‘Imagine it, Misha, the unveiling, the voices of all those ministers, and hidden deep in the horse’s belly the voice of Napoleon: “they’ll say, what a splendid fellow … I saved the Revolution which was dying…”, the voice of the Emperor, in the horse’s belly, “you are shit in a silk stocking”, the sculptor torn between hate and delight, I love that story with its multiple voices, a legacy left for future generations, you see, Misha? it’s calmed you down, I promise you, no more Waltenberg, let’s walk on, Misha, no car, no one’s going to be lifted, we’ll pick up the game where we left off.
‘And for the time being the most urgent business is Germany which isn’t an ashen-faced mother any more nor a winter’s tale, it’s still the German question, has been for centuries.
‘My friends in America didn’t like the way the new Germany refused to help them when they went to take a look-see in Iraq, Misha, no one’s asking you to switch direction, you can keep the same targets, you can keep your old moles and you’ll be one of us, don’t look like that, don’t tell me your faith isn’t strong enough, you can stay in the Devil’s kitchen, we’ll go on doing the cooking, it’ll be our pleasure, with new technologies, these new technologies are fascinating, I must show you my model train layout.
‘I’ve upgraded it all, electronic controls, we’re going to have some splendid afternoons, we’re not even obliged to tell them everything, no one can get to you, Misha, it may all be creaking like an imminent shipwreck but that’s no reason for losing heart.
‘And we’ll talk about the main issue, Misha, I have a fine scheme in mind, youth, think of the girl we saw in the bookshop earlier, must start again from square one, on the invisible front, with young people, ten or so, I know a nice bunch of students, they have dinner once a week in a restaurant I go to, been observing them for almost a year, we’ll go have dinner one Friday, their day, my usual table is on the mezzanine, against the balustrade, good seats to watch from.
‘Those young people are amazing, a journalist just out of journalism school, a medical student who’ll be a great, no, not a surgeon, in Paris we’ve got this definition, a surgeon has to have the strength of an ox and a brain to match, this boy already wants to specialise in what we call in-house medicine, the cases no one else can diagnose, he’ll try, he’ll study the symptoms no one understands and now and then he’ll understand them, there’s also a girl with a turned-up nose, very good at philosophy, that’s right, you’ve got it, it’s the girl from the bookshop, but she didn’t want to get locked into speculation, which is just words, so she’s also studying political science, I’ll try and fix it so that she’s diverted into my seminar, reliable as a clock, some day she’ll be a government minister or the general editor of France’s leading newspaper.
‘To these we can add a young Japanese, a physicist, he’s working on plasmas, he’s currently based in the university which turns out our infrequent Nobel Prize winners, in France he learned how to laugh, there’s a German, a Franco-German, an IT hotshot, already has a contract with IBM’s centre for computation, and there are two sisters, one’s doing law and the other one doesn’t know yet what she’ll do, she’s the cleverer of the two, around them there are five or six others, these young people are bursting with energy, they have dinner, they go out places, they have fun, they work, they go swimming, they dream, they kick tin cans in the street when they find them, the girls protest, try to make the boys a little more couth, I’ve watched them all, it’s a Vietnamese restaurant just by the Collège de France, spicy sauce and large fans in the ceiling, not at all expensive, there are about ten of them, all young, they comment on everything, they are intolerant, demanding, the other evening they put everyone and everything through the mincer, Cabinet ministers, the husband of the Prime Minister, Madame Cresson, he claimed he taught his wife Mozart and elegance, they left no stone unturned.
‘They mock our cinema stars, journalists, money, self-importance, everything, they imitate our singers, have you heard of Johnny Halliday? You don’t surprise me, his name’s everywhere. Last week the young Japanese quoted the singer as saying “I realised that changing your body comes about through changing your mind-set”, one of the boys stood up and starting pumping iron and looking Neanderthal, another straddled his chair and raced around the table going “vroum-vroum”, Misha, they were doing what I never dared all my life, they were behaving badly.
‘They chased each other round the table laughing uproariously, they started singing Johnny’s greatest hits, they shouted at each other, they hugged, ordered bowls of rice, poured the spicy sauce while they laughed some more, swapped plates, drank toasts to Chinese beer, imitated their teachers, said where they could go.
‘The journalist did an impression of his editor-in-chief who wants to get rid of hot type and bring in computers for everything, the budding doctor gave the journalist a helping hand, he arched his back and the journalist played on it like a computer keyboard, the editor tries to write his editorial and the machine won’t let him, there’s a computer program in the hardware which blocks long sentences, long words, unusual words, repeated words, the editor gets angry, the angrier he gets the more often the machine goes “beep-beep” instead of validating his sentences, it refuses to write “politics”, “responsible”, “unacceptable”, “constitution”, “institutions” and even “republic”, too long, it also rejects “brazen”, not sufficiently current, and refuses to write proper names when linked with the word “fraud”, a very funny number, Misha, they strung it out for a full five minutes, a very political editorial, very succinct, which ends up “one cannot, in the face of public opinion, do such things”, of which only “one”, “opinion” and “things” remained, the editor-in-chief Coqueret, he’s quite famous, also has his own TV show.
‘After the sketch the hurly-burly started up again, they interrupted each other, stopped interrupting each other, sang a mix of current hits and ‘O sole mio’ and ‘Marinella’, took each other by the shoulders, made a tremendous racket, told each other the plots of films, of books, about the struggle between Yeltsin and Gorbachev, and a cat-fight between top models, you know how … you know our ways, I’ve forgotten the names of the models, all I recall are three numbers, 88, 61, 92, it’s not at all the same with your girl-swimmers, they talked very fast, about the way African hair-styles are designed, the new fashion, very expensive, I know now that it can cost five thousand francs, with gold-thread in the braiding, one boy’s hand glided over the table, through the bottles, he was imitating the overturning of a statue.
‘The statue of your Dzerzhinsky, a giant crane in the Moscow night and the archangel of the Cheka rises into the heavens, they laughed, one of the girls turned to the young IT whiz-kid you must be a prodigy, he replied there’s no such thing, there are no precocious children, only the spawn of fuckwits, a good crowd, if one started getting uppity the rest would merrily saw through the branch he was sitting on, and then they were off again, on the next table to mine a man had a few words with the proprietor who answered “that’s life, sir, the future, I weep tears for Saigon and they put the world to rights”, the man said “some world that’ll be”, the proprietor laughed, he added “in any case we won’t be there to see it”.
‘I like this notion of putting the world to rights, Misha, the temperature in the restaurant started rising, people thought these young people were loud, vulgar, too much alcohol, at this point the journalist stood up, good-looking boy, tall, dark, hair cut very short, dressed in denim dungarees, he tapped his glass with a knife, another lapse of taste, and he started reciting a poem, “La Chanson du mal-aimé”, of course, you know it, it’s more than thirty years since you told me you knew kilometres of poems by heart, you see, on he goes, in the restaurant something happened, people stopped eating, the boy didn’t leave out the Zaporogues, he recited the whole thing, slowly, the half-mist, the waves of brick, the scar, the people who sell their shadows, the graceful ship, the burning beehives, the derrière of a Damascene damsel, the demons of chance, the backwards descent, the cafés swollen with smoke and the white bodies of women in love, a long poem, he had the knack, Misha, the secret is not to speed up.