Requiem for a Lost Empire

by Andrei Makine

  The masses of water crashing against the cargo ship now seemed more rhythmical, as if resigned to the logic of the resistance offered them by this ludicrous vessel. I heard the counsellor get up and in the sudden flare of a match his face seemed to me aged, deeply etched. His voice had the slightly disappointed tone of someone who had been getting ready to spring a surprise but has missed the right moment to announce it: "Well, that's it. We're on the Red Sea. We won't be tossed about quite so much now." Perhaps it was slight irritation at having to break off his story to announce the news. He resumed it again but brought it to a swift conclusion.

  "On account of our duels at chess Ethel nicknamed me 'Shakhmatov' or 'Shakh' for short. She knew Russian. There are only two or three people left who know this nickname… Goodnight!"

  In the years that followed he occasionally spoke of the Rosenbergs again. One day he told me why, at the moment of their arrest, he was sure they would confess. "Because if I'd had those two children, that's what I would have done," he said.

  With the passage of time, I also came to realize how his storytelling had allowed me to forget my fear, that egotistical and humiliating fear of losing one's life just when things are promising to turn out well.

  Last of all, that night taught me Shakh's nickname, which was known to very few people. You were one of them.

  2

  Everything expressed by their voices, their bodies and, no doubt, their thoughts that night seemed to me tinged with theatrical exaggeration. Their excessively enthusiastic judgments in front of this statue, before that picture. Their smiles, contorted with too much happiness. And, behind these rapt expressions, the all-too-evident lack of attention to what they were being shown. And the overly urbane and almost gleeful hypocrisy with which they kept promising to meet for lunch one day. And the glances of the men, eyeing the women's figures quite blatantly, then immediately affecting icy indifference and poise.

  At first I told myself that in an art gallery such an exaggeration of sentiments, either felt or simulated, must stem from the physical, and hence sensual, warmth of the works exhibited. A mistaken supposition, for the pictures 'were all bloodlessly and coldly geometric and the sculptures-cubes superimposed on one another and truncated cylinders-looked hollow despite the weight of their bronze.

  I then attributed these excessive reactions to the schizophrenia of this city cut in two, divided like two hemispheres of a brain, each with its own very personal vision of the world, its own customs and foibles. Berlin, where the streets ran headlong into the Wall, then reappeared on the other side, both similar and unrecognizable. In the western hemisphere of this war-disordered brain people felt themselves to be charged with a special mission, none more so, I thought, as I made my way slowly through the crowd of them, than the guests at the very first exhibition in this new art center. In their eyes these great, brightly lit rooms were becoming an outpost of the Western World, confronting the alarming boundlessness of the barbaric lands that began beyond the Wall. Each of their gestures was projected onto the screen of the darkness that stretched away toward the east. Every word, every smile produced a reaction out there in that unpredictable blackness. Each truncated cylinder hurled defiance from its pedestal at the realistic paintings and sculptures of human forms that were being exhibited in the eastern hemisphere. The guests felt themselves to be observed by attentive eyes-jealous, hostile, or admiring. It was because of how they were seen from the other side of the Wall that they acted out these exaggerated emotions, going into ecstasies over a canvas, greeting a new acquaintance, sizing up a body or a face at a glance.

  A waiter came and offered me champagne. I took the glass, thinking with a smile that what was almost a caricature of the Western World seemed like this because I was seeing it for the first time. I was still seeing it from beyond the Wall. It could not but be theatrical.

  At the other end of the room, through the coming and going of the crowd, I caught sight of Shakh, dark suit, bow tie, his gray head inclined toward his interlocutor. I knew we should pretend not to know one another and that, just as he was leaving, someone would introduce us. This someone would be a woman whom I had never met but whom I should seem to have known for a long time. At the moment of this artificial introduction Shakh would be standing next to a dealer in rare stamps. In the most natural way I should make his acquaintance, so as to be able to meet one of his regular customers at his store a few days later, a specialist in arms sales and a passionate collector of stamps devoted to the world of flowers. Perhaps in the end it was our own playacting, woven into the worldly charade of that reception, that made me think of the theater. It was amusing to see the stamp dealer walking past within a few inches of me, not suspecting my existence. It was as if I were not merely hidden in the wings, but actually invisible on stage, among actors speaking their lines and playing their parts.

  The feeling I had was a kind of highly lucid intoxication. I believed I could hear the intimate heartbeat of the Western life into which I must merge. This fusion had the discreet violence of carnal possession. I had to struggle mentally not to admit to being happy. This Berlin quintessence of the Western World was giving me back the aggressive lust for life I had thought was in terminal hibernation within me.

  I had been aware of this reawakening already in Moscow, during the months of study and training, preparing me for my new work abroad. This preparation removed me further and further from the person I had been before. And it was not the fact of learning intelligence techniques or doing night parachute drops that confirmed this discontinuity. It was the pleasure of becoming a man with no past, of stripping myself down to this body trained for future action. Of being nothing but this future and, as for my past, to have only an invented life story, well rehearsed and learned by heart.

  A couple stopped in front of a picture and I could hear the remarks of the woman, whose shoulder was almost brushing against mine. For her the pale spread of colors over the canvas was "You know, awfully strong, gutsy. And that red, you know, totally dominates the background." I turned my head slightly. Young, dark-haired, extremely elegant, her face truly transported by her contemplation. I admired her. All the Western World was there in this ecstatic hypocrisy in front of a feeble daub that had to be viewed as a work of genius. This shared lie was their unwritten constitution, the password to their social world, their genteel nonconformism. Their prosperity, the brilliance of this palace of the arts, and this woman's body, almost arrogant in its well-manicured beauty, were all underwritten by this unspoken agreement. As I looked at the woman, then at the picture, I experienced that mixture of fascination and disgust that the West had always aroused in the East. I was seized by a sudden impulse to squeeze the glass in my hand more and more tightly, to crush it, to see the couple turn around, to see the reflection of the blood in their eyes, to await their reaction with a smile.

  At this moment I caught sight of you.

  I saw a woman whose face was known to me thanks to the photos I had been shown during the final briefing for my mission. I knew her life, that borrowed life, as fictitious as my own life story, which she knew in her turn. She came in, not from the direction of the street, but through the vast bay window that opened onto a large garden. I had doubtless missed her first appearance in the room. And now she was returning after seeing the bulkiest of the sculptures exhibited in the open air.

  My first impression left me perplexed: you resembled the woman who had just been showering praises on the picture. Dark-haired, like her, the same cut to your suit, the same complexion. At once I understood the reason for my mistake. You moved with the same assurance as she, responded to other people's greetings with as much ease, and your perfect mingling with the crowd of guests made you physically similar to the gushy woman. Now that you were coming to meet me I noticed the differences: your hair was darker, your eyes slightly slanting, your brow higher, your mouth… No, you were nothing like her.

  As you crossed the room, people stopped you two or three times an
d I had time to observe you through the looks others gave you, looks of exaggerated lust, appraising your body; possessing you. I pretended to catch sight of you, I began moving toward you, dodging between groups in conversation. It was at the moment when our eyes met that I saw passing across your brow what looked like the shadow swiftly dissimulated, of very great weariness. I was vexed with you for thus, very briefly, puncturing the elation of the first day of my new life. But already you were talking to me like an old acquaintance and letting me kiss you on the cheek. We sauntered about, just like the others. Then, when we saw Shakh in the company of a man with a large, smooth, bald pate, we walked toward the garden bay, so as to be hailed in passing.

  An unexpected scene brusquely interrupted this well-regulated playacting. A crowd gathered. A man who could not be seen over the heads of the throng gave a speech like a fairground barker's, in mangled German, reminiscent of that spoken by German soldiers in comic films about the war. We wormed our way into the throng and saw the man displaying a large spinning top to the crowd. His patter was already provoking laughter.

  "The Soviets produce these in their arms factories. This means that first of all they can cover up the production of missiles and, secondly, they can give pleasure to children. Even though this machine weighs more than a shell and makes as much noise as a tank. Look!"

  The man crouched and pressed down several times on the point of the top to activate the spring concealed inside its nickel-plated body. The toy hurtled into a waltzing rotation, with a tinny clatter, describing wider and wider circles, and forcing the spectators to retreat amid peals of laughter. Some of them, like one guest with patent leather shoes, tried to push the creature away with the tips of their toes. The owner of the top looked triumphant.

  "I'm not mistaken, it's him, isn't it?" I asked you, as I moved out of the way of the people beating a retreat.

  "Yes. He's aged amazingly, hasn't he?" you said to me, studying the man with the top.

  He was a well-known dissident, expelled from Moscow, who lived in Munich. The toy made a last few turns and came to a standstill amid the applause of the guests.

  We joined Shakh and the philatelist. This first contact took place as planned, down to the last word. But the vision of the top passed in front of my eyes from time to time.

  Going out into the garden, we stopped for a few minutes among the large structures of bronze and concrete for which there had not been enough room inside the gallery. The trees were already turning yellow. "Under autumn leaves," you remarked to me with a smile, "all these masterpieces are much more bearable." And you added, in a voice that seemed to be hesitating over the need for these words, "I'm older than you. My childhood was in the first years after the war. Poverty that made us gnaw stones. I can remember the rare few days when we 'weren't hungry. Real treats. And worst of all, no toys. We didn't know what they were. And then one day someone brought us a box filled with treasures for the New Year: brand new tops that still smelled of paint. Exactly like that one just now. Later on, when they started making dolls and all the rest, we were already too old for toys…"

  I was on the brink of telling you that, despite those few years' difference between us, I too had known those great tops and that I loved their smell and even the clatter they made. I said nothing because then I should have had to talk about the child lost in the night in the Caucasus. And yet for the first time in my life that past now seemed to me admissible.

  We never know where objects and gestures from the past will one day rise to the surface again, nor how, in the accumulation of years we have lived through. The spinning top in the Berlin art gallery came back to my mind three years later in the middle of that great war-torn African capital. The soldiers who had that day come to search the house where we were living went away carrying our few possessions with them. Two or three garments, a television set, some paper money you had purposely left out on the desk. As they left they were caught in the fire of a heavy machine gun that suddenly raked the fronts of the houses from the end of the street. The group scattered to recover their breath in a narrow alley. Only the last of them was hit as he ran. Caught on his side, he began turning around on the spot, his arms open wide and still laden with confiscated objects. Bullets of this caliber often transform the movements of a person running into a swift waltzing motion, like a top, I thought, and I saw the same memory reflected in your eyes.

  During the search they had made me stand facing the wall, like a child being punished. As the mistress of the house you were from time to time asked to open a drawer, offer a glass of water. You performed these tasks without ever interrupting the swishing of an improvised fan: some of the revolutionary leaflets with which the streets were strewn and which had made their way into the houses through broken windows. Between these sheets of paper you had slipped the photos and coded messages that we had neither had time to send to the Center nor to burn. That would have been the one really dangerous discovery. Curiously enough, those leaflets in your hand wove a fragile protective zone around our lives that clearly made the soldiers uneasy. I sensed this tension, I understood it in these young armed men. They were struggling against the temptation to fire a short burst, which would have freed them from our watching eyes and restored the joyful savagery to their looting. But there were these slogans for revolutionary justice, freshly printed on the fan of leaflets. There was also the loudspeaker on a truck that had been showering the streets with appeals for calm and proclaiming the benefits of the new regime ever since the morning. Turning my head slightly, I could see hands stuffing into the bag a transistor, a jacket, and even the lamp clamped to the edge of the table, which you were helping to unfasten, while successfully avoiding giving an indication of the comic side of your involvement. You knew that the slightest change of mood might provoke the pent-up anger and the brief spitting of an automatic rifle. The soldier who removed the lamp also expropriated the banknotes left out on the desk. And, as this action looked more like simple theft than the others that had preceded it, he thought it politic to justify it by talking, in tones both menacing and moralistic, about corruption, imperialism, and the enemies of the revolution. These were the didactic and pompous tones of the loudspeaker. Ceaselessly repeated, such slogans ended up infiltrating even our thoughts and it was in this style that, in spite of myself, I formulated a silent observation, "The money that you have coveted is the end of your revolution. The serpent of cupidity has stolen into your new house."

  When they had gone I turned around and saw you sitting there, still mechanically waving your fan of leaflets. The disorder in the room now matched the chaos outside, just as if this had been the purpose of their visit. Through the window we saw them quietly moving up the street, and a second later there came their flight under the crackle of bullets and the waltzing death of the soldier, revolving several times on the spot and scattering the confiscated objects all around him, those familiar fragments of our daily life. He collapsed, I glanced at you, guessing that you had the same memory: "That top…"

  The evening of the private viewing in Berlin seemed infinitely remote. And yet scarcely three years had elapsed. I had a vision of the faces that were reflected then in the nickel-plated surface of the toy launched by that man with the forced laugh of a fairground barker. The dark-haired young woman swooning in front of a pallid canvas. Shakh speaking to the philatelist. And also the man who had succeeded in kicking away the top with the tip of his patent leather shoe. I had later chanced to pass the woman in a restaurant: in conversation with a friend, she was commenting on the menu and her descriptions were just as enthusiastic as the one she had earlier reserved for the picture. So she was less hypocritical than I had thought, I said to myself, just a little excessive in her praises. The philatelist continued to spend more than half his life in his shop piled high with stacks of stamped envelopes and albums, without having the least suspicion that he had entered our world of espionage for a few hours and left it again, unaware of what was happening to him. As for
the man who had changed the trajectory of the spinning top by giving it a little kick, two years later he had lost his post as first secretary to a Western embassy in East Berlin, on account of an amorous liaison. It was Shakh who had told us of this misadventure. "He was not a novice, he knew that bed is the best trap for a diplomat. But it's a little like dying, it's something that only happens to other people." We thought the story would stop there: the tale of one of those stupid men in their fifties who swallow the amorous encounters set up for them hook, line, and sinker. But there was a detail that made Shakh continue. There was in his voice a chess player's fascination for an elegant series of moves. "The scenario was of a pathetic banality.