Requiem for a Lost Empire

by Andrei Makine

  One night he woke up, struck by the vividness of what he had just dreamed. The light in this dream was the same pale light before the dawn as outside the window. He was walking toward a forest so tall that, even with his head tilted back, he could not see the tops of the trees. He was moving forward, guided by singing that drew him ever closer: its resonance embraced all the beauty of this forest still swathed in night mist, all the expanse of the sky as it began to grow pale, and even the delicate shapes of the leaves he brushed aside on his way. At the surface of his dream there fizzled a doubt: "She can't sing… She's…" But he went on walking, recognizing the voice better and better.

  He recounted this dream to Sasha, who still came to see them in Dolshanka, as in the old days.

  A year and a half later, one fine morning in June, Nikolai was returning from the town on horseback. The sun was not yet risen and the forest beside which the road ran had the resonance of a vast, empty cathedral nave. The calls of the birds still had a muted, nocturnal sound. Before making his way up a sandy slope he turned aside, and went into the forest, searching for the place known only to himself. But more than twenty years later the glade of long ago was disappearing under a whole copse of aspen. He was about to rejoin the road when suddenly a thunder of hoofbeats arose. The noise was growing louder so rapidly that it could only be a horse ridden at full gallop. Nikolai tugged at the reins a little, and stationed himself behind a tree. A horseman appeared on the road. A soldier crouched over the mane of his horse, welded to it as if into a single dark arrow, streaking past the trunks of the birch trees. His face was frozen in a grimace, baring his teeth. "A madman," Nikolai said to himself, tossing his head. The dust swirled gently around the marks left by the flurry of hooves.

  Passing through the village adjacent to Dolshanka, he noticed the simpleton sitting on a stack of felled pine trees. Several of the trunks had already been squared off, trickles of resin gleamed on their pink flesh, like drops of honey. The sight of this pale wood, ready to be erected into the wall of an izba, promised happiness. The simpleton was asleep, her mouth half open, as if she had some news to tell. Her hand, as she slept, continued to shuffle her glass treasures, scattered over the worn fabric of her dress.

  On arrival at Dolshanka close to noon Nikolai saw a big crowd in front of the village soviet. The women were weeping, the men frowning, the children laughing and being cuffed. A voice repeated several times, mechanically, "Hitler, Hitler…" Others were saying, "The Germans." The war had just begun.

  It seemed to him that there was no disruption in the sequence of days. Quite simply the normal routine of work in the fields now found correspondence in the parallel advance of the front line. The names of the fallen cities left him incredulous, these were already in the depths of Russia, where the presence of the Germans seemed like an optical illusion, a cartographical error. He remembered the films of the past few years: the enemy was always defeated close to the frontier. The songs he found himself humming promised, "Like Stalin, we'll confront the foe!"

  Vitebsk, Chernigov, Smolensk…

  One day even this bizarre topography disappeared. Cities were on the move, as if on a crumpled map. Routed Soviet soldiers fled through Dolshanka: the Germans had encircled several divisions. The village, surrounded, found itself on a strange territory located within the enemy army. The circle tightened, driving the villagers into the forest, then beyond the river all riddled with bullets, onto a charred wheatfield, and finally into the main street of the district capital, where there was still fighting. People stumbled about on this map that was being ripped apart under their feet, crumpled by tank tracks, pitted with explosions. With a rifle picked up close by a dead soldier Nikolai hid behind a fence observing the Germans' progress. They seemed not to notice the tremors of the map, advanced calmly, with precise and economical movements: a burst of gunfire, a house burned with a flamethrower, a tank clearing the street ahead of them.

  He left his hiding place, the smoke from the blaze burned his eyes. A number of civilians ran across the road with a determined air. They must know the way out of the encircled town. He followed them as far as the long trains on the railroad sidings, near the station. One by one they dove under one train, then under another. When Nikolai climbed up from beneath the last train he just had time to catch sight of the German soldiers stationed at the bottom of the embankment, precisely where people were coming out. He did not feel the pain but had time to think of his son, already mobilized. "I must tell Pavel these people are machines." The soldiers kept firing, reloading, firing. If fugitives had continued to emerge from beneath the train these nine soldiers would have spent the rest of their lives killing them.

  4

  Pavel believed those minutes would continue ripping his sleep apart for long nights to come: the din of the caterpillar tracks a few inches above his head, the collapse of the trench he had fallen into when trying to get away ahead of the tanks. If he had not stumbled he would have continued running amid the breathless stampede and panic of the other soldiers. But he had slipped on a lump of clay, hurtled into a trench that was half dug and therefore quite shallow, had not had time to get up again. The roaring bulk had covered him with its shadow, the steel links of one track were hacking at the earth just above his face. For a moment he had felt as if he were being sucked into the entrails of the machine. The acid smell of the metal and the glaucous trail of the exhaust had filled his lungs. From beyond the trench cries and the crunch of bodies under the tank tracks could be heard through the throbbing of the engines.

  That night, slumped down in a fir copse among some survivors from his company, he lay in wait for the return of those seconds spent under the tank. He fell asleep but the dream went off on a tangent, pushed open a secret door, translated everything into its own language, at the same time precise and oblique. Instead of tanks, a gigantic brand new machine tool with nickel-plated screws and levers covered in oil and grease. Its bowels vibrate with a rhythmic sound and disgorge punched disks at regular intervals. You have to slip your hand very nimbly into the coming and going of the mechanism and insert the steel plate into the press underneath the punch. And each time his hand goes in a little bit further, his body stretches up a little bit higher inside the machine, trying to avoid the rotation of the great cogwheels, the driving belts. Moreover the timing of the huge machine is not very well regulated. It is as if it senses the reaching out of the hand, the contortions of the body within its bowels. The fingers grasp a square of metal, the hand goes forward, the shoulder penetrates into the machine, the body worms its way in, edging between dozens of gears, crankshafts, cylinders. He manages to put the metal in place, withdraws his hand just before the punch comes down, and seeks to extricate himself. But all around him the machine is shuddering, without wasting a second, without the smallest opening via which he might reemerge. And through its noisy workings, he recognizes a room, light, and objects that come from his childhood.

  The dream did not return on the nights that followed, for there were no nights. Always a flight toward the east, then an abandoned village that, during the brief hours of darkness, they attempted to transform into an entrenched camp. And in the morning, after disorderly resistance, a fresh retreat before the steady advance of the tanks and the German soldiers who smiled as they fired. The grinning of these men as they killed made a deeper impression on him than the tanks.

  During those first weeks of the war he had to forget all he had learned during his military service. He still recalled the sergeant wetting his forefinger with saliva, raising it in the air to check the direction of the wind and explaining to them how much they needed to aim off. If anybody had spat on his finger to test the direction of the wind during these painful rearguard actions he would have been taken for a madman. The Germans fired their submachine guns and smiled. They responded with jerky small-arms fire from bolt-action rifles, often their only weapon at the start of the war. And they retreated, without being able to retrieve their wounded, without rememb
ering the names of the villages surrendered. It seemed to him that he and his comrades in arms were fighting in a battle from one of his father's stories; their old-fashioned rifles, their troops of cavalry. On the opposing side quite a different war was being waged-a rapid sweep of armored vehicles across land turned upside down by aerial bombardment. Perhaps the Germans smiled when they saw the sabers flashing above the horses, as one smiles at the passing of an automobile several decades old, one that quaintly recalls a bygone age.

  During these murderous days of the collapse there were, too, irrelevant little vignettes that sometimes made it hard to concentrate, to think only of the gray-green figure in one's sights. A dog, wounded by shrapnel, groaning and writhing on the spot, which looked their way with tears in its eyes. They had abandoned several comrades in fleeing from that burned-out hamlet, but it was the sight of the dog, that rust-colored ball with its broken back, that kept coming to mind. And in another place there was a sweet tangle of plants filled with the lazy buzzing of insects, the vegetation of a glorious summer that continued as if nothing were happening, just next door to izbas in flames, where people trapped inside were screaming. The soldiers of his detachment were hiding in a ravine, their rifles thrown to the ground, not a cartridge between them. The warm air, heady with the scent of flowers, was already growing heavy with the acrid emanations coming from the village. Later, a child's face glimpsed in a packed railroad car. Eyes that happily still understood nothing, that reflected a world from which death was still absent. The train set off. Together with other soldiers Pavel was in position around the station, hoping to keep the Germans at bay for the time it took the train to leave the town.

  On his way out of a ruined village at the start of the autumn he picked up a page from a torn newspaper, an issue from the previous week. Reading it, you might have believed the enemy had only just crossed the frontier and was about to be driven back any day now. That night there was fighting some sixty miles from Moscow.

  He had known for some time now why the Germans smiled when they fired. It was a grin that had nothing to do with joy, but was the unconscious grimace of a man whose hands are absorbing the recoil from a long burst of fire. Like most of his comrades in arms, Pavel was currently equipped with a German submachine gun, recovered in battle. And now they smiled like the Germans. And they no longer ran away in front of tanks, but dove into a trench, pretended to be dead, then got up and threw hand grenades. On awakening they would pry the panels of their greatcoats up from the frozen earth and turn their faces toward the birth of the light, hoping for sunshine. Moscow, which grew ever closer, lay somewhere within this chill vapor, they sensed it, like the swelling of bare veins, throbbing beneath the wind on that icy plain.

  He found himself saying that he had seen all that could be seen of death, that no massacred, broken, dismembered body could any longer surprise him with the capriciousness of its mutilations. And yet death remained astonishing. As on that morning by the bright light of the sun, which rose in the direction of Moscow. A soldier whose eyes had been burned in an explosion ran toward the tanks, blind, guided by the sound of the engines and his own agony, and rolled under the tracks, setting off a grenade. Or yet again that young German without a helmet, half lying beside an overturned field gun, his bloody hands pressed against his shattered sides, crying out in the whimpering voice of a child, weeping in a language that, until then, Pavel had only heard barked out and had believed to be made only for barking.

  And then, for an infinite second, there was the vision of his own body, lying there, inert among the snow-covered ruts. The explosion of a shell blotted out all sounds and it was in this silence of a vanished world that he saw himself as if from outside and very far away ("as if from the sky," he would later reflect): the body of a soldier in his mud-spattered greatcoat, his arms outstretched, his face flung back, looking up toward a glorious winter sun that would have shone with the same splendid indifference if no one had been left alive on this December morning. He was certain he had lived through those few moments of detached and painless contemplation, certain of having observed the fragile lacework of hoarfrost that surrounded the head of that unmoving soldier. His own head. When he regained consciousness at the hospital and could hear once more, he learned that they had almost abandoned him for dead on that field where there was no one else alive. Mainly to satisfy her conscience, a nurse had approached this corpse with its head trapped in a frozen puddle, had crouched down and held a little mirror to the soldier's lips. The glass had misted over slightly.

  On his return to the front at the end of the winter of 1942 he noticed that the world had changed during his absence. In the mornings now, as they resumed their military duties, they had the sun at their backs. And in the evening, during the last miles before they halted, the most wearisome ones, when their boots weighted down with mud seemed to be taking root in the earth, the sun was shining ahead of them to the west, in the direction of Germany. As if in the frozen fields near Moscow the points of the compass had been switched.

  There was a comforting logic to this turnaround by the sun. It was the only one in the war's capricious chaos. If he had had the time to reflect on it he would have noticed yet another piece of logic: there were fewer and fewer men in the ranks born, like him, at the very start of the twenties, men who had been fighting since the first day of the war. It was only years later that survivors of his generation might have the leisure to study a population census diagram arranged by age, a triangle with indented sides, like a pointed fir tree, widening toward the base. Moving down from the top to the level of 1920, 1921, and 1922 it would be deeply cut away, as if a mysterious epidemic had exterminated the men born in those years. Only one or two percent of them would be left. Branches pruned almost back to the trunk.

  In the fierce thrust of troops toward the west, Pavel had discovered that survival most often depended not on logic but on being aware of chaos's little tricks, its unpredictable whims that defied common sense. A victory could be more murderous than a defeat. The last bullet would kill someone exclaiming in relief at the end of the battle, the first man to light a cigarette. And, whatever happened, you could never say whether it was life-saving or lethal.

  It was as he walked through a town that had barely been retaken from the Germans that this notion had struck him of a victory cutting down more men than a lost battle. The streets, now empty, still had an uncertain, disquieting appearance, distorted by eyes that had bored into them when taking aim to fire; by breathless running from the corner of one house to the next. The dead looked as if they were searching for something they had lost in the dust of the courtyards, amid the rubble of gutted buildings. A few minutes before, the length of the silence, longer than a simple pause between bursts of fire, had proclaimed the end and the soldier crouching next to Pavel behind a section of wall had stood up, given a satisfied yawn, as he inhaled the damp air of that May evening. And sat down again immediately, then crumpled over on his side, a pinch of snuff still held between his thumb and forefinger. At the corner of one eyebrow, there was a hollow rapidly filling with blood. Pavel threw himself to the ground, thinking there was a hidden sniper. But, on examining the wound, he recognized the work of a stray piece of shrapnel, one of those bits of metal that came from heaven knows where at the end of a battle, unheralded by the sound of an explosion. Moreover, in the storm-darkened sky the thunder was imitating explosions with muffled rumbling at the other end of the town. Pavel got up and called to the medical orderlies who were running across the street with two bodies loaded on a stretcher.

  In the company of other soldiers he walked past houses pitted by shells, then, hearing the sound of running, turned the corner into a less damaged sidestreet and began checking the buildings, one after the other. In the last but one he found himself alone. Corridors, classroom doors, and, in the classrooms, blackboards with pieces of chalk in the grooves beneath them. Some of the windows were broken and in the half-light of a stormy evening he felt he recognized
that very particular moment in May when the last lessons of the school year were dissolving in the joy of heavy showers of rain and wet clusters of lilac outside the open window, all in a stormy darkness that suddenly invaded the classroom and created a subtle, dreamy complicity between them and the teacher. On the blackboard in one of the rooms he saw this inscription, written up with scholarly application: "The capital of our country is Berlin." Teaching was being done in accordance with German programs drawn up for the "Eastern territories." Moscow was deemed to have sunk without trace to the bottom of an artificial sea. He emerged from the classroom and heard shooting in the corridor on the ground floor. Some German soldiers were still hiding in the building and it was not easy to track them down in these dozens of rooms, where all the time the eye was being distracted by the chalk handwriting on the blackboard, or the pages of some abandoned textbook.

  Pavel was not surprised that the memory of these empty classrooms was more tenacious than that of the battle itself, although he received a medal for it and the date of it was marked by victorious gun salutes in Moscow. He knew only too well the unpredictable caprices of war and what the memory retained of it. And it was also by a caprice of ill humor that the commanding officer refused him a week's leave, time to go to Dolshanka, which was less than sixty miles from the reconquered town. It was now the third year of the war, a year made up, like the previous one, of a thousand troop movements, painful advances and chaotic withdrawals. Amid this tangle of trajectories there was one fixed point, unchanged since he had left: his family house, the plantain leaves around the wooden front steps, the familiar creaking of the door. Despite all the towns burned to a cinder, despite all the deaths, the calm of this house seemed to be intact, down to the smile of his parents on the photo in the dining room: his father with his head turned slightly toward his mother, as if waiting for her to say something. In this town, so close to Dolshanka, a town half flattened by shelling, he had been seized by doubt. He just wanted to reassure himself that the photo was still smiling on the wall. His commanding officer's refusal struck him as a bad omen, which was confirmed several days later. They walked onto a minefield like a troop of blind men, into a fountain of shrapnel, into the pain, but, before the pain, the sight of a body cut in half and still crawling: the soldier with whom he had been discussing different fishing tactics an hour earlier. At the hospital he brooded on his grudge against the commanding officer. On the day he was allowed to get up and go out into the corridor he learned that their whole division had meanwhile been wiped out by the German artillery in an ill-conceived offensive. He experienced neither joy at having escaped nor remorse. War made everything one could say or think about it simultaneously true and false, and there was too much evil and too much good mixed up in every moment for one to be able to judge. One could only hold one's peace and watch. Beside the window a young soldier was learning how to light a cigarette, clasping it between the remaining stumps of his hands.