Sila's Fortune (11 page)

‘What trouble?'

‘At best,' said Lev, sounding detached, ‘they attack the drilling operations or the pipelines. Though I suppose they could easily plant a bomb in the ELK Tower in Moscow. At worst, they kill me.'

‘How could they kill a man as rich and powerful as you?'

Lev looked at her curiously. She was so intelligent, so independent yet here she was thinking like everyone else, thinking solely in terms of money and power.

‘I wouldn't be the first,' he said. ‘Berezovsky's enemies set off a bomb in the middle of Moscow as his car was passing – and he was one of the five most powerful oligarchs in the country. His driver was decapitated; Berezovsky escaped with only minor injuries. No one is safe. Anyway, I have no choice. I need to form an alliance, with the Chechens or with someone else. But I can't carry on by myself.'

‘There's always a choice,' Elena protested. ‘There's still a police force in the country.'

‘Poor Elena,' thought Lev. ‘Choice. She thinks of it in terms of something you learn at school: the nature of choice. Philosophers agree that we always have a choice so, like a good little student, she thinks it follows: we always have a choice.'

‘The police are weak,' he said simply. ‘But you're right. I'll take my time. Weigh up the situation.'

But that night in bed while Elena was sleeping, the word rattled around in his head. Choice. What choice did he have? He could resign, of course, he could walk away. That was the choice he had. Give up. Give up the crippling weight of business, the worries, the problems, the responsibilities. Responsibilities … What did that mean? What responsibilities did he really have? What exactly was he responsible for? His business? It would be swallowed up overnight. His family? Of course. But they could always leave the country. He had so much money … They would only need to take a fraction of it. But was that a choice? Was giving up a real choice? He wanted to carry on. He was caught up in the system and now he had no choice. Otherwise he faced defeat or death. He might win, end up in prison or wind up with a bullet in his head. That was how it was. Because things had taken a strange turn. Because his life had become the strange violence of this ruined country.

Choice.

What choice did he have?

In life, the problem is reinventing oneself. Becoming someone else. Especially since when we try to reinvent ourselves the real work begins, that of sustaining the illusion; a powerful force that compels us to go on being ourselves such that the metamorphoses ravel and unravel and we come to the terrible realisation that we are still ourselves, only more so.

And it's quite possible that the ghost of Lev was merely an illusion, that the oligarch was already latent in the professor. The irony and caustic wit were the first inklings of a disenchantment, a prelude to cynicism, bitterness and cruelty. The long process of decline.

But Lev was older than Simon, Matthieu, Ruffle or of course Sila, and business had made him old before his time, if not physically, then morally. His role as Yeltsin's advisor at precisely the point the empire blew up – at the point when the kamikaze team, believing it necessary to destroy the ancient, ossified carcass, had deliberately blown it up – had not helped.

As for Sila, he did not consciously reinvent himself because he was still young. He was content to change. He was entering into the real, becoming more ordinary. And yet his aura had not yet completely disappeared: as Fos had predicted, Sila had
luck on his side. What Fos had called the light. And it is true that he attracted people, men and women, possibly by a sort of impassivity. Sila expected nothing of anyone – or of life itself. He set no store by predictions, by wishes or hopes, he simply lived. A rare talent. And this pure presence, this harmony, combined with his great beauty was like a magnet to others, especially to Westerners eaten up with frustration, tormented by unquenchable desires.

One evening when Sila was covering in the restaurant for a waiter off sick, he was called over by a man with a shock of white hair and an affected manner who was drinking at the bar.

‘I've got a job for you, if you like.'

‘I've already got a job,' said Sila.

‘I'm the greatest restaurateur in the world. You'd be working in a unique environment, you'd be well paid and you'd truly learn the trade.'

Sila considered the man with amusement. Pretentiousness had always made him smile.

‘Give it a try,' the man went on, ‘you've got nothing to lose. I'll pay you three times what you're earning now.'

Sila shrugged.

‘I couldn't even if I wanted to.'

The man looked at him.

‘No papers, huh?'

Sila nodded.

‘The President of the Republic is a regular at my restaurant. I'll have a word with him. What do you say?'

Sila tossed his dishcloth onto the counter and walked out
with his new employer. Anyone can promise the moon, anyone can claim to be on intimate terms with the President, but the man who, by some quirk of fate, happened to be having a drink in Montmartre that night was indeed one of the foremost restaurateurs in the world, and like all restaurant owners, he was constantly complaining about his staff. Sila's physical appearance and his impeccable demeanour were considerable assets. In short, the light had done its work.

So began the period of his apprenticeship: Sila studied during the day and worked in the evening. Gérard Lemerre, true to his reputation as restaurateur, artist and philanthropist – a combination that could only exist in France – became Sila's mentor, much as Fos had been but with infinitely greater means. He got his protégé a work permit, enrolled him in a hotel management course where Sila learned the business and acquired the basic knowledge he lacked. It was here too that he was first introduced to English, a language that would later prove invaluable to him. He was entering the real world.

For Ruffle, reinventing himself meant finding himself. Over and over he told the story of the promising football jock whose career had been cut short by a knee injury. A one-shot story, always the same, like the feeble pop of a cap gun. This was his life, his lie. And his whole family colluded in the story. His mother often tearfully spoke about him coming home after the accident, hobbling on crutches, devastated that his career was over. And his father, adopting a more positive tone, backed her up. ‘He was a tough kid. He could have been a pro footballer, but it wasn't to be, God decided otherwise, but he went on to
become a champion businessman, because he had that same fierce determination, that same fighting spirit. I've always said, life's like a football game. You run straight for the end zone and you give it all you've got.'

The problem with lies, even when you believe them, even when you revel in them, is that they become strangely, subconsciously unsatisfying because the disparity between mask and truth resonates like muffled guilt. With Ruffle, this disparity took the form of a persistent, recurring, nebulous feeling of never being equal to the task. He was a man with no Sundays. With no one to cheer him, to admire him, to praise him. With no public, no fans. He felt as though he were invisible.

If he could only get Sunday back … It was something he couldn't quite explain, but this was the nub of it. Why did he have no more Sundays? Shoshana had stuck by him and he was proud to be with the cheerleader he had dated as a teenager, the girl with the big breasts who had cheered him from the sidelines, but her admiration, which had once fascinated him, given him confidence, spurred him on, was gone now. She still loved him, he didn't doubt that, but perhaps all they had in common was a comfortable life where money was no object, a nice house (not as big as his father's, but nice) with a pool (not as big as his father's, but nice) and a European car, a BMW (not as big as his father's, but nice). Yes, he had things, he owned things, but … And that was the problem.
But
. A life filled with buts was a satisfactory life but was constantly undermined. Like himself. Spoiled by the bad taste in his mouth.

Maybe the bad taste came from the fact that a ‘satisfactory life' was not really living. Not being Mark Ruffle. On those
faraway Sundays, in the roar of the crowds, he had been Mark Ruffle and everyone he passed would say ‘Good game, Mark, good game.'

‘You're the best, Mark, you're the best, champ.' The intoxicating feeling of living, of being noticed.

What was he now? Mark Ruffle Jnr. On the football field, his father had been Mark's dad. In business, Mark was his father's son. Daddy's boy. Oh, he had started at the bottom, he had mopped floors, run off photocopies, made coffee. Of course. He had to work his way up, climb the company ladder on his own merit. It was taken for granted. He played along. He mopped offices that had already been scrubbed clean by workers who did not want the boss's son to think they were dirty. He had played the coffee boy with admirable sincerity. For a whole day. He had spent time as a real-estate broker and the branch manager worked him hard. Obviously. The boss had said, ‘No favouritism. I don't want you treating him any different just because he's my son.' So it must have been out of sheer respect for his talent that Mark was given the best properties to sell, the ones where you only had to open the door for the client to sign a cheque. The branch manager told his boss, ‘I don't know how he does it. It's like he only has to open the door and he's got the client eating out of his hand. All that's left is for them to sign the cheque.' And Mark Ruffle Snr gave a proud satisfied laugh …

Mark was a winner. A natural, whether on the football field or with a client. Every job. Every rung. On his own merits. He was appointed manager of the real-estate agency. Everything was going fine. He hadn't got Sunday back, but Monday was now his glory day, when he walked into his agency, got his team all fired up, got his tired employees to work.

‘Come on guys, you can do it. These are your targets … anyone doesn't make his target gets a personal ass-kicking from me!'

And he'd laugh. Everyone laughed with him. He was a good guy, the boss's kid. A bit of a hothead but a good guy. Always got someone pulling strings for him, but a good guy. He was the boss's son …

Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, they were all Sunday now. So why did he still have that bitter taste in his mouth? Why could he still hear that
but
? Why did he still feel incomplete, like someone watching his own life, someone who has not found himself?

It is always difficult not to have a first name.

This is perhaps why he became a young father, to the delight of his own parents. It was such a wonderful story … Everything glided so easily through the shimmering of these perfect lives: a site foreman becomes a property tycoon, marries a dependable, faithful wife with whom he has a son who grows up to be a football pro, or would have if it hadn't been for the accident, and a pro in business who quickly proves himself and will one day take over the family business and expand it further. And now the champion has fathered a child, and with a beautiful girl too, Shoshana, yes, that's right, his childhood sweetheart. A handsome strapping child. Nine and a half pounds.

No longer his father's son but his son's father. Hearing himself called ‘Dad'. Rediscovering Sunday for someone. Through the eyes of his son. Being a former champion, a boss, a husband, a father. Accumulating the symbols of respectability. Having the house, the pool, the BMW. Strolling the streets of Clarimont with his wife and his child.

Mark Ruffle's lawns were immaculately mown, watered on spring and summer evenings by sprinklers tracing perfect arcs. The child, growing up now, loved to leap into the spray. It was one of his favourite games. The child would pass through the liquid fan, laughing at the coolness of the water, the sweep of water, making rainbows against the setting sun before returning to its usual course.

And everything glided through the shimmering.

But no one felt this desire for reinvention as keenly as Matthieu. He could not stand himself. From the beginning and perhaps to the end. He needed, like a snake, to shed his skin, his life. He would say that things around him had started to smell, to rot like a life losing its youth and its drive.

‘It stinks, Simon. We have to get out of here. This country isn't for us any more. We need new horizons.'

The country stank all the more given that his dealer had been arrested. Matthieu had read it in the papers. He had been calmly eating breakfast when he stumbled on a sly, mocking article in
Le Parisien
clearly delighted at the fall of the ‘bourgeois gang', as the police had nicknamed it. A nightclub owner Matthieu knew well had set up a drug-dealing racket, initially in his own club, later in other clubs. Since most members of the gang, like their customers, came from rather posh families, in locking them up the police had enjoyed a very pleasant social settling of scores. And it would be several years before they got out. One of them had been Matthieu's dealer.

‘There's no decency left,' he joked to himself, reading the
paper. ‘To think that he was working for the competition. How completely immoral!'

But even as he joked, Matthieu worried. He knew he could very easily have been one of them. For two months, he panicked every time the doorbell rang and hated going to Le Miroir. Thankfully the dealer kept his mouth shut.

Even so, the episode heightened the sense of guilt that ate away at him and fed his desire for change. Despite his arrogance, Matthieu constantly felt himself in the wrong, diminished, and this was another reason he was constantly boasting and trying to impress. He felt threatened by the police and, deep down, by all forms of authority. He found hierarchies intolerable and could not bear a boss's stare. Even the slightest degree of power was unbearable for him because he constantly felt guilty. While he was arrogant towards lesser mortals, sneering at servants and lashing them with a contempt verging on insult as often as possible, he reserved an almost equally surly disdain for their masters, which though less aggressive, and akin to pretension, clearly marked out the social no-man's-land he inhabited, dreaming of summits without having the means to attain them while living in a permanent fear of disparaging looks and confrontations.