The Optimists

by Andrew Miller

  Upstairs he towelled his head dry, climbed from his damp clothes and left them on the bathroom floor. His gaffer-taped contact book was on the bedside table. He found ‘Silverman’ and rang the number.

  ‘Hello?’ said a woman’s voice.

  ‘Hello,’ said Clem, letting his head loll on to the pillows.

  ‘Hello? Who is that?’ she asked.

  ‘Shelley-Anne?’ He had rung the New York number.

  ‘Well, that’s me,’ she said. ‘Who you?’

  ‘Clem Glass. A friend of...’

  ‘Oh, yeah. OK. How are you doing, Clem?’

  ‘I’m in Belgium,’ he said.

  ‘Wow. It must be pretty late there.’

  He agreed it was, though in fact he had no idea of the time.

  ‘Clem,’ she said, ‘I’ve got some friends here for dinner. Maybe we could talk tomorrow?’

  ‘I liked your book,’ he said.

  ‘You did? Which one?’

  ‘The Stitches of Time.’

  ‘That one I just called A Stitch in Time. You know, like the proverb?’

  ‘I like it anyway.’

  ‘That’s sweet of you. Thank you.’

  ‘Silverman says he can get a picture of you in any good bookshop.’

  She laughed. ‘Maybe that’s why he doesn’t feel the need to come home too often.’

  ‘I wanted to speak to him.’

  ‘I guess we’d all like to speak to him.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘There’s nothing to be sorry about. He’s working something out up there. Maybe when he’s ready...’

  ‘You know,’ said Clem, ‘he thinks that people are basically good but he only thinks it to keep himself sober. Really he believes what I believe.’

  ‘Well, I think that people are basically good too. I mean, don’t we have to believe something like that if we’re not to go completely crazy? There are some, of course—’

  ‘The first,’ said Clem, cutting across her, ‘the first we saw was a child, a young boy lying on the path with his—’

  ‘No,’ she said.

  ‘No?’

  ‘I don’t want to hear it.’

  ‘No,’ said Clem. ‘Why would you?’ The heat of the room was unpicking him. Inside his skull a voice nagged, telling him to end the call.

  ‘Have you seen someone?’ she asked. ‘Someone you could talk this through with?’

  ‘A doctor?’

  ‘It doesn’t have to be a doctor.’

  ‘A priest?’

  ‘A priest if you’re a believer,’ she said. ‘Which ‘I’m guessing you’re not.’

  ‘I had a drink tonight,’ he said.

  ‘You guys got too close,’ she said. ‘Way too close.’

  ‘We thought we were involuble.’

  ‘In what?’

  ‘Inviolable.’

  ‘Invincible?’

  ‘What are you cooking?’ he asked.

  ‘Cannelloni with pork and dried apricot and chestnuts.’

  ‘It sounds wonderful. You sound wonderful.’

  ‘You should get some sleep now, Clem.’

  ‘I hope he comes back,’ he said. ‘I hope he finds his way.’

  ‘Oh, he’ll be back,’ she said. He heard her smile. ‘I always insist on a happy ending. You should too.’

  In the morning he caught the last five minutes of the breakfast buffet. He drank lukewarm coffee, filled his pockets with fruit. In his room he took a painkiller and spent twenty minutes under the shower, trying to remember what he had said to Shelley-Anne. He searched in his jacket pocket for his cigarettes but found only a handful of francs, a receipt from the restaurant, his air ticket in its written-over folder. He watched the news updates on CNN and the BBC. Naked on the side of the bed he called Laurencie Karamera.

  ‘Do I have to come to the office?’ he said. ‘How much do they know there?’

  ‘I cannot help you,’ she said. ‘Please. Please go away.’

  ‘You’re on the rue du Sceptre, yes? That shouldn’t take me long.’ He waited, giving her some time to picture it, the unknown man shouldering his way into the office talking of bloodbaths, fugitives.

  ‘Give me your number,’ she said. ‘I will call you later.’

  ‘When?’

  Today.’

  ‘Call me in one hour,’ he said. ‘One hour from now. If I don’t hear from you, then you can expect to see me at the office.’

  He ate the fruit he had put into his pockets, watched some of the local daytime TV, then dressed and stood at the window. He opened it. The wet weather had blown through: the day was mild, clear, the street below washed clean by the rain. The houses opposite were no more than thirty feet away. Through the line of windows he could spy on the lives being lived in the various rooms of the apartment facing him. He saw a young woman sitting behind a music stand bowing a cello, or something smaller than a cello—a viola da gamba?—sounding her chords tentatively, though, as far as Clem could make out from across the street, without error. He did not recognise the piece, guessed it was something slow by J. S. Bach. She was so close he could have called across to ask her. Would she answer? What a nice, neighbourly exchange that would be! The next window showed a family room—rugs and paintings, chairs that didn’t match each other, a vase of white flowers. The end window belonged to an office or study. At the table, a man with a garland of grey hair sat writing, his arm crook’d, his back stooped, absorbed in his labours. A letter? A story? Or a memoir perhaps (yes, let it be a memoir), the History of My Life written for the girl whose music seeped under his study door. Lines to help her make sense of the mystery, to tie life down on its back and show her its belly.

  The telephone rang. He clambered over the bed to pick it up.

  ‘There is a café,’ she said, ‘by the church of St Boniface.’ She gave him the name. He scribbled it down on the notepad beside the phone. ‘Come at five thirty,’ she said. ‘At five thirty exactly.’

  ‘Ruzindana will be there?’

  ‘You must come on your own. No camera and no taperecorder.’

  ‘He’ll be there?’

  ‘I have legal training,’ she said.

  ‘We all have legal training,’ said Clem.

  He took his map and left the hotel. He bought cigarettes at the local tabac. Half an hour later he found the church (blackened façade, turreted roof), standing, warder-like, at one side of a small semi-circular place on the edge of Matongé. A scattering of cafés and restaurants gave to the area a character of well-heeled bohemianism. The café Laurencie Karamera had mentioned—Une Vue de Mars—was not what he had anticipated. The walls were hung with pop art; the music was American swing from the fifties; the clientele—students, young professionals, liberal arts types—almost exclusively white. Had she chosen it for its size? Full, it would hold two hundred customers, probably more. Or was it that in Matongé proper there were too many people who might be capable of piecing together snatches of the conversation—people for whom the events of April were more than a foreign news item buried now beneath a weight of other wars and new atrocities? He had assumed Matongé to be a refuge for Ruzindana, but had assumed it for no better reason than that most of its inhabitants shared the Bourgmestre’s skin colour. This made him what? A fool? A racist? What other unexamined assumptions was he carrying? Matongé might not at all be the sanctuary he had supposed.

  At the hotel he slept until he woke himself with the noise of his own snoring. There were still two hours to fill. In the house across the street the chair by the music stand was empty and the man had left off his writing (it had been a tax-return perhaps, a shopping list). In the bathroom he shaved, then tilted back his head for the eyedrops. At four fifteen, tired of pacing, unable to stay in the room, he put on his jacket, put the plastic folder under his arm, and rode the small mirrored lift to the ground floor. He made himself walk slowly, stroll like some flâneur with nothing more to worry him than where he would take his first aperitif of the evening
. It was ten to five when he reached the rue St Boniface. He sat in a café diagonally opposite the open comer-door of Une Vue de Mars. He had no idea, of course, what Laurencie Karamera looked like but thought it would not be difficult to pick her out, a woman in the frame of mind she was surely in. And wouldn’t Ruzindana be with her? There had been no explicit promise of it, and yet why else would they be doing this? It occurred to him that in dealing with Laurencie Karamera he might, in fact, have been dealing with Ruzindana all along. Would he surface now? Break cover? Or was this to be the first of a series of unfulfilled meetings in which she brought not the Bourgmestre of R—but a tangle of stories, lies, excuses, stalling him until he lost the will to go on with it? It would not be such a bad strategy.

  At five thirty-five, a taxi—a white Mercedes—coming from the direction of avenue Louise, turned into the place. It drove through, but returned a few minutes later and pulled up outside Une Vue de Mars. A woman and two men climbed from the rear of the car and went inside. The car moved off. Clem waited another half-minute, then scattered change beside his coffee cup and crossed the street. Through the windows he saw them at a table by the back wall, underneath a poster, several feet square, of the Martian desert. They were sitting like a committee, all three of them along the same side of the table, facing outwards. The woman was on the left. Beside her was a muscular young man in a tight-fitting short-sleeved shirt, and next to him, a much older man, gaunt and grizzle-bearded, who sat with his head bowed, gazing at the table-top through black-framed spectacles.

  ‘You have five minutes,’ said the young man, who, through narrowed and unblinking eyes, had watched Clem’s progress across the cafe. ‘Five minutes to say what you want. Then you go away. You don’t come back.’

  Clem sat on the chair opposite him, catching, as he settled, the whiff of an aftershave or hair tonic, something with sweet rum and spices, though which of the two men was wearing it he couldn’t yet tell. He turned to the older man. ‘Sylvestre Ruzindana?’

  Slowly, as if the movement pained him, the older man raised his head.

  ‘I’ve been wanting to meet you for a long time,’ said Clem, reciting words he had rehearsed a dozen times in the quiet of his hotel room. ‘I have even been to your home. Though others had been there first.’

  There was no response. No look of alarm or defiance or shame. ‘Your home is in ruins,’ said Clem. ‘Destroyed.’

  Still there was nothing. Clem unclipped the folder and took out the prints he had made in London. His heart had beaten wildly as he walked over to the table but now he felt calm, and something more than calm, as though the note of outrage in his voice were not quite authentic.

  ‘I took these in April,’ he said, ‘at the church in N—. I don’t think you need me to explain them to you.’

  He slid the prints across the table. Ruzindana picked them up. He began to go through them, carefully, without haste. At one he paused as though to make some comment, but he shuffled it to the back of the pile and studied the next. The waitress came for Clem’s order. ‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘Nothing, thank you.’

  ‘What type of human being,’ hissed the young man when the waitress was out of earshot, ‘can take photographs like these?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Clem. He saw that Laurencie Karamera had turned in her seat towards the far corner of the café. ‘Would you like to see them too?’ he asked. She ignored him. He looked back at Ruzindana.

  There are witnesses,’ he said, ‘who identify you as the man who led the killers. The one who encouraged them when they were tired, who ordered them to leave no grave half filled. There are people who say they saw you handing out weapons and that you were smiling.’

  By the side of the Bourgmestre’s chair was a string bag filled with shopping. Clem could see oranges, a bar of chocolate; something—meat or fish—wrapped in white greaseproof paper.

  ‘Listen,’ said the young man, heavily, as though it had fallen to him to explain the glaringly obvious, ‘we are educated people. We are successful people. We own land. We have a business. We are not living in mud huts, OK? Because of this we have enemies. They lie because they are envious of us. They want to drag us down. To destroy us.’

  ‘One of the witnesses,’ said Clem, ‘is a ten-year-old girl.’

  ‘A girl?’ He laughed. ‘A little girl? She will tell what she is told to tell.’

  ‘Then let me hear it from him,’ said Clem. ‘Let me hear him say that it’s all lies.’

  Ruzindana shook his head. He looked as though what he had been listening to was a story he knew, but only vaguely, a parable of human folly, something to sigh over. Through the not-quite-clean lenses of his glasses his eyes focused on Clem. He smiled. A broad, sad smile. Tell me,’ he said, softly, ‘have you been blessed with children?’

  ‘I’m glad you mention them,’ said Clem. ‘I wanted your opinion on whether killing children is more unpleasant than killing adults, or if, once the killing starts, it really makes no difference at all.’

  The young man leaned across the table. He jerked a finger two inches from the end of Clem’s nose. ‘You think we will let you insult us? Are you shameless? Are you a fool?’ He stood, pinching the older man’s sleeve so that he was forced to stand up alongside him. The woman stayed where she was, ignoring them still. Clem gathered the prints and returned them to the file. He snapped the file shut. To the young man he said, ‘I haven’t come here to insult you. I don’t even know you.’

  He left the café and walked down to the church steps, picked out a piece of shadow there, lit a cigarette, and waited. Was that iti Was it over now? Where had his anger been? His righteousness? That rage he had squandered on poor Paulus? The whole interview—this long-imagined confrontation—had played out as a failure of a kind he had not prepared himself for. Why had he not climbed on to his chair and announced to the whole café that there, sitting among them, among the Warhols and the Lichtenstein prints, was one of the genocidaires? Yet it had been hard to believe that the man across the table was the same whose image he carried in his wallet. No suavely tumed-out politician on the make any more; more the demeanour of some retired academic, some dreamy former expert on quasars or Babylonian dynasties, the type who regularly leaves the house without his keys. Depravity should not appear in the guise of someone’s elderly relative who has spent the afternoon food shopping. It was as though the man he wanted to grapple with no longer even existed. As if time had smuggled him to safety while he, Clem, avenging angel, swordless and wingless, had dug in a little garden and grown oblivious.

  After a quarter of an hour they came out. Whatever it was they had needed to say to each other after he left them they had obviously already said it. The two men immediately moved off together, leaving Laurencie Karamera alone on the pavement outside the café doors. Her presence there—intentionally or otherwise—effectively ended any thoughts Clem had had of following Ruzindana: he could not have pursued the men without first walking in front of her. He watched her smooth her brow, brush something from the sleeve of her charcoal-grey jacket, then look up and down the road. Once the men were out of sight he approached her, speaking her name while still some distance from her, hoping not to startle her, but startling her anyway. Whoever she was waiting for it had not been him.

  ‘I wanted to thank you,’ he said.

  ‘Thank me?’

  ‘For arranging the meeting.’

  ‘What choice did I have?’

  ‘They were angry with you?’

  ‘What do you want?’

  ‘Who was the young man?’

  ‘Go away,’ she said.

  ‘Is he Ruzindana’s son?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘Does he have sons?’

  ‘His sons are dead.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘In the camps.’

  ‘The refugee camps?’

  She nodded.

  ‘What happened to t
hem?’

  ‘Maybe they were sick. Maybe someone killed them. You’re the journalist. You find out.’

  ‘Did you know them?’

  ‘This is not my business,’ she said. ‘Why are you trying to make it my business?’

  ‘He’s accused of a terrible crime,’ said Clem. ‘Accused by you.’

  ‘Accused by the International Tribunal.’

  ‘It was war.’

  ‘War? It was murder!’

  He saw the word’s blunt force—assassinat!—go through her. She stiffened, then fumbled inside her bag for her cigarettes. When she had one between her lips Clem lit it for her.

  ‘You believe that he’s innocent?’ he asked.

  ‘He’s old,’ she said. ‘You saw him. Old and sick.’

  ‘He’ll stand trial,’ said Clem.

  ‘Perhaps.’

  ‘He’ll be convicted.’

  ‘He has friends there still. Powerful people.’

  ‘It will make no difference.’

  ‘None of it,’ she said, ‘will make a difference.’