The Wondrous and Tragic Life of Ivan and Ivana

by Maryse Conde

  Beneath their mutual raptures, however, Ivan and Ivana were suffering the martyr. On the one hand, Ivana was forced to give in to Abdouramane in order to save her brother. She blamed herself for the pleasure he had dragged out of her and the moans and cries she had uttered, albeit unwittingly, during these moments of carnal passion. How vile and wretched is the human body, she constantly repeated to herself. At night she had trouble getting to sleep. On the other hand, Ivan was unable to forget the time he had spent with Alix and Cristina, whose memory was encrusted in his flesh.

  The Waterloo Hotel had a shabby dining room where you could down a frugal breakfast every morning. For three days our friends stood around waiting, wondering when the wait would be over. On the morning of the fourth day, a newspaper seller came in. The Niamey Matin posted a headline that drew Ivan’s attention: “Spectacular Military Operation: Ivan Némélé’s hideout discovered”. There followed an article describing how Abdouramane Sow’s militia had launched an attack on The Last Resort where two foreigners, Alix and Cristina Alonso, had hidden Ivan Némélé for several weeks. The two wretches had received the punishment they deserved and been slaughtered.

  Ivan’s hands trembled so much he let the newspaper fall to the ground. Racked with grief, he collapsed onto the table, shaking with raucous, painful sobs like a child’s.

  “Why? Why did they kill them?” he stammered. “Alix and Cristina were non-violent, they had hearts of gold, they were tender and understanding.”

  Barthélemy picked up the paper and handed it to Ivana who read it in turn.

  The assassination of Alix and Cristina brought on a fit of anger in Ivan, beyond anything he had previously known.

  If you ask my opinion, I would say that it was at this precise moment that Ivan became radicalized, as they say. All the horror of the world was revealed to him. The world seemed to be divided into two camps: the West and their lackeys, and the rest. The former claim they are victims and are attacked for no reason as they have done no harm and are fervent defenders of free speech, every type of gender, love between people of the same sex, and adoption of children by homosexuals. In actual fact, this is not true. Both camps are playing games of massacre and each is as savage and implacable as the other. Both have no other solution but to respond to violence with violence. No finger is lifted to engage a dialogue or invent a compromise. Peace conferences open in Geneva and result in nothing and still the bombs keep coming.

  It was then, I believe, that Ivan decided to destroy this rotten society that stretched out around him. In my opinion this is when he resolved to change the world. How? For now, he had no idea.

  The Air France strike ended after a week throughout which the unfortunate passengers had piled into all the available hotels. Those who couldn’t afford to delay their business any longer had endeavored to reach Europe by every possible means. The day before their departure Barthélemy invited his travel companions for dinner at the well-known Trigonocéphale restaurant, for the three felt a strange affinity towards each other. The trigonocephalus or pit viper is a small, poisonous snake endemic to Martinique. Why this name was given to a restaurant owned by a French couple from Strasbourg is a complete mystery.

  “It’s big brother who’s inviting you,” he joked. “I’ll find a way to get him to pay for the dinner.”

  Ivan had no inclination to follow him. Ever since he had learned of Alix’s and Cristina’s deaths he had lost interest in everything. Memories of them constantly came back to haunt him and almost suffocated him. He was obsessed with the idea of making a final pilgrimage to The Last Resort, drinking in with his eyes what remained and losing himself in the memory of those who had disappeared. But the banks of the Joliba where The Last Resort was situated were at least five hundred kilometers away and he didn’t dare ask Barthélemy to drive such a distance, something he was sure to refuse. Moreover, Ivan had no intention of taking advantage of their executioner’s generosity. It took all of Ivana’s persuading, her arms locked around his neck, for Ivan to follow his companions to the restaurant.

  Despite its weird name the Trigonocéphale was a magnificent, welcoming establishment located a little outside town. It was the place to be for the Niamey elite. It was known for its professional artistic turns between dishes: belly dancers from Turkey and Egypt, acrobats from Ukraine, knife throwers who seemed to aim straight for their partner’s heart, jugglers, and ventriloquists. The high point of the dinner, however, was performed by the fortune-tellers. Their heads wrapped in turbans, and dressed in sparkling colors, they grabbed the hands of the diners and claimed to read the future. One of them plonked herself in front of Ivan, who nonchalantly held out his palm. No sooner had she taken a long look at him than she stepped back in fright.

  “Who are you?” she asked. “I see only rivers of blood, tears, and assassination where you are concerned. Aren’t you one of these fearsome terrorists?”

  Ivan replied quite calmly.

  “I am what I am.”

  Thereupon he swiftly handed over the bank note he had prepared for her.

  The following day at 5 p.m. brother and sister took the plane to Paris. The rays of the setting sun drew great scarlet Vs across the sky: V for vengeance. Yes, thought Ivan, Alix and Cristina had to be avenged. But how?

  -

  OUT OF AFRICA

  Ivan and Ivana disembarked at Roissy Airport, still dazzled by the colors of Mali, on a morning which to them appeared gray and dirty. Although we were only in the early days of September the weather was quite cool. Fortunately one of their “mothers” in the Diarra compound had knitted soft pullovers for them, unfortunately in a shocking spinach green for Ivan and salmon pink for Ivana. Hugo, one of Father Michalou’s cousins, who for years had tightened bolts in the car factory on the Île Seguin and now enjoyed a meager pension, had come to meet them. He was very proud to own a car, an antiquated Ford which still hummed along intrepidly. Exiting the airport they drove along a road cluttered with cars. At the end of a tunnel they entered Paris. Ivan and Ivana had never seen such tall, massive buildings forming a sooty black wall along the sidewalks. Set apart at regular intervals the street lamps gave off a ghostly, yellowish light. Despite the early hour the streets were by no means deserted. Men, women, and even children headed down into the metro while vehicles as gloomy as hearses revved impatiently at red lights. Ivan’s heart sank at the sight of this hardly welcoming atmosphere. Ivan had never liked Kidal but now he felt he wouldn’t like Paris either. Why was it named the City of Light? He recalled that Father Michalou compared it to a lovely odalisque who struck dumb those who admired her.

  They drove for miles across Paris and then exited the city, for Hugo lived in Villeret-le-François, a suburb that to the two new arrivals seemed miles away from anywhere. Hugo proudly insisted that in Villeret-le-François there were people of every nationality.

  “We have Indians,” he said. “Pakistanis, and even Japanese. Soon the Whites will be in the minority compared with those who come from elsewhere.”

  He had kept a strong Guadeloupean accent, and on hearing him Ivan relived his childhood and those moments of happiness.

  After an endless journey the car finally reached Villeret-le-François. It stopped inside a somewhat shabby-looking housing estate in front of four or five multistory tower blocks surrounded by a peeling wall.

  “Here we are,” Hugo said. “This is the André Malraux housing estate. There was a time when they called it the Mamadous. Chirac was very proud of it. He went straight ahead and installed electricity and running water for the garbage collectors he recruited from Africa.”

  “What!” exclaimed Ivan, climbing out of the car, “He had Africans come over to empty the garbage of the French!”

  Apparently Ivan had never heard of the famous song by good old Pierre Perret:

  They thought she was fairly pretty, Lily

  She was a Somali

 
Who arrived in a ship full of émigrés

  Who came of their own free will to empty the garbage bins in Paris!

  Hugo did not seem to be at all shocked.

  “Chirac pampered his garbage collectors like they were the apple of his eye. Today everything’s dilapidated. The elevators no longer work. A pack of dealers sell drugs in the stairwells.”

  Hugo shared his two-bedroom apartment and his life with Mona, an ageing woman from Martinique who still cut a fine figure and had once sung at La Cigale club in Paris. She had even been highly successful singing Luis Mariano’s famous hits.

  Life is a bouquet of violets

  Love is a bouquet of violets

  Love is sweeter than these flowerets

  When happiness chances by, beckons, and stops

  You must take it by the hand

  And not wait for tomorrow.

  At present she worked at the Villeret-le-François school canteen and could go on forever about the students’ deplorable behavior.

  “They’re impolite,” she would say. “Aggressive and always prepared to answer back. It’s not surprising they end up going to Syria and elsewhere to do their jihad.”

  The next day, while Ivana was anxious to get to the police training school where she was registered, Ivan reluctantly set off for the establishment where he was to do his apprenticeship. During the months he had spent in Mali, the prospect of such an apprenticeship in a chocolate factory had seemed incredible and somewhat ridiculous. Since the establishment was located in another suburb, he had to take the regional express metro, which to his amazement was crowded with a foul-smelling humanity. The day before in Hugo’s car he had been spared the smell of these unwashed bodies as well as their brilliantine and cheap perfume. Men with crimson-colored faces trying to look natural took advantage of the crush to squeeze up against young women’s curves. What struck Ivan was the number of Arabs—the girls wearing dark headscarves over their hair, the boys growing curly beards over their cheeks. What a surprising change of face France had undergone, he said to himself. He wondered whether one day there would be room for him.

  The buildings of the Crémieux chocolate factory founded in 1924 by Jean Richard of the same name were not visible from the street, even though a strong smell of chocolate swept over the sidewalk. You had to enter along a corridor and then cross a paved courtyard where overflowing garbage bins stood guard. In the meagerly lit entrance hall Ivan introduced himself to the receptionist, a disagreeable man who searched in vain for his name in the register.

  “You’re not here,” he concluded drily.

  Ivan explained he had been registered as an apprentice for over a year now and that the management had consented to delay his apprenticeship. Since he had no letter or document whatsoever to prove it, the man shook his head and pointed to a chair.

  “You’ll explain yourself to Monsieur Delarue,” he said.

  Ivan sat down. Gradually the hall filled up with men of every age sharing the same lack of confidence.

  Are these the people I’m going to work with? he wondered. The prospect discouraged him. He felt as though he was a prisoner deciphering his death sentence on these faces.

  After waiting for an hour he unconsciously got up, went out into the courtyard, and found himself on the sidewalk. It had started to rain, a gentle, penetrating drizzle which added to the gloom. Was this what he had left Guadeloupe and then Mali for?

  Once again he sat down in the express metro and returned to Villeret-le-François, where he took a walk to get to know the neighborhood. What he saw was not exactly heartening: nondescript buildings which all deserved a good touch of paint; public squares covered in seedy-looking grass, and a patch of wasteland where some children were playing football. He got slightly lost in the maze of narrow streets as he walked back to the André Malraux block. Hardly had he set foot in the hall of Tower A than he bumped up against two rapidly approaching colossuses.

  “Who are you? Where are you going?” one of them asked him in an arrogant tone of voice.

  Ivan’s answer was evidently not to their liking for they indicated coldly for him to follow them.

  “You’re going to have to explain to the boss what you are doing here.”

  Ivan had no choice but to follow them and climb up the dusty stairwell. The two men preceded him into an apartment on the third floor and pointed to a chair for him to sit down. After almost an hour a door opened and Ivan found himself face-to-face with the last person he expected to meet: Mansour. His friend Mansour who had lived in the same compound in Kidal. Mansour was totally unrecognizable, dressed like never before. At one time always so badly dressed in faded gandourahs and sarouel trousers he had now become a genuine fashion plate. He was wearing a dark-blue suit. His neck was clasped by a white high-collar and now that his hair was better combed it seemed thicker. In short he might have looked like an African version of Karl Lagerfeld. Mansour and Ivan threw themselves into each other’s arms.

  “Mansour, Mansour,” Ivan shouted. “What are you doing here? I thought you were in Belgium.”

  Mansour shook his head.

  “Yes, I did go, but I didn’t stay. Nothing good, nothing lucrative to be had there. Nothing like I expected; I was so disappointed. I landed in France, and here I found what I was looking for. But what about you? Tell me about yourself. Apparently you’ve become what they call a terrorist. I thought you were locked up in a prison in Kidal. Tell me more.”

  Ivan gave an evasive wave of the hand. He didn’t like referring back to that part of his life which forced him to wonder about his sister’s behavior. How had she obtained his liberation?

  “But what are you doing in Villeret-le-François?” Ivan asked.

  “Listen to me carefully, if you do what I tell you to do, you’ll do as well as I have done.”

  From that day on Ivan worked for Mansour. Well, work is one way to put it! Judge for yourselves. He got up at noon and, since he slept on a mattress spread out in a corner of the dining room, Hugo and Mona had to use elaborate tactics not to wake him while they ate their breakfast. Then he went into the tiny bathroom which he flooded with water and never thought about mopping up or cleaning. After which he, too, dressed like never before. Whereas previously he had always taken little notice about what he wore, now he began to imitate Mansour: bow ties, neckties, polka-dot or striped ties, slim-fitting shirts, and Giorgio Armani suits. He began taking a liking to Tergal, salt-and-pepper fabrics, and linen, and making comparisons between these different yarns. That’s how he treated himself to a red leather jacket, which he wore like a toreador, together with a black leather ensemble that could have passed him off as a homosexual. You might well ask where he got the money from to dress so ostentatiously. It was because money now flowed endlessly between the hands of Mansour and Ivan.

  His work consisted of filling little sachets with a drug which arrived in packs of four or five hundred grams and delivering them in exchange for a small fortune to a bar called La Porte Étroite, owned by Zachary, a Serbo-Croat. Zachary would then hand over small cases full of carefully pre-counted bank notes which Ivan took back to Mansour. No credit cards, no checks. Cash, and cash only. The barons of this drug trafficking remained invisible and stayed safely hidden, probably in their luxury apartments in Paris or the wealthy suburbs. Ivan did his best, having only one hope in mind: earn enough money to find an apartment where he would live alone with Ivana as Mansour had promised him.

  Ivan’s attitude regarding drugs was steeped in indifference. He was totally unaware of the harm he was doing by becoming a drug trafficker. He had no idea that this white powder, apparently as inoffensive as the wheat flour in Simone’s pastries, was capable of liberating the imagination, arousing death wishes, and destroying individuals. He carried out his smuggling without the slightest remorse or guilty conscience.

  In the evening he would follow Mansour. For some
one like him, who neither drank nor took an interest in girls, the charms of this night life were extremely limited. Mansour regularly visited La Baignoire, a night club in the center of Paris that was once a meeting place for famous homosexuals. It was said that Marcel Proust loved to swim in the pool on the lower third floor where he organized sumptuous parties with his one-night stands. Mansour was extremely busy making off with numerous maidens, preferably blonde and buxom. It was amazing when you think of how the girls in his own country used to treat him. The money he now flouted in Paris gave him direct access to and possession of the bodies of these lovely foreign girls.

  Ivan, who at first was bored to death at La Baignoire, gradually took a liking to gambling. He was no longer content to sluggishly pull the slot machines on the first floor. He began playing roulette and especially baccarat. He liked the aristocratic charms of the rooms where the tables were laid out; the unexpected turn of events for the gamblers excited him. The croupier’s somber, fateful voice seemed to utter the diktat of destiny. All around him the gamblers were an eccentric lot. For example, Ivan became friendly with an old penniless countess, who called herself Gloria Swanson, as well as her lover, Hildebert, a house painter, forty years younger than her. The countess and Hildebert often invited him to their apartment on the boulevard Suchet to down a glass of champagne, since they knocked back a case a day. Even though Ivan didn’t drink alcohol he was fond of their company. Unfortunately all that didn’t last. After a few months of this frequentation the countess fell into an alcohol-induced coma from which she didn’t come out alive and Ivan had to follow her to the Père Lachaise Cemetery along the alleys lined with graves bearing all sorts of names. Here he thus discovered it was possible to brave death’s anonymity. Ivan had never heard of some of the names engraved on the tombs. Who was Jim Morrison? What had he done to deserve such a long epitaph? When Hildebert explained to him the whys and wherefores, Ivan was bombarded with a new idea. Why couldn’t he too overstep his destiny? It’s true he was neither a musician nor a painter or writer and that he had no talent. But he could be the author of an extraordinary act which would shake the world and thus avenge Alix and Cristina. The death of Alix and Cristina was constantly on his mind and it repeatedly came back to haunt him. At certain moments he told himself it was his fault and that he had poisoned their generosity. Then his heart would break and he’d burst into tears.