Requiem for a Lost Empire

by Andrei Makine

  Even in intelligence schools I don't think they give such obvious examples any longer. On the other hand, as regards psychology, hats off to our East German colleagues. Here's how it was. The diplomat makes the acquaintance of a young Aryan beauty, falls for her, but remembers the need to be prudent. He hesitates. The young woman introduces him to one of her friends. Younger still and even more irresistible. The wretched diplomat doesn't resist. The first girl treats him to a terrible scene of jealousy and leaves him forever. Now he's completely reassured: have you ever seen a jealous female spy? Confident of his charm, he forges ahead. The sequel is an ultra classic case, even the subsequent reaction of his wife-and this scared him more than his own country's legal sanctions…"

  After the house search that day it was you who talked about the ghosts reflected in the brilliant spinning of a top. You knew that after all those hours, when our deaths could have been caused by one word too many or a gesture that might have annoyed the soldiers, what we needed was to move, to talk, to laugh about that diplomat who was ready to sell all the secrets in the world, provided his wife did not learn of his misconduct. As you talked you were putting our house back in order, filling the gaps that had been left by the objects carried away.

  I listened to you distractedly, conscious that it was not the substance of these stories that mattered. In the gleaming top I could see a young man in a dark suit, a glass of champagne in his hand. This self of mine that looked like a brilliant caricature, with his lust for living, his feverish anticipation of the new life, his haste to immerse himself in the seductive complexity of the Western World, with a pistol in his armpit and an ice-cold glass in his burning hand.

  Our life had rapidly erased that caricature, turning as it did into an exhausting hunt for men who manufactured death. Those who invented weapons in the sheltered comfort of laboratories, those at the highest levels who made decisions about their production and later their use, those who sold them and resold them, those who killed. From this human chain all we needed was to seize upon just one tiny link of information, an address, a name. And it was often in countries at war that the chain could be uncovered most easily. We would settle there under one identity or another (in that African city we were representatives of a geological prospecting company), we would endeavor to meet the person who was supplying arms to feed the imminent fighting. "Fighting that very likely wouldn't break out if there were not all these means of killing," I said to myself, two days before the start of the massacres, as I was talking to an arms salesman about to catch a plane to London. In the early days I used to think it would have been simpler to shoot down this Ron Scalper, him and his like, they were so palpably insignificant compared with the carnage that resulted from their trade. But this desire had been left behind among the fantasies of that young man with his glass of champagne in the middle of a Berlin gallery. In reality one had to cherish this salesman with all possible solicitude, for he was the first link that could uncover the whole chain. At the airport he had given me his London address-our next destination.

  We went on joking, so as to forget the few hours we had lived through, when death was sickeningly promiscuous. You observed that a man who feels himself to be seductive becomes very nimble, like the diplomat with the patent leather shoes, slipping his foot between the legs of the other guests and deflecting the top with the adroitness of a soccer player. I told you about my impulse to kill the arms salesman I had accompanied to the airport two days earlier and my regret that such radical solutions are only effective in spy films. Picking up the books that the soldiers had flung to the ground during their search, I went over to the window and caught sight again of their ill-starred comrade lying in the road and of two furtive figures who emerged from a side street in the already encroaching dusk, went over to the corpse, picked up its booty scattered in the dust, and disappeared into their hole. You came and stood beside me, noticed a detail I had missed, and murmured with a smile, "Look, our album."

  It was a big photograph album that the robbers of the dead man had left behind when they carried off the lamp and the clothes. An album in which the snapshots, cunningly contrived and carefully arranged in order, were designed to confirm the identity we were living under at that time: a couple of Canadian prospectors in charge of a geological search. Family photos, of a family that had never existed, with no other reality than that of these smiling faces of our purported nearest and dearest and of ourselves, in the settings of vacations or family reunions. This reconstruction had, of course, been made not for the benefit of looters in a hurry but for scrutiny by professionals, such as we had already had occasion to undergo during those three years. Tucked away in a dusty corner on a shelf, this album, with its cheerful aura of routine married life, was more convincing than the most carefully fabricated life story. Now it lay beside the soldier's body in this half-burned city, and what was strangest of all was to picture one of the townspeople leafing through it one day, believing it was a real family history, endearing at every stage, with all those sentiments that constantly recur, and the children growing up from one photo to the next.

  Later on, during the night, I would sense that this past, photographed but never lived, aroused in you a memory of ourselves, of our actual life together, that we paid such little attention to under our borrowed identities. Our life had left behind no photos, no letters, had led to no exchange of confidences. Suddenly the counterfeit album reminded us that we had had these three years of routine complicity, an imperceptible closening of ties, an affection we avoided calling love. Far away there was our country, the weary empire whose physical mass we were ever aware of as the magnet that drew our thoughts, even through the African night. There were its scents and its winter smoke above the villages, the snows in its little towns, mute beneath the blizzards, its faces scarred by forgotten wars and exiles with no return, its history, in which the victorious din of sounding brass often gave way to weeping, to a silence cadenced by the tramp of a column of soldiers after a defeat in battle. And, buried deep in this snow and those muddy roads, there were the years of our childhood and youth, inseparable from the pulse of joy and sorrow, from that living alloy that we call our native land.

  Your words came like an echo of that distant presence: "It must be possible one day to tell the truth."

  I felt caught in the act of having shared your train of thought. But above all I felt obliged to bear witness to the truth that had arisen behind the forged photos in a family album. What truth? Again I saw the corpse of the soldier stretched out on the ground, the young man who had just confiscated several banknotes from us in the name of revolutionary justice. I recalled that the previous day I had seen a burned-out armored vehicle and the arm with a leather bracelet on its wrist, an arm protruding from a chaotic jumble of metal and flesh. The wearer of the wristband was the enemy of the young revolutionary. They were about the same age, had perhaps been born in two neighboring villages. Those who called themselves revolutionaries were supported by the Americans, those who had been defeated were, until the fall of the capital city, in receipt of arms from us and aid from our instructors. The two young soldiers were certainly not aware of the vastness of the forces opposing one another behind their backs.

  Was that the truth you were referring to? I doubted it. For to be truthful one would also have to speak of the arms salesman, maybe at that very moment lying between the thighs of his young mistress, scrupulously attentive to his own hard-won pleasure. The two messages you had slipped into your fan must be decoded: delayed and now useless information about the fighting already ended. Those two columns of figures that could have cost us our lives. And we should have died in the guise of a certain Canadian couple, whose existence would have been authenticated by the cheerful banality of a photograph album.

  You got up. In the darkness I was aware that you seemed to be waiting for a response. I sat up as well, ready to admit my confusion: for this truth you had spoken of was constantly changing, giving rise to little murky, fle
eting, sprawling truths. The tragedy of the massacres was sullied by my chatting with the arms salesman at the airport, by the vision of his chubby body, hard up against that of his naked mistress. Our arm-wrestling with the Americans was becoming mired in a political demagoguery revised so many times that we now found ourselves supporting a regime held to be conservative while they had their money on the victory of the revolutionaries. These labels no longer had any meaning, revolution meant access to oil wells. As for our own personal truth, all it amounted to was this score of faces, young and old, surrounding us on the pages of a photo album, these nearest and dearest whom we had never known.

  I was about to say all that to you when, thanks to the glow from the fire that was petering out in the next street, I saw what you were doing, standing up in front of the window, your arms raised, repairing the torn mosquito netting. I guessed at how the tentative needle was working its way upward in the darkness, drawing together the panels of dusty fabric. With a newfound joy I sensed that this moment had no need of words. There you were, in the identity most faithful to yourself, in all the truth of the silence that followed a setback in our efforts to understand each other. And beneath the whole accumulation of masks, grimaces, and alibis that made up my life, there was just one day that seemed to match your truth.

  Hesitantly, as if I had only just learned the words I was speaking, I began to tell you about the infant falling asleep in the depths of a forest in the Caucasus.

  One day, in another city, in another war, I once more came upon you in silent contemplation. The windows onto the terrace had been shattered by an explosion and the table on which we often took our meals was strewn with shards. You were picking them up patiently, not saying a word, sometimes crouching, sometimes leaning with one hand on the back of a chair. You were wearing next to nothing, so suffocating was the heat of the Gulf at this moment of low tide. I saw your body and the mixture of fragility and strength that was apparent in your movements. The innocently carnal play of nakedness that does not know it is observed. A trunk with muscular curves, the firm outline of a leg, then suddenly, as if betrayed, this delicate collarbone, almost painful in its childish outlines.

  Something rebelled in me. At its start this task of picking up the pieces always seems endless. But, above all, it was you, your life spared in the face of so many threats, over so many years, now being idiotically used up on this most rare evening of respite. A week before the fighting broke out we had finished piecing together a network of arms sales: nine intermediaries across Europe, buying and selling, so as to line their pockets on the way and, as always in this kind of traffic, to cover their tracks. To begin with the whole thing had looked seamless, impenetrable. Shakh had succeeded in obtaining a copy of the first of these contracts and had sent it to us in London. A banal transaction, even if, in reading the list of weapons supplied, we could readily picture their harvest of death on the ground. Otherwise an arms sale like thousands of others. It was you who had detected the anomaly, the first link that was to enable us to work our way along the chain: nowhere in this contract was there any mention of technical assistance after delivery. As if the purchasers had no intention of using all these armored vehicles and rockets. You had mentioned resale via a third country. We tugged at the link and managed to gain access to this strangely unwarlike first purchaser. Then, another… Nine, until we reached the people in this ravaged city who were killing, and getting themselves killed, with the weapons listed in that contract. Commissions worth millions of dollars. And, among the beneficiaries, a fully operational Minister of Foreign Affairs.

  Crouched by the window, you went on picking up the fragments of glass. Calm, resigned, unbearable in the tenderness of your silent presence, because of the madness of it, because of the injustice of fate that had assigned this house to you with its shattered windows, and this intimacy with death and the ghosts of those nine characters who had invaded your life.

  My angry words remained unspoken. In our fragmented lives where the unforeseen was becoming the only logic, this table, wiped clean, that you were about to set, the way you did before the fighting began, this simple action made perfect sense. "I'll soon be finished," you said, standing up, and talked about the couple who were due to replace us. That, among other things, was our task: to prepare the ground for the colleagues who would take over the network after the end of the war. I noticed a slight cut on your left hand marked with blood. The sharp edge of a splinter, no doubt. Absurdly, amid all these deaths, this tiny wound pained me greatly.

  That night I told you about the child who learned to walk around a block of granite stuck in the middle of the house built by his father.

  The words I had held back when I saw you on the terrace welled up a year later. We were in the house belonging to a couple of doctors sent by a humanitarian organization, this being our identity at that rime. The villa next door was empty. Its owners had left as soon as the first skirmishes in the streets had begun. And now from their garden came the piercing cries of peacocks which the soldiers were amusing themselves by torturing. One of the birds, its neck broken, was writhing on the ground, the other lay there, spitted by an iron bar. Glancing occasionally at this massacre, I was stirring papers and photographs in a bucket, where they were slowly being consumed by smoky little flames. There was nothing left to steal in our house, it had already been ransacked. But after a week of looting such activities were becoming more and more unmotivated, almost an art form, like the torture inflicted on the peacocks. And I knew from experience that it was an unmotivated search that was often the most dangerous. The soldiers shot down the last of the birds, the most agile, spraying it with bullets-a maelstrom of feathers and blood-then made off toward the center of the city, guided by the bursts of gunfire. I crushed the ashes, mixed them up and threw them into the middle of a parched flower bed. And set about waiting for you, that is to say, rushing out regularly into the chaos of streets invaded by yelling surges of people, who seemed to be simultaneously pursuing one another and running away from those they were pursuing. I encountered a road block, allowed myself to be searched, tried to argue. And reflected that if they refrained from killing me it was because the infernal din prevailing in the city was such that the soldiers could not hear me, otherwise my very first word would have unleashed their fury. I returned home. I saw the empty house, with its window overlooking the garden next door, in the middle of which a peacock was pinned to the ground by a stake. You were somewhere in this city. In distress, I guessed at your presence, perhaps in the wealthy quarter, with its cluster of glass towers, two of which were currently surmounted by smoke, or else in the poor quarter, in the alleys near the canal encrusted with filth. I went out again, hurried toward each crowd gathering around a person who could be heard giving orders or whose execution was being prepared. In one courtyard, as if this square had been cut off from all the madness of the city, I came upon a seated woman leaning against a wall, who seemed far away, her eyes open wide, her cheek distorted by a ball of khat, which her tongue was slackly moving around. And in the street men were dragging a half-naked body along the ground, which passersby tried to trample on with roars of delight.

  When you came home there was still enough daylight to see the fine tracery of cuts on your face. "The windshield…" you murmured, and you stood facing me for a few seconds, staring at me in silence. On your forehead the scratches you had wiped clean when you came in were once more filling with blood. I was silent, too, stunned by the words that had just come into my mind but could not be spoken, "In any event you wouldn't have died." Or rather, "Even if you'd died it would have changed nothing between us." I was particularly struck by the serenity, almost joy, that these strange, unspeakable, apparently cruel words had given me. I had tumbled into a dazzling light, far, far away from this city, somewhere beyond our life. I began speaking to you in harsh tones, harsher and harsher the more touching and vulnerable you became in your evening routines: you undressed, went into the bathroom, asked me to help.
I poured out a stream of water, drawing more from time to time from our reservoirs, the vessels that stood along the wall, and I continued talking, almost shouting, working up my indignation as if to convince myself that my luminous tumble had been simply an illusion brought on by tension.

  "Do you know what our lives remind me of? Those samurais from World War Two who lay low in the jungle and remained at war fifteen years after the fighting had ended! No, it's worse than that. At least they laid down their weapons when they learned the truth. While we… It's true, we're about as much use as those madmen who ended up shooting at ghosts. We're chasing ghosts, too! We spent six months getting close to that idiot of a military attaché. Three months in Rome at the height of summer to arrange an informal ten-minute interview. I loathe that city! When I'm in that tourist bazaar I become a fool. We had to spend all those hours in that moth-eaten archive because our man was fanatical about uncial script or whatever that stupid stuff was. Then we had to locate him here- pure chance, of course. A chance about as broad as a shotgun cartridge in the magazine of a pistol. Of course our little strategists at the Center need their spectacular, instant results to earn their promotions. So now, quick as a wink, we have to recruit some guy the service has had its eye on for years. And to crown it all, he's just leaving. Did you hear his perfectly pleasant laugh? 'Oh, what excellent timing! The fighting's breaking out just when, as it happens, I was planning to take my leave.' And off he goes. Six months of work and several good chances of being bumped off in this filthy tropical climate. And all for nothing. No, sorry, I nearly forgot. We've obtained one piece of information of the first importance. The mines that are going to blow up the people here are of Italian manufacture. I guess you'll get a citation for that. Why are you laughing?"