My driver, who is himself Armenian, asks which one and says that it’s only fifteen minutes from the place where we are going to eat. Everyone is doing their best to please me: they think that the person I’m inviting to supper should be happy and pleased to be so honoured, that anything else can surely wait.
‘What’s your name?’ asks Marie.
‘Mikhail.’
‘Well, Mikhail,’ and I see that Marie has understood everything, ‘why don’t you come with us for an hour or so; the restaurant we’re going to is just around the corner. Then the driver will take you wherever you want to go. If you prefer, though, we can cancel our reservation and all go and have supper at the Armenian restaurant instead – that way, you’d feel less anxious.’
I can’t stop looking at him. He isn’t particularly handsome or particularly ugly. He’s neither tall nor short. He’s dressed in black, simple and elegant – and by elegance I mean a complete absence of brand names or designer labels.
Marie links arms with Mikhail and heads for the exit. The bookseller still has a pile of books waiting to be signed for readers who could not come to the signing, but I promise that I will drop by the following day. My legs are trembling, my heart pounding, and yet I have to pretend that everything is fine, that I’m glad the book-signing was a success, that I’m interested in what other people are saying. We cross the Champs-Elysées, the sun is setting behind the Arc de Triomphe, and, for some reason, I know that this is a sign, a good sign.
As long as I can keep control of the situation.
Why do I want to speak to him? The people from the publishing house keep talking to me and I respond automatically; no one notices that I am far away, struggling to understand why I have invited to supper someone whom I should, by rights, hate. Do I want to find out where Esther is? Do I want to have my revenge on this young man, so lost, so insecure, and yet who was capable of luring away the person I love? Do I want to prove to myself that I am better, much better than him? Do I want to bribe him, seduce him, make him persuade my wife to come back?
I can’t answer any of these questions, and that doesn’t matter. The only thing I have said up until now is: ‘I’d like to invite this young man to supper.’ I had imagined the scene so often before: we meet, I grab him by the throat, punch him, humiliate him in front of Esther; or I get a thrashing and make her see how hard I’m fighting for her, suffering for her. I had imagined scenes of aggression or feigned indifference or public scandal, but the words ‘I’d like to invite this young man to supper’ had never once entered my head.
No need to ask what I will do next, all I have to do now is to keep an eye on Marie, who is walking along a few paces ahead of me, holding on to Mikhail’s arm, as if she were his girlfriend. She won’t let him go and yet I wonder, at the same time, why she’s helping me, when she knows that a meeting with this young man could also mean that I’ll find out where my wife is living.
We arrive. Mikhail makes a point of sitting far away from me; perhaps he wants to avoid getting caught up in a conversation with me. Laughter, champagne, vodka and caviar – I glance at the menu and am horrified to see that the bookseller is spending about a thousand dollars on the entrées alone. There is general chatter; Mikhail is asked what he thought of the afternoon’s event; he says he enjoyed it; he is asked about the book; he says he enjoyed it very much. Then he is forgotten, and attention turns to me – was I happy with how things had gone, was the queue organised to my liking, had the security team been up to scratch? My heart is still pounding, but I present a calm front, I thank them for everything, for the efficient way in which the event was run.
Half an hour of conversation and a lot of vodka later, I can see that Mikhail is beginning to relax. He isn’t the centre of attention any more, he doesn’t need to say very much, he just has to endure it for a little while longer and then he can go. I know he wasn’t lying about the Armenian restaurant, so at least now I have a clue. My wife must still be in Paris! I must pretend to be friendly, try to win his confidence, the initial tensions have all disappeared.
An hour passes. Mikhail looks at his watch and I can see that he is about to leave. I must do something – now. Every time I look at him, I feel more and more insignificant and understand less and less how Esther could have exchanged me for someone who seems so unworldly (she mentioned that he had ‘magical’ powers). However difficult it might be to pretend that I feel perfectly at ease talking to someone who is my enemy, I must do something.
‘Let’s find out a bit more about our reader,’ I say, and there is an immediate silence. ‘Here he is, about to leave at any moment, and he’s hardly said a word about his life. What do you do?’
Despite the number of vodkas he has drunk, Mikhail seems suddenly to recover his sobriety.
‘I organise meetings at the Armenian restaurant.’
‘What does that involve?’
‘I stand on stage and tell stories. And I let the people in the audience tell their stories too.’
‘I do the same thing in my books.’
‘I know, that’s how I first met…‘
He’s going to say who he is!
‘Were you born here?’ asks Marie, thus preventing him from finishing his sentence (‘…how I first met your wife’).
‘I was born in the Kazakhstan steppes.’
Kazakhstan. Who’s going to be brave enough to ask where Kazakhstan is?
‘Where’s Kazakhstan?’ asks the sales representative.
Blessed are those who are not afraid to admit that they don’t know something.
‘I was waiting for someone to ask that,’ and there is an almost gleeful look in Mikhail’s eyes now. ‘Whenever I say where I was born, about ten minutes later people are saying that I’m from Pakistan or Afghanistan…My country is in Central Asia. It has barely 14 million inhabitants in an area far larger than France with its population of 60 million.’
‘So it’s a place where no one can complain about the lack of space, then,’ says my publisher, laughing.
‘It’s a place where, during the last century, no one had the right to complain about anything, even if they wanted to. When the Communist regime abolished private ownership, the livestock were simply abandoned and 48.6 per cent of the population died. Do you understand what that means? Nearly half the population of my country died of hunger between 1932 and 1933.’
Silence falls. After all, tragedies get in the way of celebrations, and one of the people present tries to change the subject. However, I insist that my ‘reader’ tells us more about his country.
‘What are the steppes like?’ I ask.
‘They’re vast plains with barely any vegetation, as I’m sure you know.’
I do know, but it had been my turn to ask a question, to keep the conversation going.
‘I’ve just remembered something about Kazakhstan,’ says my publisher. ‘Some time ago, I was sent a typescript by a writer who lives there, describing the atomic tests that were carried out on the steppes.’
‘Our country has blood in its soil and in its soul. Those tests changed what cannot be changed, and we will be paying the price for many generations to come. We even made an entire sea disappear.’
It is Marie’s turn to speak.
‘No one can make a sea disappear.’
‘I’m twenty-five years old, and that is all the time it took, just one generation, for the water that had been there for millennia to be transformed into dust. Those in charge of the Communist regime decided to divert two rivers, Amu-Darya and Syr-Darya, so that they could irrigate some cotton plantations. They failed, but, by then, it was too late – the sea had ceased to exist, and the cultivated land became