The Festival of Insignificance Read online

  “Sick? With what?”

  “Cancer. I’m surprised to see how sad that’s made me. He may be living out his final months.” Then, after a pause: “I was touched by the way he told me about it—very laconic, shy even—no show of pathos, no narcissism. And suddenly, maybe for the first time, I felt a real sympathy for the jerk—a real sympathy.”

  PART TWO

  The Marionette Theater

  The Twenty-Four Partridges

  After his long, wearing days, Stalin liked to linger awhile with his associates and relax by telling them little stories about his life. For example, this one:

  One day he decides to go hunting. He puts on an old parka, clamps on skis, he takes a long shotgun and treks out thirteen kilometers. Then he sees before him a flock of partridges perched on a tree. He stops and he counts them. There are twenty-four of them. But what rotten luck—he’s only brought along twelve shells! He fires, kills twelve birds, then turns around and treks the thirteen kilometers back to his house and picks up another dozen shells. Again he skis out the thirteen kilometers and reaches the partridges, who are still sitting on the same tree. And he finally kills them all …

  “You like that?” Charles asks Caliban, who answers, laughing.

  “If it was actually Stalin telling me that, I’d congratulate him! But where did you get that story?”

  “Our master gave me this book, Khrushchev’s Memoirs, published in France a very, very long time ago. In it Khrushchev reports the partridge story the way Stalin told it to their little group. But according to Khrushchev, nobody reacted the way you did. Nobody laughed. All of them, without exception, thought that what Stalin was telling them was nonsense, and they were disgusted by his lying. But they all kept silent, and only Khrushchev had the courage to tell Stalin what he thought. Listen to this!”

  Charles opened the book and slowly read aloud: “‘What! You really mean to tell us that the partridges hadn’t left their branch?’ Khrushchev says.

  “‘Exactly,’ replies Stalin. ‘They were still perched in the same spot.’

  “But that’s not the end of the story; you should know that at the end of the workday, all the men would go to the bathroom, a huge washroom that had the toilets in it as well. Imagine. On one wall a long row of urinals, on the facing wall a line of washbasins. Urinals in the shape of shells, in ceramic, all colors, decorated with flower motifs. Each member of Stalin’s clan had his own urinal, created and signed by a different artist. None there for Stalin, though.”

  “And where did Stalin piss?”

  “In a private stall at the other side of the building; and since he pissed all alone, never with his colleagues, all these fellows back in the bathroom were divinely free and finally dared to say out loud what they had to suppress in the chief’s presence. Especially the day Stalin told them the story of the twenty-four partridges. I’ll read you some more from Khrushchev: ‘As we washed our hands, there in the bathroom, we were spitting with contempt: He was lying! He was lying! Not one of us doubted it.’”

  “And who was he, this Khrushchev?”

  “A few years after Stalin’s death, he became the supreme leader of the Soviet empire.”

  After a pause, Caliban says: “The one thing I find unbelievable in that whole story is that nobody understood that Stalin was joking.”

  “Of course not,” said Charles, and he laid the book back on the table. “Because nobody around him any longer knew what a joke is. And in my view, that’s the beginning of a whole new period of history.”

  Charles Dreams of a Play for the Marionette Theater

  In my unbeliever’s dictionary, only one word is sacred: “friendship.” The four friends I have introduced here—Alain, Ramon, Charles, and Caliban—I love. In my fondness for them, I brought Charles the Khrushchev book for them all to enjoy.

  All four already knew the partridge story, including the magnificent finale among the toilets, when one day Caliban complained to Alain:

  “I ran into your Madeleine, and I told her the partridge story. But to her it was just an incomprehensible anecdote about some hunter! Maybe the name ‘Stalin’ was vaguely familiar, but she didn’t understand why a hunter would be called that.”

  “She’s only twenty,” Alain said quietly in defense of his girlfriend.

  “If I’m calculating properly,” Charles put in, “Madeleine was born about forty years after Stalin died. Myself, I had to wait about seventeen years after his death before I was born. And you, Ramon—when Stalin died …” He paused to work it out, then, a bit uncomfortable: “My God, you were already born!”

  “I’m ashamed to say so, but it’s true.”

  “Unless I’m mistaken,” Charles went on, still to Ramon, “your grandfather and some other intellectuals signed a petition supporting Stalin, the great hero of progress.”

  “Yes,” Ramon admitted.

  “I imagine your father was already a little skeptical about him, your generation more so, and for mine, he had become the greatest criminal of all.”

  “Yes, that’s how it goes,” said Ramon. “People meet in the course of life, they talk together, they discuss, they quarrel, without realizing that they’re talking to one another across a distance, each from an observation post standing in a different place in time.”

  After a moment Charles said: “Time moves on. Because of time, first we’re alive—which is to say: indicted and convicted. Then we die, and for a few more years we live on in the people who knew us, but very soon there’s another change; the dead become the old dead, no one remembers them any longer and they vanish into the void; only a few of them, very, very rare ones, leave their names behind in people’s memories, but, lacking any authentic witness now, any actual recollection, they become marionettes. Friends, I am fascinated by that story Khrushchev tells in his memoirs. And I cannot shake off the urge to draw on it and invent a play for the marionette theater.”

  “The marionette theater? Don’t you want to do it at the Comédie Française?” Caliban teased.

  “No,” said Charles, “because if that story about Stalin and Khrushchev were played by humans, it would be a lie. No one has the right to pretend to be reconstructing a human life that no longer exists. No one has the right to create a person from a marionette.”

  The Toilet Revolt

  “They fascinate me, those people around Stalin,” Charles went on. “I imagine them shouting out their revolt there among the toilets! They’d all longed so much for the right moment, when they could finally say aloud all they were thinking. But there was one thing they never suspected: Stalin was watching them and waiting for that moment with the same impatience as theirs! The moment when his whole gang would go off to the toilets was delectable for him as well! My friends, I can just see him! Very quietly, on tiptoe, he slips down a long corridor, sets his ear against the door to the toilet room, and listens. Those Politburo heroes, shouting and stomping around inside, cursing him, and him, he’s hearing them and he’s laughing. ‘He lied, he lied!’ Khrushchev howls, his voice thunders, and Stalin, with his ear pressed to the door—oh, I can see him, I can see him, Stalin savoring his comrade’s moral outrage—he’s guffawing like a madman, and he doesn’t even try to muffle the great sound of his laughter, because the people in the toilets are howling like madmen too, and they can’t hear him over their own racket.”

  “Yes, you already told us about that,” says Alain.

  “Yes, I know, but the most important thing, the real reason Stalin liked to repeat himself and kept telling the same story of the twenty-four partridges over and over to that same little audience—that, I haven’t told you yet. And that’s what I see as the main plot of my play.”

  “And what was the reason?”

  “Kalinin.”

  “What?” Caliban asked.

  “Kalinin.”

  “Never heard the name.”

  Though a little younger than Caliban, Alain was better read, and he knew: “That must be the fellow they rena
med a famous German city after, the city where Immanuel Kant lived his whole life and that’s called ‘Kaliningrad’ now.”

  Just then, from the street, a horn sounded, loud, impatient.

  “I must leave you,” Alain said. “Madeleine is waiting for me. Till next time!”

  Madeleine was waiting for him in the street on a motorbike. It was Alain’s bike, but they shared it.

  The Next Time They Meet, Charles Gives His Friends a Lecture on Kalinin and the Capital of Prussia

  “Since its founding, the illustrious Prussian city was called Königsberg, which means ‘the king’s mountain.’ Only after the last war did it become Kaliningrad. ‘Grad’ means ‘city’ in Russian. Thus: Kalinin City. The century we just had the luck to survive was crazy about renaming things. Tsaritsyn was renamed Stalingrad, then Stalingrad became Volgograd. Saint Petersburg became Petrograd, then Petrograd was renamed Leningrad, and eventually Leningrad became Saint Petersburg. Chemnitz became Karl-Marx-Stadt and Karl-Marx-Stadt went back to Chemnitz again. Königsberg was called Kaliningrad—but wait: Kaliningrad remained and will forever remain unrenameable. Kalinin’s fame will outlast everyone else’s.”

  “But who was he?” Caliban asked.

  “A man,” Charles went on, “with no real power, a poor innocent puppet who nonetheless was for a long time the president of the Supreme Soviet, thus from the standpoint of protocol the highest representative of the state. I’ve seen his picture: an old militant worker with a pointed goatee, in a badly cut jacket. Now, Kalinin was already an old man, and his swollen prostate very often forced him to go piss. The urinary urge was always so abrupt and so strong that he would have to run to a urinal even during an official luncheon, or in the middle of some speech he himself might be delivering to a big audience. He had got very adept at handling the problem. To this day all of Russia recalls a great ceremony to inaugurate an opera house in some city in Ukraine, during which Kalinin was giving a long, solemn speech. He had to break off every two minutes and, each time, as he left the rostrum, the orchestra would strike up some folk music, and lovely blond Ukrainian ballerinas would leap onto the stage and begin dancing. Each time he returned to the dais, Kalinin was greeted with great applause; when he left again, the applause was still louder, to greet the advent of the blond ballerinas—and as his goings and comings grew more frequent, the applause grew longer and stronger, more heartfelt, so that the official celebration was transformed into a joyful mad orgiastic riot whose like the Soviet state had never seen or known.

  “But alas, between times, when Kalinin was back in the little group of his comrades, no one was interested in applauding his urine. Stalin would recite his anecdotes, and Kalinin was too disciplined to gather the courage to annoy him by his goings and comings from the toilet. The more so since, as he talked, Stalin would fix his gaze on Kalinin’s face growing paler and paler and tensing into a grimace. That would incite Stalin to slow his storytelling further, to insert new descriptions and digressions, and to drag out the climax till suddenly the contorted face before him would relax, the grimace vanished, the expression grew calm, and the head was wreathed in an aureole of peace; only then, knowing that Kalinin had once again lost his great struggle, Stalin would move swiftly to the denouement, rise from the table and, with a bright, friendly smile, bring the meeting to an end. All the other men would stand too, and stare cruelly at their comrade, who positioned himself behind the table, or behind a chair, to hide his wet trousers.”

  Charles’s friends were delighted to picture the scene, and only after a pause did Caliban break into the amused silence: “Still, that doesn’t explain at all why Stalin gave the poor prostatic’s name to the German city that was the lifelong home of the famous … the famous …”

  “Immanuel Kant,” Alain whispered to him.

  Alain Uncovers Stalin’s Ill-Understood Affection

  When Alain met with his friends a week later, in some bistro (or at Charles’s place, I don’t recall), he immediately broke into their conversation:

  “I’d like to say that for me it’s not at all puzzling that Stalin would put Kalinin’s name to Kant’s illustrious city. I don’t know what reasons you might have come up with yourselves, but for my part I see only one: Stalin felt an enormous affection for Kalinin.”

  The happy surprise on his friends’ faces pleased and even inspired him: “I know, I know—the word ‘affection’ doesn’t fit with Stalin’s reputation—he’s the Lucifer of the century, I know; his life was filled with plots and conspiracies, betrayals, wars, jailings, murders, massacres. I don’t deny that; on the contrary, I’d even emphasize it, to make absolutely clear that with that enormous load of cruelty he must have undergone, committed, and lived through, it would be impossible for him to muster an equally enormous amount of compassion. That would be beyond human capacity! To live the life he lived, he would have had to first anesthetize, then totally suppress any faculty for compassion. But as he looked at Kalinin, in those brief intervals away from the massacres, in those quiet moments of restful talk, it all changed: He was confronted with a completely different pain—a small, concrete, individual, comprehensible pain. He looked at his suffering comrade, and, to his own mild astonishment, he felt stirring a faint, modest emotion that was almost unfamiliar, or anyhow forgotten: love for a man who is suffering. In his ferocious life, this moment was a kind of respite. The fondness grew in Stalin’s heart at the same rate as the pressure of urine in Kalinin’s bladder. The rediscovery of an emotion he had long ceased to feel struck him as an unspeakable beauty.

  “And that,” Alain continued, “is what I see as the only possible explanation for the curious renaming of Königsberg as Kaliningrad. It occurred thirty years before I was born, and yet I can imagine the situation: With the war over, the Russians annex a famous German city to their empire, and they must Russify it with a new name. And not just any name! This rebaptism must draw on a name famous over the entire planet, a name whose brilliance will silence enemies! The Russians have plenty of such names: Catherine the Great! Pushkin! Tchaikovsky! Tolstoy! Not to mention the generals who had conquered Hitler and who at the time were adulated everywhere! So how are we to understand why Stalin would choose the name of such a nonentity? That he would make such an obviously idiotic decision? Only private, secret reasons can explain that. And we know what they are: He feels affection for the man who has suffered for his sake, before his very eyes, and he wants to thank him for his loyalty, honor him for his devotion. Unless I’m mistaken—Ramon, you can set me straight!—for that brief moment in history, Stalin is the most powerful statesman in the world, and he knows it. He feels a mischievous delight at being, among all the presidents and kings, the only one who can scorn the gravity of grand, cynically calculated political gestures, the only one who can allow himself to make some thoroughly personal decision, a decision that’s capricious, unreasonable, splendidly bizarre, gorgeously absurd.”

  On the table stood an open bottle of red wine. Alain’s glass was already empty; he refilled it and went on: “Now, telling the story before you all, I see a deeper and deeper meaning in it.” He swallowed a mouthful, then again went on: “To suffer to keep from soiling your shorts … To be a martyr to your personal hygiene … To struggle against urine as it stirs, as it swells, threatens, attacks, kills … Is there any heroism that’s more prosaic, more human? To hell with the so-called great men whose names adorn our streets. They all became famous through their ambitions, their vanity, their lies, their cruelty. Kalinin is the only one whose name will live on in memory of an ordeal that every human being has experienced, in memory of a desperate battle that brought misery on no one but himself.”

  He ended his speech, and all were moved.

  After a silence, Ramon said: “You are absolutely right, Alain. After I die, I intend to wake up every ten years to check whether Kaliningrad is still Kaliningrad. As long as that is the case, I’ll feel a little solidarity with humankind, reconciled with it, and can go back down into
my tomb.”

  PART THREE

  Alain and Charles Often Think About Their Mothers

  The First Time He Was Gripped by the Navel’s Mystery Was When He Saw His Mother for the Last Time

  Returning slowly to the house, Alain observed the girls, who—every one of them—showed her naked navel between trousers belted very low and a T-shirt cut very short. As if their seductive power no longer resided in their thighs, their buttocks, or their breasts, but in that small round hole located in the center of the body.

  Do I repeat myself? Am I starting this chapter with the same words I used at the very beginning of this novel? I know. But even if I’ve already described Alain’s passion for the enigma of the navel, I do not want to hide the fact that this enigma does preoccupy him still, the way you yourselves are preoccupied for months, if not years, by similar problems (certainly far more pointless than the one obsessing Alain). So: Ambling along the streets, he would often think about the navel, untroubled at repeating himself and even strangely obstinate about doing so, for the navel woke in him a distant memory: the memory of his last encounter with his mother.