The Incorrigible Optimists Club (14 page)

21

I
gor 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 Petersburg.'

‘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.

‘He's alive for the time being. He was operated on for five hours by Mazerin himself. He hasn't regained consciousness. Prognosis pending. The professor said you saved his life. Since he has no identity papers on him, they don't know his name. Do you really not want to come back?'

‘May I see him?'

‘Charcot wing, room 112.'

The man with the swollen face was in a ground-floor room on his own. He had a drip attached to his right arm, and was intubated and
under cardiac and respiratory supervision. With his head swathed in bandages, he looked like a mummy. Igor checked his health record and the post-operative report. Not brilliant. He sat down near him. It was quiet and unbearably hot in this department. He held the man's left hand. It was grey, cold and wrinkled. Igor warmed it by blowing on it and rubbing it. It took on a little colour. What sort of struggle was taking place inside this faltering body? What more could he do? Was there anything new, some unknown remedy that could save him? Was his helpless condition unpreventable? Had his time come? Would he manage to swim back to the surface or would he let himself sink? Igor rediscovered that forgotten feeling a doctor has when confronted with death, remembered the unspoken urge to fight against it, to challenge its prerogative, that supreme pleasure of snatching away its prey. Once more he saw the fingers clenching the mattresses, the crazed eyes, the countless fears, the inevitable asphyxiations, the faces of those he had been unable to save, who had slipped through his hands during the interminable siege of Leningrad and on the front line, the vast crowd of abandoned, sacrificial victims, who counted for nothing, who were of no importance. He rediscovered that visceral repulsion, that bitterness that always welled up again within him and with which he always struggled. This inert man, suspended between life and death, was closer to him than anyone else. A human brother. This was someone he would look after. He squeezed his hand and said to him in Russian: ‘I swear to you that you're going to live.'

He was aware just how much he missed his profession. A little over four years. Would he have to leave France to practise again? Set off for Africa? South America, perhaps? In which countries would his degree be recognized? He ought to find out, not content himself with merely surviving, not allow himself to become resigned. At five o'clock, the night nurse came by on her rounds. He introduced himself to her. At six o'clock, she found Igor asleep, slumped in the armchair. He was holding the man's hand. At seven o'clock, the day nurse woke him inadvertently. He apologized and slipped away. He came back in the evening. He spent a moment beside the man, who was in a coma. He returned again after his night's work and stayed with him for an hour, holding his hand, speaking
to him in a low voice. He got into the habit of visiting twice a day. He asked the nursing staff for news of the patient and the response was: ‘Stable.'

A nurse informed him that, during the day, a police inspector from the Gobelins station had called in to question the patient about the assault. Seeing the man's condition, he went away again.

Igor made the acquaintance of the senior consultant, Professor Mazerin, a fairly young man, who was portly and wore superb bow ties. Mazerin had realized that Igor was a doctor and he plied him with questions: how had he managed to carry out such a perfect pleural tapping? Where did he come from? Who was he? Igor did not reply to any of the questions. Instead he asked questions of his own. No one could say when the man would emerge from the coma or what state he would be in. He had suffered a cranial trauma, but his spine had not been broken. The one piece of good news was that his blood pressure, which had been low, was normal again. Mazerin was hesitant about whether to try out a new Canadian product that enabled the intracranial pressure to be reduced. Igor studied the specifications and ventured the opinion that there would be no point, the problem was not a cerebral hypoventilation. One had to wait. Perhaps he would be lucky?

Igor came every day. He examined the medical sheet, sat himself down in the armchair and took the man's hand. He recounted Victor's fairy tales, told him about the passengers' reactions, the amount of tips, the new areas he was discovering during the course of his journeys. With his exam in mind, he took the guide to the Paris streets and the suburbs with him and learned it by heart. Victor had suggested that he start with the maps of the métro lines and the bus routes and use them as landmarks. The night nurse made him revise and acted as his examiner. She was a hard taskmistress. She knew Paris like the back of her hand, and she explained the layout of the arrondissements and their significance, which were middle-class districts and which were not. When she heard the bell on the ward, she rushed off to the patient's bedside. Suzanne was a true Parisienne, a brunette with a high-pitched voice who had always lived in Buttes-Chaumont. She never stopped talking, and she was delighted to meet someone she could chat to at last.