The Incorrigible Optimists Club

Jean-Michel Guenassia, Euan Cameron

• Publisher: Atlantic Books
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9781848875425
• eBook ISBN:
  9781782394044
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

Paris, 1959. As dusk settles over the immigrant quarter, 12-year-old Michel Marini—amateur photographer and compulsive reader—is drawn to the hum of the local bistro. From his usual position at the football table, he has a vantage point on a grown-up world—of rock 'n' roll and of the Algerian War. But as the sun sinks and the plastic players spin, Michel's concentration is not on the game, but on the huddle of men gathered in the shadows of a back room. Past the bar, behind a partly drawn curtain, a group of eastern European men gather, where under a cirrus of smoke and over the squares of chess boards, they tell of their lives before France—of lovers and wives, children and ambitions, all exiled behind the Iron Curtain. Listening to this band of survivors and raconteurs, Michel is introduced to a world beyond the boundaries of his childhood experience, a world of men made formidable in the face of history, ideas and politics: the world of the Incorrigible Optimists Club.

Contents

Translator’s note

APRIL 1980

OCTOBER 1959–DECEMBER 1960

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

JANUARY–DECEMBER 1961

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

JANUARY–DECEMBER 1962

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

JANUARY–SEPTEMBER 1963

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

SEPTEMBER 1963–JUNE 1964

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

LENINGRAD 1952

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

PARIS, JULY 1964

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Translator’s note

Some readers may be puzzled by the term ‘baby-foot’, a faux anglicisme for the football game played so remorselessly yet so effectively by Michel and many of his contemporaries in this novel. Known variously in different parts of the world as ‘table football’, ‘kicker’ or ‘foosball’, in France ‘baby-foot’ has its own federation, tournaments and rules. In the Paris of the 1960s the game became a craze and no self-respecting café could be without a ‘baby-foot’ table or two.

I should like to express my particular gratitude to Sara Holloway for her sensitive editing of my text. My thanks, too, to various friends who have offered suggestions or advice on specialized terms used in the translation: Irina Brown, Mark Eisenthal, Ben Faccini, Hélène Fiamma, Jeremy James, Agnès Liebaert, Nelly Munthe, Joséphine Séblon. I should also like to thank Adélaïde Fabre, Julie Etienne and their colleagues at the Villa Gillet in Lyon for their kindness and hospitality during the month I spent there working on this translation.

Club: Klub/noun; a place at which one meets for social, political, athletic or other ends. [Middle English]

I prefer to live as an optimist and be wrong, than live as a pessimist and be always right.
ANONYMOUS

APRIL 1980

A writer is being buried today. It’s like a final demonstration: an unexpected crowd – silent, respectful and anarchic – is blocking the streets and the boulevards around the Montparnasse cemetery. How many are there? Thirty thousand? Fifty thousand? Fewer? More? Whatever they say, it’s important to have a lot of people at one’s funeral. If anybody had told him that there would be such a multitude, he wouldn’t have believed them. It would have made him laugh. It’s not a question that can have concerned him much. He expected to be buried hastily, with twelve faithful mourners, not with the honours of a Hugo or a Tolstoy. Never in the past half-century have so many people paid tribute to an intellectual. Anyone would think he was indispensable or had had unanimous support. Why are they here, all of them? Given what they know about him, they ought not to have come. How absurd to pay homage to a man who was wrong about almost everything, was constantly misled, and who put his talents into defending the indefensible with conviction. They would have done better to attend the funerals of those who were right, whom he had despised and poured scorn on. No one went out of their way for them.

And yet, behind these failures, there was something else, something admirable about this little man, about his passionate desire to force the hand of destiny with his mind, to press on in the face of all logic, not to give up in spite of certain defeat, to accept the contradictions of a just cause and a battle that was lost beforehand, of an eternal struggle, constantly repeated and without resolution. It’s impossible to get inside the cemetery, where they are trampling over graves, climbing on top of monuments and knocking over tombstones in order to get closer and see the coffin. You would think it was the burial of a pop star or a saint. But it’s not just a man they are interring: an old idea is being entombed with him. Nothing will change and we know that. There will not be a better society. You either accept it or you don’t. We have one foot in the grave here, what with our beliefs and our vanished illusions. This is the multitude as absolution for wrongs committed out of idealism. For the victims, nothing is changed. For them there will be neither apologies, nor reparation, nor a first-class burial. What could be worse than to do harm when you intended to do good? It is a bygone era that is being taken to the grave. It’s not easy to live in a world without hope.

At this moment, no one is settling scores. No one is taking stock. We are all equally to blame and we are all wrong. I’ve not come because of the thinker. I’ve never understood his philosophy, his plays are heavy going and, as for his novels, I’ve forgotten them. I’ve come for the sake of old memories. But the throng has reminded me who he was. You can’t mourn a hero who supported the oppressors. I make an about-turn. I shall bury him in a corner of my mind.

There are disreputable districts that take you back to your past and where it’s best not to loiter. You think you’ve forgotten it because you don’t think about it, but all it wants is to come back. I avoided Montparnasse. There were ghosts there I didn’t know what to do with. I saw one of them straight ahead of me in the side road that runs beside boulevard Raspail. I recognized his inimitable pale-striped overcoat, Humphrey Bogart 1950s-style. There are some men you can spot from the way they walk. Pavel Cibulka, orthodox, partisan, king of the great ideological divide and two-a-penny jokes, haughty and proud in his bearing, was striding along unhurriedly. I overtook him. He had grown stouter and could no longer button up his overcoat. His tousled white hair made him look like an artist.

‘Pavel.’

He stopped, looked me up and down. He searched his memory for where he had seen this face. Surely I conjured up a vague recollection. He shook his head. I did not remind him of anything.

‘It’s me… Michel. Do you remember?’

He gazed at me, incredulous, still suspicious.

‘Michel?… Little Michel?’

‘Enough of that, I’m taller than you.’

‘Little Michel!… How long has it been?’

‘The last time we saw each other was here, for Sacha. That’s fifteen years ago.’

We stood there in silence, confused by our memories. We fell into one another’s arms. He clasped me tightly.

‘I wouldn’t have recognized you.’

‘You haven’t changed.’

‘Don’t make fun of me. I’ve put on a hundred kilos. Due to dieting.’

‘I’m glad to see you again. Aren’t the others with you? Did you come on your own?’

‘I’m off to work. I’m not retired.’

His Bohemian drawl had become even more pronounced. We went to the Select, a brasserie where everyone behaved as though they knew him. Hardly had we sat down than the waiter, without his having asked for anything, brought him a strong coffee with a jug of cold milk then took my order. Pavel leant over to grab hold of the basket full of croissants from the next table and gleefully wolfed down three of them, talking with immense elegance and with his mouth full. Pavel had fled Czechoslovakia almost thirty years ago and lived in France in precarious circumstances. He had escaped in the nick of time from the purge that had removed Slansky, the former Secretary-General of the Communist Party, and Clementis, his Minister for Foreign Affairs, with whom he had worked closely. A former ambassador to Bulgaria and author of a reference work, The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk: Diplomacy and Revolution, which no Paris publisher wanted, Pavel was the nightwatchman in a hotel in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, where he lived in a small room on the top floor. He hoped to find his elder brother, who had made his way to the United States at the end of the war, and he was waiting for an American visa, which was refused him on account of his past.

‘They’re not going to give me my visa. I won’t see my brother again.’

‘I know an attaché at the embassy. I can talk to him about it.’

‘Don’t bother. I’ve got a folder that’s as plump as I am. Apparently, I’m one of the founders of the Czechoslovak Communist Party.’

‘Is it true?’

He shrugged his shoulders resignedly.

‘When you were a student in Prague in the thirties, the alternative was clear. You were either for the exploiters, or for the exploited. I didn’t choose sides. I was born into one. I was young, convinced that we were right and that there was no other solution for our country. It’s true: I was one of the leaders of the party. I had a law degree. I believed that electricity and the education of the masses were going to give birth to a new man. We couldn’t imagine that Communism was going to crush us. Capitalism would, we were sure of that. During the war, it was clear-cut. You either supported the Communists, or the Fascists. For those who had no opinion, it was their bad luck. We made enthusiastic progress. I never questioned myself. After the liberation, nothing happened as we had hoped. Today, they couldn’t give a damn that my friends were hanged, or that my family was harassed until they disowned me. They’re not interested in an old Commie, and I’ve decided to be a bloody nuisance. Every year, I submit a request for a visa. They refuse. It doesn’t matter, I continue doing it.’

‘Tell me, Pavel, are you no longer a Communist?’

‘Still am and always will be!’

‘It’s a total disaster. It’s collapsing everywhere.’

‘Communism is a beautiful idea, Michel. The word comrade has a meaning. It’s the men who are no good. If they had been given time, Dubcek and Svoboda would have got there. Mind you, my luck’s beginning to change.’

‘Why?’

‘Well, believe it or not, I’ve written to Cyrus Vance, Jimmy Carter’s Secretary of State. He’s replied to me. Can you believe it?’

From out of his wallet, he carefully extracted a letter that was in its original envelope and handed it to me to read. Cyrus Vance was replying to his letter of 11 January 1979, telling him that he would forward it to the appropriate department.

‘What do you reckon?’ he asked.

‘It’s a standard reply. He’s not exactly committing himself.’

‘In twenty-five years, it’s the first time they’ve done anything. It’s an omen. Cyrus Vance is not a Republican, he’s a Democrat.’

‘Didn’t you get a reply before?’

‘I was an ass, I wrote to the President of the United States. He doesn’t have time to reply to those who write to him. It was Imré who advised me to write to the Secretary of State.’

‘You may well have knocked at the right door. If they refuse again, what are you going to do?’

‘I’m no longer Czech. I’m not French. I’m stateless. It’s the worst scenario. One doesn’t exist. I do have a glimmer of hope of seeing my brother again. He’s American. We phone once a year to wish each other a happy New Year. He’s a foreman in the building trade. He has a family. He lives well. But he can’t afford to come to Europe. I’ll put in another request next year. And the following one.’

Th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Dedication page
• Contents