French Rhapsody Page 16

  ‘Chin chin …’ said Alain, a little disconcerted by the Russian’s presence in his sitting room.

  They clinked glasses and each drank a mouthful.

  ‘Are you all on your own here?’

  ‘Yes, it’s my day for home visits so I don’t need my receptionist today.’

  ‘Don’t you have a wife either?’

  ‘Yes,’ replied Alain, smiling, ‘I do have a wife. She’s at an exhibition for work at Porte de Versailles. At least I think she is …’ He swirled his whisky in its glass.

  ‘You think or you know?’

  Alain smiled grimly, then looked Ivana in the eye. ‘My wife is cheating on me. So I never really know where she is …’

  Alain was surprised to find himself being so open, reflecting that sometimes it is easier to tell the most intimate things about your life to complete strangers you will never see again – precisely because they are strangers you will never see again.

  ‘That’s not good,’ said Ivana, in a disapproving tone that surprised him. Perhaps it was a remnant of Soviet rigidity.

  ‘No, it’s not good,’ Alain agreed. He took another mouthful of whisky. ‘Not long ago, I asked her if she was cheating on me. I was hoping she would say no, and she did. But I knew she was lying, so I was quite annoyed with her for not saying yes. It’s complicated between couples … I should leave her, but I can’t make myself – we’ve been together for such a long time.’

  ‘Shh,’ said Ivana, placing a finger on Alain’s lips. ‘Your wife isn’t here, and I won’t be here long.’

  Her long fingers glided over Alain’s cheek and through his hair.

  ‘What are you doing?’ he whispered.

  ‘I came to bring you your songs,’ she said softly, ‘the tracks made by your group. Lepelle kept everything. I put them all on a USB stick for you.’

  ‘The songs …’ murmured Alain, and he wasn’t sure if his feeling of giddiness came from the reappearance of the songs or from Ivana’s hand which was now stroking his neck and proceeding towards the top button of his shirt.

  ‘Who are you? A model or something like that?’

  ‘Shh, you’re talking too much. No more talking,’ she said, getting nearer so that she could more easily undo the second button and then the third button of his shirt. ‘Some people say that life is short,’ she murmured in his ear, ‘but my grandfather says that life is long and boring … You understand? Do you understand?’ she repeated, looking at him seriously.

  Alain wasn’t sure he understood any longer, but Ivana’s hands, which had finished unbuttoning his shirt, seemed to be saying that if life were as long and boring as a grey sky, it was important to seize the moments of sun when they appeared. Ivana took off her boots and socks then stood up and stripped off her skirt and denim shirt. Alain was still looking at her when she deftly reached behind her back and unhooked her bra. Standing in front of him, she gazed at him in silence and Alain held his hand out to her perfect body, as if to check that it was real, that Ivana actually was standing in his waiting room, wearing only little white knickers, and that she was not a product of his imagination. Her skin felt incredibly smooth, as did her rounded breasts and especially her gorgeous flat stomach. She lay down on the sofa and put her bare feet on the arm. Alain wondered how many people had sat on this sofa. Millions perhaps. He had had it re-covered but it dated back to his father’s time.

  ‘Come here,’ she said, and he joined her with the caution required of a man approaching a splendid, wild feline.

  Their first kiss was gentle; the ones following, at Ivana’s instigation, were more insistent, more avid, and for a brief moment, it was as if he were kissing Bérengère at Gare de Lyon. Better even – as if Ivana comprised all the Bérengères of all lost youth. The years dropped away, the past floated off, only the present counted, and there was no future. Nothing existed except their two bodies encountering each other on the sofa, then the same bodies getting up and going to the bedroom to lie down on the bed without a word and resume their frantic kissing and their caresses that became more and more targeted. Nothing existed except this girl who was offering herself to him and demanding nothing in return. Nothing mattered except the fact of being alive, astonishingly alive, somewhere in Western Europe at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

  As Ivana’s body quivered in the semi-darkness of the bedroom, and she let out gentle moaning sounds that rose to the ceiling, high above the clouds, the birds and the aeroplanes, in the infinity of space, under the cosmic pressure that had inflated it into an almost perfect sphere, Bubble imploded in the silence of the Galaxy. The debris disintegrated as it fell back to earth, making a fleeting mark across the sky like a shooting star.

  A Letter (2)

  Ivana had left. She may have been the one taking the flight to Russia, but it was Alain who seemed to be suffering the effects of jet lag. As if his internal clock had come too close to a source of radiation that had confused his synapses.

  ‘Take me to Russia with you,’ he clearly remembered saying to Ivana as he held her close. The apartment was very still; only a single ray of light filtered through the bedroom curtains. He had never uttered anything quite so insane, yet he had never been more deadly serious.

  ‘You’re mad,’ Ivana had gently replied.

  ‘I could cure people … That’s what I do. Is there a doctor in your village?’ Alain had asked hopefully.

  ‘You’re mad,’ Ivana had repeated.

  In the waiting room, Alain finished his whisky, then he finished Ivana’s too. He stood up, took the bottle and put it back in the drinks cabinet, rinsed the glasses in the kitchen sink, dried them, and replaced them in the cupboard too. In the bedroom he opened the window wide, then removed the pillowcases and the sheets, piling them in the centre of the room. Then he crawled over the bed inspecting the mattress cover and headboard, looking for an incriminating long brown hair – but he found none. He returned to the kitchen, put the sheets and pillowcases in the washing machine and set them to wash on what he thought was a suitable programme. Véronique would probably be surprised he had washed the sheets, but would not pursue it. It would never occur to her that a young girl born in Siberia twenty-five years earlier would have undressed in the living room then led Alain to the bedroom to make love with him, before taking a plane to Moscow. Before Véronique got home, perhaps Alain would be able to come up with one of those explanations that make up the charm of domestic life: a cup of coffee carelessly spilt on the bed as he passed, a dirty mark left by his medical bag … In the bathroom cupboard Alain found clean sheets and two new pillowcases. He remade the bed and contemplated the result.

  Nothing remained of Ivana’s visit. All traces, right down to her DNA, had been erased. Alain closed the bedroom door and went to take a shower. Then he dressed in clean clothes and sat down in his waiting room. As he listened to the distant churning of the washing machine’s first cycle, his eye fell on the day’s post which was still waiting on the low table. He had been about to open it when Ivana rang the bell. It seemed as if an entire week had passed since then. Alain tore open the handwritten envelope and began to read.

  Claude Kalan

  Voie communale Le Vallat

  43450 Blesle

  Auvergne

  Dear Dr Massoulier

  I received your recent letter along with the photocopy of the earlier letter sent by my previous employer, Polydor.

  I appreciate you writing to me and I can understand how surprised you must have been to receive that encouraging reply from Polydor thirty-three years after sending them your demo tape. You have told me that you are trying to track down the other band members in the hope of finding a copy of the tape. I don’t know if you will succeed in finding it and I’m not sure if it would be worth your while to do so because I have to tell you that I did not write to you thirty-three years ago.

  Let me explain. In September 1983, I had an assistant at Polydor called Sabine who was responsible, amongst other things,
for the post. We had a disagreement. I can tell you now, as it is so long ago, that I had an affair with Sabine. An affair I had to end. I was obliged to tell her our relationship was over and I was letting her go. She seemed to accept the situation, to take it well, as they say. But, in fact, she didn’t take it well, she took it very badly. The day she left, she took her revenge by changing all the letters she sent out. To all those who had sent us a tape before the summer that we had decided to reject, she sent a personalised acceptance letter asking them to contact us for a meeting. After Sabine left, I found myself with almost a hundred people calling me for meetings. I was forced to explain that the letter they had received had been an administrative error. That their tracks were not of interest to us. You can imagine how that went down. Some didn’t believe me, and turned up anyway; some were pretty threatening. That lasted for over three weeks, then it settled down and I heard no more of that damned Sabine.

  From a distance of more than thirty years, I quite admire the style of Sabine’s revenge. And I realise that I probably deserved it. Believe me, I won’t forget September 1983 in a hurry.

  I recognise my signature diligently forged by Sabine at the bottom of your letter. I’m also sure that she wrote the letter because she always used that turquoise ink, and because, in autumn 1983, there were only two groups and one singer that attracted our interest. We offered those three a meeting, but, of course, they received a rejection letter. I was able to contact them, however, and rectify the situation. Your group, the Holograms, was not one of the two groups contacted.

  I am sorry to have to give what may be a disappointing explanation. If it’s any consolation, the groups we took on that year did not go on to have successful careers, and nor did the singer. Perhaps we should have taken on the Holograms. Perhaps you were better. The music industry is such a lottery … Even at sixty-three, and retired from the fray, I am not sure that I always made the best choices.

  Yours sincerely

  Claude Kalan

  Alain was overcome by laughter. The same nervous laughter as in the post office, but this time even more hysterical, and accompanied by the definite feeling that if God existed his sense of humour knew no bounds. He looked down at the USB stick Ivana had brought him and picked it up contemplatively. First there had been vinyl records, then cassettes, CDs, now this: a little piece of plastic smaller than a lighter. Ivana had liked the songs and had even downloaded them to her iPod – which proved that songs produced in the early eighties could appeal to a girl thirty years later. On the other hand, Polydor had not kept their demo, no singles would ever have been produced, no radio station would ever have played the Holograms and ‘Such Stuff as Dreams Are Made On’ would never have entered the Top 50. Alain wondered if it was actually worth listening to the songs again. Perhaps it would be better for the memory of the songs to be for ever associated with the sunny afternoon they were recorded, when everyone had been young and enthusiastic. Perhaps that was the magic he had been chasing after all these years?

  Alain had still not decided what to do when he heard keys in the lock. ‘Hello,’ called Véronique from the hallway.

  She took off her coat, put down her bag and came into the living room. ‘I’m exhausted but it was really good; I made some very useful contacts at the exhibition. How was your day?’

  Alain looked at the sofa and imagined the outline of Ivana there, but already the lines were blurred, already she had become a distant memory.

  ‘Me?’ he said, looking at his wife. ‘Nothing much, just home visits.’

  Epilogue

  Domitile put the finishing touches to her comms strategy for JBM. She called it ‘Appearance/Disappearance’. The issue of Paris Match featuring JBM had flown off the shelves and the picture from the train station had swiftly ‘gone viral’. The cover story, banally but apparently crowd-pleasingly entitled ‘JBM, the interview’, had led to a 40 per cent boost in sales. Numerous media outlets had got in touch with Domitile asking for another interview, but JBM had suddenly ceased to be available, and disappeared from view for several weeks.

  The same pattern repeated itself several times as JBM’s popularity rating continued to climb. Then an article in Le Monde cranked things up a gear, marking the beginning of the campaign for the queen of comms. A blitzkrieg of a campaign, short and sharp like a flash of lightning, with no one able to stand in its way. Popular philosopher Alain Finkielkraut’s instantly famous piece entitled ‘Coming full circle’ heralded the end of the Fifth Republic and even of the societal model it had upheld since 1958. Few people took the analysis seriously, considering ‘Finkie’ to have gone a step too far this time. Yet ahead of the article, the newspaper had reproduced the no less notorious piece ‘When France becomes bored’ by Pierre Viansson-Ponté, published in the same newspaper on 15 March 1968, diagnosing the principal causes of the events that would break out that May. Almost half a century apart, these two thinkers, two men of letters, reason and intellect, had put the world they saw from their windows into words, capturing the zeitgeist before anyone else. JBM had heard about the philosopher’s article, and it was probably when he finished reading it for himself that he really began to take on board what Aurore, Blanche and Domitile had said.

  The investigation into the attack on the Zénith was fruitless and Vaugan could no longer ensure that FR had any kind of political presence. While the press talked of a ‘long road to recovery’ for the controversial leader who positioned himself ‘To the Right of the Right’, the true outlook was even worse: since he had woken from his coma in hospital, Vaugan had given incoherent responses to all the questions his doctors had asked. Among other things, he said his parents and sister should be informed, that he needed to get to work and couldn’t be kept in any longer. When asked what his job was, Vaugan answered that he was a carpenter’s apprentice. Though it was true he had taken a vocational carpentry course – and passed with flying colours – that was almost thirty years ago. When Vaugan replied, ‘1985 – why?’ to the standard question ‘Can you tell me what year it is, Sébastien?’ his doctor recommended a period of bed rest. He questioned the young men and the girl in combats who had taken turns to stand at their leader’s door since he had come into hospital, asking them to contact Vaugan’s next of kin, his family. ‘We’re his family,’ one of them replied. ‘You may be his political family, but I’m talking about parents, a wife, children,’ the doctor countered gently. But Vaugan’s parents were long dead, as was his little sister, who had been killed in a boating accident over twenty years earlier. And Vaugan had no wife, no partner, no mistress. One morning, the doctor had to summon the courage to explain to his plaster-bound patient that he was considerably older than twenty and there was nothing and nobody left of the world he thought he was living in.

  Paralysed from the waist down, slumped in a wheelchair pushed by his last remaining followers, Vaugan, while still remembering only the odd fragment of his political life, gradually managed to piece together the puzzle of the missing three decades, and came to what he saw as the inevitable conclusion: his lifeless body was found in his office at the Black Billiard. The autopsy revealed that Vaugan had ingested a vial of cyanide of the type carried by special forces on both sides during the Second World War, to be taken if they fell into enemy hands. The press didn’t fail to highlight the fact that Vaugan had killed himself in the same way Hermann Göring had done at Nuremberg. Alongside this act of despair – not without its causes – Vaugan had done something else, which didn’t make the papers. He had entrusted his solicitor with a will in which he left the sizeable contents of his bank account and the Black Billiard building to the Society for the Protection of Animals, stipulating in writing that he was making the donation because he had ‘always loved big dogs’. The organisation never disclosed the legacy to the media. The Black Billiard building, on which work to turn it into the headquarters of France République remained unfinished, was sold to an American pension fund. All that is left of Vaugan today is the family to
mb at Juvisy, where a few of his followers gather once a year before heading off to drink beer in memory of the ‘commander’.

  While Vaugan lay in his hospital bed imagining himself in 1985, the political mainstream continued to prepare for the forthcoming election. Despite his lacklustre record and a popularity rating close to zero, the incumbent announced his intention to stand for the highest office once again. Though some were outraged, most of the party leaders reacted with customary caution and were philosophical about the decision, counting on the party’s primaries to put an end to the matter. Against all odds, the current president beat François Larnier by the narrowest of margins. Larnier, who had topped all the internal polls, made a spectacle of himself on the night the results were announced at party headquarters. ‘Oh, no! Not him!’ he shouted in front of an audience of stunned journalists. ‘You mark my words, I will not stand by and watch this happen.’ The next day, the two men’s lawyers appealed for a recount.

  In the weeks following the dispute, some strange anomalies came to light. One of François Larnier’s supporters, who had been dead for two years, had nevertheless turned out to vote for his choice of candidate. Other activists who had voted for the president could not be reached at the addresses given on their forms, and had never been seen by their supposed neighbours. The opposition condemned ‘grave suspicions of fraud, unworthy of the spirit and values upon which the Republic rests, and which tarnish our very view of France’. The situation was festering on when the president took perhaps the strongest decision of his entire presidency: not to stand. A decision he had ‘thought long and hard about, and taken in complete peace of mind’, he declared with a strained rictus grin that fooled no one during the short address he made to the nation at eight o’clock one evening, ‘in order not to give currency to rumours and lies, to put an end to the harmful atmosphere hanging over public life, and to restore respectful democratic debate to its rightful place at the heart of political life at every level. To the people of France, this is not a goodbye. I shall remain in office as Head of State until the forthcoming election. Long live the Republic; vive la France.’ Then the president withdrew into silence, and didn’t speak again.