‘I’ve done them no harm. I’m like the others: if I hadn’t escaped, I’d be in the wastes of Siberia down some icy hole. I make the most of each day as though it were a gift. For years, I worked like a lunatic, without counting the hours spent, without taking a rest. For nothing. That time was given to me and I lost it. Nowadays, I read, I sleep, I listen to concerts on the radio, I roam around Paris, I chat to people, I go to the cinema, I take siestas, I feed the cats in the neighbourhood and when I’ve not got a penny left, I either get by or get myself a job. I have the bare necessities and I’ve never been so happy in my life. What’s shocking is not the exploitation, it’s our bloody stupidity. These constraints we impose on ourselves to have things that are superfluous and useless. The worst thing is the silly fools who work for peanuts. It’s not the bosses who are the problem, it’s money that makes us all slaves. On the great day of judgement, the one who will come out on top is not the silly bugger who’s come down from the trees to become sapiens, it’s the ape who’s continued to pick fruit while he scratches his belly. Man has understood nothing about Evolution. A person who works is a complete moron.’
6
We never saw it coming. Juliette and I had believed what we’d been told. One evening, my father did not come back for dinner. That happened, occasionally. We spent the evening without him, watching television. He came back late from the shop and had a bite to eat in the kitchen. We caught a glimpse of him the following morning, hurrying to get ready. That was normal. On the second evening, we thought he was overdoing it. On the third, my mother said he was away on a business trip. She spoke in that odd, slightly dry tone of voice that meant: ‘Don’t push me, I’m not in the mood.’
On Friday, they came home together. We were glad to see them. They both had gloomy expressions. We sat down in the drawing room. Just as we did when guests were there.
‘Go on,’ my mother said.
‘Children, we have to talk to you. You must have noticed that, for some time, there have been problems at home.’
‘Oh really?’ said Juliette.
My father glared at my mother, shaking his head in a helpless sort of way.
‘My darling,’ my mother continued, ‘your father and I have decided that it would be better if we separated.’
‘What?’ Juliette exclaimed, getting up from the chair. ‘What does that mean?’
‘We thought it best.’
‘You’re going to divorce?’
‘Nothing is decided. For the time being, we’re thinking. We’re taking stock. You’re grown-up. There’s nothing unusual, these days, about parents that separate. You’re not involved. We’ll always be there for you. You’ll continue to see your father, but we won’t live together any more.’
‘You can’t do that!’ cried Juliette.
She ran out of the room. We heard her bedroom door slam. My father rushed along to her. She had locked the door.
‘Juliette, open up. I’m going to explain to you.’
‘There’s nothing to explain!’ yelled Juliette through the door.
‘Be reasonable, darling. You’re really upsetting me.’
‘And what about me? Do you suppose I’m not upset?’
‘Please, my Juliette.’
‘I’m not your Juliette!’
For an hour, they tried to persuade her to open the door. She didn’t reply. They took turns, using the same arguments alternately, from begging her to threatening her and being angry.
‘I don’t know what to do any more,’ said my father in a drained voice. ‘I told you that we should have gone about it gently.’
‘There’s no perfect solution!’ my mother exclaimed. ‘When you have an abscess, you have to burst it! It hurts and afterwards, it’s over. We’ve prevaricated, and this is the result. She’ll get over it.’
They considered whether my father ought to barge open the door with his shoulder. Eventually, they concluded that this was not advisable. They needed to give her time for it to sink in. They spoke in my presence as though I were not concerned. My father packed two suitcases. He came to see me in my bedroom.
‘I’m off now, Michel.’
‘Where are you going?’
‘I’m at the Hôtel des Mimosas, by the Gare de Lyon.’
‘Are you leaving Paris?’
‘The owner is a friend. He’s helping me out until I find myself a flat. We’ll see each other, don’t worry, but I’m going to be fairly busy.’
‘Why do you say that?’
‘I’ve not got any work, my boy. It’s over.’
‘What about the shop?’
‘It’s your mother’s. I’ve got nothing.’
‘That’s not possible.’
‘That’s the way it is, and that’s the way it’s going to be.’
‘It’s not right. You’re the one who’s done everything.’
‘The shop doesn’t matter. I’ll always manage. What bothers me is you and your sister.’
‘Are you… are you going to get divorced?’
‘We’re deliberating, because of you. We’re going to see if we can come up with a solution. I believe she’s right. There comes a time when you have to know when to say stop.’
‘What’ll you do?’
‘I’ll get back on my feet. I’ve got a few ideas. As for the other guy who’s incapable of signing up a customer, I wouldn’t give them six months before they file for bankruptcy.’
He put his hand on my shoulder. He squeezed it.
‘We’ll get ourselves organized. Listen, Michel, you mustn’t judge your mother. Do you understand? What’s happened to us, it’s just life. I’m counting on you.’
He took me in his arms and we gave each other a hug. He left the room and switched off the light. I strained to listen. There wasn’t a sound. In the middle of the night, I felt a hand shaking me. I turned on the bedside light. It was Juliette, her eyes red and her hair awry, her pillow under her arm.
‘May I sleep with you?’
I lifted up my blanket. She lay down and snuggled up to me. I put my arms around her.
‘Are we going away too?’
‘No, we’re staying in our home. It’s Papa who’s going. You mustn’t worry.’
‘Mama told me it wasn’t serious.’
‘You know, Juliette, you mustn’t always believe what your parents say. Brothers and sisters are for life. I won’t ever let you down.’
‘I won’t either.’
Two days later, my mother and grandfather Philippe arrived, accompanied by a man in a dark suit whom they addressed with the greatest deference. They showed him around the flat. He was a bailiff. He noted that my father had departed the marital home, that he had taken his clothes and his personal effects. Maria certified that Monsieur had left with two large suitcases. The concierges confirmed this. My father ought to have been more wary of my mother, who told him that they would both be able to think more clearly if they were on their own. When you become a couple, you shouldn’t think clearly.
7
On Sunday in the early afternoon, Vladimir, assisted by Pavel, arrived at the Balto with two or three crates overflowing with food. The shopkeepers in rue Daguerre had waited for the market to be over to pay him in kind. He spread out the provisions over the tables. The souk was open. ‘It makes us feel young again,’ said Igor. ‘It’s as though we were back in the days of the New Economic Policy.’
They shared out the fruits of Vladimir’s accounting labours according to the neo-Marxist principle: To each according to his desires and his pleasure, which was a matter for subtle negotiations.
‘Take the pâté en croute. Next week, you can let me have the knuckle of ham.’
‘Who wants some quiche Lorraine? I’ve got too much. I’ll swap half of it with you for some gruyère.’
The shopkeepers made up generously for the low fees they paid him for keeping their accounts. Vladimir Gorenko had been wrong to treat the objectives set by the Commissioner for Planning as unrealistic
and utopian and he had clashed with a vice-commissioner whom he had criticized for never having set foot in a factory in his life and for being a narrow-minded apparatchik. The moment he uttered those words, he had regretted them and knew that his fate was sealed. On his return to Odessa, he had been summoned to the headquarters of the Ministry for Internal Affairs. He had escaped in the hold of a cargo boat and found himself in Istanbul. Once he reached Paris, he had searched in vain for work and had gone back to being an accountant again. His experience as a weary administrator in manipulating accounts to disguise colossal losses and transform them into proletarian success stories gave him a long head start on French clerks. He had no equal in detecting inconsistencies in administrative schedules or fiscal regulations and he had built up a clientele of small shopkeepers for whom paying taxes and national insurance was extortion.
To those who didn’t have any cash, Vladimir gave what he brought back. He made others pay a third or a quarter of the price. They obtained camembert from Normandy for one franc, sausage from the Ardèche for five francs a kilo, roast chickens from Bresse at ten francs apiece, and as much loose sauerkraut and sardines as they wanted for nothing at all.
That Sunday, a few protests could be heard.
‘I haven’t had any rabbit pâté for months,’ Gregorio grumbled.
‘Who’s pinched the sausages from the sauerkraut?’ asked Pavel.
‘It’s not right that Werner should have the rillons,’ Tomasz moaned.
‘Do you know why you should gather ceps when they’re small?’ asked Leonid, who had taken a Bayonne ham bone on which there was masses left over.
We spent five minutes trying to come up with an answer.
‘They’re more tasty?’
‘They cook better?’
‘There are very few of them?’
‘You can’t have been to the forest very often,’ Leonid concluded. ‘If you wait, there’s someone who’ll pick them before you do. In life, it’s the early bird that catches the worm.’
‘And what about democracy?’ Tomasz protested.
‘You’re getting confused with equality. Democracy is an unfair system. They ask idiots like you for their opinion. Be happy with what you’ve got. There might be nothing else. And say thank you to Vladimir.’
Imré was the last to arrive. There were six eggs left. Vladimir gave them to him.
‘I’ll make an omelette with white beans. That should be good, shouldn’t it?’
‘In Hungary, maybe,’ said Vladimir.
Imré was a melancholy bachelor. When he got home, he didn’t feel like cooking. It’s not much fun eating on one’s own. He found it hard to endure the silence. He turned up the volume on the radio and paid no heed to the neighbours. He opened the windows of his modest two rooms in Montrouge that overlooked the busy highway, and enjoyed the hellish noise of the traffic. It didn’t prevent him from sleeping with the windows open. No one had taken the place of Tibor, who haunted him like a ghost. He had resigned himself. He preserved this emptiness deep within himself. It wasn’t unpleasant. For Imré, eating was a dreary functional activity, to be carried out quickly, mainly involving tinned food: lentils or white haricot beans, with vinaigrette in summer, or heated in the bain-marie in winter. At home or in the street, Imré would speak to himself. He held proper discussions with Tibor. They told each other about their lives and their worries, they asked one another’s advice, they joked and they quarrelled. Passers-by were not surprised to hear him. They no longer took any notice of him. There are countless lonely people. Whom should they talk to, if not to themselves?
‘I know you don’t like flageolet beans. They make you fat. You put on kilos the older you get. It’s normal. I don’t feel like salad. Tomatoes are outrageously expensive at the moment. You’ll never change.’
For the sake of doing something different, Imré decided to fry the eggs that Vladimir had given him. He took out his frying pan, put in a little butter, broke open one egg, and then a second. When he broke the third, he heard a shrill, repeated ‘tweet-tweet’ sound. He thought that a pigeon was sending him a message. He leant out of the window. There was nothing but traffic as far as the eye could see. Pigeons don’t say ‘tweet-tweet’ he told himself. He was about to empty the contents of the third egg into the pan when he noticed an unusual yellow patch in the shell. He saw the chick. Alive! Taken aback, his arm wobbled and the creature fell in. Without thinking, he caught hold of the little thing before it burnt its feet. At that very moment, something happened, such as happens only once or twice in a lifetime: love at first sight. There is no other term to describe what occurred between them. They gazed at each other for ages. Imré was spellbound. The eggs were burnt. It was Saturday evening. He opened a tin of beans in tomato sauce for himself.
How and why did it get there? Raymond Martineau, the cheesemonger in rue Daguerre to whom Vladimir put the question, refused to believe it. It wasn’t possible. In twenty-nine years in the business, he had never heard of such a ridiculous thing.
‘If you’re telling me that so you can get an extra egg, you’re making a mistake, my lad. You don’t fool old Martineau with stories like that.’
Perhaps it was a particularly hardy bird with a knack for staying alive. For Imré, it was a miracle. A real one. He could see no other explanation. He mentioned it to the priest at Saint-Pierre-du-Petit-Montrouge, the church he walked past each day. The priest asked him whether he was making fun of him and asked him to stop blaspheming in God’s house. This did not reconcile Imré to the Catholic Church. For him, it was proof that it knew nothing about miracles and that it was blind to reality and to signs from the Lord. When he told us the story the following day, we were convinced that he would get rid of the chick, but he decided to keep it.
‘A chicken is less of a nuisance than a dog. You don’t catch cold going out two or three times a day and it’s less tiring than a cat. There’s no litter-tray to change and it doesn’t go on at you all day long asking for food.’
‘If it gives you pleasure, you’re right. What will you call it?’ asked Igor, who was very broadminded.
‘I haven’t thought about that.’
We wondered what you could call a chicken. We were used to the sort of names given to cats and dogs. Médor, Toby, Rex, Kiki, Mimine, Minette, Bibi, Pilou and others of that kind didn’t seem right.
‘An animal that’s a companion needs a name,’ Werner asserted.
‘You’ll just have to call it “my Chick”,’ declared Gregorios, who had little imagination.
‘What about “Cocotte”? That’s perfect,’ Virgil Cancicov suggested.
‘Call it “my sweetheart”, that’ll make a change for you,’ said Tomasz, who had a nasty sense of humour.
‘I don’t like that. I’m going to call it… Tibor.’
‘I don’t believe it!’
‘You can’t do that!’
‘He shall be called Tibor!’
We looked for a resemblance. There wasn’t one. The creature was tiny and fragile, with its downy feathers and it’s very faint tweeting call. Imré took it to the Club on several occasions. Igor and Werner made an exception for it, since animals were not permitted. It was a baby that suffered from loneliness and needed affection. Imré put it inside his overcoat pocket. It proved to be a lively and mischievous pet. We took it in our hands and stroked it. It tweeted at us. After four months, it had reached a respectable size and could be left at Imré’s home on its own.
‘It keeps me company, but I’m looking ahead. A cat or a dog produces nothing. A hen is useful and productive. It gives eggs. One just has to wait. Hens are unjustly despised creatures. They have a different sort of intelligence to ours. There’s a complex hierarchical organization in the farmyard that prevents conflicts. When the hen finds food, she alerts her chicks with a chirping sound. If there’s a danger, she gives out a different call according to whether the threat comes from the ground or the air. When I say “Bi, bi, bi, bi”, it rushes over to eat. And
if I say “Bou, bou, bou, bou”, it knows we’re going out.’
He fed it with the leftovers from his meals: bits of bread and white beans that the creature pecked at delicately.
‘Say what you will. There’s nothing like a chick. They’re affectionate, discreet, humorous and clean. When I’m sad and don’t feel like talking, it stays on its cushion and respects my silence.’
The creature prospered on this diet and grew into a magnificent white hen that never laid an egg. Imré didn’t mind. On the contrary. She followed and obeyed him like a lapdog. They communed and had a relationship that few people experience. When Imré went away on holiday he took his hen with him to the Noirmoutier camping site. We felt awkward. Nobody dared ask how he was. It embarrassed us to ask him questions, for fear of having to say ‘And how is Tibor?’
We hesitated to mention his strange companion, though we spoke about it when he wasn’t there.
‘He could have chosen another name,’ Virgil maintained.
‘It’s embarrassing, it’s true.’ Igor agreed.
‘It’s you who have a problem. Not Imré,’ Gregorios explained. ‘Because he’s homosexual and loves a hen. It bothers you that he’s happy with Tibor.’
‘In my opinion, he ought to consult a specialist!’ said Tomasz.
‘Don’t forget, you moronic Pole, that it was we Greeks who invented psychology. From the Greek psukhê which means “soul”, and logos which means “science”. When you give affection, you receive it in return. You ought to be able to understand that?’
The Incorrigible Optimists Club Page 42