Lang smiles his charming smile. Bayard shakes his hand, and the soon-to-be minister of culture can at last go off to join his comrades in celebrating their victory.
Simon contemplates the human tide that fills the square.
He says: “What a waste.”
Bayard is surprised: “What do you mean, what a waste? You’re going to be able to retire at sixty now—isn’t that what you want? You’ll have your thirty-five-hour workweek, your extra week’s vacation every year, your nationalizations, your abolition of the death penalty … Aren’t you happy?”
“Barthes, Hamed, his friend Saïd, the Bulgarian on the Pont-Neuf, the Bulgarian in the DS, Derrida, Searle … They all died for nothing. They died so Sollers could have his balls chopped off in Venice because he had the wrong document. Right from the beginning, we were chasing a mirage.”
“Well, not entirely. The sheet in Barthes’s apartment, the one inside the Jakobson book, that was a copy of the original. If we hadn’t intercepted the Bulgarian, he’d have given it to Kristeva, who would have realized there’d been a substitution when she compared the two texts. And Slimane’s cassette: that was a recording of the original too. It was important it didn’t fall into the wrong hands.” (Shit, thinks Bayard, stop talking about hands!)
“But Derrida wanted to destroy it.”
“But if Searle had got his hands on it”—seriously, what the fuck is wrong with me?—“who knows what would have happened?”
“They know in Murano.”
An oppressive silence, despite the singing crowd. Bayard doesn’t know what to say. He remembers a film he saw when he was a kid—The Vikings, with Tony Curtis as a one-armed man who kills the two-armed Kirk Douglas—but he is not sure that Simon would appreciate this reference.
There was nothing wrong with their investigation, no matter what anyone thinks. They tracked down Barthes’s murderers. How could they have guessed that they didn’t have the real document? No, Simon is right: they were barking up the wrong tree from the very start.
Bayard says: “Without this investigation, you wouldn’t have become what you are.”
“Disabled?” sneers Simon.
“When I first met you, you were a little library rat, you looked like a hippie virgin, and now look at you! You’re wearing a decent suit, you meet loads of girls, you’re the rising star of the Logos Club…”
“And I lost my right hand.”
A series of performers appears on the huge stage in the Bastille. Among a group of kissing, dancing young people, blond hair blowing in the wind (this is the first time he has seen her with her hair down), Simon recognizes Anastasia.
What were the odds of him bumping into her again, tonight, in this crowd? The thought flashes through Simon’s mind that either he is being manipulated by a really bad novelist or Anastasia is some sort of superspy.
Onstage, the group Téléphone are playing their hit, “Ça (C’est Vraiment Toi).”
Their eyes meet and, as she dances with a long-haired guy, Anastasia gives him a little wave.
Bayard has seen her too; he tells Simon that it’s time for him to go home.
“You’re not staying?”
“It’s not my victory. You know I voted for the other baldy. Anyway, I’m too old for all this.” He gives a vague wave at the groups of people jumping up and down in time with the music, getting drunk, smoking joints, and making out.
“Oh, give me a break, granddad—you weren’t saying that at Cornell when you were high as a kite, screwing God knows who with your friend Judith up your ass!”
Bayard does not take the bait:
“Anyway, I’ve got cabinets full of files that I need to shred before your friends get their … get hold of them.”
“What if Defferre offers you a job?”
“I’m a fonctionnaire. I’m paid to serve the government.”
“I see. Your patriotism does you honor.”
“Shut your mouth, you little twerp.”
The two men laugh. Simon asks Bayard if he isn’t curious to at least hear Anastasia’s side of the story. Bayard puts out his left hand to shake and tells him, watching the young Russian woman dance: “You can tell me later.”
And Bayard vanishes into the crowd.
When Simon turns around, Anastasia is standing in front of him, covered in sweat and rain. There is a brief moment of awkwardness. Simon notices that she is looking at the space where his missing hand should be. To create a diversion, he asks her: “So, what do they think about Mitterrand’s victory in Moscow?” She smiles. “Brezhnev, you know…” She hands him a half-empty can of beer. “Andropov is the coming man.”
“And what does the coming man think of his Bulgarian counterpart?”
“Kristeva’s father? We knew he was working for his daughter. But we couldn’t work out why they wanted the function. It’s thanks to you that I was able to discover the existence of the Logos Club.”
“What will happen to him now, Kristeva Senior?”
“Times have changed. This isn’t ’68 anymore. I have not received any orders. Not for the father or for the daughter. As for the agent who tried to kill you, we last saw him in Istanbul, but after that we lost track of him.”
The rain falls harder. Onstage, Jacques Higelin sings “Champagne.”
In a pained voice, Simon asks her: “Why weren’t you in Venice?”
Anastasia ties up her hair and takes a cigarette from a soft packet, but is unable to light it. Simon leads her to a sheltered place, under a tree, above the Port de l’Arsenal. “I was following another trail.” She had discovered that Sollers had entrusted a copy of the seventh function to Althusser. She didn’t know it was a false document, so she searched everywhere in Althusser’s apartment while he was in an asylum—and that required a great deal of work because there were tons of books and papers, the document could have been hidden anywhere, and she had to be extremely methodical. But she didn’t find it.
Simon says: “That’s a shame.”
Behind them, onstage, they catch a glimpse of Rocard and Juquin, hand in hand, singing “The Internationale,” echoed by the entire crowd. Anastasia mumbles the words in Russian. Simon wonders if the Left can actually be in power, in real life. Or, more precisely, he wonders if, in real life, it is possible to change one’s life. But before he is drawn, once again, down the rabbit hole of his ontological reflections, he hears Anastasia whisper to him: “I’m going back to Moscow tomorrow; tonight, I’m not on duty.” And, as if by magic, she takes a bottle of champagne from her bag. Simon has no idea how or where she got it, but who cares? They take turns drinking from the bottle, and Simon kisses Anastasia, wondering if she is about to slice open his carotid artery with a hairpin or if he will fall to the ground, poisoned by her toxic lipstick. But Anastasia lets him kiss her, and she isn’t wearing lipstick. With the rain and the celebrations in the background, the scene is like something from a Hollywood film, but Simon decides not to dwell on this.
The crowd yells: “Mitterrand! Mitterrand!” (But the new president is not there.)
Simon goes up to a street vendor who has drinks in his cooler, including, for tonight only, champagne. So he buys another bottle and uncorks it with one hand, while Anastasia smiles at him, her eyes shining from the alcohol and her hair, unpinned again, falling over her shoulders.
They clink their bottles together and Anastasia shouts over the clamor of the storm:
“To socialism!”
Everyone around them cheers.
And Simon replies, as a flash of lightning streaks across the Paris sky:
“The real kind!”
96
The French Open men’s final, 1981. Borg is crushing his opponent yet again, this time the Czechoslovakian Ivan Lendl; he takes the first set 6–1. All the heads in the crowd turn to follow the ball, except for Simon’s, because his thoughts are elsewhere.