Requiem for a Lost Empire

by Andrei Makine

  Later on I attributed my confusion to the stress of all the dangers, long-term and immediate, that made up our existence at that time. To our wanderings from country to country, from language to language, to all the masks that our profession imposed on us. And, still more, to that love we superstitiously refused to name, myself knowing it to be unmerited, you believing it had already been declared in instants of silence in cities at war, where we might well have died without ever experiencing such moments at the end of the fighting that restored us to ourselves.

  "One day it must be possible to tell the truth…" These were the words, uttered with a mixture of insistence and resigned bitterness, that misled me. I pictured a witness-myself! Confused, lost for words, stunned by the enormity of the task. To tell the truth about that age whose course our own lives had here and there stumblingly followed. To testify to the history of a country, our country, that had succeeded, almost in front of our eyes, in building itself up into a formidable empire, only to collapse in a cacophony of shattered lives.

  "To tell the truth one day." You were silent, half lying beside me, your face turned toward the rapidly maturing night outside the window. The netting of the mosquito screen could clearly be seen against the hot, dark background. And in the middle of this dusty rectangle a zigzag tear was becoming more and more visible: the blast from one of the last shells had cut into this fabric that separated us from the city and its death throes.

  "To tell the truth…" I did not dare object. Uneasy at the role of witness or judge you were assigning to me, I mentally ran through all the reasons that made me incapable or even unworthy of such a mission. Our age, I told myself, was already receding and leaving us on the shore of time, like fish trapped by the ebbing of the sea. Bearing witness to what we had lived through would have meant speaking of a vanished ocean, evoking its ground swells and the victims of its storms, while faced with impassive undulations of sand. Yes, preaching in the desert. And our native land, that crushing empire, that Tower of Babel cemented together by dreams and blood, was it not disintegrating, story by story, vault by vault, its glass-lined halls turning into batteries of funhouse mirrors, its vistas into dead ends?

  The weariness of sleepless nights gave substance to these words. I saw the desert and the tiny puddles of water sucked in by the sand, the colossal ruined tower, drowning in long red banners, a liquid red, a whole river of purple.

  You slipped off the bed. I woke up, ready, when suddenly awakened, as for many years now, to abandon our current dwelling, to reach for a gun, to reply calmly to anyone who might be hammering at the door. This time the reflex was unnecessary. The silence of the city was broken only by occasional uncoordinated shots, and a brief rumble of trucks, swallowed up at once by the density of the night.

  You went over to the table. In the darkness I saw the pale touch of your body, colored by reflected light from a fire at the other end of the street. "To tell the truth…" All my waking energy became focused on this impracticable notion. As I watched you moving through the dark room I resumed my silent refusal.

  You speak of truth. But all my own memories have been falsified. Ever since my birth. And I could never bear witness for other people. I don't know their lives and I don't understand them. As a child I never knew how they lived, all these normal people. Their world stopped at the door of our orphanage. When one day I was invited to a birthday party in a normal family-two little girls with long braids, parents brimming with goodwill, all as it should be, jam in little silver-plate dishes, table napkins I didn't dare touch-I thought they were making fun of me and at any minute they were going to admit it and kick me out. I still remember it with morbid gratitude, you see, as if by not dismissing me they had performed an act of superhuman generosity. Just think of it, tolerating this young barbarian with a shaven head and hands nearly blue with cold, sticking out of sleeves that were too short. And to top it all, the son of a disgraced father. So how can you expect me to be an impartial witness?

  You switched on a flashlight, I saw your fingers in the narrow beam, the glint of a needle. "To tell the truth about what we have lived through." I raised myself on one elbow, wanting to explain to you that I understood nothing about the age that was already slipping away beneath our feet. And that the whole shambles of it made me think of the innards of the armored vehicle I had seen the day before at the center of the city, when taking refuge from bursts of gunfire. Ripped apart by a rocket, it was still smoking and displayed a complex mixture of dislocated machinery, twisted metal, and lacerated human flesh. The force of the explosion had made this chaos astonishingly homogeneous, almost orderly. The electric cables looked like blood vessels, the dashboard, battered and splashed with blood, was like the brain of a rare creature, a futuristic war beast. And, buried somewhere in this lava of death, the radio, undamaged, blared forth its quavering rallying calls. Such a scene was not new to me. Only the sudden, sharp realization that I did not understand was quite new. Sheltering in my hiding place, I said to myself that these men who were killing one another under a cloudless sky lived in a land where epidemics were palpably more efficient at this than armaments; that the cost of one rocket would have sufficed to feed a whole village in this African country; that the money spent on that vehicle would have funded the sinking of hundreds of wells; that the blame for this war must be laid at the door of the Americans and ourselves, for we were fighting each other through intermediary nations, and also of the former colonial powers, who had corrupted the Eden-like state of these lands. But that primitive paradise was a myth, too, for men had always fought, with lances in the past, with rocket launchers today; and the only thing to distinguish the deaths of the occupants of the burned-out armored car from the carnage of their ancestors was the complex fashion in which their deaths, deaths both so individual (beneath a layer of torn-off armor I saw a long, very slender, almost boyish arm with a fine leather bracelet on the wrist) and so anonymous, were swallowed up by the interests of remote powers, their thirst for oil or gold, the cut and thrust of their bureaucratic diplomacy, their demagogic doctrines. And even by the petty concerns and anticipated pleasures of that arms dealer I had seen, two days before the fighting broke out, getting onto the plane for London. He had given his name as Ron Scalper and seemed like a very ordinary sales representative. He sought to accentuate his ordinariness by handing over his briefcase to security with a tourist's naive clumsiness, mopping his brow in front of the person checking his passport. Yes, that soldier's death was insidiously linked to the relief this man feels once he is seated in the plane, turning up the ventilation control and closing his eyes, already transported into the antechamber of the civilized world. By the same tortuous routes, that wrist, with its leather bracelet, reaches out into the life of the woman whom the man on the London plane can already picture, offering herself naked, yielding to his desire, the young mistress he has earned for himself by taking all those risks. Our age, I thought, is nothing more than a monstrous organism that digests gold, oil, politics, and wars, and secretes pleasure for some, death for others. A gigantic stomach that churns up and blends together things that, in our shame and hypocrisy, we keep separate. The young mistress, at this very moment moaning beneath her arms dealer, would utter a cry of indignation if I told her her happiness (for, no doubt, they call it happiness) is inseparably linked to that childish bracelet stained with grease and blood!

  I got up, wanting to confide these thoughts to you in all their despairing simplicity: no, I do not begin to understand this grotesque organism, for there is nothing to understand. I crossed our room in the darkness streaked with reflections from the flames, I joined you at the window.

  "One day it must be possible to tell the truth." I was going to give you my reply: the truth about our age was a young body steeped in beauty creams, the human flesh the arms dealer treated himself to, in exchange for his rocket launchers. And this trade, the tragicomic outcome of global maneuvers, had ordained that today, in that precise spot, a soldier, wearing a
leather band on his wrist, should be blown to pieces by an explosion. The truth was absolutely logical and absolutely arbitrary.

  Just as I was about to say this to you, I noticed what you were doing. Hands raised halfway up the window, you were darning the torn mosquito screen. Long stitches of pale thread, movements very slow, guided by the needle as it felt its way in the darkness, but there was also another slowness, that of a deep reverie, of a lassitude so great that it no longer even sought rest. It seemed to me that never before had I happened on you in such a relaxed state, at a moment in your life of such perfect harmony with yourself, with what you were to me. You were the woman whose shoulders my hand caressed lightly when they seemed cold in the sweltering heat of the night. A woman whose infinite singularity and troubling uniqueness, as the being I loved, I was aware of as never before and who, that night in this ravaged city, inexplicably found herself living so close to death, whether accidental or intended. A woman who was drawing two edges of fabric together on a night when the fighting had stopped. And who, noticing my hand at last, inclined her head, letting my fingers rest beneath her cheek and was already becoming utterly still, in a half sleep.

  Your presence was one of total strangeness. And at the same time of completely natural necessity. You were there and the murderous complexity of this world, this tangle of wars, greed, vengeance, and lies found itself face to face with a truth beyond dispute. This truth was poised in your gesture: a hand closing up two pieces of fabric against a night glutted with death. I sensed that all the testimonies I could have offered were overtaken by the truth of that moment, snatched from the madness of men.

  I did not dare, and in any case I would not have known how, to question you about the meaning of your words. I kissed the back of your head, your neck, the start of the fragile rosary of your vertebrae, transfixed by the tenderness a woman's body inspires when she is totally absorbed in a task she cannot interrupt. And so it was as a simple response to your desire for truth that I began telling you about the birth of the world in the eyes of that infant lost among the mountains. His fear of understanding, his refusal to name things, his life being saved by the music of an unknown language. He hesitated for a moment on the brink of our games of pleasure and death, then let himself sink back once more into the fraternal intimacy of the universe. The woman who held him in her arms went on softly singing her lullaby, even as the sound of gunshots reached them from the other bank of the stream. The unknown language was her mother tongue.

  I embarked on this story beside the window, beside the rectangle of netting you were darning, I finished it in a whisper, leaning toward your face relaxed in sleep. I thought you had dozed off and missed the ending. But after my last words, without saying anything, you gave my hand a gentle squeeze.

  There were times, long before I knew you, when I did go back to that night in the Caucasus and the sleeping child. These returns to the past allowed me to take refuge from sudden excesses of grief, horrors that were too overwhelming. They marked a dotted line of brief resurrections along the course of my life, following each of the temporary deaths that punctuate our lives. One such death had assailed me on the day when a fellow pupil, the leader of one of the little gangs that were rife at our orphanage, spat some crumbs of tobacco from his cigarette stub in my direction and hissed with explosive scorn, "Look, everyone knows about your father. The firing squad shot him like a dog!" Or another time when, out for a stroll, I chanced upon a woman deep in the long grass of a gully, half naked and drunk, being taken in brutal haste by two men, who puffed and panted with little false laughs and oaths. Against a dark background of lush June vegetation, her rotund, obese body was blinding in its pallor. She turned her head, and I recognized the simpleton whom the townspeople called by a little girl's pet name, Lyubochka. And then there was that birthday party with dishes of silver plate. Everyone tried to behave as if I were just like the others, tried not to notice my clumsy actions or to anticipate them. And their kindness was so evident that there was no longer any doubt: I would never be like them, I would always be that youth whose hands were red with cold, dogged by his past, who, if asked about his background, would sometimes stammer out truths that people took for wild lies and sometimes lie to reassure the curious. And there would always be, as there was that day, a very young child who would tug at his sleeve and ask him, "Why aren't you laughing with us?"

  After each of these deaths I would once more find myself in my Caucasian night: I would see the face of the white-haired woman, her eyes fixed on my eyelids; I would listen to her song, crooned in a language whose beauty seemed to stand guard over this moment in the darkness.

  Later on, when studying medicine, I tried to put an end to these returns to the past, seeing them as a sign of sentimental weakness, shameful for a prospective army doctor. I stopped being ashamed of them when I realized that night had had nothing in common with the soft-heartedness wrung from us by a happy childhood. For there had been no happy childhood. Only that night when, venturing across the frontier into the world, the child took fright and, through the magic of an unknown language, was able to retreat for a little longer into his earlier universe.

  This was the universe I always returned to in my flights from the suffocations of life. And when, having joined the army, I found myself looking after soldiers in the undeclared wars waged by the empire at all four corners of the globe, little by little this night of the child became the sole remaining trace that allowed me to go on recognizing myself.

  One day this trace was obliterated.

  At first I convinced myself that the very last wounded man did exist. At the end of the very last war. Wars, I told myself, 'were small now, local, or so the diplomats said. So, logically, an end to them was thinkable. But I discovered soon enough that it was the big wars that came to an end, not the little ones; these were simply a continuation of the others in peacetime. For the first few months, perhaps a whole year, I kept a diary: customs of the country, characteristics of the inhabitants, scraps of life stories that wounded men confided to me. Then on to another country, another war, and I perceived that the differences in terrain and customs were increasingly blurred by the routine of fighting, with its monotony of suffering and cruelty, which is the same under every sky. Ethiopia, Angola, Afghanistan… Now the pages of my diary disgusted me, with their tone of the nosy tourist and the detachment of the observer who plans to leave tomorrow. By now I knew that I would not be leaving. My dreams were no longer peopled with human faces but with the gaping grins of wounds. Each had its singular smile, sometimes broad and fleshy, sometimes with an indented gash blackened with burns. And, like the filter on a camera, the same light colored all these dreams, the color of dirty blood, of rust on the carcasses of armored vehicles, of the reddish dust raised by helicopters bringing fresh wounded to the hospital. Often the same vision woke me: what I was stitching up was not the gaping grin of a wound but lips trying to speak. I would get up and, for several seconds after being switched on, the light seemed to alleviate the raging furnace where an old electric fan kept churning away. My watch showed it was the hour at which soldiers returned from night operations. Standing at the mirror, I would try to reassemble the man I must once more become in the morning. I would make the effort for several seconds, then return to the child hidden in the mountains of the Caucasus.

  One day this refuge lost its power. A soldier who had had both arms amputated escaped during the night, loomed up in front of the sentry with a threatening cry, and was killed by a burst of gunfire. The authorities preferred to call it an attack of madness rather than suicide. That evening, after a day in which there had been two men seriously burned and another amputation, I realized I had almost forgotten the suicide of the night before. When I went to bed I had to wait for the blissful weightlessness of morphine before admitting that within me there was no longer any place, no longer any moment, where I could hide.

  Thus I lived, letting each new day obliterate the anguish of the previous one in th
e panic-stricken looks of the newly wounded. The only measure of time left to me was the all-too-evident progress in perfecting the weapons used by our soldiers and their enemies. I no longer remember in which war it was (it may have been in Nicaragua) that we first encountered strange bullets with a displaced center of gravity. They had the appalling characteristic of traveling through the body in an unpredictable way and lodging in parts that are the most difficult to reach. Some time after that cluster bombs appeared, ever more ingenious shells filled with needles that seemed to be dragging us into a macabre competition in which our normal surgical instruments frequently turned out to be ill adapted. And then one morning, the helicopter that was due to pick up the wounded and dead following a battle did not return. We learned it had been shot down by a new portable missile. From that morning onward what our ears detected in the throb of the propellers was a dull vibration of distress.

  I had no time to reflect on the underlying causes of these wars. Besides, all the discussions I had with other doctors or with officer-instructors always used to end up in the same little geopolitical dead end. The world was becoming too small for the two vast, over-armed empires that shared it between them. They collided with another, like two icebergs in the bottleneck of a strait, they disintegrated at the edges, breaking countries in half, tearing nations apart; avoiding the worst while in disputed zones there was continual friction. Hiroshima and Vietnam sufficed to establish who was the aggressor: America, the West. Some of our number, the most prudent or the most patriotic, left it at that. Others would add that America, this convenient enemy, justified a good many absurdities in our own country. In return, our baleful existence helped the Americans excuse their own. This, they concluded was the price of global equilibrium. These sober conclusions would often be swept away a few hours later by an armored vehicle in flames whose steel shell echoed with the cries of people being burned alive or, as on the last occasion, by the death of the wounded man reaching out with his stumps toward bursts of submachine-gun fire. I made an effort not to comprehend these deaths, lest I make light of them in our discussions of strategy.