Requiem for a Lost Empire

by Andrei Makine

  The second time (their team had returned earlier than expected on account of frosts, he removed his muddy boots in the hall and went noiselessly upstairs) this happiness almost turned him into a killer. The bedroom door was ajar and already from the kitchen he could see his companion naked, and, glued to her, a very thin man, who seemed, as he huffed and puffed, to be trying to push her out of bed. He looked for the ax in the entrance hall and could not see where it had gone. The few seconds of searching for it calmed him. "What? End up in jail for the sake of that lump of pork and that worm with a wrinkled ass? I'm not crazy." He put on his boots and hurried to leave, knowing it would have been enough for him to see the woman's face, or hear her voice, to kill. He spent the night with a friend and did not sleep, at one minute almost indifferent, at the next planning revenge. In a moment of weariness he believed he had understood what kind of woman she was, whose life he had shared for a year. He had never thought about it before. The war was a time of women without men and men without women, but also one of women who, more from the chance of a town being near the front than from lewdness, had made love recklessly, accustomed to men who went back to the war and whom death made irremediably faithful to their mistress of one night. "Filthy whore!" he muttered in the darkness of the kitchen where his friend had made up a bed for him, but in reality this curse was a way of trying to silence a covert pardon. His concubine reminded him, through her very infidelity of the days of war. She was still living in those days. "Like me!" he thought.

  In the morning the desire for vengeance got the better of him. He went back to the izba and found it already empty. The woman had gone to work, leaving him a saucepan of potatoes. He withdrew the cartridges from his automatic pistol, determined to put them in the stove, picturing with malicious glee the fireworks that evening. Then he changed his mind, went up to the bedroom, drew his knife. He stabbed at the down quilt halfheartedly, as if to satisfy his conscience, and stopped. A few feathers fluttered around the bed. The room already looked unrecognizable to him, as if he had never lived there. He stroked the notches on the handle of the knife, then gathered up several things that belonged to him and left. In the hall he noticed the ax, propped in a corner behind the door.

  Once again he lived nowhere for several months, still playing at the soldier's return, cunningly avoiding the new life the others were embarking on, so he could stay in the company of those who were no more. Thinking about them one day, he remembered his mother's friend, the foreign woman, Sasha, who was so very Russian and who often came to see them at Dolshanka. He caught up with her in the little town where she lived, near Stalingrad, allowed himself to be persuaded to stay at her house, and began to work at a railroad depot. The third anniversary of the victory was approaching, the town was being covered in red and gold panels with triumphal slogans, and the radiant faces of heroic soldiers. Pavel had the strange impression that the people around him were talking about a different war and coming more and more to believe in the war that was being invented for them in the newspapers, on billboards, on the radio. He talked about his own war, the penal companies, about attacks made with their bare hands. The head of the workshop rebuked him, they grappled with each other. Pavel let go when he saw a long scar on the chief's arm, crudely sutured the way they used to do it at the front. When their quarrel had abated and they were alone the man took him outside behind a pile of old ties and warned him, "It's all true, what you say. But if they take you away tomorrow for your truth I want you to know I had nothing to do with it. There are spies in the workshop." Pavel told Sasha about it. She gave him bread and all the money she had in the house and advised him to spend the night with an old friend who lived in Stalingrad. She was right. They came looking for him at three in the morning.

  He no longer needed to find a pretext for his wanderings. He simply needed to move farther and farther away from Stalingrad, make himself invisible, merge into the new life he had so far been running away from. He left the Volga region heading west, then through one chance or another began descending southward, thinking of the sea, the ports, the teeming, colorful south, in which his dubious air of a vagabond soldier would pass unnoticed. For a long time now stations and trains had become his true home. The weeks spent at the depot had given him the self-confidence of a professional. More than once he detected the presence of a military patrol. He would change, put on his blue overalls, and pass as a railroad worker. Then he became a soldier again: engineers rarely refused to help a "defender of the nation."

  That day Pavel was in uniform. The train he had spotted that morning was already unloaded and was due to start at any minute. Its destination suited him. He still had to negotiate with the engineer or, if he were refused, leap into a freight car after the train had started. It was while he was keeping watch between two warehouse storage buildings that he heard their voices: two men's voices, backing one another up-with menacing jocularity-and that of a woman, whose strongly oriental accent he noticed straight away. Curious, he turned the corner and saw them. The men (one of them leaning on a broom, the other, switching his lamp on and off, teasingly, for it was still light) were preventing the woman from leaving, blocking her path, pushing her against the warehouse wall. They were doing it without violence but their movements had the authority of a cat playing with an already damaged bird.

  "No, my beauty, first tell us where you're going and what train you're catching, then tell us your name," repeated the man with the broom, moving his shoulder forward to check the young woman.

  "And then we'd like to have a look at your papers," chimed in the railroad worker, shining his lamp in the woman's face.

  She took a more vigorous step to free herself, in her voice a weary cord snapped, "Let me alone!" The man with the lamp thrust his hand against her chest, as if to ward off an attack. "Now you be nice to us, honey, that's all we ask. Otherwise the militia are going to want to know about you."

  The woman, dazed, her eyes half closed as if to avoid seeing what was happening to her, could no longer repulse the four hands that were pulling at her dress, squeezing her waist, pushing her toward the gaping warehouse door.

  In an effort to forestall the warnings to be prudent sounding in his head Pavel moved up to them with one bound. It was not an urge to come to the rescue that decided him but an irrational vision: the violent contrast between the beauty of the woman, the chiseled delicacy of her face, and the quagmire of words, physiognomies, and actions that held her fast.

  His sudden appearance and his uniform made an impression on them, even frightened them. At the sound of his harsh voice the railroad worker turned, stepped away from the young woman, bent down to pick up the lamp he had put on the ground. He stammered, "No, look, it's like this, Sergeant… She's a thief. When we saw her she was lifting stuff from the warehouse."

  He began justifying himself, invoking the sweeper as a witness. But gradually, as he got the better of his fear, he realized that the sergeant had a bizarre look about him: his cheeks covered with a four-day beard, a tunic coarsely patched here and there and with no collar, his top boots battered and swollen by wear. Appalled by his mistake, he changed his tone.

  "And what about you? What are you doing here? Did you want to visit the stores, too? So she was with you, this thief? You're two of a kind."

  Pavel, scenting danger, tried to silence him. "Right, shut your trap, you! Leave the woman and go tap some wheels! Get going! And not another sound from your whistle."

  But the other man, on whom it was dawning more and more clearly that this soldier who had given him such a fright was on shaky ground himself, exploded, "What's that? Wheels? Just who do you think you are? You wait. We're going to find out what regiment you've deserted from! Hold him, Vassilich! I'm going to call the patrol! They're here, somewhere, near the station."

  Pavel threw off the sweeper as he tried to seize him, turned and saw the man was not lying: an officer and two soldiers were making their way along the track. He struck out to stop the two men shouting. O
ne fist impacted against a clammy, slippery mouth, the other hand hit a chin. But the yelling continued, only in shriller tones. And the fingers twisted, clutching at his tunic. He struck again. The lamp fell, rolled along the ground, lit up by itself, and its beam cut across the wheels of a train that was just moving off. In the distance the two soldiers of the patrol began to run, the officer quickened his pace.

  It was the young woman who dragged him away from this fruitless brawl. Rooted to the spot close to the wall, she suddenly seemed to come to her senses and sped like an arrow toward the train that was moving forward with somnambulistic slowness. Pavel grabbed his pack and followed her, wiping his bloodstained hand on his trousers.

  They climbed onto the platform of a freight car, jumped down onto the track on the other side, rolled under another train, and seeing that the soldiers had run around it right at the far end, dove under again, ran the length of the train and crawled between the wheels once more. The whistle blasts of the patrol guided them, now far off, now deafening, separated from them by a single line of freight cars. And their eyes had time to take in the calm of a workman, quietly smoking, sitting on a pile of ties, and the enamel plaque (with an improbable destination) on an old freight car on a siding, and even the inside of the compartments (children, tea, a woman making up the bed) in a passenger train that came hurtling past at high speed and saved them, separating them from their pursuers. They raced forward, drawn along by the draft of its passing, and found themselves once more between the express train and a freight train that was hardly moving at all, as if it could not make up its mind to leave. They saw the opening of a sliding door, for the first time exchanged a look of complicity, and climbed in. Pavel closed the door, found the young woman's arm in the darkness. They remained there without moving, listening behind the thin wooden partition to the coming and going of footsteps, shouts, whistle blasts. Footfalls came closer, walking beside the train, which was still sliding along with agonizing slowness, and a voice addressing someone on the other side of the track shouted, "Hey, they must be somewhere. I saw them! Tell him to bring his dog!" Their eyes were already accustomed to the darkness. They stared at one another fixedly, both sensing that each one's danger, so unique, so linked to each one's past, was now merged with the danger the other was escaping. That their lives were merging. In the distance an angry voice rang out, an order, then there was some barking. And it was at that moment that a shudder ran through the train and Pavel sensed in his own body, at the same moment as in the woman's, an involuntary straining of every muscle in the infantile desire to help the train move off. Its speed accelerated very little but after a dozen clanks of the wheels the noise changed, became more resonant, more vibrant. The train began crossing a bridge and moved faster and faster.

  Very early in the morning Pavel got up, quite numbed by a night of watching, his head filled with fleeting visions of the day before. He slid open the heavy door of the freight car and suddenly stepped back a pace, alarmed, dazzled. Against a still-dark sky, beyond heavily wooded valleys, there gleamed the snowy peaks of the Caucasus, almost menacing in their beauty. Their faintly bluish bulk seemed to be growing closer with every second, towering over the train. And, thanks to their height, the whole space reared up vertically. It was impossible for someone who had always lived on the plain to imagine life at the foot of this silent grandeur.

  The young woman came to the door as well and looked out, tossing aside her long hair which the wind blew in her face. Through the clattering of the wheels Pavel cried out in admiration. She nodded her head but expressed neither surprise nor fear. She seemed not to be interested in the snowy peaks on the horizon but was studying the wooded hills and the rare villages, still slumbering.

  Pavel wanted to get off at the first opportunity, attracted by a large town the train stopped in for a few minutes. This vertical country seemed too foreign to him. The woman held him back.

  They jumped from the car when the train slowed down on a bend as it emerged from a long tunnel in the middle of the mountains.

  The woman walked quickly, climbing down the slope covered in trees and shrubs that were unfamiliar to Pavel. He followed her with difficulty, getting caught up in brambles that she knew how to avoid, slipping on little screes concealed beneath the heather. With no pathway the forest seemed virgin. Emerging onto the bank of a stream, the woman stopped. Catching up with her ("Does she want to shake me off or what?" he had said to himself a few moments earlier), and without being able to conceal his anxiety beneath a tone of bravado, Pavel asked, "So, are we going to climb up Kazbek mountain, while we're at it? Where are you taking me?" The woman smiled and it was at that moment he noticed how tired she was. Without replying she walked out over the pebbles and into the stream, plunged into it fully clothed, and remained still, letting the water wash her body, her face, and her dress with its frayed sleeves. Pavel wanted to call out to her, then changed his mind. He smiled and walked off toward the rocks that led into the river a little downstream. Everything suddenly seemed simple to him, as if foreseen by an unusual order of things that he had yet to fathom. He undressed behind the rocks and slipped into the water. The sun was already at its height and roasted their skin. Their clothes dried in a few minutes.

  During this halt on the bank he learned what he had already guessed. The woman was a Balkar. One of those Caucasian people deported in 1944. Some of them had tried to return secretly, but were caught well before they had seen the snow of the mountain peaks.

  She showed him her village in the distance: a deserted street, orchards with branches bowed down to the ground under a vain abundance of fruit, and in the yard of one house, hanging on a line, a row of washing in tatters.

  For reasons of prudence they settled several miles from there. From time to time Pavel went down into the empty village where he found a few carpenter's tools, a box of nails, an old tinder box. One day he saw wheel marks imprinted in the thick dust of the road. He identified them as a military four-wheel-drive. The months passed, the vehicle did not reappear. He said nothing to the woman. "My wife," he often thought now.

  The shelter they had built in the rocky fold of a valley was a day's walk from a little town with a railroad station. It was from this town that Pavel sent a letter to Sasha. She was the only one to know of their secret life. The only one to come and see them once or twice a year.

  She came, too, for the birth of their child and stayed longer that time. One evening Pavel was returning from the beehives set up on the other side of the valley at the edge of a chestnut forest. He crossed the stream, carrying a pail filled with fresh honey on his shoulder, and stopped to catch his breath at the foot of the little slope that led up to their house. Through the half-open door he saw the figures of the two women. Sasha was standing, a candle in her hand, his wife was sitting down, her face bent over the child. He heard not the words but just the music, slow and even, of their hushed conversation. He thought of Sasha with the wistful gratitude inspired by a person who expects no word of thanks, who never even thinks of such a thing, and who gives much too much for it ever to be possible to repay her. "If she were Russian she would never have dared to come here," he said to himself, realizing that this was a very imperfect manner of expressing the woman's nature. A foreigner, she took greater liberties with the weighty laws and customs governing the country: she did not consider them to be absolute, so they ceased to be absolute.

  From the place where Pavel had stopped he heard the rippling of the stream, the supple and resonant murmur that filled their house at night, merging with the sounds of the forest, the crackling of the fire. Below the rock, facing their house, the water was smooth and very black. The sky tossed into it the reflection of a constellation that swayed gently, changing its shape. He was amazed to think that man needed so little in order to live in happiness. And that in the world they had fled, this little got lost in innumerable stupidities, in lies, in wars, in the desire to snatch this little away from others, in the fear of having only this
little.

  He lifted the pail and began climbing toward the house. His wife was standing on the threshold with their son in her arms. The child had waked up but was not crying. The stars cast a weak light on his tiny brow. They remained there for a moment in that night, without moving, without saying a word.

  She who was telling me the story of Pavel's life broke off the narrative at this nocturnal moment. I thought it was simply a pause between two words, between two sentences, and that the past would once more come alive in her voice. But little by little her silence merged with the immensity of the steppe surrounding us, with the silence of the sky that had the dense luminosity of the first moments after the sunset. She was seated in the middle of an endless expanse of undulating grass, her head tilted slightly upward, her eyes half closed, gazing into the distance. And it was when I realized there was nothing more to come, that I suddenly understood: the end of the story was already known to me. I already knew what would happen to the soldier, his wife, their child. The tale had been confided to me more than a year before, one winter's evening in the great dark izba, the day when the words a youth yelled at me had almost been the death of me. "The firing squad gunned your father down like a dog." After that, from one Saturday evening to the next, the story had continued, giving me what I had missed most at the orphanage-the certainty that I had been preceded on this earth by people who loved me.

  As I looked at this white-haired woman seated a few yards away from me, it was becoming clearer to me all the time that the real ending to her story was this silence, this tide of light hovering over the steppe and the two of us, bonded together by the lives and deaths of beings who now survived only in ourselves. In her words and henceforth in my memory. She did not speak but now I could picture her shade: in the depths of the house hidden in a narrow valley in the Caucasus. There she was, a woman holding a candle, smiling at a young mother as she walked in, carrying a child in her arms, at a man who was setting down on a bench a heavy pail covered with a cotton cloth.