The Incorrigible Optimists Club (7 page)

She merely smiled, with an ambiguous expression. Bardon and certain neighbours still had their doubts about me, so Juliette had a splendid idea. She switched the record player on while I was out and turned it up to the maximum. I would arrive down below, all unsuspecting, and complain to Bardon about this racket that was preventing me from working.

‘Do we no longer have the right to be quiet in our own home? It's unbelievable!'

On several occasions, she also warned me about our mother arriving home unexpectedly. Our little game lasted for a long time. But this trifling episode, which ought to have brought us closer, paradoxically set us a little further apart. Whether I lied was of no consequence. These were the tools a man resorted to in order to survive; but that a young girl, not yet an adolescent, who was the image of purity, could deceive people and
do so with such nerve, opened up frightening new perspectives for me on the human soul. If she was capable of lying with this alarming sincerity, capable of making me doubt myself, how could I know when she was telling the truth? Who could I believe? I could no longer trust anyone. It was a horrible revelation.

9

T
he Balto was packed. Ten people were clustered around the baby-foot table. I was in dazzling form. Opponents followed one after another, powerless. True to our custom, we played with our heads down. We saw his leather wristbands before we heard his husky voice: ‘Hi there, nitwits. You've improved, haven't you?'

Samy tossed his coin on the table. He was wearing his smug expression. Nicolas and I gave each other a quick glance. We were determined to deal with him unceremoniously. We were the ones on fire, not him, and we intended to make the most of our advantage. Samy got round my midfielders, but Nicolas played the game of his life. He stopped almost everything. He held his centre-back at a slightly straighter angle so as to block shots from Samy, who was getting irritated. Nicolas scored four goals with his backs, three of them off the side. I was the one who was useless. As soon as I got the ball back to the forwards, Samy blocked my shots almost as if he had guessed what I was going to do beforehand. I scored one miserable goal by shooting when he had barely laid hands on his rods. It was a bit iffy. Samy, in lordly fashion, did not protest. On match point, he played around with us and lined up a rebound shot that was so quick we didn't see the white ball disappear into the goal. We heard a metallic
clack
followed by ‘Take that, morons!' Nicolas was furious with me. There were seven coins in the ashtrays. He inserted one. Three quarters of an hour waiting for our turn, just to be trounced by Samy. Nicolas had a go at pinball on the Liberty Belle. He challenged me to a game. But while he started to play, I sat on the terrace reading. I was dripping with sweat.

At the far end of the restaurant, facing me, and behind the benches, was the door with the green curtain. Jacky was coming through it with cups and empty glasses. I shrank back into the corner. He passed by without seeing me. An unshaven man in a stained, threadbare raincoat
disappeared behind the curtain. What was he doing dressed like that at this time of year? It hadn't rained for weeks. Stirred by curiosity, I drew back the curtain. In sprawling handwriting, someone had written on the door: ‘Incorrigible Optimists Club'. Heart racing, I moved forward cautiously. I got the greatest surprise of my life. I had walked into a chess club. There were some ten men absorbed in games. Half a dozen more were following the matches, either standing or sitting. Others were chatting in hushed voices. Neon lights lit up the room, the two windows of which gave onto boulevard Raspail. It also served as a storage room for old father Marcusot, who kept spare tables, folding chairs, parasols, worn-out benches and crates of glasses there. Two men were making use of the armchairs to read foreign newspapers. No one had noticed me coming in.

It was not the chess club that was the surprise. It was seeing Jean-Paul Sartre and Joseph Kessel playing together in the smoky backroom of this working-class bistro. I recognized them from television. These were famous people. I was fascinated. They were joking away like schoolboys. I've often wondered what could have made Sartre and Kessel laugh so much. I never found out. Imré, one of the pillars of the Club, maintained that Sartre used to play like a dimwit. They did it for fun. I don't know how long I remained there, in the doorway, watching them. Neither of them took any notice of me. Nicolas came to look for me: ‘It's our turn.'

He didn't know there was a chess club there and he wasn't in the least interested. As for Kessel or Sartre, their names meant nothing to him. Nicolas didn't have a television and reading was not his strong point.

‘I don't want to play any more.'

He stared at me in disbelief: ‘Are you crazy?'

‘I'm going home.'

I rushed off to tell Franck and Cécile my story. I would have done better not to say a word. Because of me, they started arguing again. To begin with, I kept them guessing. They went through a list of a whole string of celebrities. Franck had deduced that the men playing chess were intellectuals. Eventually he hit on Sartre. He couldn't get over the fact that I had seen him. They didn't get Kessel. They couldn't imagine that these
two could be playing and joking with one another. The problem was that Franck swore by Sartre, and Cécile didn't in the least. She adored Camus. Franck loathed him. I hadn't yet realized that it was like being for Reims or the Racing Club de Paris, Renault or Peugeot, Bordeaux wine or Beaujolais, the Russians or the Americans, you had to choose which side you were on and stick to it. There must have been one hell of a disagreement between the two men for their voices to rise so sharply. Certain nuances of the exchange eluded me. The words: narrow-minded, history, complicit, blind, lucidity, bad faith, cowardice, morality, commitment and conscience reoccurred on both sides. Cécile gained the upper hand. Her machine-gun delivery and her vivaciousness may have prevented Franck from responding at first. Unable to contain himself, he countered with: ‘You're a petit-bourgeois moralist and you always will be. Like Camus.'

Cécile seethed. Quite calmly, she retorted: ‘As for you, you're a pretentious little bugger and you always will be. Like Sartre.'

Franck left, slamming the door. Cécile and I sat waiting for him. He did not come back. Cécile was not annoyed with me. I tried to console her and to plead Franck's case. She was turning this discussion into a matter of principle; something fundamental and of prime importance. I did not see why it was so crucial. She said to me: ‘Don't go on about it. He's wrong.'

From one of the piles of books stacked up in the drawing room, she picked up a thick book and handed it to me.

‘
L'Homme révolté
by Albert Camus.'

‘I may not understand it.'

She opened the book. I read the first line: ‘What is a rebel? A man who says no.' It didn't seem very complicated. I felt involved. Did this mean that I was a rebel?

‘Read it. You'll see. What bugs them is that Camus is readable. And brilliant. Sartre isn't. They loathe Camus because he's right, even though I don't agree with him on everything. He's a bit too humanist for my taste. Sometimes, one has to be more radical. Do you follow?'

At the dinner table that evening I could not resist announcing: ‘Guess who I saw playing chess?'

Franck gave me a dirty look. I pretended I had not seen him. My father was amazed and felt obliged to explain to my mother that Sartre was a famous communist philosopher.

‘He's not a communist. He's an existentialist.'

‘It's the same thing.'

‘Not at all.'

She looked to Franck for support, who confirmed: ‘He's close to the communists. He's not a card carrier. He's primarily an intellectual.'

My father sensed that he should not step into this minefield. Persuaded to be a good chess player in spite of the thrashings Enzo gave him, he took it upon himself to explain the subtleties of the game to her and was shot down with: ‘I'd remind you that in our last game I had you checkmate.'

‘That was after the war. Perhaps I'll go and take a look at this club one of these days.'

He could see from the look on my mother's face that she did not want him wasting his time in a chess club. I could feel the storm brewing.

‘And you, what were you doing in this bar? I've told you a hundred times that I don't want you hanging around out of doors! Have you seen your maths marks? I forbid you to go there! Is that understood?'

She turned and walked away. Franck wore a smile from ear to ear. My father tried to comfort me: ‘That's the way it is and that's the way it's going to be.'

That is how, on the same day, I discovered Kessel, Sartre and Camus.

10

O
f course, I went back. Very gradually, I got to know the members of the Club. They were virtually all from Eastern Europe. Hungarians, Poles, Romanians, East Germans, Yugoslavs, Czechs, Russians, sorry, Soviets, to take just a few. There were also a Chinese and a Greek. The large majority shared a passion for chess. Two or three of them hated it and yet came every day. They had nowhere else to go. The Hungarians played a card game for which they alone knew the rules, which were incomprehensible to anyone who was not Hungarian even after they had explained them to you. In one corner there was a small table with a draughts board. No one played the game apart from Werner and old father Marcusot. Whenever one of the members wanted to wind up his partner, he would point to the table and say: ‘Chess is too complicated for you. You ought to play draughts instead.'

They had several things in common. They had fled their countries in dramatic or quite incredible circumstances, often crossing over to the West during a business trip or a diplomatic visit. Some of them had never been communists and had kept their opinions to themselves for years. Others had been communists from the start, convinced deep down that they were acting for the good of the world before becoming aware of the horrors of the system and discovering that they had been hoist on their own petard. Some of them still were, even though they had been disowned and thrown out by their party and by the French Communist Party, which regarded them as traitors. Worse still, Franck told me: as renegades! They embarked upon endless discussions or tried to justify themselves and asked themselves questions that were impossible to resolve: why did it fail? Where did we go wrong? Had Trotsky been right? Was it purely Stalin's fault or are we all complicit? Which meant: are we monsters? Are we to blame? And worst of all: might not social democracy be the solution? It led to animated, drawn-out, hate-filled
and impassioned discussions. Frequently, they would peter out for lack of vocabulary. Igor, one of the two founders of the Club, ruled that French should be the common language. He was a stickler about this and was constantly reprimanding them: ‘We're in France, so we speak French. If you want to speak Polish, go back to Poland. Me, I'm Russian. I want to understand what you're saying.'

In opting for freedom, they had abandoned wives, children, family and friends. It was for this reason that there were no women in this club. They had left them behind in their own countries. They were shadows, pariahs, without any means of support, and with degrees that were not recognized. Their wives, their children and their homelands belonged in a corner of their hearts and their minds and they remained loyal to them. But they spoke little of the past, more preoccupied with earning their living and finding a justification for their lives. By going over to the West, they had given up comfortable homes and good jobs. They had not imagined that the future was going to be so tough. Some of them had fallen, within a few hours, from the status of top-ranking civil servant in a protected job or manager of a public company with everything one could wish for, to that of someone of no fixed abode. This downfall was as unbearable as the loneliness or nostalgia that gnawed at them. Often after endless journeying, they had found themselves in France, where they had been given political asylum. It was better to be here than in the countries that had rejected them. This was the land of the rights of man, as long as you kept your mouth shut and were not too demanding. They had nothing, they were nothing, but they were alive. Among them, this refrain was like a leitmotif: ‘We're alive and we're free'. As Sacha said to me the other day: ‘the difference between us and other people is that they are alive and we survive. When you've survived, you're not allowed to complain about your lot, for you would be insulting those who stayed behind.'

At the Club, they had no need to explain themselves or to justify themselves. They were among exiles and they were not obliged to talk in order to be understood. They were in the same boat. Pavel declared that they could be proud of finally realizing the communist ideal: they were equals.

‘What'll you have, son?'

The first person to speak to me was Virgil, a Romanian with a rolling, sing-song accent that made me smile. This was something they had in common: odd accents that caused them to swallow half their words, conjugate verbs in the infinitive, place them at the beginning of sentences, gobble up their pronouns, mix up homonyms, and ignore the masculine and the feminine or else use them in risky combinations. Occasionally, one of them would make a correction and take it upon himself to give a lesson in French grammar that was riddled with mistakes. Endless and pointless discussions would ensue and, even after years, pronunciation and grammar did not improve. Nevertheless, they understood one another and they managed to have rows in French whenever they discussed politics or commented on the news, which was their principal activity.

‘May I stay?'

‘If shut up, no possible kibitz.'

He could see that I had no idea what that meant.

‘Follow game without speak. No interrupt.'

Silence was inherent to the Club. In actual fact, it was not so much the silence as tranquillity. You could hear the pieces being moved on the chessboard, the breathing and the deep sighs, the stifled whispers, the cracking of fingers, the sneering laughter of the victors, the rustling of newspapers and, from time to time, the regular snoring of a player who had fallen asleep. They sat so close that they could touch one another. Only the movements of their lips and their cocked ears made one realize they were conversing. Some of them still had the habit of putting their hands to their mouths as if to conceal what they were saying. You had to get used to this hissing noise that made it sound as though they were plotting. Igor used to say it was a habit acquired over there, on the other side of the world, where the slightest word could send you to prison or the cemetery, where you had to be wary of your best friend, your brother, your own shadow. Whenever one of them began to raise his voice, there was surprise and it took the rest a second to remind themselves that they were in Paris; then, as in a lively allegro, they began to have tremendous fun. Voices suddenly grew louder and then died down equally quickly. Without thinking, I developed the habit of slipping in between the tables,
sitting in my corner without anyone noticing me, talking in such a low voice as to be inaudible, and expressing myself with a glance, or a movement of my eyebrows.

There were afternoons when the periods of silence were brief and the laughter devastating. Igor, Pavel, Vladimir, Imré and Leonid were joyful companions who took nothing seriously and made fun of everything, especially themselves. They were the first to scoff at a grumpy player who requested quiet. They knew an endless number of communist jokes that made them choke with laughter. It took me some time to realize that their absurd jibes were not far from the reality. But in spite of their humdrum lives, they were neither sad nor melancholy. On the contrary, they displayed constant good humour and appeared carefree and unburdened by any memories. Woe to him who was depressed and manifested his anxiety; he would be called to order and told: ‘You're boring us stiff with your problems. You're alive, make the most of it and live.'

With them, it was either heaven or hell. There was no in-between. All of a sudden, there would be a flare-up between those who hated the system and those who believed in the future of the human race. Two or three of them would begin raising their voices. Then they forgot their French and started to speak in their native tongues, disobeying the rule laid down by Igor. They took sides, even those who had no idea what had caused the altercation. For ten minutes, there was a shambles of Babel-like proportions. They insulted one another, gave the impression they were about to smash each other's faces in, called each other by every name imaginable and spat out the most appalling insults. When I asked Igor to translate for me, he replied with a smile: ‘Best not to. They're not nice. There's nothing to be done: we're either severed or unsevered.'

One day, Igor explained to me this fine distinction that divided members of the Club into two eternally irreconcilable categories: those who were nostalgic and had cut ties with socialism, and those who still believed in it and remained bogged down in insoluble dilemmas. The wounds were raw and painful. These rows were as violent as a hurricane that destroys a town as it passes through, except that they were over as quickly as they had begun and caused no damage. Age-old quarrels and ancient resentment
rose to the surface. The Poles hated the Russians, who in turn loathed them; the Bulgarians detested the Hungarians, who ignored them; the Germans abhorred the Czechs, who despised the Romanians, who could not care a damn. Here, they were all stateless and equals in adversity. Once they had unburdened themselves, those who had been scrapping calmed down miraculously and got on with their game of chess. Five minutes later, they were joking with one another without any thought of revenge. They drank without moderation. Both good and bad news was justification enough to clink glasses and down a few bottles. Since the price of vodka was prohibitive in those days, they had discovered local beverages and enjoyed calvados, armagnac and brandy. They bought each other 102s, double pastis 51s at the drop of a hat and happily returned the favour. They had retained an expression used by Leonid Krivoshein who, when he arrived in Paris, did not speak French. He did not know how to say: ‘I'd like to buy you a drink' and would say instead: ‘Shall we knock back a bottle?' Ever since, they knocked back bottles. By common consent, Leonid had no rival as a drinker. No one had ever seen him the worse for wear. Even when he sank back one or two 204s.

Having been used to reading only one newspaper, they rightly enjoyed being able to choose the paper that corresponded to their own views. They read whatever came to hand, and were astonished that a journalist could criticize a minister without being arrested or shot, or that a newspaper could challenge government decrees without being banned. Wednesday was the day for the
Canard
. Vladimir, Imré or Pavel read aloud the article by Morvan Lebesque, whom they praised to the skies for his forthright views, his inexhaustible capacity for rebelliousness and ‘his brawling poetry'. They were all in agreement with the polemicist's column and his combative writing.

‘This guy ought to be given a public health award,' Werner maintained.

I should also add that they survived thanks to the money given them by Kessel and Sartre, who were rich, famous, generous and discreet. They recommended their pals to Gaston Gallimard and to other publishers for translation work, although there wasn't much available. I lived among them for years without being aware of any of them getting a great deal of
work. I learnt the truth, by chance, fifteen years after the Club had closed down, when I came across Pavel at Sartre's funeral.

I abandoned my baby-foot mates and became the youngest member of the Club. I struck up a friendship with Igor Markish, a Russian doctor who taught me to play chess. He had a son of my age in Leningrad. He introduced me to his pal Kessel with whom he spoke Russian. That was how I came to know Sartre. My testimony contradicts all the biographies. Sartre joked, he was humorous, he cheated at chess by stealing pawns, and he burst out laughing when Kessel surprised him by asking what had happened to his knight on f5. He did not come often. He could sense the animosity of several members of the Club, who criticized him for his communist sympathies, but accepted his money. He would spend the afternoon writing on his notepad, never looking up, absorbed in his work, dragging on his cigarette down to the filter, and nobody dared disturb him. We gazed at him from a distance, slightly intimidated, feeling we were privileged witnesses of creativity in action, and even those who disliked him watched in silence: ‘Let's not make any noise. Sartre's working.'