Alain was walking down a Paris street. He observed the young girls with their exposed navels. Most men, he thought, prefer to gaze at buttocks, breasts and thighs; yet he liked gazing at navels. His own, in particular. In another street, Ramon was deciding not to visit the Chagall exhibition for a fourth time as it was a bit crowded. At about the same time, D’Ardelo was being told by his doctor he didn’t have cancer. He felt both relieved and disappointed.
“Madame Franck’s husband died of cancer last week,” Ramon later told D’Ardelo.
“I’ve got cancer, too,” D’Ardelo replied.
“Oh dear.”
Why had D’Ardelo lied? Was it just because he found himself in the middle of a caricature of the European philosophical tradition in which everything was equally possible and impossible?
Ramon then went to inform Charles that there was a cocktail party job for him and Caliban. “Did I ever tell you about my good friend Quaquelique? The secret of his womanising success is being dull and ignoring them,” he added. “I’m sure you’ve told me that many times in a parallel universe,” Charles replied.
Elsewhere, Stalin was telling his comrades a joke about partridge shooting. It wasn’t funny but they laughed anyway. Apart from Kalinin, who wet himself as he was incontinent. “Did you know?” Ramon interrupted, “Königsberg was renamed Kaliningrad in recognition of the Soviet general’s insignificance.”
“Kant.”
“No need to insult me.”
“He lived in Königsberg.”
“I wonder if the Italians will ever change Milan to Kundera to celebrate my insignificance,” the novelist mused.
Alain was walking down a Paris street. He observed the young girls with their exposed navels. I’ve written this before, haven’t I? But doesn’t every story have any number of possibilities and couldn’t everything have already been written before? If not usually quite so quickly or obviously. Alain then thought about his mother who had abandoned him at birth. He was sorry for the inconvenience his life had caused her.
“Me, too,” she sighed from a tattered photograph that hung on his wall.
“I’m sorry. The circumstances of my birth have made me an apologiser.”
“That’s why I left you. If only the story had been written in a way that made you less snivelling, I might have stayed.”
In another part of Paris a young woman threw herself into the Seine. “I want to die,” she yelled. “We know how you feel,” murmured the rest of the Rive Gauche, apart from a teenager who dived in to save her.
“Actually I want to live,” she decided, having drowned her would-be rescuer. “That was deep,” the Rive Gauche admired.
“Too deep for him.”
Caliban was an actor who had never acted, so to amuse himself he pretended to be a Pakistani. Though because he could not speak Urdu, he had gone to the trouble of making up his own language. In Paris, they find that sort of thing hilarious.
“I hate the bourgeoisie,” Caliban said in his made-up language.
“So do I,” Charles replied as a feather floated from the ceiling. Everyone in the room stopped talking to stare at the feather and consider the unbearable lightness of its being. “I’m sure Julie fancies me,” D’Ardelo imagined. Julie may well have done, but sadly for D’Ardelo it was the type of book where she ended up in bed with a complete stranger.
“Let’s go and drink Alain’s symbolic bottle of Armagnac,” Caliban said.
“I’ve got to see my mum. I think she’s dying,” Charles groaned.
“My mum has always hated me and I’m sorry about that,” Alain apologised.
“I’m not,” his Mum snapped.
“Don’t break my symbolic bottle.”
“Sorry.”
Outside in the Luxembourg Gardens, Stalin was ranting about what an inspiration Schopenhauer had been to him, while shooting the head off a statue of Marie de Medici. Kalinin was urinating behind a bush. Ramon missed them both, because he was still studying his navel. “It’s possible that somewhere, in a different time and space, Milan is writing a rather better book than this,” he said. “I do hope so,” Alain replied. “Still, at least it wasn’t very long.”
Digested read, digested: The significance of insignificance
