The Optimists

by Andrew Miller

  Where was the beginning? For lack of a better, Clem started with Fiacc driving down from Dundee with a cutting from the Scotsman in her coat pocket. Then Kirsty Schneider, the FIA, Laurencie Karamera, the meeting at the cafe. Several times Silverman made Clem loop back, be clearer, give details, state not just impressions but facts. He wanted to know who the young man was, how he fitted in. He wanted to know if Clem was sure, one hundred per cent sure, that the older man at Une Vue de Mars had indeed been Ruzindana.

  ‘Any chance at all that you were hoodwinked? Why would he ask if you had been “blessed” with children? What the fuck did that mean?’

  ‘Apparently his sons died at one of the camps.’

  ‘Apparently?’

  ‘It’s what Laurencie Karamera said.’

  ‘And how would she know?’

  ‘I don’t know that she did.’

  ‘You don’t?’

  ‘I don’t know exactly what she knew. How much.’

  ‘Did you check out what she does at the HA? Who does she lobby for? Someone’s government? For all you know she works for the Belgian Sûreté. And why oh why didn’t you take someone along to the café who could independently confirm Ruzindana’s identity? Then you would have had a story.’

  ‘I was told to come alone.’

  ‘You went in there blind!’

  ‘Blind?’

  ‘And maybe fouled it up for someone else.’

  ‘Someone who would have known what they were doing?’

  ‘Yes! Jesus! I don’t know what I’m getting so pissed about. It brings stuff back, I guess. I’m sorry.’

  ‘Forget it,’ said Clem. He mentioned the trip out to Tervuren, but not the trip back, and certainly not the night-moves that followed at the apartment. He did not want to hear any clever remarks about Laurencie Karamera falling for him a little too easily, a little too quickly, or how, by sleeping with her, he had fatally compromised his objectivity. As for the lodger—could he ever persuade Silverman that anyone had been there at all? The man in the cafe had been Sylvestre Ruzindana: he did not need any witness to confirm it. But the man in the apartment? He had thought he knew, so sure indeed that he had not even stayed to interrogate Laurencie (an omission he could not possibly confess to), afraid that it would force her to lie to him, that he would see fear or shame on her freshly woken face. Or triumph. Contempt. At first light, released from his trance of sitting, he had replaced the boning knife on the rack, retrieved his clothes from the bedroom, dressed, and walked to his hotel along shining carpets of hosed-down pavement, trying to work out why she had taken such a risk, and hoping that he himself was at least part of the answer.

  Silverman made pondering noises, digesting information noises. He was not irritable any more. He mused and maundered and, from the tip of the satellite antenna twenty thousand miles over Clem’s head, certain key words dropped like rainwater from a twig—Hope, Sincerity, Closure, Beauty... Then, in a kind of vocal spasm, the phrase, ‘If people would only embrace each other!’

  ‘How’s Shelley-Anne?’ asked Clem.

  ‘Shelley-Anne?’ Silverman quoted his wife’s judgement that Clem had been strung-out when he called her. ‘Pieeyed was how she put it.’ Clem admitted it. He could not, he said, remember what they had talked about but he remembered liking her.

  ‘Me too,’ said Silverman. ‘I haven’t given up on anything. There are still things I need to do up here. But later...’

  ‘The people in the station? What became of them?’

  ‘All of them out. All due to have their cases heard in the next couple of weeks. Prospect of positive decisions is strong. The boy’s been getting some medical help, gratis. I’m teaching them a little English and showing them the wonders of my native land.’

  ‘Niagara?’

  ‘Yeah, we’ve done the Falls. They nearly died of pleasure. And this will make you laugh. I’m going to open an office here. Got my eye on a building in Cabbage Town. Thought I might call it the Maggie Peterson Centre. What do you think?’

  Clem said he liked it.

  ‘Not too grand?’

  ‘Not at all.’

  ‘We’re getting some interest. We’re even getting some funding.’

  ‘I’m pleased.’

  ‘We’ll put this other stuff behind us now. OK? I admire what you tried to do out there, in darkest Belgium. But leave the rest to the tribunal.’

  ‘I intend to.’

  ‘It’s finished, Clem.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Dust those cameras off!’

  ‘I will.’

  ‘There’s still a lot that’s worth doing. That’s what I’ve been learning.’

  ‘You’re right.’

  ‘It’s over for us.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘It’s over.’

  ‘It’s over.’

  ‘Yeah, it’s over now.’

  In October, Clare started again at the university. I’ll only be doing a few hours, she explained in a letter she sent to Clem in the middle of the month. It’s really about keeping my hand in, staying in touch, feeling useful. There were, she said, bad days still and bad nights, and she was never quite without the fear that the illness would close over her head again, but she thought she was managing, and managing was what counted. She wanted to thank him for his help. He had been a good brother and a good friend. He had been kind to her; she wouldn’t forget it. What was he doing at Christmas? Had he made any plans? Finola—this as a hurried postscript—sent him her best.

  Clem took to roaming again. Places he had walked in his shirtsleeves in May and June he walked now in his overcoat, sometimes with the sense that the streets he passed fell away behind him into heaps of mortar and dust as though he were some Hindu god of destruction. He was drinking more and eating less. At the end of the month he spent a week in bed with a viral complaint that started in his guts with three-a.m. retching and ended in his lungs, a cough like a fox’s bark that he couldn’t shake off.

  Patsy Stellenbosch from the agency rang wanting to know if he was available for a job. He told her there were family commitments still, family problems. ‘It’s November,’ she said. ‘It’s been a long time.’ He suggested Toby Rose. ‘We’d rather have you,’ she said. He said he was sorry. ‘You call us,’ she said, ‘and tell us when you want to be a photographer again.’

  Ray and Frankie moved to Poplar. They sent Clem a photocopied picture of their building, a pencilled arrow to distinguish their flat from the identical ones above and below. On the back of the picture was an invitation to the house-warming in December, the message ending with a jovial upper-case reminder for guests to bring their own food and drink.

  His father phoned with the news that Simon Truelove had died. He had been ninety-four years old. As old as the century! He had fought at the battle of Amiens in the first war and served as a volunteer fireman throughout the second. He had stood as an independent in several national elections and, though never elected, never lost his deposit. ‘A very considered life,’ said his father. ‘A considerable one too in its way. No regrets there, I think.’

  By the end of the first week in December Clem was out of money. The bank, having allowed him a sizeable overdraft, changed its tactics from writing him polite but firm letters to calling him regularly at home. He sold the Leica (‘A lovely piece,’ said the man in the shop. ‘A beautiful weight to it.’). He was paid fifteen hundred in cash. Five hundred he gave to the bank, the rest he put into a drawer in the kitchen. He started looking for somewhere much cheaper to live. After three days he found a place on the Harrow Road, thirty minutes’ walk from his flat on the Grove. The neighbourhood reminded him of places he had photographed on assignment. A zone of workers’ houses and small, half-empty shops, of plundered and burned-out cars; a place mostly missed by the Blitz and later put at the service of traffic, an arterial road much used by emergency vehicles. In the cafes, Portuguese men, owners of some residual Latin dignity, watched satellite television and sipped a
t little coffees. Clem’s new landlord was Portuguese. His name was Leonardo. He looked at all the things that did not work in the flat as though, moments before, they had all worked perfectly. He took a screwdriver from his pocket and made what adjustments he could. He made a list with a stub of pencil. ‘Don’t worry about the pigeons,’ he said. ‘I’m going to poison them.’

  Clem wrote a note to Frankie and Ray excusing himself from the house-warming. A few days later he sent a card to Clare (robin with a sprig of mistletoe in its beak) saying he would probably be out of the country at Christmas. His card from her (Byzantine Madonna, artist unknown) said she was sorry she wouldn’t be seeing him but understood that work must come first. She thought she might go abroad herself. Ireland perhaps, or one of those Italian hill towns he had read to her about in Colcombe.

  On the twenty-second of the month the Bourgmestre was arrested in Brussels. Clem heard it on the radio, the early-evening news. A spokeswoman for the Belgian government said that though it was, of course, a matter for the courts, she did not anticipate any difficulties with the extradition. Ruzindana would stay in custody until his hearing in the New Year. Belgium was committed to the principle of international justice, and those who stood accused of heinous crimes could not escape simply by crossing borders. For Ruzindana, his lawyer said it was a clear case of mistaken identity. His client was a victim of malicious accusations. He was innocent and in poor health and wished only to be with his family again.

  Christmas Eve was cold and clear. Clem drank in the pub opposite the church. The old priest came in for his whisky and hot water, then crossed the road to take the midnight service. Clem reeled home, looked for more drink in the kitchen, found a quarter-bottle of dark rum and woke, Christmas dawn, lying on the carpet, a glass of rum untouched by his elbow. Over the holidays he packed up his flat. On 2 January he hired a van and made two trips to the Harrow Road, carrying the boxes up the stairs and leaving them in a pile on the floor of his new living room. The man who lived downstairs was called Mehmet. He helped Clem to carry his bookshelves, the parts of his desk, his mattress. Clem unpacked boxes until three in the morning, then lay on the unassembled bed listening to night buses, police cars, the all-night cooing of the pigeons. He heard Mehmet go out while it was still dark. He slept and came to at noon, lurching into consciousness as though the house were tipping sideways, crumbling into some dripping black seam below.

  There were boxes in the kitchen too. He unpacked what he needed and pushed the rest into the comers. Beneath the kitchen window was an asphalt garage roof where pigeons gathered like commuters, their feathers puffed against the cold. Sometimes the birds huddled on his window-sill. One morning he tried to sketch them but the drawings looked childish and he threw them away.

  In late January the weather became bitter: keeping the flat warm turned out to be impossible. Leonardo visited and tapped the failing boiler with the handle of his screwdriver. He told Clem about his daughter who had just qualified as a dental surgeon. Did Clem know what a dentist could earn? Clem congratulated him. Leonardo said the cold weather wouldn’t last. Clem agreed. He started wearing his coat indoors, slept in his clothes. When it was too cold to stay inside he joined the men in the cafe watching television. He had an odd and contradictory sense of time, believing that he had almost slipped outside of it, but that also time was running out for him at a rate he would be wise to be very alarmed by. He wondered if he should call Kirsty Schneider and find out what had happened at the extradition hearing in Brussels, then realised he was no longer greatly interested in the tribunal’s version of justice. The tribunal was there to say that men like Ruzindana were aberrations, cancerous cells that could, with the scalpel of the law, be cut out to leave the patient in perfect health. The tribunal would argue that someone like Ruzindana was meaningless, a freak of nature, a freak of culture.

  In the kitchen, sitting on a stool inherited from a previous tenant, he started to write things down. He wrote on a lined pad. The paper piled up by his left elbow. He wrote about Nora and blindness, Clare and sanity. He wrote about Nora’s death, the funeral cars oozing like black molasses through the narrow street outside the house. He wrote about Zara, about the little prostitute with the white slippers, about Frank Silverman and Shelley-Anne, Laurencie Karamera and Emile. He wrote about his photographs—the president’s exhausted gaze, the Tamil girl balletic and heartbroken between her captors, the crowds in Karachi dispersed by monsoon rain. He wrote about Odette, little Odette Semugeshi in her blue pinafore, who might have healed them all. He hoped that if he wrote enough he would discover a piece of evidence to contradict what now suggested itself as the fitting conclusion, an outcome of logic, irresistible. He wrote for days, but under his nib the words squirmed. Language was not complaint: it had its own agendas and grew more interested in itself the more he used it, its truths all at curious angles to his own.

  He bought another pad and wrote a story in which he took the voice of one of the men on Géricault’s raft. He started at the moment they were cut adrift in the surf, everyone yelling uselessly as the raft was swept further and further out. Then the fear, the fighting, the onset of disease, the sick pushed into the sea at night. The tyranny of the strong, the tyranny of the weak. The vertigo of selfknowledge.

  The character Clem chose for his narrator was the man who sat with covered head at the back of the raft, the philosopher with the young man’s corpse across his knees. Soon his appetite will overcome his disgust and he will suck at the dead youth’s bones, lash out at those who try to steal them from him. He does not scan the horizon any more: he cannot bear the thought of their being rescued. Found, they and their revolting craft would be a source of infection, a spiritual cholera, a blight on hope. He longs for a second storm, fiercer than the first. And when he hears the look-out’s shout, a cry that must have seemed to climb a mile straight up into the empty sky, what then? He laughs? Flings himself into the maw of the next wave?

  The story was only a few pages long, and though clearly there was something wrong with it, it satisfied him more than the other writing had. He copied it out, neatly, and put the pad away. Through the kitchen window the clouds were motionless and dirty grey. He left the flat. He wasn’t sure of the time but guessed it was mid-afternoon. He was passing the cemetery before he realised he had forgotten his scarf and gloves. He pressed his hands into his pockets. London was a city made of iron. His feet rang on the paving-stones. Even his breath was a grey metal, beaten fine. At the junction with Kilburn Lane he turned right, paused by the canal, then crossed the railway bridge and came on to the Grove. At his old address he let himself into the house with a key he had kept. Mail was piled on the hall floor, most for people who would never return for it. There were several letters for him and a postcard with a photograph of a harbour on it. The letters were bills or circulars, except one, a small brown NHS envelope that contained, he supposed, the date of his appointment at the eye hospital. This and the postcard he put into a pocket of his coat. He shut the front door and went down to the road again. A light, indecisive snow had begun to fall. Outside the church, fresh flowers, roses on long stems, the blooms so red they looked as though the colour could be squeezed from them like a juice, had been threaded behind the neck and knees of the wooden Christ. Clem broke his step to admire them, then walked on beneath the Westway flyover and up the slope to the old police station beside Holland Park Avenue. Steps at the side of the station led to a small reception area. There was no one at the front desk. He waited. After a few minutes a woman sergeant came out.

  Clem said he wanted to speak with someone from CID.

  ‘What about?’ she asked.

  He said he had some information. She looked at him for a moment then told him to take a seat. There were three others waiting, and Clem had the impression they were people whose lives had brought them to that place before, perhaps many times. He unbuttoned his coat and took the postcard from his pocket. It was from Clare. The harbour was at Cork. Finola Fiacc’
s family lived in the nearby countryside and Clare had been staying with them. They were, she had written, just as you probably imagine them. His name was called. He stood up.

  ‘I’m DC Kelly,’ said the man. He led Clem to a door at the back of the reception area. He tapped a number into a keypad, opened the door and stood back to let Clem pass. They sat across a table from each other. Kelly was pale and dark-eyed. His hair was cropped close to his skull. There was something of the convalescent about him. He looked at Clem with the same assessing stare the sergeant had used. He asked Clem what his information was. Clem said he had come about the rape of the Spanish girl in June. The detective waited. ‘What about it?’ he asked.

  ‘I did it,’ said Clem.

  ‘Did what?’

  ‘The rape.’

  ‘You’re confessing to a rape?’

  ‘Yes.’

  The detective sucked in his cheeks. He opened a drawer in the table and took out a sheet of paper and a pen. He looked at his watch and made a note of the time. He asked for Clem’s full name and address and wrote these down. ‘So who was she, this Spanish girl?’

  ‘I don’t know her name,’ said Clem.

  ‘And the offence took place last June?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘On Portobello Road.’

  ‘In a house?’

  ‘On the street.’

  ‘Right.’

  There was a telephone on the wall. The detective made a short call, then, quite casually it seemed to Clem, arrested him. He asked if he wanted to contact a lawyer. Clem said he didn’t. A young uniformed constable came in. Kelly stood up with the paper he had been writing on and left the room. Clem asked if he could smoke. The young policeman took a saucer from the desk drawer and put it on the table. Clem lit up. There was a window high on the opposite wall through which he could see the sky. Already it seemed to be half night. Kelly was gone for twenty minutes. Clem wondered if he would find some record of his assault on Paulus. When he came back he was carrying a file. He sat down, put the file on the table and opened it.