opposite direction. He’s become as boring as Papa.’

  ‘You never speak about your parents.’

  ‘They’re dead and buried. There’s nothing to say about them.’

  ‘Will you show me the album?’

  ‘Out of the question. Personally, I’d have thrown it away. Pierre insisted on keeping it. You see what I’m saying. We always get hoodwinked by our feelings.’

  There was someone else who got hoodwinked. Twice a week, I found myself running like an imbecile around the Luxembourg. Cécile gave me a tracksuit that was my size. To begin with, it was hell. After a month, I managed to complete a circuit without stopping. I couldn’t believe it. We ran on Thursdays and Saturdays for one hour, and on Sundays I did the housework. With practice, it became easy. I ran for Cécile’s sake, to help her keep her promise never to touch a cigarette again. But she would fall back into bad habits at the slightest provocation and she always had a good reason. When I arrived at her home, I could smell the stale tobacco even though she had opened the windows wide to air the flat. It was her thesis, which was not progressing, that was to blame, or Pierre, who wrote to her saying he wanted to read it, or a girlfriend who had been ditched by some bastard, or the enjoyment of smoking… It was impossible to reason with her.

  But then an unforeseen transformation took place. It was a Thursday afternoon, towards the end of March. It was cold and drizzling. The Luxembourg was deserted, swept by a north wind that bit into our cheeks. As usual, she was running ahead of me, and I was trotting along at her heels. I drew up alongside her. She accelerated. I didn’t slacken. I could hear her panting. I’d never felt so light. We remained elbow to elbow. I upped the pace. She was unable to follow me. I overtook her. I could hear her straining behind me. I took a ten metre lead, then twenty. I waited for her to come back at me. She was out of breath. I accelerated.

  ‘Stop, Michel, I can’t go on.’

  She was doubled up, her hands pressed to her knees, trying to catch her breath. It took her two minutes to do so. I waited, smiling to myself.

  ‘You look great.’

  ‘Do you think so?’ she murmured, breathing rapidly.

  ‘Pity I haven’t got my camera. You could see how you look.’

  ‘I feel as if I weigh a ton.’

  ‘Are you sure that running makes you lose weight? Perhaps, in your case, it has the opposite effect.’

  She turned scarlet. I set off without waiting for her reply.

  ‘You little bastard!’

  3

  Tibor soon became disenchanted. The world of Paris theatre was split into two groups of equal importance who loathed one another passionately: the scoundrels, who put on interesting plays, and the turncoats, who operated on the boulevards; certain moonlighters laid claim to both labels. The majority of directors belonged to the communist party, which enthusiastically supported the Soviet invasion. During an audition, a well-known director referred to Tibor as a fascist and had him removed from the room by his assistants. Another one told him of the disdain he felt for petits-bourgeois like him who took advantage of the working class. Everywhere, all he encountered was hatred, snubs and rebuffs. Those who were not communists hadn’t heard of him and had nothing to offer an unknown actor with a strange and unpleasant accent. With others his past reputation stood him in bad stead. The only two directors who were willing to help him and offer him parts failed to understand why he turned them down and classified him in the boring and pretentious category. It’s true that modesty was not Tibor’s prime virtue.

  Imré and he submitted an application asking for political refugee status. The hypocritical Rousseau, who ran the department, went out of his way to throw a spanner in the works for the Hungarians who flooded in. How could you prove you were a refugee and that your life was threatened when you left your country in a panic?

  ‘I need evidence, do you understand? It’s easy to say that you were hounded out by the political police. If the Soviets intervened, it was at the request of the Hungarian government, as far as I know, and to save the country from the counter-revolution led by small landowners. The vast majority of your fellow-countrymen approve. It may be that you have fled Hungary because you’ve broken the law or haven’t paid your taxes. It’s up to you to provide me with evidence, not me. For the time being, your file is empty. When it goes before the committee, you would be well advised to have something important inside it. Otherwise, you’ll be refused. France is not a haven for foreign crooks! We’ve got enough of our own.’

  When they arrived, at the beginning of 1957, they were alarmed by the price of hotels in Paris and they moved into a brothel in rue Saint-Denis. The manager threw them out the following day.

  ‘I don’t want any queers!’

  ‘But whores are allowed?’ Imré protested.

  ‘It’s not the same. I don’t want any trouble with the police.’

  Tibor couldn’t find any work. They sold their watches and their cuff-links, they ate dry bread, and they moved out of the shady hotels they could no longer afford without paying their bills. Imré found a job as a packer with a butter, eggs and cheese agent in Les Halles who was a decent man, even if he paid him on the black market at half the going rate. It wasn’t as though there was any lack of Hungarians for the wretched job. At least he allowed him to take home the produce that had travelled badly. Tibor could also have found work at Les Halles, but he had to preserve his energy for auditions and he did nothing while he waited for Imré to finish his backbreaking night shift. Because they constantly left without paying the bill, they were banned from the district around Les Halles and had ended up in a small hotel in rue de la Huchette.

  One Monday evening, they were sharing a coffee on the terrace of a brasserie on rue des Écoles. They were in low spirits. Imré had a painful shoulder and his hands were cracked. Tibor was in despair. He had spent the entire day waiting to audition for a Feydeau play. After four hours hanging around in a draught, an assistant came along to inform them that they had filled all the parts.

  ‘I’ll never find a part in this land of arseholes. Supposing we went to England? They don’t make a fuss about letting foreigners in.’

  ‘I don’t speak English,’ Imré protested.

  ‘You think only of yourself!’ moaned Tibor, despite the fact that gratitude was not his strong point. ‘I’m about to die here.’

  ‘I’m killing myself for you. All you do is blame me. Do you think it amuses me to squelch around in cheese. I smell of cheese, don’t I?

  ‘You stink of cheese! You should have worked at a florist’s. Let’s leave right away, Imré. They’ll give me some interesting parts in London.’

  ‘The only thing the English will offer you is their bloody contempt.’

  ‘I’ve played Macbeth and Othello.’

  ‘The fact that you play Shakespeare in Hungarian is one thing, for you to play it in their country would be considered a crime of lèse-majesté or a joke in poor taste. As soon as
you opened your mouth, they’d burst out laughing. That fucking accent would cling to you there too.’

  ‘That’s not true, I speak English.’

  ‘Not as they do in Oxford! For them, you’re a Hungarian, that’s to say a savage.’

  ‘There’s not just the theatre. I can make films. You’re always putting me down.’

  ‘Why not try America while you’re about it?’

  ‘And Bela Lugosi? Didn’t he succeed in Hollywood? His Hungarian accent didn’t prevent him acting in dozens of films.’

  ‘For playing Dracula in vampire films, it’s indispensable. Is that your aim? You? In lousy films?’

  ‘I want to act. I’m an artist! Not some flunkey!’

  Their voices rose. Customers began staring at these two foreigners who were squabbling in an incomprehensible language. A man came up to them and peered at Tibor.

  ‘Excuse me, Monsieur, are you not Tibor Balazs?’

  ‘What do you want?’ he asked guardedly.

  ‘I’m one of your admirers. I adored The Return of the Travelling Players. I’ve seen it dozens of times. It’s a wonderful film.’

  In the four months since he had arrived in France, it was the first time anyone had recognized him. For an actor, recognition is what distinguishes you from other mortals. Tibor had been fortunate enough to come across the only Parisian film buff capable of remembering an obscure Hungarian film that had gone unnoticed when it was released four years previously. In his eyes he could see the same glimmer of joy he had been accustomed to observing among his Hungarian admirers.

  ‘You’ve seen The Return of the Travelling Players dozens of times? Are you making fun of me?’

  ‘I’m a projectionist at a cinema in the Quartier Latin. We had the film on for six weeks, with five showings a day…’

  ‘Do you watch the films you show?’

  ‘When it’s a good film, it’s the great thing about the job.’

  Werner Toller was delighted to meet Tibor, especially since he loved actors, never met any of them, and, despite his introvert character, was starry-eyed by nature.

  ‘You’re not French. You have a slight accent.’