“I think it was vodka.”
José turned to the waiter and ordered an iced vodka to reconcile the remedies of old wives’ tales with a universal state of drunkenness. The others watched the rush hour of the Group’s employees, some of the faces inspiring them to make merciless jibes. Nicolas could not be described as one of the best at this game. Like everyone else, he had his share of nastiness, but his natural shyness – particularly in front of Régine and Cendrine – meant he could not find the killing adjective. Jean-Claude Marcheschi, on the other hand, was not short on repartee, it was almost his job. As a bigwig, Managing Director to be precise, in the Mergers and Acquisitions Department, he juggled with financial markets, and bought and sold all sorts of companies around the globe. The Group was indebted to him for a handsome contribution to its turnover, and therefore a far from negligible share of the salaries of the people sitting at that table. While the waiter put the little ice-cold glass in front of Nicolas, they all listened to Marcheschi having a dig at the financial director of the three cable chains owned by the Group. Smiling at his well-chosen words, Nicolas took the first sips of the colourless, odourless and apparently soulless liquid, that bearer of disillusioned tomorrows.
“Has Magda been to see you for your holiday dates?” Régine asked the assembled company.
“First fortnight in July at Cap d’Agde,” said José, “and second fortnight in September in Paris to finish my building work.”
With the very first mouthful, Nicolas felt he had been given an uppercut in the chest; he closed his eyes for a moment and held his breath, waiting for the burning sensation.
“I’m going to Quiberon with my family,” said Arnaud. “A nice rest, I need it.”
And contained within that burning was a sense of imminent pleasure, of deliverance. A purifying fire was driving everything out: his wasted day, his bad conscience, his futile remorse, his dark thoughts. Everything.
“If I’ve got enough money I’m going to Guadeloupe with my loved one,” said Régine.
The blaze died down quickly, leaving just a spark somewhere inside. Everything would be better now. He could feel it in every part of his body. Without even realizing it, he heaved a serene sigh, as if his heart were at last reaching a point of inertia and balance. Of peace.
“For me, it’s the sea,” said Cendrine, “it doesn’t matter where, otherwise I feel like I haven’t had a holiday.”
The taste was only just beginning to appear. Subtle: pepper, spices, salt and earth. Brute strength.
“I can’t decide,” said Marcheschi. “I’ve been invited to go rafting on the Verdon, but I could also go to Seville to see some bullfights.”
And so it was that on this lowly earth there was a liquid capable of triggering a blazing fire in a thimble, and of delivering him from the burden he had been carrying since forever. He emptied his glass, hoping to find one last stab of pleasure on his tongue.
“What about you, Nicolas, are you going back to your friends in the Pyrenees?”
He did not even give himself time to think, his life had just stepped on the accelerator, horizons were opening up, and he felt he had the strength to confront them all.
“I’m going to the Tobriand Islands to play cricket with the Papuan Indians.”
It had come to him just like that, the most exciting – and, therefore, the most sincere – answer possible.
“Haven’t you ever heard of the Trobriand Islands, off the coast of New Guinea? You know, Papua New Guinea? It’s a former British colony from early in the twentieth century. The colonizers didn’t leave a single trace there except for cricket, the natives turned it into a sort of ritual ceremony.”
“. . . Cricket?”
“Their cricket isn’t anything like the English game any more, the teams are usually made up from two neighbouring tribes, and there can be as many as sixty players instead of eleven. They wear warrior costumes and war-paint, the bats are protected by magic rituals and the balls are made of wood polished with boars’ tusks. After each point, the team that’s just scored dances and chants: ‘My hands are magnetic! The ball sticks fast!’ And the umpire is a member of one of the teams, he can play himself and cast spells.”
Nicolas was enjoying the sudden stillness around him. Without actually meaning to, he had become the centre of a conversation which could no longer be called one. His whole body was relaxing after so much battling against a pitiless day. This early evening felt to him like a new dawn.
“Have you been there before?”
“No, that’s just it.”
José asked him whether this was an old dream, a whim or a decision he had made a long time ago.
“All three. At 15,000 francs, it’s a gift. A flight from Paris to Sydney, then from Sydney to Port Moresby, the capital of Papua New Guinea, then a little prop plane to Kiriwina, the main island of the Trobriands. Idyllic beaches and virgin forest. There are two villages that play cricket, and you sleep in someone’s home. It’s no good if you want to use the phone every five minutes but apart from that, it’s bliss.”
They asked him again where he had got this strange idea from, whether he often made such long journeys, and whether he was planning to go alone; and all their questions turned him into an adventurer. Nicolas Gredzinski was the exact opposite. He would not have been able to place Nairobi on a map, or endure a trek in Nepal, he had no desire to drink tea in a Ukrainian datcha, and he would have been bored in Chicago’s Museum of Modern Art, at the Rio carnival or at the religious festivals in Kyoto. In his physiotherapist’s waiting room he was much less interested in National Geographic than Paris-Match. But when National Geographic was the only available magazine, he was capable of reading an article about the customs of some indigenous people and of retaining the most colourful details. The thought of going to see the Papuan Indians playing cricket was irresistible to him. He tried, and failed, to think before it was too late of one good reason why he could not go to the Trobriand Islands.
*
Sitting, alone, on a terrace on the Montagne Sainte-Geneviève, he studied the glass of Wyborowa in front of him. Night was falling slowly, the air was warm, all the weariness of the day had been erased. He no longer wanted to go home and just tried to hold on to the moment, to feel it between his fingers before he let it slip away. A burst of serenity, a moment stolen from himself. Taking a sip of vodka, he paid homage to all those who had contributed to the fact that this nectar was now running down his throat. God probably had the biggest hand in it; by creating man, he had created intoxication. Or perhaps man had created that all by himself, which Nicolas found even more pleasing. One fine day, a man had distilled some grains of barley in a still, and thousands of other men had started to dream. Nicolas even remembered the lorry driver who had made the journey all the way from Warsaw to this little side street in the Fifth Arrondissement of Paris, and the waiter who had taken the trouble to put the bottle in a freezer so that it was at its best. This third glass brought him a new feeling of peace, an absence of anxiety, true peace. At the Nemrod he had only felt it as a sweet promise. He drank this vodka extraordinarily slowly, as if meditating. He had all the time in the world, this evening. And the world could fall apart, it no longer frightened him.
Peace.
Only yesterday it was a word he was forbidden. He hardly dared formulate it for fear of putting his demons in a rage. The peace of ancient philosophers, of before the big bang, the peace we taste with our eyes closed. Why wasn’t life always like this? If there was one worthy answer to this question, Nicolas wanted to find it.
The previous evening came back to him all of a sudden. What was that madman’s name? Brun? Blin? With his thick beard and his ferrety eyes. He must have woken up in a tunnel, equally ashamed of all the nonsense propounded the night before. They must both have been as drunk as each other to have come up with that ridiculous challenge. In the state they had been in, they could just as easily have climbed up the Arc de Triomphe or sung under the window of some happily marri
ed ex-girlfriend. Instead of that, they had dreamed of becoming someone else.
Where would they be in three long years’ time?
Despite the complete absurdity of the challenge, Nicolas could not behave as if it had never been thrown down. He had to cancel it before it was too late.
*
“He came by an hour ago.”
“To play?”
“No, that’s what was so odd.”
As he answered Nicolas’s questions, the attendant watered and smoothed the surface of a court which had been trampled by four men now discussing their match round the drinks machine. Night had fallen at last, the wind had lifted to cool everything down. A mixed double came to the end of their set before finding themselves in complete darkness.
And Blin had disappeared.
“What did you think was odd?”
“He asked me to rescind his membership of the club.”
“Sorry?”
“He used the word ‘rescind’. He’d only just joined. Normally, people just don’t come back and that’s the end of it. But he wanted me to give him the form back.”
“And did you rescind his membership?”
“It was the first time I’d done it, I even had to call the manager.”
“But you must have some way of contacting him, or have his details on computer?”
“His file didn’t have time to get onto the system, and even if I did have his details, I couldn’t give them to you.”
Nicolas apologized and asked him to tell Thierry Blin he had asked after him, should he reappear. He already knew it was pointless. Blin would not reappear.
Back in the centre of Paris, he asked the taxi driver to drop him in the Rue Fontaine. He had liked vodka for less than twenty-four hours but it was already so familiar to him that he needed to have a quick tête-à-tête with it about this disappearance. He looked for somewhere to go and was drawn to the Lynn, a classic bar all in red and black leather with waiters in white uniforms and a wooden bar counter even more impressive than the one the night before.
They say it takes one fool to know another. Nicolas no longer even wanted to know whether he had found something he was looking for in Blin’s madness or Blin had in his. One thing was sure, Blin had taken what they had said seriously, down to the last word, as if it was a project that had already been kicking about in his mind for some time, and meeting Nicolas had given him an opportunity to give it some substance at last.
He ordered a glass and downed it in one. From the full height of his serenity, he let himself slide into euphoria. He raised his glass high and addressed Blin as if talking to a dead friend.
We’ll probably never see each other again, Blin, but if you can hear me, wherever you may be, please tell yourself that our drink-fuelled words yesterday only warranted being lost in the mists of sleep. No one can become someone else. Don’t take any of it seriously, you risk losing yourself in a place you’ll never get back from. Believing in this challenge and trying to win it would be utter madness: it’s bound to lead to some strange, irreversible situation. Just thinking about it would be going too far. We mustn’t wake our inner demons or ridicule them by finding replacements for them. Ours have already been appointed, guarding our souls like fortified towns, watching over us! Do we really have the nerve to turf them out? They’d never forgive us. We can’t change anything about who we are, everything is written down, anchored, engraved, and nothing can erase that. Our minds aren’t a repentance, a page we rewrite every day. Our hearts can only ever beat as our hearts, they won’t try to find new rhythms, they found their melodies long ago. What’s the point in changing them, it took years to compose them.
He suddenly felt like having a cigarette, and he asked the waiter for a packet.
“We don’t sell them.”
“You wouldn’t have one you could let me have, would you?”
“I’ve given up.”
“So have I, but . . .”
“I’ll go and ask.”
Nicolas noticed a packet of blue Dunhills beside a woman who was sitting close to him at the bar. If he was prepared to ditch his good resolutions, then he might as well choose a real cigarette, a strong one which tasted of something, like the ones he had smoked until five years before. The waiter handed him a filterless Craven, which he put to his lips, aware of the risk he was taking; if he smoked it, thousands more might follow, none of them as good. On his worst, anxious mornings, some of them might even taste of death. He spotted a Zippo lighter next to the woman’s glass – it was the first time he’d seen a woman using a petrol lighter – and he borrowed it. Before lighting his cigarette, he hesitated a little longer, the time it took to have another vodka.
And what if he wasn’t so predictable after all? And what if, after this cigarette, he only smoked another couple, just to make the most of the intoxication of the moment? And what if he, Gredzinski, had the strength to triumph where others had failed? To outplay a script which had been written long before, to dismiss both camps – the inveterate smokers and the reformed smokers – without coming down on either side. He made the flame spring up, lit his Craven, froze for a moment with his chest filled out, then let out a sigh of smoke.
The future would decide what happened next.
It was half past midnight, the place was light and cool, the ventilation system swallowed what little smoke came from his lips, his glass left no mark on the wooden bar, he had no meetings before ten the next day, and there was nothing to stop him having one last drink. With each new drag on the cigarette, a snatch of expensive perfume teased his nostrils; for a moment he was surprised by this curious phenomenon and discreetly sniffed his own fingers, which should have smelled of petrol. Without asking for permission from the woman, he picked up the lighter and smelled every part of it.
“Don’t tell me that instead of refilling it with petrol, you fill it with perfume!”
“Miss Dior. Otherwise it’s disgusting,” she said. “It burns just as well, and it gives a pretty blue flame too.”
Her eyes were blue too, you just had to be curious enough to look at them, which he eventually did. In fact, they were practically all you could see, but she did not really play on them. Nicolas would have liked to see that face by the light of day; something told him that that steely gaze was there to contradict the warm harmonies of her olive skin and chestnut hair. In normal circumstances he would already have stammered some social nicety and looked away shyly, caught out and quite incapable of responding to this peculiar girl’s innocent charm. But this evening, with his cigarette in the corner of his mouth and his soul at peace, he looked her in the eye and made no effort to furnish the silence with smalltalk, letting the moment run its course without needing to be one step ahead of it.
“Do you think it would work with vodka?” he asked.
She smiled. Intrigued to see what she was drinking, he leant towards her glass.
“What is it?”
“Wine.”
“. . . Wine?” he repeated, surprised.
“You know, the sour red stuff which changes the way people behave.”
“I didn’t know you could get it in bars. To be honest with you, I’m a beginner.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“I’ve only been drinking since yesterday.”
“. . . you must be kidding!”
“I got drunk for the first time last night!”
Despite the irresistible ring of truth, she refused to believe it.
“I swear it’s true. This morning I even made acquaintance with the hangover!”
“What was it like?”
“I wanted something bubbly.”
“So?”
“I drank some Perrier.”
“Any good?”
“I haven’t surfaced all day.”
“I shouldn’t say this to a novice, but the best thing is beer. It’s a shame to say it, but it does work.”
Nicolas looked at her in confused silence.
&nb
sp; “You’re so lucky to be starting so late! You’ve got a liver like a baby’s, a stomach ready for anything and a cardiovascular system that’s not going to give up on you for ages. If I were you, I’d do a world tour of gut rots, they all have a slightly different effect and don’t necessarily take you where you want to go. Something tells me you have an adventuring spirit.”
“And your favourite destination is . . .?”
“I only drink wine. Not much of it and only very good ones. They have an excellent wine list here, which is quite rare for a late-night bar.”
“I’m Nicolas Gredzinski.”
“Loraine.”
She was wearing a fine grey pullover, a long black skirt which came down to her ankles, a jumble of bracelets on her right wrist and ankle boots in leather and black canvas. Her prominent cheekbones and the natural depressions under her eyes did not make her look worn but lent her whole face a certain elegance. Her slightly golden skin was darker on her cheeks and forehead. A Latin skin on Slavic features. A unique face, which Nicolas had just imprinted on his retina for ever.
“So, what do you do in life?” he asked.
And everything stopped dead.
The unexpected moment of grace came to an end at that precise moment.
She asked how much she owed, took out a banknote and put the cigarettes and the lighter away in her bag.
“I never answer any sort of personal questions.”
Nicolas, caught unawares, did not know how to backtrack other than to offer her another drink, which she refused with a curt gesture. She picked up her change and left the bar without a backward glance.
Before going home to bed Nicolas drank one last vodka to check whether it knew how to forget failure as well as it celebrated victory.
Thierry Blin
He hesitated between Bereavement and Stocktaking for a long time. Superstitiously, he avoided the first but could not resolve to use the second and scribbled Closed due to exceptional circumstances in marker pen on a piece of cardboard. As he taped it to the window in the shop’s front door, he wondered how long he would be allowed to let the exceptional go on before anxious customers contacted the police.