Requiem for a Lost Empire

by Andrei Makine

  "And is it true they put you in a penal company because of Stalin? You really refused to shout?"

  "Look, there was a political commissar who hated my guts. There was nothing I could do about it. He never left me alone. One day he got me out in front of the troop and ordered me to shout: 'For our country! For Stalin!' I refused. I said we weren't attacking."

  "But on an attack you shouted?"

  "Sure, like everyone else. When you shout you don't feel so scared. You know that yourself."

  That night Pavel learned that the soldier had gone as a volunteer to the front at the age of seventeen, lying about his age like so many others. He came from Leningrad and had not received a single letter since the start of the siege, even after the blockade was lifted. When their guard duty was relieved the soldier remained stock still for a moment, with the dazed irresolution of someone who is suddenly overtaken by a wave of sleep, until then held at bay. As Pavel was moving away, he turned back and saw him thus: a figure all alone, in the expanse of the fields at night, beneath a sky already filling with the first light.

  He caught up with him again next day during a halt. Now that the company had been slimmed down to half its size by an unsuccessful attack it was easier to locate faces. The soldier greeted him, held out his hand. "He's Jewish," thought Pavel and experienced a mixture of disappointment and distrust, derived from a source he himself was unaware of. He often heard it said at the front that all the Jews stayed behind the lines or were in cushy jobs in supply. Yet they had all of them come across many Jews in the front line or severely wounded in the hospital, as well as in the rushed interludes that came between the trivial actions before a battle (a tongue wetting a cigarette paper, a joke, a hand brushing aside a bee) and the first steps taken afterward, on a strip of earth covered with silent or howling bodies. And yet he continued to hear that refrain about cushy jobs and crafty little bastards in supply. Now he realized that among the men of the penal companies these remarks were no longer heard. The extreme proximity of death swept away the tawdry trappings of names and origins.

  "I'm called Marelst. That's my first name."

  Pavel stared at him and could not suppress a smile: he was tall, very thin, with the narrow, bony shoulders of an adolescent and glasses that had a diagonal crack across one of the lenses. His physique corresponded very little to the forename derived from the contraction of Marx-Engels-Lenin-Stalin. One of those revolutionary relics from the twenties. On his tunic, above his heart, you could still see the tear marks left by his confiscated medals.

  "Did you have a Red Star?" asked Pavel, noticing an angular patch, darker than the rest, on the fabric bleached by the sun.

  "Yes, and a 'For Gallantry,'" replied Marelst, and corrected himself at once, so as to eradicate the note of juvenile pride that had crept into his voice. "Yes, I had them. But, when it comes down to it, I tell myself there's no way I'd have got anything else, short of capturing Hitler in person."

  As they marched in a column that extended along a road over the plain, he noticed Marelst three files away from him carrying the steel base for the mortar, the most cumbersome burden, for one never knew how to balance it on one's back. Pavel eyed the slightly bent back, the swerves in Marelst's step necessitated by the rocking of the base. A back like any other, Pavel thought, distractedly, a soldier dragging his weary feet in the dust of a road in wartime. He recalled his distrust and vexation on learning that this man was a Jew. Unwillingly he noted that this vexation seemed to him inexplicably justified by, and even inseparable from, the fact of being Russian. He would have liked to find the reason for it. But from his childhood days the possibility of being a Jew had remained purely theoretical, for no one had ever seen one in Dolshanka, where even the people from the other end of the village were regarded as foreigners. Later, away at school, there were a few old sayings of folk wisdom about Jews "raking in the money with both hands." This wise saw was curiously contradicted by their history teacher, a veteran soldier and a Jew who had lost one arm, and whom it was difficult to picture as a raker-in of money.

  The next day (after they had been hurled, as usual without artillery support, into the stone maze of a little Polish town), he observed Marelst yet again, while trying to comprehend it all. There were many wounded because of the bullets rebounding in the narrow streets. Pavel was carrying a soldier whose tunic was swollen with blood, like a strange wineskin. As he came around a corner in the street he caught sight of the figure of Marelst, he, too, with a human burden. For a moment they walked together in silence, both of them sunk in that torpor at the end of a battle, when, finding your body still alive, you resume possession of it, as of your thoughts of a few hours ago that now seem several years old. From time to time Marelst gave way at the knees and straightened himself up with an effort, as he adjusted the position of the wounded man on his back. The lenses of his glasses were spattered with mud; one of the broken earpieces had been replaced by a length of wire. Pavel stared at these glasses, this face, saying nothing, struck by the disproportion: the broad bruise on his chin, a banal bruise, just like one you might receive in a mere fist fight, a mere bruise left by a battle that had just killed so many men. There was a curious irony about this flick of the wrist, with which death seemed to hurl back a man whose hour had not yet come.

  Marelst must have noticed this look, or had he guessed that his origins did not find favor? That evening, seated by their campfire, he spoke in that level, dull voice the men in penal companies used to probe the depths of their past lives in whispers, lives which, from one day of reprieve to the next, seemed more and more foreign to them, as if lived by someone else. Somewhere halfway through his story, anxious no doubt to avoid the tones of a confession, he stopped and announced with uncompromising irony, "As a matter of fact, I've decided not to die. So nothing I'm telling you is final. Life continues, as the hanged man said when he saw the first carrion crows arriving. No, you'll see. We'll come through. We'll drink our hundred grams in Berlin. A hundred grams, what am I saying? A barrel." Later, when recalling that story told at nightfall, Pavel could not quite pinpoint the moment at which this gleeful outburst had occurred. As he remembered them, Marelst's words had had a grave, intense rhythm, into which it would have been impossible to introduce the merest scrap of humor.

  In this story there was Marelst's father, a young clockmaker in Vitebsk, who one day walked out of his shop and hurled a heavy clock onto the sidewalk, together with its mahogany case, then began to trample on the fragments of glass as he wept. They thought he was mad. In a certain sense he had become mad, on learning that the house of his brother, who lived in Moldavia, had been pillaged and that the looting had degenerated into killing and they were driving nails into the skulls of newborn babies. He felt as if he could hear the crunch of the metal points piercing these heads scarcely covered with hair and could see the children's wide-open eyes. This noise and this vision pursued him relentlessly, so that he could no longer hear the watches ticking or respond to the smiles of his nearest and dearest. What tortured him as well was knowing that for the most part the looters were workers with three days' hunger in their bellies, jealous of the down quilt possessed by his brother. He felt that he had the strength, born of desperation, to seize the terrestrial globe and shake all the evil out of it. He would soon need this strength at the time of arrests, during the years of secrecy, in exile. In the revolution he became the all-powerful governor in his native town, and was then called to Moscow by Lenin himself. The goal seemed to him clearer than ever: not a single person must be left in this country, in the whole world, whom hunger transformed into a killer. To this end, some people must be given food. And, among the others, a few must be killed. During the civil war he understood that more than just a few must be killed. A few thousand, he began by thinking. Then a few tens of thousands, a few million… At a certain moment he caught himself having forgotten why they were killing people. It was the day his secretary had laid on his desk a fresh bundle of denunciations:
in one of them he found a form of words that reminded him of the convolutions of a snake: "Citizen N. must be arrested, as he is suspected of being a suspect." It suddenly seemed as if his secretary was waiting for his reaction through the half-open door. That same year he learned that one of his old comrades from the time of secrecy had committed suicide. He tried to think calmly. The choice was becoming limited: he should either follow this friend or forget, once and for all, why they were killing people. He had three children. The youngest, Marelst, was born the day tears had been seen in Stalin's eyes as he stood beside Lenin's coffin. "I have a family," Marelst's father argued with himself. "And besides, you can't make a revolution in kid gloves." A big apartment right opposite the Kremlin, a chauffeur-driven car, a new secretary, even younger and more amenable than the previous one-when she left his office straightening her skirt he experienced a long moment of pleasant torpor, which no questions could any longer disturb. When he learned of the famine organized in the Ukraine and the millions dead he told himself that what was needed, so as not to lose your reason, was to extend this torpor over the entire duration of days. Marelst was ten in that summer of 1934 when they went to the Crimea. The excitement of the long train journey with his parents, his brother, and his sister kept him awake. He saw what he should not have seen. In one station, in a night blinded by floodlights, a crowd of women and children being driven toward cattle cars by soldiers brandishing their rifle butts. "Who are those people?" asked Marelst from his bunk. "Kulaks and saboteurs," his father quickly replied and went down onto the platform to threaten the stationmaster, who had dared to hold up their train in this ideologically dubious situation. His mother put her hand over Marelst's eyes. And he experienced a complex pleasure, comparable to the taste of the cake they had eaten on his sister's birthday: the white cream that lingered on your palate, fine chocolate chips, tiny flakes of crystallized fruit. In the same way he relished both in his mouth and through all his other senses the calm of their compartment, moving gently as it slid along beside the platform, the delicious swaying of his bunk, the smell of the cold tea on the little shelf below the window and, above all, in a foretaste of happiness to come, the Crimean pebbles that you had to pour from one hand to the other, searching for the mysterious chalcedony his father had told him about. The existence of the kulaks, who were being loaded into those hideous cattle cars, only served to add spice to his contentment. He was just about to go to sleep with this taste of patisserie on his lips when suddenly it was as if an icy gust of wind whirled around in the darkness of their compartment. The child was gripped by fear, an irrational fear and an idea that passed his understanding: one day he would be punished for this sugary taste of happiness in his mouth, for his joy at knowing the others were being crammed into freight cars without windows. He would learn how to formulate this fear some years later. For the moment there was only the fleeting draft of cold air and the vision of a woman trying to protect her child in the cut and thrust of rifle butts. He understood this fear during the winter of 1938. In the space of two months his parents grew old and now only spoke in whispers, feeling their way from one word to the next. All conversations carefully avoided the secret, betrayed precisely by this effort not to mention it: the imminent arrest of his father, the disappearance of what it came to them so naturally to call their life, their family. His father succeeded in forestalling the nocturnal ring at their door. In the government building where he was the minister in charge the staircases soared up in a broad, majestic curve and the space between the handrails was at least a yard across. His father threw himself into it from the top story and the employees going up and down had time to see this body as it streaked past the floors and several times struck the ironwork of the banisters. Someone tried to catch the open panels of his jacket in flight but all he was left with was a rapid burning beneath his nails. Thanks to this death, his father did not become an "enemy of the people" and their family, although dislodged from the prestigious apartment building, was not deported. They went to live with friends in Leningrad. The memory of the night when he saw the cattle cars as a child-the memory of his happiness-came back to him every day, together with that burning under the fingernails, which he imagined thanks to the employee's description. But the first battles had wiped out both the memory of this shame and the need to exonerate himself. There were too many deaths, too many bodies sunk in the mud of the fields, too many regrets encroaching on one another: the day when an abandoned wounded man reached out to him with his bloodied hand and he didn't stop, the next day, when an officer, standing up to go into the attack a second before him, was mown down by a burst of gunfire and Marelst had to climb over him. Ah that remained of his former life was a notebook filled with poems from his youth. A notebook now being dismembered, page by page, and used for cigarette papers. At first he saw this as a brutal lesson from life, as it reduced these sheets of paper, with their labored and melancholy sonnets, to ashes. But very quickly the taste of the coarse tobacco that drove away the smell of blood and rotting flesh gave the notebook a new significance-the silence of soldiers after a battle, rolling a cigarette with part of a poem. From now on there seemed to him to be infinitely more truth in the calm of such moments than in anything that might have been said about life or death in those rhyming verses.

  As he talked, Marelst raised his head from time to time and the lenses of his glasses caught the light of the fire, making his eyes disappear, as if beneath a spurt of blood. Pavel told himself that in peacetime they would never have met and even if they had met would never have understood one another. "A man from Leningrad," Pavel would have thought with suspicion, "the son of a minister." It occurred to him now that the war had simplified everything. There was this fire, drying the slabs of mud on their boots and causing it to flake, the darkness over this plain, lost somewhere between Poland and Germany, this scrap of land in the night, just snatched back from the enemy. And this man, sitting close to the fire, a man talking very quietly, as if in his sleep, who was quite complete in what he was saying. Pavel suddenly understood that there was nothing else: darkness, a man, a voice. Everything else was a peacetime invention. Man was simply this naked voice beneath the sky.

  The next day, as they set out on the road again, he thought that after the battle he would tell Marelst what he had always kept to himself: the story of that woman buried alive, with her child in her belly, a woman with no voice but whom he could always understand.

  In the next battle they were due to liberate a concentration camp. Transformed into a fortified base, it was holding up the offensive of an entire division. It was not known if there were any prisoners left in the huts: all that could be seen was some thirty captives tied to posts around the camp as a shield. They would have to attack without firing a single shell, without hand grenades. "With our bare hands?" exclaimed a newcomer in amazement. No one answered him. Three penal companies were thrown into the assault, six hundred men. After the first attack, which was driven back, Pavel saw that the rolls of barbed wire had half disappeared under inert bodies. Further off, all along the fence, the bound prisoners watched in silence the ebb and flow of soldiers letting themselves be killed without being able to respond.

  At the fifth or sixth wave, when only a quarter of the three companies remained, Pavel, by now deaf and with the taste of burned blood in his throat, withdrew in a group of a dozen soldiers toward a broad ditch to the rear of the camp. Someone leaned down to take a drink but straightened up again immediately: his hands had drawn up a viscous, yellowish pulp. It was a narrow dead river, blocked with ashes. They shuffled for several seconds, without mustering the resolve to pass through this stagnant liquid, where several corpses floated. Marelst came up at this moment and Pavel saw his figure moving forward, wading in up to his knees, up to his belt, up to his chest. His arms held his submachine gun high above his head. When he reappeared on the far bank, coated with a thick crust of scum, the soldiers raced after him and time went into turmoil, as if to make up for the delay.
On one watchtower the barrel of a machine gun aimed at them frenetically. The scum came to life, seethed with bullets. The machine gunner twisted about at the top of the watch-tower, struggling against the dead angle. An attack from that direction had doubtless not been foreseen. The soldiers rushed toward the barbed wire. And, as always in combat, everything disintegrated into a series of increasingly rapid and random flashes. A beam of the watchtower blows up. The machine gunner with his brow torn open by a burst of fire. He falls and reappears, his face is intact-it's another German. The bullets lash the scum, rake the bank. One soldier stops, sits down, as if to take a rest. Pavel swerves around him as he runs, hurls an oath at him, then realizes… In the distance a mass of gray-green uniforms pours out between the huts-the German reinforcements. To the left, tied to a post, one of the prisoners seems to be smiling; no doubt he's already dead. The first line of barbed wire. The soldier running in front of Pavel leaps and suddenly straightens up, fingers his throat. The lower part of his face has been blown away by a fragment from a hand grenade. His body falls, a bridge across the jagged wire. They climb over his back. Someone else falls. The bridge grows longer. The sky is turned upside down by an explosion. The earth shakes his body and hurls it into the blue. What he sees: an encounter between a clod of earth and a cloud. The sky is beneath his body, which is drowning in the blue. A torn-off arm, as if someone had abandoned it behind a roll of barbed wire. A German's eyes, his mouth open, and the smoothness, almost tenderness, with which the bayonet plunges into his belly. Another explosion. The skewered body protects him from the shrapnel. The gaping door of a barrack hut. The pile of skeletons in striped garments. A German lying in wait behind this heap. A grenade scattering the dead. A section of the wall crumbles-the violence of the sunlight. The German writhes amid the striped bodies. A hut burns. A half-naked being crawls to safety out of the flames. The deafness is total. Explosions are heard by the stomach, the lungs, and pressure on the temples. Silence also comes from inside, from the belly. The eyes, still feverish, ricochet from one wall to another, from a shadow to a door that suddenly bangs, blown by a blast of wind. Then the body no longer hears anything. Gradually the ears start hearing again in their turn. Silence. The chirping of a cricket in the grass between two lines of barbed wire. And, crumpled up against the wall of a hut, a soldier with a broad trail of blood across his chest. And his cry ("water") which for the others is no more than the proof that their hearing has returned and their own lives are intact.