The Optimists

by Andrew Miller

  ‘Perhaps I don’t get it,’ said Clem. ‘Maybe I can’t. But I won’t accept one crime being used to justify another.’

  She rolled her eyes. ‘Oh, Monsieur Won’t-accept!’

  Why are you being like this?’ he asked. ‘Because I didn’t say when we first met that I despise what these men were part of? Should I have said that? Is it still necessary for anyone to say such a thing? Or are you angry because I have disturbed the comfortable life you have made for yourself here? I think,’ he went on, taking a kind of pleasure in the injustice of the comment, ‘that you would prefer to see Ruzindana free than make even the smallest change to your routine.’

  ‘That is not true,’ she said. ‘And you have no right to say it.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘You really believe I have nothing better to do with my time? Nothing more pleasant? The question,’ she said, regarding him very steadily, ‘is what you are doing here. I mean, what you are really doing.’

  ‘You know the answer to that,’ he said.

  She shook her head. ‘I thought I did. Now, truly, I am not sure.’

  The museum had a café. Smokers were required to sit outside in a grassed courtyard. Clem brought out two coffees. They sat, not quite face to face but at a slight angle, so that sipping coffee and smoking they gazed past each other’s shoulders to the windows and pillars of the courtyard walls. It was mid-afternoon; they were the only people there. The other tables and chairs already had an out-of-season look to them, ready to be stacked and carried in, stored somewhere until the spring.

  For several minutes they made small-talk. Clem asked her what she did when she went out in the evenings. She said she didn’t go out much; when she did she liked to see films. He said he liked films too. He saw a lot of films in London. She nodded. The spark seemed to have gone out of them, as if each was secretly disappointed with the force of his or her argument. Nothing much had been settled at the Musée Royal, though neither of them seemed to know quite what had been missed.

  ‘Now,’ she said, lighting her second cigarette, ‘now that I have made you look at a photograph, you will expect me to look at the ones you showed to the old man. You will call me a hypocrite.’

  ‘Those are at the hotel,’ said Clem. ‘I don’t carry them around with me.’

  ‘I’m glad.’

  ‘But if you want a picture for a picture...’ He pulled his wallet from his trouser pocket, flipped it open, undid the popper, selected one of the transparencies, and passed it to her. ‘Hold it up to the light,’ he said.

  She held it up.

  ‘Can you see her? Her name is Odette. She’s ten years old...’ He told her what he knew about the girl. How she had suffered her wound at N— when the killers hacked through the leg of the woman she was hiding beneath. How she lay in the dark for many hours believing herself to be dead, until she heard another child crying and went with her to find water, not knowing, of course, if the men with the machetes were still waiting. He described the Red Cross hospital, the rows of narrow beds, the unreal calm with which she had answered Silverman’s questions, then gone out to sit in the shade of a tree.

  ‘So she is alone?’

  ‘Except for the others like her.’

  ‘No mother and father?’

  ‘Among the victims. Her brothers too.’

  Laurencie gave the film back to him. As he returned it to his wallet she stood and walked, hurriedly, towards the cafe. Through the window Clem saw her pushing open the swing door to the toilets. He wondered if he had upset her; he assumed that he had, and that it had been an easy and shameless trick, a point-scoring trick that proved nothing other than her ownership of a heart more feeling than his own.

  He carried the coffee cups inside and waited for her by the toilet door. When she came out they returned together through the marble foyer and into the gardens again. The grounds, merely impressive when they first arrived, had taken on a brief late-afternoon splendour. The fountains played, the birds sang from the trained branches of the trees, and the whole softening world seemed to tremble at the point of melting into a pool of liquid bronze. They walked slowly, pensively, the width of a hand between them, though on the raked gravel of the path their shadows overlapped. Clem said he would be flying home the next day. Laurencie nodded. ‘You’ve finished with us?’ she asked.

  ‘I don’t know what else I can do here.’

  ‘When the time comes,’ she said, ‘the police will know where to look for him.’

  ‘For Ruzindana?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘No one will hide him?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘The young man?’

  ‘Jean?’ She shook her head. ‘What will you do in England?’ she asked.

  ‘There’s lots to do,’ he said.

  ‘You’ll write about this?’

  ‘I’m not really a writer.’

  ‘You’re a photographer with no camera,’ she said.

  ‘That’s one way of putting it.’

  She smiled. ‘Is there another way?’

  They drove back to the city in her car, an old Peugeot she drove well. Emile was waiting outside his piano teacher’s house. He had a brightly coloured music satchel over his shoulder. When the car pulled up he clambered on to the back seat. Clem reached around and shook the boy’s hand.

  ‘Good morning,’ said the boy, in English.

  ‘Good afternoon,’ said Clem.

  ‘He learns at school,’ said Laurencie. ‘He always wants to practise.’

  ‘Then let’s speak English,’ said Clem. ‘Pm sure you speak some.’

  ‘I could not do my job unless.’ Her voice in English seemed entirely different. Emile clapped his hands in pleasure at hearing her.

  ‘We are shops!’ he cried.

  ‘Shopping,’ said Laurencie. ‘Yes. I have to buy food. I will leave you in a street near the hotel.’

  ‘I don’t mind shopping,’ said Clem.

  ‘Mind?’

  ‘I like it,’ he said. ‘I like shopping.’

  She laughed. ‘A man who likes shopping!’

  ‘Is it OK?’

  ‘As it pleases you,’ she said, pulling out into the road.

  They went to a local supermarket. A man inside a smoked-glass booth read out the special offers of the day. Emile pushed the trolley. Clem tested him on the names of the groceries Laurencie picked from the shelves. ‘And this?’ he asked.

  ‘It is the chicken.’

  ‘And this?’

  ‘It is the egg!’

  Clem carried the bags to the car. They drove to Laurencie’s apartment block, a grey substantial building in a grey stone street. ‘It looks nice,’ said Clem. They were speaking French again.

  ‘Not so great inside,’ she said.

  ‘Am I far from the hotel here?’

  She shook her head. ‘Go down on to the avenue. Turn right, then right again on to Toison d’Or. After ten minutes you will see your street.’

  ‘Can you manage the bags?’ he asked.

  ‘There is an elevator.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘If you want to cat with us,’ said Emile, ‘we have a lot of food.’

  Clem thanked him. ‘I have some things to do,’ he said. ‘Another time?’

  The boy shrugged. They shook hands again. Clem turned to Laurencie. ‘Right on the avenue?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then I’ll say goodbye.’ He thanked her for her help and started walking. When he had crossed the street he looked round in time to see them go through the door into the building. He waited, thinking she might step outside again for some reason, but the door swung slowly shut and they were gone.

  On the avenue Louise the shopping day was coming to a close. Heavy traffic edged past the plate-glass windows of fashion emporia where girls in heels, Italian dresses, drew down security grilles and cashed up. Clem stopped at a bar near the place Louise. He ordered a bottle of Leffe and took it to an empty table
. The clientele was a dozen middle-aged men in a purple twilight, most, like Clem, at tables on their own. He lit a cigarette. The music was a low-level whining about heartbreak, impossible to listen to but impossible to ignore. He considered getting drunk again but the prospect immediately disgusted him. He left his half-full bottle on the tabletop, left the bar, and crossed the road on to Toison d’Or. Tonight was his last night: surely there was something useful for him to do? Try Silverman again, call Laura. His father too? Then he could sit down with some paper—there were a dozen sheets of writing-paper in a drawer in his room—and fire down some bullet points. One to ten, one to five. He was rolling to a standstill! Rolling like the year itself towards a midwinter stasis. Vital now that he stay occupied, interested in things. He lengthened his stride, moving in conscious mimicry of the home-bound business types on either side of him, but by the time he turned into the narrow dog-leg of rue Capitaine Crespel he felt as much a ghost as those others for whom, in the end, he had done nothing but distribute a few macabre postcards.

  At the hotel they were having a party. Balloons dangled in clusters from arches and door-frames; from the underground breakfast room there came a noise of uninhibited singing. Clem went upstairs and curled on the bed. He tried to sleep but his eyes kept opening to the light. After several minutes he realised the singing was coming closer—men and women’s voices echoing from the grey walls as they advanced up the stairs. It was a song they obviously all knew well. Now and then some responsible person tried to hush them, and one of the verses would be whispered, but at the chorus, unable to contain themselves, they burst out again, more vigorously than ever. Clem stood by his door. There was no peephole, no way, short of opening the door, that he could see them. They passed by, inches from him, then sang their way to the next floor and on to the next. The game, perhaps, was to go to the very top and sing from the roof, to serenade the chimney-pots and aerials, the first stars. It was just after six thirty. He went to the bathroom, washed his hair in the sink, cleaned his teeth. He picked up the brown glass vial of his eye medicine and put three drops in either eye. Some of the liquid leaked down his cheeks. He wiped it away with a corner of the towel, then held the vial by the side of his face, raising it a little, lowering it, moving it slowly forwards and slowly back. Healthy eyes have a greater than two-hundred-degree arc of vision: objects slightly to the rear of a line drawn across the front of the eyes should still be apparent. But were they? He could not, with any certainty, say so.

  At a store on the chaussée d’Ixelles he bought a bottle of French red, a bottle of white from the cold cabinet. Back on Toison d’Or, then on the avenue, he fixed his attention on the physical. How many cars, what kind of cars. He counted the steps between one street-lamp and the next, counted trees, litter-bins. His plan was to arrive without a plan, to arrive like someone who falls in through a door in the midst of a rainstorm at the start of a story in which almost nothing about the past will be explained.

  When he reached her building he found ‘karamera’ on the bell panel and rang, leaning his ear by the speaker. He rang again. He thought perhaps he had completely forgotten how to behave with people. He was, he was sure, about to make himself ridiculous.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘It’s me,’ he said. ‘Clem Glass.’

  Silence.

  ‘May I come in?’

  He heard her sigh, though it might have been the static in the speaker. ‘Laurencie?’

  ‘Fourth floor,’ she said.

  He rode the lift. The fourth floor was unlit, though a feeble shaft of twilight descended by the wooden stairwell. There were smells of cooking, and the sound of water stuttering through old plumbing. The door opposite Clem swung open. He saw that she had changed out of her dress and put on jeans and a red shirt. ‘I brought some wine,’ he said.

  She glanced at the bag. ‘Are you going to ask more questions? If you are going to ask more...’

  ‘I came to apologise,’ he said. ‘To tell you that I know you have nothing to do with this business. That Ruzindana is not your problem.’

  ‘Nor yours,’ she said.

  ‘I came to ask you to excuse me,’ he said.

  ‘To pardon you?’

  ‘Yes. To pardon me.’

  He watched her think it through (think something through); then she turned and walked into the apartment. ‘We have a visitor,’ she called. Clem followed her into the kitchen. There was a table in the middle of the room with a light over it. Emile was sitting on a chair, reading a comic and swinging his feet. He was pleased to see Clem. He took him to his room to show off the bicycle he had been given for his last birthday, a cherry-red racer propped against the wall underneath a poster of all-time champion Eddie Merckx. Clem, though he knew little about such things and had not ridden a bike in years, could see it was an expensive piece, particularly for a small boy who might have outgrown it by his next birthday. He listened as Emile explained the gearing, the fancy alloys. It was, said Clem, one of the best bikes he had ever seen. He did not ask whose present it had been. He preferred to think it had come from Laurencie, from whatever it was they paid her at the FIA.

  In the kitchen she was jointing the chicken they had bought at the supermarket. She used a long knife and a cleaver. She rolled the joints in flour and herbs. There was a smell of hot oil, the papery smell of steaming rice. Clem opened the white wine. He put her glass beside the chopping-board. ‘Thank you,’ she said.

  ‘Aren’t you afraid for your fingers?’ he asked.

  She shook her head. She had a streak of flour dust on her cheek. Clem sat at the table with Emile. Behind the boy at the back of the kitchen was a doorway covered by a red or red-brown curtain. He talked to Emile about music, bikes, and bandes dessinées. Laurencie fried the chicken pieces. The oil spat and bubbled. At a quarter to eight they sat down to eat Clem poured out more of the wine. The food was good and he said so, three or four times. She asked if he cooked for himself in London. He said that he often wasn’t there and when he was he was often too lazy to make anything. Some nights he ate out of tins.

  ‘Like a bear,’ she said.

  ‘A bear?’

  ‘We watched a film about bears going through people’s rubbish,’ she said. ‘When they find something in a tin they push their long tongues inside, very carefully.’

  Emile giggled.

  ‘That’s exactly how it is,’ said Clem.

  When the meal was over they left the dishes and went through to the living room. There was an upright piano against the wall opposite the window. Emile played a tune on it; Clem applauded; then the three of them sat on the sofa watching television until it was time for Emile to get ready for bed. He came back to the living room in blue and black soccer-strip pyjamas. He said goodnight to Clem in French and in English. Laurencie took the boy to his room to settle him. Clem went to the kitchen. He started the washing-up. Plates, pans, the knife and cleaver.

  ‘That isn’t necessary,’ she said, finding him at the sink still when she had finished with Emile.

  ‘It’s nearly done,’ he said. He wiped his hands and turned round. She was standing in the frame of the kitchen door, and he saw again, clearly, what he had first seen as he walked towards her on the pavement outside Une Vue de Mars: her aloneness, and the pride with which she tried to hide it.

  ‘There’s some wine left,’ he said. ‘Enough for a glass each.’

  ‘You should go soon,’ she said.

  ‘I know.’ He poured the wine into the glasses and they went back to the living room. They sat on the sofa; she left the television on. ‘The noise of it helps him to sleep,’ she said.

  ‘Does he miss his father much?’

  She shrugged. ‘He doesn’t mention him often. He thinks it will make me sad.’

  ‘Would it?’

  ‘I don’t live in the past,’ she said.

  ‘And the future?’

  ‘I’m not afraid of it.’

  ‘You were very young when you came here.’
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br />   ‘I was seventeen.’

  ‘That’s young.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It must have been difficult.’

  ‘You think you can imagine it?’

  ‘Some, I think.’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘You cannot.’

  He disagreed, though feared she was right. What could he know about such a thing? Yet it seemed to him that the effort of trying was important, and he told her so.

  She asked him about his work. In his answer he concentrated on the early stuff, the comical perils of his apprenticeship; then the good luck of finding himself in a hotel in Lubbock, Texas, at four in the morning sitting across the room from an election-weary Ronald Reagan. After that he had begun to travel, six, seven months of the year.

  ‘To wars?’

  He went, he said, where his employers wanted him to go. He had photographed many different things. The horse fair in the Camargue. Riots in Karachi. The Rio Carnival. The blind writer, J. L. Borges. He had photographed a fifteen-year-old Tamil suicide bomber whose explosive belt had failed to detonate. That picture, the girl held up between two soldiers not much older than her, had made the cover of Time.

  ‘Her disaster,’ said Laurencie, ‘was your good fortune.’ There was no venom in the remark. He agreed with it.

  ‘You think about the people afterwards?’ she asked.

  ‘Sometimes.’

  He said nothing about April, stayed years away from it. On the television a sports programme came on. They watched the opening laps of a grand prix, then she switched it off. ‘He’ll be asleep now,’ she said.

  ‘I should go,’ said Clem.

  She nodded.

  He leaned across and kissed her mouth. She put a hand against his chest as though she would push him away, but didn’t. He drew himself closer, caressing her. He began to undo the buttons of her shirt.

  ‘No,’ she said, when he reached the third button.

  They stood up. She smoothed the front of her shirt. ‘Is this what you came for?’

  ‘This?’

  ‘To do this.’