The Incorrigible Optimists Club (27 page)

I'd just reached place du Panthéon when, immediately behind me, I heard a voice I knew: ‘Keep walking. Don't turn around. Take rue Valette, to the right. Look ahead of you. You shouldn't read when you're walking!'

I began walking down rue Valette. Lots of pupils were waiting outside the Collège Sainte-Barbe.

‘Stop! Go into this building!'

I pushed open the door of number 13. I walked down a poorly lit corridor and turned round at the corner. In front of me stood Franck.

5

O
ne day, the fighting had stopped. No more bombardments, no more shelling from dive-bombers, no more explosions, or the blasts of tanks and guns; no more acrid smells of oil or burning wood, no more yelling. Peace, at last. No cries of victory, nothing. A disturbing silence. Cities destroyed as far as the eye could see, transformed into vast piles of rubble. Crazed-looking civilians who found that nothing remained. Streets that had disappeared. Corpses nobody had the strength to bury. Endless lines of bearded, filthy and unkempt prisoners. Why? Who? Was it all going to begin again? During the Polish campaign, a few months earlier, the camps had been liberated, revealing things impossible to name and understand: the discovery of mass graves, the death industry, the hordes of living skeletons, the typhus, the victors who were more bitter than those they had conquered. The shame, the hatred, the madness. And, up until April, in Germany, hideous camps on the outskirts of the cities. Then acts of vengeance against the captured German soldiers and the civilian populations.

On 8 May, Leonid's squadron had been the last to return to base. For him, it was not an evening of celebration. He had had to wait weeks before he took part in the victory parade on Red Square on Sunday 24 June. In spite of the gloomy skies, it had been the biggest military parade of all time. A glorious occasion, the like of which had not been since ancient Rome. The drums in their hundreds and a host of brass fanfares of
A Slave's Farewell
had given the millions of delirious survivors goose pimples, as had the vast army marching past the marshals who were standing side by side – Zhukov on his white horse and Rokossovsky on his black horse – and the way the standards of the defeated armies of the Reich had been thrown pell-mell at the feet of the victor, perched on top of Lenin's mausoleum. Leading his Yak 9 squadron, Leonid had flown three times over Moscow. That evening, he had received from the hands of the Little Father
of the Russian people his second gold star as a Hero of the Soviet Union.

After forty-seven months of uninterrupted fighting, Colonel Leonid Mikhaïlovitch Krivoshein had returned to find his homeland devastated, his city, Leningrad, razed to the ground, his parents dead from hunger, cold and disease, and an endless list of friends killed in the fighting or from the bombing. He had not been able to find his girlfriend, Olga Anatolievna Pirojkova. He had had no news of her and he hadn't written to her for over three years.

Two years after Leonid returned home, a nightmare left him sweating and his heart thumping. His plane was on fire, spiralling downwards like a spinning top, and he was a prisoner in the cockpit and could see the ground coming closer by the second. During the nights that followed, the demons of the war came back to torment him, and in his mind's eye he saw once more the slaughter of civilians and soldiers. Images of the gunfire, the raping, the brutality and the spectres of concentration camp prisoners haunted him and woke him with a start at exactly half past two every morning, and he remained awake, unable to get back to sleep. He refused the sleeping pills prescribed by the doctor, Major Rovine. Taking medicine meant that you were ill and, in spite of this weariness, he felt in good health. He waited in the surgery, sitting opposite the young doctor, who consulted numerous specialist books in the hope of finding a treatment then asked him two or three questions before immersing himself in his books once more. In the medical corps, Dimitri Vladimirovitch Rovine had lived through the same battles as Leonid. They wondered how they had managed to survive and not come across one another. He was a doctor who did not believe in the power of medicine and who was convinced that we ourselves are the sole cause of our illnesses. ‘We're living in the Stone Age,' he used to say, as if to apologize.

He prescribed his remedies with a sceptical and perplexed air and seemed surprised when they succeeded. Very soon, the two men became inseparable. Rovine had three attributes that made him a good friend: he talked constantly about the war, he knocked back his drink and he was a remarkable chess player.

Eventually Rovine admitted: ‘I know of no cure for you.'

Leonid decided to exhaust himself physically in order to be able to sleep. To fight against himself. He walked until daybreak without meeting a living soul. At the first call of the clarion, he joined the marines in their training sessions, said to be the toughest in the army. He found hidden strength to keep up with the ferocious pace demanded of the privates by the Staff Sergeants. During the day, he went to the air base to establish exactly how many spare parts the air force had, an interminable and pointless task that no one had asked him to do. He dared to do battle with the military bureaucracy in order to stop them ordering just anything and, since it was rumoured that he might be appointed divisional squadron leader, they promised him they would do what was necessary. Sergei Ilyushin personally invited him to join his research consultancy to work on the project for a long-range aircraft that would be capable of raids deep into the rear of the enemy. Leonid couldn't imagine himself being a sedentary engineer, especially in Moscow, and he dreamed of only one thing: piloting his plane. Ilyushin insisted. Leonid agreed on condition that he would be the number one test pilot but received no reply.

In the evening he drank and played chess with Rovine. The drink had no effect on him. He increased the dose. He consumed several bottles of vodka with his chess partner, who succumbed before he had been beaten, and he eventually collapsed, numb with tiredness, only to spring out of his slumber an hour later. His eyelids were swollen, his temples heavy, and there was an anvil at the back of his skull and a blacksmith who kept hammering at his forehead. Only the bags of crushed ice that he pressed to his brow from dusk till dawn afforded him slight comfort.

One evening as he was strolling along the River Neva, the smell came, insidious and hard to identify. He returned to his bedroom. The smell followed him.

‘Can you smell something horrible?' he asked his colleagues at the barracks, who sniffed but could not detect anything apart from the cabbage that was cooking. ‘No, not that one. There are some rotting corpses somewhere.'

They searched, but in vain. The stench remained, clinging and acrid. No one suspected him. He was a hero of the Soviet Union, one of the most decorated men in the land, a close friend of Stalin's. The generals and the political commissars spoke of him with respect and esteem. They looked again, they searched the cellars and the most hidden recesses of the fortress; they checked the riverbanks and the destroyed mansions nearby. They thought that a concealed mass grave might be uncovered, but they found no trace of one. The smell persisted and it was unbearable, even when the north wind blew and swept away everything in its path, or when he pressed a pile of handkerchiefs to his nose, or when he wore a gas mask. The smell permeated everything; it prevented him sleeping, it suffocated him. The treatments prescribed by the most eminent university professors proved ineffectual. The only means of relief he found was to soak a handkerchief with vodka, so that the alcohol obliterated the stench. But breathing it in made him drunk, and the odour seeped in beneath the alcohol. He wondered whether he might be rotting internally. When yet another well-known professor confessed his own helplessness and admitted that the only possible treatment was a course of therapy that could take years without guaranteed success, Leonid decided he'd had enough. He hadn't survived four years of war in order to die a lingering death. He took this decision in a flash. It was obvious. It was the only solution. He put his affairs in order, wrote a letter to his sister who lived in Moscow, to whom he bequeathed the little he owned, and asked to be buried at the Tikhvine cemetery at the Nevsky monastery. He prepared himself. He had thought it would be agonizing, that he would feel deeply distressed and be racked with regrets, but he felt calm and serene. He downed a flask of vodka and tidied his office. Before leaving, he asked himself what were the ten most beautiful things that he had seen during his life and he decided that he would pull the trigger after the tenth. He thought of his mother Marina, of her smile that forgave him everything, and of his sister's infectious laughter. And memories came back to him of Leningrad before the war, before the most beautiful city in the world was destroyed. He saw once more the images of his youth, the northern lights over frozen Lake Ladoga, the Hermitage and its vanished treasures,
Petrodvorets and its hanging gardens, Saint Nicholas the Sailor with its thousands of twinkling icons, and Smolny, the white and the blue, with its delicate golden domes in the pristine sky. He was disconcerted to notice that all the wonders of his city dated from the time of the Tsars and the clergy, and that his own generation had brought nothing but destruction. He didn't deserve to live after allowing such a disaster to occur. He counted on his fingers.

He had reached eight when, in spite of the late hour, there was knocking at his door. He opened the door to Rovine, who had seen the light on in his window. He was holding a large, white porcelain teapot and he wanted Leonid to drink the potion he had prepared for him. He insisted, pushed him away with his arm, sat down on a chair without asking, requested that he close the windows, and poured some dark green liquid into a bowl.

‘What is it?'

‘Tea.'

‘Your tea has a smell of ether.'

‘It's been difficult to get hold of. I've been searching for some for a month. Drink.'

Leonid drank the burning liquid in small sips.

‘Supposing we played a game?'

‘Thank you, Dimitri Vladimirovitch, but it's not the right moment.'

‘Are you tired, perhaps?'

‘I've got work to do.'

‘You know what they say in the kolkhozes? One should always put off till tomorrow what can be done today. Perhaps you're frightened I'll beat you?'

Leonid told himself that chess had been his one real pleasure in life and that a final game would be a good way to go. What's more, he had to win it. Rovine was a tough player who didn't attack much, hid behind an impenetrable defence and, being an excellent finisher, waited for his opponent to make a mistake without taking any risks himself. Rovine set out the pieces on the chessboard. Leonid grabbed a bottle of vodka and two glasses.

‘Are you joking? No alcohol! You're drinking tea. I, on the other hand, will have some with pleasure.'

Rovine picked up the handkerchief soaked in vodka that Leonid was using and threw it in the dustbin. He poured some tea into Leonid's bowl and some vodka into his own glass.

‘Why are you doing that? This tea's disgusting. What is it?'

‘Don't ask pointless questions and just play. I'll let you have white. You'll need them. I'm intending to teach you a lesson.'

Leonid hesitated between two pieces, changed his mind, then advanced a pawn two squares and started the clock. Rovine took his own pawn and placed it opposite Leonid's.

‘I don't mean to be rude to you,' Rovine remarked. ‘But this game is only interesting if one observes two or three rules. In chess, a piece that is touched is a piece that has been played. I'd like you to remember that.'

‘You're right, Dimitri Vladimirovitch, I won't do it again. While we're on the subject of rules, I'd remind you that you should press the button of the clock with the hand that has just made the move.'

They played without talking, absorbed in the game. With an instinctive gesture, Leonid picked up the bottle of vodka. Rovine was quicker than him and poured him what was left in the teapot. The game lasted close to two hours. The pointer of the clock was close to XII. Taken aback by Rovine's cast-iron defence, Leonid was showing signs of irritation.

‘You've taken advantage of the condition I'm in to gain the upper hand. That's unfair.'

‘Three minutes more and you'll be out of time'

‘You're playing for time. It's really boring.'

‘The important thing is to win. If I'd attacked, you'd have beaten me.'

‘Are you ignoring the rule that forbids a subaltern from beating his senior officer? At least I allowed Stalin to win the game.'

‘That's the difference between us. If it were me, I'd have beaten him. And you're not my senior officer.'

Leonid put his hands to his head and stared at the board intently, searching for a miraculous solution that would get him out of this hornets' nest. His position was desperate and there was no sign of any
dramatic change. He was on the point of knocking over his king when he sniffed several times.

‘I no longer smell anything!'

‘I'm pleased for you.'

‘Is it what you gave me to drink? What did you put in the teapot?'

‘Some simple things.'

Leonid stood up, opened the window wide and breathed the freezing night air into his lungs.

‘It's extraordinary, I no longer smell anything! Tell me, Dimitri Vladimirovitch, am I cured?'

‘I'm sorry, Leonid Mikhaïlovitch, but this smell will come back. We don't know how to cure what is wrong with you. A psychoanalyst might perhaps, but it's not the kind of thing we deal with. When the smell returns, sniff this.'

From his pocket he took a small brown phial and gave it to him.

‘It's pure essence of eucalyptus. When the smell comes back, you must drink eucalyptus tea twice a day. It's not nice, but there's no other treatment. Morning and evening, you must have eucalyptus fumigations. The hardest thing will be to find some.'

‘Why didn't you give me any before?'

‘At the university they look down on this type of remedy. An old woman who sells herbal teas recommended it. I had to move heaven and earth to find any.'

Rovine gave him a tablet to soothe his headache without telling him it was a sleeping pill.

‘Thank you, Dimitri Vladimirovitch. It's the first time that I'm happy to lose a game.'