Sila's Fortune

by Fabrice Humbert

  ‘What about you, Simon? How much of “The Drunken Boat” have you managed to learn?’

  In that moment, the images swelled in the confusion of words. With impeccable, inspired delivery, Simon the goldfish recited the entire poem under the astonished eyes of the rest of the class, as though another Simon, transfigured, had just stepped into the light.

  Nor did this other Simon ever completely return to the darkness. For that whole year, he was ‘The Drunken Boat’ kid, something that later led Simon to believe Rimbaud had saved his adolescence. Not only did his teachers no longer look on him as some pathetic creature unable to pack his school-bag who blushed or paled the moment he was spoken to, but even his classmates saw him in a different light. They would not have elected him class president, but he was the-kid-with-the-incredible-memory, the-boy-who-never-forgets, that-guy-who-doesn’t-even-have-to-study, and for this they felt a certain innocuous envy. This did not mean they were jealous of him, since in every other way – his blushing, his awkwardness, the unfashionable clothes his aunt bought for him – he was utterly ridiculous.

  The result of this event was that no one ever recognised Simon’s true gift, which was for maths. He was never really very good at French. Since the death of his parents, silence had welled in him like a mute, infinite fountain, forever leaving him at a loss for words. He drew strength from that silence: words would never open the world to him. Truncated phrases slipped out, phrases like amputated limbs, too short, too curt, subject-verb-object constructions that never connected him to others, since nothing in his life connected.

  The silent world of mathematics, on the other hand, suited him perfectly. This was his real poetry and even if his teachers did not yet fully realise it, because the problems were still too simple, they were beginning to suspect that Simon understood maths in the way that some musicians have perfect pitch, a gift, like all of nature’s gifts of pure and uncertain beauty.

  It was around this gift that Simon constructed his sense of self. In the reassuring world of mathematics, a field impervious to the emotions he so feared, Simon forged the personality he was to have as an adult, and would have had still if events had not conspired to destroy him. Now he moved among his peers without cowering, invisible and silent perhaps, ignored perhaps by girls (for which he was grateful since they terrified him), but at least protected from misfortune. He lived in his little bedroom surrounded by his formulae in a little apartment where meals were served at precise times, where at eleven o’clock an elderly shadowy figure in her soft, gentle voice told him to go to bed and woke him again at seven for a breakfast of hot chocolate, already steaming on the table, and two slices of bread.

  Simon’s schooldays unfolded as they should. He learnt formulae and mathematical problems till they were coming out of his ears. He successfully won a place at the École Polytechnique, leading him to move out of his little room and into one hardly bigger on the outskirts of Paris on a barren plain where arrogant fellow students informed him that having secured a place at the finest university in the world, it was time for him to ‘make a career for himself’, a concept that troubled him. If ‘making a career’ meant becoming an entrepreneur, he was clearly unqualified. On the other hand, he could easily imagine making a non-career for himself in a mathematics laboratory. It was a path even the least astute career guidance counsellor could not but recommend to this raw-boned young man, pockmarked with adolescent acne who could barely bring himself to look you in the eye as he shook hands. Sadly, there came a time when even guidance counsellors – fatuous fatheads who never moved from their chairs – hadn’t a clue. Especially when the guidance counsellor in question took the fearsome form of Matthieu Brunel.

  The university was organising its annual fancy dress ball. Simon ‘the Jude’, a nickname given him by his good-natured colleagues, went wearing a military uniform, and the epaulettes for once gave a certain power and form to his anaemic physique. By this point in his life, some years after graduating from the École Polytechnique, he found it easier to deal with social occasions, and the prospect of being in a ballroom in Paris with hundreds of others was no longer quite as terrifying. The uniform granted him a place, and after all, finding his place in the world had always been his greatest problem.

  Stepping into the ballroom, he looked around for a familiar face. He had arrived rather early, though he knew social convention suggested arriving late to show how blasé one was about such events, and there was no one there he knew. So he headed for the buffet table where a considerable crowd – ordinary civilians who had come to the ball for fun – was already gathering. He joined the queue. When his turn came, he ordered champagne. As the waiter handed him the glass and he was about to pay, he felt a hand on his shoulder.

  ‘Hey, penguin features! Don’t suppose you could get a glass for me and my lady-friend?’

  A raucous laugh defused the insult.

  Simon turned and came face to face with the last person he needed in his life. Were it not for this encounter, he would probably never have become part of a milieu that was to devastate both his life and the economy of the modern world.

  Standing behind him was a tall, very elegant young man who seemed sure of his own good looks, accompanied by a slim blonde girl.

  ‘Don’t worry, I’m paying. I’ll even pay for yours since you saved me having to queue.’

  Simon, unfortunately, agreed. And this was how he came to meet Matthieu Brunel, his antithesis and, since they were to become best friends, also his double.

  3

  The Russian couple left the restaurant shortly after Simon and Matthieu. The man was short, with glossy black hair and slightly slanting eyes. He claimed his ancestors hailed from the steppes, that vast expanse which, over thousands of years, had witnessed a succession of nomadic empires sweeping from the plains of Manchuria to those of Hungary. Laughing, he would add that his ancestors probably included a certain Lieutenant Attila, who had brought war to the gates of Rome itself. But it was obvious that it was a hollow laugh, that his genealogical dreams indeed lay at the crossroads of the Roman Empire and Attila the Hun, in universal destruction.

  His companion was also dark-haired, with a pale beauty. She, more than her husband, attracted attention, and not simply for her beauty. She was tall and had a commanding air. And that evening, she seemed nervous.

  The couple headed for the Parc Monceau. They tried to go inside, but found all the gates were closed. Slowly, without exchanging a word, without touching, they circled the park. Then, heading back, they turned into the vast doorway of a luxury hotel. The man picked up their key from reception and they went up to their suite on the top floor. Through the windows, the city stretched away into the distance and perhaps, in that vastness, Lev Kravchenko’s eyes met those of Simon Judal, who sat looking out at the city through the window of his winter terrace.

  The woman lay on the bed.

  ‘You should have done something back there,’ she said.

  ‘Done something about what?’

  ‘When that waiter was punched.’

  ‘It was none of my business, Elena.’

  ‘That’s not what you would have said once upon a time.’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘You would have done something.’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘Well I should have done something, at least.’

  ‘Then why didn’t you?’

  ‘I wanted to. I was shocked by the brutality, the … senselessness, I was about to get up but then … nothing. No one else seemed to react, you didn’t react, apart from giving the man a scornful look and, I don’t know, I lost heart, especially since the waiter himself didn’t fight back. All he seemed to be doing was trying not to get blood stains on the carpet or something.’

  ‘Ah, yes. The alienation of the proletariat,’ said Lev mockingly, ‘we know all about that.’

  ‘Don’t joke. I found the whole thing appalling.’

  ‘The guy should have stood up for himself. H
e looked like he was in good shape, too. Thin but agile, muscular. I got a good look at him.’

  ‘While that fat pig …’

  ‘Fat maybe, but strong.’

  ‘So you were afraid of him?’

  Lev smiled. ‘You know very well I wasn’t.’

  Elena nodded. ‘Yes, I know. But that just makes it worse. You didn’t even want to do something. You just watched with that sort of vague curiosity, that world-weariness you increasingly seem to feel. I swear, Lev, there was a time when you wouldn’t have reacted like that. I don’t know if you would have done something … but you certainly wouldn’t have watched like a passive witness, like some passer-by in the street.’

  Lev shrugged. ‘It’s possible. But that was then, and I’m not the man I used to be any more. Excuse the cliché.’

  They stared at each other in silence.

  Lev Kravchenko had been Elena Matis’s professor at Moscow University. A research fellow at the Institute of Economics, a hotbed of ideas where he and a few friends – none of them famous at the time – discussed radical models of economic reform, Lev had also taught a course at the university where Elena had enrolled to do a double degree in political science and literature. She admired him, as did all his students at the time, for his eloquence, his intelligence and his passion, a rare quality among the rest of the faculty.

  One evening, they had met by chance in the city and he had invited her for a drink. Lev was as fascinating in conversation as he was when he lectured. He had the same energy, the same passion to persuade. She fell in love. Three months later they moved in together and within a year they married, on the very day the Berlin Wall fell. The coincidence of these two events struck them as comic, because laughter seemed to them the only possible response to the farcical collapse of the Empire.

  It had been some time since either believed in Communism. It had been some time since the succession of ageing dictators had been anything more than a ridiculous, pathetic pantomime that mirrored the regime itself. It had been a long time since they had faith in words, because words no longer corresponded to ideas: ‘people’s democracies’ meant dictatorships, the constant mantra of ‘we’, of ‘the people’ masked the vested interests of a select few, and the ‘struggle’ they were constantly told about through the hot war and the cold war was simply a slow and steady defeat. Elena even considered combining the fields of literature and political science in an analysis of Communist speeches, a paper she obviously could not actually write, at least not under the dictatorship, but one which she thought might sum up the hypocrisy of the regime and the disparity between word and action. They couldn’t quite understand what perestroika and glasnost meant: rightly or wrongly they believed that dictatorship either exists or does not exist, that any laxity necessarily heralds the end. Lev was convinced Gorbachev would be eliminated and things would go back to how they had been before; Elena, for her part, believed this was the beginning of the end, that before the millennium, the USSR would have ceased to exist. It was she who had been proved right, and in fact the thaw had happened more quickly than she had anticipated. Already, the huge ice floes of Communism were crashing down around them, great blocks breaking away, and the most important collapse of all, the most symbolic, was the Berlin Wall, which fell while they were getting married.

  And they laughed about it, a laugh that had no real meaning, a grim laugh in absurdity revealed. But they also laughed because they were young, because they were happy. And they would have done well to go on laughing for as long as possible, because what was to come was unutterably bleak.

  It was enough to contemplate Lev. It was enough to look from the lean, witty, brilliant professor he had been to the thick-set man with the cynical smirk and the screwed-up eyes of his Hun ancestors, who now gazed out of the window of his hotel suite, to realise that Lev Kravchenko would have done better to go on laughing, holding his young wife in his arms.

  But Lev had stopped laughing. Not straight away, of course. No, not straight away, but gradually, as he abandoned Marx and economic theory in favour of oil and struggle. As the Hun in him gradually revealed itself and he joined the headlong rush for victory. He no longer laughed, nor did he cry. He might have wept for the loss of what he had been, but he didn’t. His wife did it for him.

  In other circumstances, things might have been different. Lev might have gone on working at the Institute and later, probably, taken a post with an NGO where he might have had a dazzling career, combining a few useful acts with much talk. But the collapse of the Soviet Union and the shift to a primitive, savage capitalism decided otherwise. Circumstances revealed another Lev, one neither more nor less genuine, merely the Lev of that historic moment.

  In their formative stages, all societies are governed by thieves and criminals who impose themselves upon a lawless world, and it is only later, by a distortion of history and of memory, that these criminals come to be seen as great men. The feudal lords of the Middle Ages were savage plunderers, exactly as the first Greeks and the first Romans had been. Just as the millionaire robber barons of nineteenth-century America built their fortunes on steel and oil, on robbery and blackmail before rediscovering morality through the magnificent artistic and social foundations their descendants are so proud of, so Lev belonged to a savage period when crooks and robbers fought over the choicest morsels of the corpse of empire.

  In this clash with his own time, Professor Lev Kravchenko died and Elena had to live with his ghost, with a man who seemed less and less like him, whose cleverness developed into a callousness that sent chills down her spine.

  Lev immediately realised that the universities would be the first to be affected by the impoverishment of the state. He was already poor but he knew that, before long, he would have to drive a taxi to make ends meet. But it was not just that. Under the Communist system Lev had accepted being poor; in this emerging new world which, it seemed clear, would be utterly unlike the old, he wanted to act, to decide his own fate. The wind of change was blowing: he would make his own path through the ruined wasteland.

  Lev’s PhD supervisor knew Boris Yeltsin’s daughter. Like Elena, Lev had first become aware of Yeltsin when he was famously sacked from the Politburo in 1987, where as First Secretary of the CPSU Moscow City Committee, having railed against the corruption, the filth, the drugs and the prostitution in the capital, he lambasted Ligachev, the Second Secretary of the Communist Party, at the Central Committee plenum, screaming: ‘The corrupt and the dishonest are right here among us, as everyone here knows perfectly well.’ And while perhaps everyone did know, it was something not to be mentioned. Yeltsin was sidelined and it was rumoured he had had a heart attack, but in 1989, despite repeating his attacks on Ligachev, ninety per cent of Muscovites, including Elena and Lev, voted for his election to the Supreme Soviet. Obviously they were both too astute not to notice, even in his attacks on corruption, the signs of a populism that might make him a new dictator, replacing a weakened Gorbachev, but still Yeltsin seemed like a viable solution.

  And so Lev decided to get in touch with the man on the advice of Elena, who felt that in difficult times it was important to become involved in politics, to defend democracy. Yeltsin, after all, was in favour of a multi-party system. Lev, through Yeltsin’s daughter, secured an introduction.

  On their first meeting, he was impressed by this tall, heavy-set man with his brutal, authoritarian manner. Yeltsin was missing two fingers on his left hand, lost as a child during the war when a grenade he was playing with exploded, and his nose had been broken on several occasions during brawls. Lev would later liken him to a punch-drunk boxer: unpredictable, sometimes stupid, sometimes brilliant, driven by random urges.

  ‘What is it you want?’ Yeltsin asked.

  ‘I want to work with you to bring democracy to Russia.’

  Yeltsin looked doubtful.

  ‘What do you really want?’

  ‘Exactly what I said. And I’ll work to get you elected President of Russia.’

>   ‘What about Gorbachev?’

  ‘He will be President of the Union.’

  ‘The Union? That sounds like a tall order.’

  And Lev was hired. At first he was merely an administrative pawn in the team. He worked with the Democratic Bloc, of which Yeltsin was a leading light, and in an electoral landslide his mentor was elected to the Supreme Soviet as people’s deputy for Sverdlovsk, which position he used to run for President of Russia against Vlasov, Gorbachev’s preferred candidate.

  Now President of the Soviet Union, Gorbachev still had the power to sway the Russian deputies in the second-round ballot and ensure Vlasov was elected. Yeltsin was of the view that Gorbachev would do anything to block his path and that negotiation was pointless. A campaign meeting was convened at Yeltsin’s offices with the whole team present.

  ‘We need to negotiate with his team,’ Lev suggested.

  ‘What do you mean?’ snapped Litvinov, an advisor with whom Lev had a fractious relationship. ‘He is the team,’ Litvinov added contemptuously.

  Lev did not rise to the bait.

  ‘Gorbachev is Gorbachev, his team is his team. Gorbachev has been weakened and his men are increasingly acting on their own initiative. Mostly, they’re trying to stop things falling apart. I’m convinced we can negotiate with them.’

  No one said anything. Yeltsin stared at Lev curiously.

  ‘I think the boy is right. Sort it out, develop contacts, Kravchenko will oversee this.’

  If the negotiations failed, Lev knew, he would be dropped from Yeltsin’s team, but he also knew that if they succeeded, it would make his name and a government post might open up for him.

  Gorbachev was scheduled to make an official visit to Canada and the United States. Lev needed to act while he was away. He met with each of Gorbachev’s allies and outlined the situation. Yeltsin, he said, was the strongman of Russia, and though he might well lose this election he would win the next one because all of Moscow was behind him. His name alone was enough to bring 100,000 people onto the streets. And when he was eventually elected, he would have each and every one of them sent to the Gulag, for which he needed only to find a new name. Then, opening a briefcase stuffed with banknotes, he explained that the Russian President might prove to be generous, indeed very generous, to those who helped him.