Prologue
That year, for the first time in ages, Thierry Blin
decided to play tennis again, with the sole purpose of
confronting the man he had once been: a competent
player who, without ever earning a place in any official
seeding, had given a few ambitious players a run for
their money. Since then the cogs had ground to a halt,
his shots had lost their edge, and the simple act of
running after a little yellow ball no longer seemed so
instinctive. Just to be clear in his own mind, he took
out his old medium-headed Snauweart racket, his Stan
Smiths and a few other relics, and made his entrance
cautiously at Les Feuillants, the club closest to him.
Having paid for his membership, he asked an attendant
whether he knew of anyone who was looking for an
opponent. The attendant pointed to a tall man who
was playing alone against a wall, returning the ball with
pleasing regularity.
Nicolas Gredzinski had been a member of the club
for two months now, but he still didn’t feel confident
enough to challenge a seasoned player, or sufficiently
patient to restrain his shots against a beginner.
Gredzinski was actually refusing to admit to himself that
his perennial fear of confrontation was being demonstrated
yet again, in these weekly two-hour tennis sessions;
he had a way of seeing hawkish tendencies in the
most peaceful situations. The fact that a stranger had
come and suggested knocking up for a while,
or evenplaying a set, was his one opportunity to get onto a
court for real. To gauge his opponent’s skill, he asked
a few questions to which Blin gave only guarded
replies, and both men headed for court number 4.
From the first few warm-up shots, Blin rediscovered
forgotten sensations: the felty smell of new balls, the
sprays of rust-coloured grit on his shoes from the clay
surface, the creaking sound of the strings as they
slackened with the impact of the first returns. It was
still too early to talk about the rest: the feel of the ball,
the gauging of distances, his position, the suppleness
of his leg movements. The priority was to return the
ball. To return it, come what may. He had to launch
into this dialogue and remember how to use the words,
even if his first sentences were not those of a great
speaker, let alone epigrammatic.
Gredzinski was reassured by the eloquence of his
forehand, but felt that his backhand was talking gibberish.
There had always been something forced about
it; he avoided using it as an attacking shot and preferred
taking his chances and lunging – at his own risk
– in order to end up playing a forehand. He had actually
succeeded in integrating this weakness into his
game, paradoxically creating a style. It only took a few
balls for him to make up for that slight delay in the
attack, and his backhand rediscovered that little flick
of the wrist which was far from a copybook move but
which usually proved to be successful. He surprised
himself by suggesting a match; however wary he was of
competition, he could already see himself emerging
from the trenches as a hero and striding towards the
enemy lines. “It was bound to come to this,” they both
thought, and it was actually the only way that Blin
could be absolutely sure, and that Gredzinski could
break free of his fatalism, which meant he didn’t see
tennis for what it really was: a game.
The first exchanges were courteous but unremarkable,
each of them wanting to review his argument
before the great debate. With his long straight shots
which kept Blin behind the baseline, Gredzinski was
trying to say something like: I could go on chatting like
this for hours. To which Blin replied with a succession of
precise, patient as you please s, alternating forehands and
backhands. When he lost his service, which put him
4–2 down in the first set, he decided to get to the point
by coming in unexpectedly for a volley, which clearly
meant: How about stopping this chitchat? Gredzinski was
forced to answer yes by serving an ace, taking him to
15–love. And the conversation became increasingly
heated. By systematically coming straight up to the
net after the return of serve, Blin threw all of his
opponent’s suggestions back in his face, flinging down
a Not a chance! or an Onto the next! or even a Hopeless! or
a Pathetic! with each definitive volley. It was a good tactic
and it saw him win the first set 6–3. Gredzinski never
seemed to think of things until it was too late; it was
while he was mopping his forehead as they changed
ends that he realized how he should have replied to
such peremptory attacks. He thought he might demonstrate
for the two or three onlookers who had come to
hang on to the wire mesh round the court. He now
started serving into the middle of the service box to
give his opponent as little angle as possible, then he
had fun sending his drives one way then the other,
playing Blin back and forth to the point of exhaustion
as if to say: You see . . . I too can . . . pick up the pace . . . you
madman . . . or you poor ignoramus . . . who wanted . . . to
make me look . . . like an idiot. The madman in question
fell into the trap and missed a fair few opportunities as
he ran out of breath and failed to follow his shots
through properly. Some of his net-skimming volleys
warranted a bit of attention and issued a strange
request, a sort of Let me get one in, at least. The second
set was beginning to look like a summary execution,
and the members of the Feuillants club, whether they
were players themselves or just there to watch, were
pretty sure which way it would go. There were now
almost a dozen spectators to applaud the risks
Gredzinski was taking and the rare replies from Blin,
who lost the set. Even so, Blin had a psychological
advantage that Gredzinski had always lacked, a profound
conviction of his own rights, a belief in his own
reasoning which forced him to play within the lines, as
if the principle was self-evident. Gredzinski couldn’t
help but be affected by this and it wasn’t long before
Blin was giving the questions and the answers, taking
the lead 5–2 in the third with victory in his sights. One
of the elementary laws of debating then came to poor
Gredzinski’s aid: a debater of limited skill can’t bear
having his own arguments thrown back in his face.
Accordingly he started using long shots with maximum
spin as if deciding to resume control of a conversation
with an inveterate talker. Strange though it may seem,
Blin lost a game at 5–3 and was quickly overwhelmed,
eventually letting Gredzinski re-enter the set at 5–5
with his service still to come. But Blin still had a few lines
of argument in his racket; he had a perverse way about
him, he was the sort who would never lie but just
wouldn’t tell the whole truth. Now for the first time
he played several magnificent backhands straight
down the line, and this saw him break the service of
Gredzinski, who turned to stone between the tramlines.
The latter had been prepared for anything except for
this show of bad faith from an opponent who, from the
very beginning of the match, had had the good grace
to proceed quite openly. Where had these backhands
straight down the line come from? It was dishonest! He
should have declared them at the outset, just as you
pronounce some profound truth to show exactly what
sort of man you are. The third set ended in a painful
tie-break which brought both men right back into the
match, and proved what each of them was capable of
when he felt threatened. Blin came up to the net to
volley three times in succession, and the last of these
was too much. Gredzinski replied with such a high lob
that you could clearly read the message in its parabola:
This sort of reasoning will always be way over your head.
That showed he had misjudged the other man, who
wasn’t afraid of sending drop shots from the baseline
just to see his opponent run: You have no idea how far
you are from the truth. Gredzinski ran as fast as he could,
sent the ball back onto the court and planted himself
in front of the net: I’m here and I’m staying! And he
stayed, towering, waiting for a reaction from the man
who’d just made him run flat out, the man who hated
using lobs, even in the direst straits – to him they were
a cheap trick, cowardly shots. He delved to the depths
of his racket to come up with a superb passing shot
which meant: I’m cutting you off at the knees. The beginnings
of a tear fogged over Gredzinski’s eye; not only
had he run several miles to get the drop shot in
extremis, but now he was floored by the most humiliating
rejoinder known to this demonic sport: the passing
shot down the line. The coup de grâce was dealt by a
handful of spectators who had become fascinated by
the quality of their game: they started clapping. One
of the longest standing members of Les Feuillants
climbed up onto the umpire’s chair to pronounce
coolly: “3–0, change ends.”
Gredzinski could see himself cracking his Dunlop
over the poor devil’s head; but all he did was change
ends, as he had just been reminded to do. Like any
other shy person who feels humiliated, he trawled
through his darkest feelings for some residual energy.
Blin, on the other hand, was celebrating the fact that
he had found himself again, the man he had been, the
man he might be again for some time, always agile,
mischievous and sure of himself when it really mattered.
He just managed to win the fourth point and
then lost the next with just as much effort. When one
of them said: I’ll be here to the end, the other would reply:
And I’ll be right there beside you, but neither of them had
managed to edge ahead. At five all, the two players
exchanged a last look before the final showdown. A
look which said the same thing, a feeling almost of
regret that they couldn’t find a gentleman’s agreement
or some way of pulling out, each with his honour
intact. The moment of truth had come, they were
going to have to go through with it. Gredzinski eased
the pressure and lost the next point, then the match,
delivering tired shots devoid of malice. As if to tell Blin
that victory comes to whoever hungers for it the most.
*
When they came out of the changing rooms they bypassed
the sodas and the club’s garden chairs to take
refuge in a bar near the Porte Brancion. They needed
somewhere worthy of their match, a reward for so
much effort.
“Thierry Blin.”
“Nicolas Gredzinski, pleased to meet you.”
They shook hands a second time, sitting on two tall
stools, facing hundreds of bottles of spirits lined up in
three rows. A barman asked what they would like to
drink.
“Vodka, ice cold,” Blin said without thinking.
“And for you, sir?”
The fact was that Gredzinski never knew what to
have in cafés, let alone in bars, where he hardly ever set
foot. Fuelled by a sort of complicity engendered by the
match, he looked at the barman with obvious delight
and said: “The same!”
Now that “the same” needs some consideration
because Gredzinski, despite distant Polish origins, had
never drunk vodka. He sometimes sipped at a glass of
wine with a meal, or a beer to freshen up when he left
work, but you could say he didn’t have a personal
relationship with alcohol. Only the enthusiasm and
the euphoria of the match could explain that “the
same” with which he surprised even himself.
Tennis was not truly a passion for either of them, but
no other sport had given them so much pleasure.
Leaning on the long wooden counter, they ran through
all the players who had made them dream. They very
quickly agreed: whether or not you were susceptible to
his game, Björn Borg had been the greatest ever.
“And his extraordinary list of wins is only the tip of
the iceberg,” said Blin. “You just had to watch him play.”
“That silence the minute he walked on the court,
do you remember? It hovered in the air, it didn’t
leave room for any doubt about the outcome of the
match. He knew it, you could see it in his face; but his
opponent would still try his luck.”
“Not one spectator ever asked themselves if he was
having a good day, if he’d recovered from the previous
match, if his shoulder was hurting or his knee. Borg
was just there, harbouring his secret, which – like any
real secret – shuts everyone else out.”
“Borg didn’t need luck. He even denied the whole
idea of chance.”
“The one unexplained mystery is his gloominess,
that little something in his features which was so
obviously sad.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t say there was sadness but, quite the
contrary, serenity,” said Gredzinski. “Perfection can
only ever be serene. It shuts out emotion, drama
and, of course, humour. Or perhaps he had a sort of
humour, which involved robbing his opponents of the
last weapons they had left to defend themselves with.
When people tried to dismiss him as a machine returning
balls from the baseline, he’d retaliate by playing
extraordinarily cruel volleys.”
“Put Borg up against the biggest server in the world?
He’d start by inflicting a love game on him, all in aces!”
“Did Borg sniff out their weaknesses? Did he wear
them down? If he wanted to, he could step on the
accelerator and save more than an hour for an audience
keen to go and watch a less monotonous match.”
“As soon as he lost just one game, the journalists
started saying he was on the way down!”
“Whoever the other finalist confronting Borg was,
he could be a hell of a tournament winner. Being
number two to Borg meant being the best in the eyes
of the world.”
They stopped talking for a moment to bring the
small chilled glasses to their lips. Blin automatically
took a good swig of vodka.
Gredzinski, who was not prepared for it and had no
experience of the stuff, kept the drink in his mouth for
a long while to let it express itself completely, swirling it
round so as not to miss out a single taste bud, creating a
cataclysmic response all the way down his throat, and
closing his eyes until the burning passed.
“There’s only one shadow on the picture of Borg’s
career,” said Blin.
Gredzinski felt ready to take up a new challenge.
“Jimmy Connors?”
Blin was amazed. Gredzinski had responded with all
the confidence of someone who knows the answer.
And it wasn’t the answer but his answer, just his opinion,
a quirky idea intended simply to rock the so-called
specialists.
“How did you guess? He’s exactly who I was thinking
of!”
And, as if it were still possible, the very mention of
Jimmy Connors inflamed them almost as much as the
vodka.
“Are we allowed to love something and its exact
opposite?”
“Absolutely,” replied Gredzinski.
“Then you could say that Jimmy Connors was the
opposite of Björn Borg, don’t you think?”
“Connors was a destabilizing force, the energy of
chaos.”
“Borg was perfection, Connors was grace.”
“And perfection is often lacking in grace.”
“His constant willingness to pin everything on every
shot! His exuberance when he won and his eloquence
in defeat.”
“The sheer audacity of his despair, his elegance in
the face of failure!”
“How can you explain that he had every audience
in the world on his side? He was adored at Wimbledon,
adored at Roland-Garros, adored at Flushing
Meadow, adored everywhere. People didn’t like
Borg when he won, they liked Connors when he
lost.”
“Do you remember the way he used to launch himself
into the air to strike a ball before it had even had
time to get there?”
“He made his return of service into a more deadly
weapon than the serve itself.”
“His game was counter-intuitive, it was even counter
to the rules of tennis. As if, ever since he was little, he’d
made a conscious effort to contradict his teachers in
every lesson.”
“We love you, Jimbo!”
They drank to Connors, and then drank again, this
time for Borg. Then they fell silent for a moment, each
lost in his own memories.
“We’re not champions, Thierry, but that doesn’t
mean we haven’t got a bit of style.”
“Sometimes even a bit of panache.”
“That backhand down the line, have you always been
able to do that?” Gredzinski asked.
“It’s not what it used to be.”
“I’d really like to have had a shot like that in me.”
“Your turns of speed are much more impressive than
that.”
“Perhaps, but there’s something arrogant about that
backhand that I’ve always liked. A thundering reply to
anyone with any pretensions, a trick which would
freeze the feet of the most insolent opponent.”
“I stole it straight from Adriano Panatta, Roland-
Garros, 1976.”
“How can you steal a shot?”
“By being pretty conceited,” replied Blin. “At fifteen,
you have a lot of nerve.”
“That’s not enough, unless you’re exceptionally
talented.”
“I didn’t have that sort of luck, so I just had to sweat
blood and tears. I neglected all the other shots to
concentrate on that down-the-line backhand. I lost
most of my matches, but every time I managed to place
one of those shots I’d floor my opponent against all
expectations and, for those five seconds, I was a champion.
Now it’s disappeared from lack of use, but it’s
still quite a memory.”
“It can reappear, you know, and when your opponent
least expects, trust me!”
Gredzinski was surprised to find his glass empty just
as a strange feeling came over him, relaxing his whole
body. A sort of bright gap in the foggy sky that
hovered over him all the time. Without actually being
unhappy, Gredzinski had adopted a sort of restlessness
as his natural state. He had accepted a long time ago
now that every morning he would come across the cold
monster of his own anxiety, and nothing succeeded in
calming it except for feverish activity, which meant he
could never live in the present. All through the day
Nicolas struggled to stay one step ahead of it, right up
until those sweet few moments before he fell asleep.
This evening, though, he felt as if he was where he
wanted to be, the present was enough in itself, and the
little glass of vodka exhaling icy mist had something to
do with that. He surprised himself by ordering another,
and swore that he would make it last as long as possible.
The rest followed on from there; the words he was
uttering were certainly his own, his thoughts were freed
of any interference, and a peculiar memory came back
to him, like an echo of the one Blin had just described.
“There’s something beautiful and tragic about the
story of those five seconds; now I understand the
stealing. I had a similar experience when I was about
twenty-five. I shared an apartment with a piano teacher,
and most of the time – thank God! – she taught
while I was out. That piano was in the middle of everything,
our sitting room, our conversations, even our
timetables, given that we organized them around it.
Some evenings I actually hated it and, paradoxically,
I sometimes felt jealous of the pupils who laid their
hands on it. Even the worst of them managed to get
something out of it, but not me. I was useless.”
“What was the point in battling on with this piano if
it annoyed you so much?”
“Probably to insult it.”
“Meaning . . .?”
“Playing it myself was the worst revenge I could
find. Playing when I’d never learned how to, when I
couldn’t tell the difference between middle C and a B
flat. The perfect crime, really. I asked my flatmate to
teach me to play a piece by memorizing the keys and
the position of my fingers. It’s technically possible, it
just takes a lot of patience.”
“Which piece?”
“That’s where the trouble started! I aimed high and
my friend tried everything to stop me, but I stuck to my
guns: Debussy’s ‘Clair de Lune’.”
Thierry didn’t seem to know it so Nicolas hummed
the first few bars; they sang the rest together.
“In spite of everything, she was tickled by this impossible
task, and she set me to work on ‘Clair de Lune’
and, like a performing monkey, I eventually did it.
After a few months I could play Debussy’s ‘Clair de
Lune’.”
“Like a real pianist?”
“No, obviously, she’d warned me about that. Yes, I
could create the illusion with a bit of mimicry, but
I’d always be lacking the essential ingredient: heart, a
feeling for the piano, an instinct which only comes
from a proper apprenticeship, a passion for music, an
intimacy with the instrument.”
“But, there you are, when you’re twenty you’ve got
nothing better to do than impress those around you.
And you must have done that a couple of times.”
“Only a couple, but each time it was an extraordinary
feeling. I’d play ‘Clair de Lune’ and adopt a brooding
expression. The piece was so beautiful that it kindled
its own magic, and Debussy would always turn up at
some point between two phrases. I was treated to
cheering, to smiles from a handful of young girls, and
– for a few minutes – I felt like someone else.”
Those last words hung in the air, just long enough
for their resonance to be felt. The bar was filling up,
people heading off for supper were being replaced by
new arrivals, and this melting movement brought a
new quality to the silence between Thierry and Nicolas.
“Well, at least you can say we’ve been young.”
Caught up in a surprising surge of nostalgia, Thierry
ordered a Jack Daniel’s, which reminded him of a trip
to New York. Nicolas was negotiating his vodka with
all the patience he’d promised himself but it was an
effort; several times he nearly downed it in one as he
had seen Blin doing, just to see how far this first inkling
of drunkenness might take him. Without knowing
it, he was experiencing the beginnings of a great love
story with his glass of alcohol, a story which was unfolding
in two classic movements: allowing oneself to be
overrun by the effects of that first thunderbolt, and
trying to make those effects last as long as possible.
“I’m thirty-nine,” said Thierry.
“I was forty a fortnight ago. Can we still think of
ourselves as sort of . . . young?”
“Probably, but the apprenticeship’s over. If you
think that life expectancy for a man is seventy-five,
we’ve still got the second half to go, perhaps the better
half, who knows? But it’s the first half that’s made us
into who we are.”
“What you’re saying is that most of our choices are
irreversible.”
“We’ve always known we wouldn’t be Panatta or
Alfred Brendel. Over the years we’ve constructed ourselves,
and we may have thirty years ahead of us to
see whether we’ve got ourselves about right. But we’ll
never be someone else any more.”
It fell like a verdict, and they drank to the certainty
of it.
“Anyway, what’s the point in wanting to be someone
else, to live someone else’s life?” Gredzinski went on.
“Or to feel someone else’s joy and pain? If we’ve
become who we are, then the choices can’t have been
that bad. Who else would you have liked to be?”
Thierry turned round and swept his arm over the
room.
“Why not that man over there, with the gorgeous girl
drinking margaritas?”
“Something tells me the guy must have a complicated
life.”
“Wouldn’t it appeal to you to be the barman?”
“I’ve always avoided work which involved contact
with the public.”
“Or the Pope himself?”
“Not the public, I’ve already said.”
“A painter whose work gets exhibited at the
Pompidou Centre?”
“That’s worth thinking about.”
“What would you say to being a hired killer?”
Nicolas raised an eyebrow in silence.
“Or just the man in the apartment next door?”
“None of the above, but why not me?” said Nicolas.
“The other me that I dream of being, the one I’ve
never had the courage to become.”
He suddenly had a sense almost of nostalgia.
For the pleasure of it and out of curiosity, they
each described this other me who was both so close and
hopelessly inaccessible. Thierry could see him wearing
particular clothes, doing a particular job; Nicolas
exposed his great principles of life and some of his
failings. Each of them had fun describing a typical day
for his other self, hour by hour, in such abundant detail
that they found it worrying. They were so thorough
that, two hours later, there really were four of them
there, leaning on the bar. The glasses had proliferated
to the damning point where the very idea of counting
them was almost indecent.
“This conversation’s becoming absurd,” said Nicolas.
“A Borg can’t become a Connors or vice versa.”
“I don’t like myself enough to want to stay as me at
all costs,” said Blin. “I’d like to spend the thirty years
I’ve got left as this other me!”
“I’m not used to this,” said Gredzinski waving his
glass, “but do you think we might be a bit drunk?”
“It’s up to us to go and find this someone else. What
is there to lose?”
Gredzinski, captivated, had buried his anxiety somewhere
in a desert and was now dancing on its grave. He
fished about for the only answer that made any sense
to him: “We might lose ourselves along the way.”
“That’s a good start.”
They clinked their glasses together under the jaded
eye of the barman who, given the time, was not going to
serve them anything else. Blin, who was far more lucid
than Gredzinski, suddenly affected a conspiratorial
expression; without even realizing it, he had steered the
conversation to arrive exactly here, as if in Gredzinski
he had found something he had spent a long time
looking for. His victory in the match now egged him on
to play another kind of match in which he would be
both his own opponent and his only partner, a competition
so far-reaching that he would have to gather
all his forces together, to reawaken his free will,
remember his dreams, believe once again and push
back the limits he was beginning to sense around him.
“I’ll need time – say two or three years to fine-tune
the tiniest details – but I’ll wager you that I will be that
someone else.”
This was a challenge Thierry was putting to himself,
as if Gredzinski was reduced to a pretext, at best a
witness.
“. . . It’s June 23rd,” he went on. “Let’s meet in three
years’ time, three years to the day, in this same bar,
at the same time.”
Far, far away, intoxicated by the momentum of what
was happening, Gredzinski let the drink guide him, a
form of autopilot which left him free to concentrate
on what mattered.
“If we meet . . . will it be the two of us or the other
two?”
“That’s what gives the challenge its spice.”
“And what’s at stake? If by some extraordinary
chance one of us manages it, he’d deserve some
incredible reward!”
For Blin, that was not the question at all. Conquering
this other him was the greatest stake in itself. He
wriggled out of it with a flourish. “On that evening,
June 23rd at 9 o’clock in exactly three years, whichever
one of us has won can ask absolutely anything of the
other.”
“. . . Absolutely anything?”
“Are there higher stakes in the world?”
From where Gredzinski was right then, nothing
seemed eccentric any more; everything and nothing
vied for attention. He was discovering his own capacity
for elation, a rare sensation pervading both his head
and his heart.
It was time for them to part, something indicated
the moment when they should leave. Neither would
have been able to say what.
“This may be the last time we ever see each other,
Thierry.”
“That would be the best thing that could happen to
us, don’t you think?”
