Requiem for a Lost Empire

by Andrei Makine

  Mentally I spoke her name, Sasha, as if to ensure that the woman sitting on the grass of the steppe beside me was one and the same as that other who had so discreetly, so constantly, threaded her way through the life of my family. At that moment she made an effort to get up, no doubt noticing that the night was drawing in. Clumsily, I hurried to come to her aid, to offer her my arm, sensing for the first time the frailty of her body, the frailty of age, which at fourteen one finds hard to imagine. In this hasty gesture my fingers grasped her injured hand. I felt an instinctive trembling, that decorous reflex certain disabled people have when they do not want to cause alarm or elicit sympathy. She smiled at me and spoke in a voice that had rediscovered its serene and precise tones.

  After walking for several minutes I realized that I had left behind the book we used to take with us during those long days spent on the steppe beside the river. I told Sasha, ran back, and when I turned, saw her in the distance, all alone amid the limitless expanse filled with the translucency of the evening. I walked slowly, catching my breath, and watched her waiting for me in that absolute solitude, with the detachment that made her presence like a mirage. I was not thinking about the history of my family, of which she had just given me the last memories. I was thinking about her, herself, this woman who in a most discreet manner, almost accidentally, I might have believed, had taught me her language, and in that language had taught me about the land of her birth, the land that had never left her during her long life in Russia.

  From afar I recognized her smile, the gesture of her hand. And with ah the ardor of my youth I made a silent oath to give back to her one day her true name and her native country, just as she had dreamed of it in the endlessness of this steppe.

  5

  "No, listen, let's face it, politically speaking the country's a corpse. Or rather a phantom. A phantom that would still like to frighten people but simply makes them laugh instead."

  They were talking about Russia. I did not intervene. If I occasionally found myself at very Parisian gatherings of this type, it was never to join in the conversation. I accepted invitations because I knew that, in this highly composite world, there was always a chance I might encounter a guest who, learning where I came from, would exclaim, "Well I never! Only yesterday I met a compatriot of yours in Lisbon, at So-and-so's place. Now, what was her name?" In this way, at any rate, I imagined that, by questioning this providential guest, I could locate a trace of you, hold onto it, narrow down its whereabouts to a continent, a country, a city. For more than two years I had been patiently revisiting the places where your presence seemed to me likely, cities where, even briefly, we had once lived together. From now on, instead of this questing (I had often told myself that, logically, those must be precisely the cities you would avoid), I took to listening for some clue that might slip out amid the cocktail party chatter, between a couple of pronouncements on the subject of political corpses or similar pieces of conventional wisdom.

  That day Russia-as-phantom scored a bull's-eye. The conversation took off.

  "A black hole that swallows up everything thrown into it," someone added.

  "They're allergic to democracy," affirmed the first.

  A woman reaching out with her cigarette toward an ashtray said, "I've read somewhere that they now have a shorter life expectancy than in some African countries."

  "That, darling, is probably because they smoke too much," declared her husband, playfully spiriting away her pack of cigarettes.

  Everyone laughed. They changed the subject. On the pretext of going for another drink, I moved away, eyeing their little group among other circles that were forming and breaking up on the whim of a look, a word, a moment of boredom. The woman stubbing out her cigarette was a kind of minuscule adolescent, despite being in her sixties. Her husband, a former ambassador, was a tall, heavy man who, all the while he was listening (that is to say, pretending to listen) was raising his eyebrows in greeting to people over the heads of his interlocutors, then rejoining the conversation, diving in with a glancing remark. There was another woman, a high priestess of Parisian culture with a masculine profile and a voice like iron. Her very thin body, the expression in her eyes, and the movements of her chin seemed to be full of militancy for some cause. Below her short-cropped hair, her neck with its almost childlike delicacy, the last refuge of her femininity, belied this militancy and even she may not have been aware of its beauty. His eyes slid over yet another woman, an absolutely classic blonde who smiled and whom one had the impression of having already met a thousand times, until one penetrated through this gilded, smiling carapace to an unknown stranger. Finally, the young man who had just been speaking about the "phantom country." He was young at fifty and always would be. Black jeans, a white shirt widely unbuttoned to reveal a pale chest, an artist's mop of hair, elegant round spectacles. More than from this style of dress, the illusion of youth derived from his knack of always being up-to-the-minute. What he actually said mattered little, for during his long life as a teller of truths he had been a Maoist, a communist, an anti-communist, a liberal, an anti-bourgeois living in the most bourgeois district possible; he had defended every cause and its opposite, but, above all, he knew what you had to say to be perceived as a controversialist, a revolutionary, someone who could think the unthinkable, even while uttering banal propositions he would strenuously oppose the next day. At that moment the thing to do was to denigrate the phantom country He was a master of the sound bite.

  As I was leaving I was stopped by a journalist I had met at one of these gatherings. "I'm going to cover your president's visit here with a Russian journalist. Maybe you know her, she's called…"

  Walking through the night streets I told myself that the chances of discovering you again under a Russian identity were virtually nil. Especially alongside "our" president. However, it was the only means I had left for eliminating one by one the women who were not you.

  The epithet "phantom country" haunted me for some time, like a tune you get on your brain but can't identify. And so did this regret: I should have intervened, tried to explain, told them that… Later, in the night, I thought about the phantom pain an injured man can feel after an amputation. He has an intense physical awareness of the life of the arm or leg he has just lost. I told myself that it was the same for one's native land, for one's country, lost or reduced to the state of a shade. It comes to life again within us, as both desolation and love, in the deepest throbbing of the severed veins.

  "I should have talked to them about…" But what came into my mind was a silent image: that woman, alone, amid the immensity of the steppe, her gaze lost in the last glow of the sunset. I pictured this same woman, younger, at the start of the war, a nurse in a hospital in a little town beyond the Volga. Wards crammed with wounded, dying, dead. Surgeons operating day and night, collapsing with exhaustion. The earth resonating underfoot, thanks to the bombing, like a broad slab laid over a cavity. Trains arrive, discharge their cargoes of bodies, sticky with blood, mud, lice. Arms numbed by the weight of all these men who have to be carried, turned, lifted. In the tumult of cries one can no longer make out which mouth is calling out. Pain makes all look alike. And this is happening in a country in which both of the capital cities are under siege, the army is routed, the towns laid waste. A phantom country.

  She had never called it that, had certainly never said to herself, "I am a foreigner, this country isn't mine, I don't have to suffer the extreme fate of this people." During a bombing raid a piece of shrapnel had maimed the fingers of her right hand. Since then she had worked from dawn till dusk and often through the night sorting men in transit at the switching yard among the trains setting off for the front and returning from it.

  I remember that, as I was taking my leave of the people with whom I had spent the first part of the evening, I heard someone remarking that the price of real estate ("in central Paris, in any event," the girl-woman qualified) was about to go up again.

  The winter night was warm, the ra
in at the open window split up the city's glow into an infinity of twinkling lights. Myriads of luminous dots spread out before me, a crude symbol of human dispersal: to discover a lost person all you would have to do would be to visit each of these sources of light, one after another, over the whole planet. Often in my despair this infinite sifting of the lights seemed to me achievable.

  I could remember very precisely the day I told you about Sasha, about the woman who suddenly appeared to me, all alone in the immensity of the steppe.

  In our jargon we called them "Peeping Toms."

  That day, in the furnace of an African city, there was nothing left but the shreds of the two opposing armies, exhausted soldiers who no longer even had the strength to hate one another. A few citizens besides, lying low, deafened by explosions, watched over their dead. And, finally, the Peeping Toms, professionals in the pay of arms manufacturers, specialists who observed the fighting from a reasonable distance, took photos, noted the performance of weapons, filmed death. People who bought guns were no longer satisfied with advertisements or demonstration firings at mickey mouse rifle ranges. They demanded the real conditions of war, evidence obtained under fire, real bodies being blown to pieces instead of dummies with holes shot through them. The Peeping Toms' telephoto lenses would capture the outline of a tank with a torn-off turret, from which blackened human carcasses were emerging, or achieve a well-composed shot of a group of soldiers cut to ribbons by an assault grenade.

  They were our reason for remaining in the city. We had contrived to approach them, get to know them, help them out, make sure we would be able to pick up their trail in Europe. Then, when the smoke from the fires had begun to interfere with their filming, we had watched them leaving: a helicopter slipping by against the russet hills, so light that it looked like a tourist flight.

  Moving from one hiding place to another, we had found ourselves on the top floor of a hotel dominating the port area. The first five or six floors were blackened with soot and had no glass left in the windows. An iron spiral staircase leading to the terraced garden on the first floor had been ripped away by an explosion and now swung like an enormous spring, pointing up into the void. The top floor was occupied by a panoramic restaurant that in peacetime revolved slowly, enabling tourists to contemplate the sea, the colorful crowds swarming in the market, the ocher shapes of the mountains. Now that the dining room was still and without air conditioning, we felt as if we were in a glass cage. Not a breath of air was admitted by the double glazing, which even deadened the sound of the shooting. The tables were laid, the napkins stood there like little starched pyramids. The silence and the stale air were reminiscent of an empty museum on a July afternoon. A great swordfish, mounted on the wall above the bar, added to this impression of being behind glass in a museum. From time to time bursts of gunfire could be heard at the bottom of the building, then on the floors above, climbing higher. One night the electric current returned for a few seconds: tinted glass lampshades spread a soft light the color of tea, the fans above the tables came to life. And next to the bar came a sighing sound from a cassette player: two or three phrases of a blues number that faded almost immediately as the darkness returned.

  By day we could observe virtually the entire city from the curved windows. Often two groups of soldiers, rebels and government troops, would be advancing blindly toward each other, separated by a block of houses, and would suddenly come face to face, dive into porches or onto the ground, and kill each other. Occasionally a lone man would be moving along, hugging the walls, his gun at the ready, and from our glassed-in refuge we would see his enemy proceeding with a stealthy tread, just around the corner of the house. Seen from above, war revealed its whole nature: that of a comic and ruthless game. Watching the two soldiers as they drew closer, not yet having seen each other, we knew what was going to happen and both our vantage point and this superhuman prescience distressed us, like a prerogative usurped. In the distance, several miles away from the burning city, we could make out the gray rectangles of the American camp. They were waiting for the fighting to end before they intervened.

  Our thoughts and our words had a hard, decisive clarity during these days of confinement in our rooftop refuge. Perhaps because we were seeing the battle from a great height, as if on a model, and realizing that, in the end, all you need to do is to climb up ten floors for human folly to be laid bare. Or else it was because our own situation was only too clear and irrevocable: watching the Peeping Toms take off we could no longer hope that, as in the past, a heavyweight combat helicopter would come thundering down to land alongside the blazing houses and lift out the remnants of the forces still stubbornly serving the empire. The latest confused and improbable news that had reached us from Moscow spoke of shooting in the streets and civilian buildings being bombarded. Chaos that very clearly spelled out the end.

  And to underline it all, the war appeared so transparent. Despite the smoke from the fires, despite the amount of blood spilled, despite the tangle of commentaries the newspapers wrapped it up in. Its logic was very simple. A change in the governing team had been decided on by the Americans a million miles away from this city. What they would gain from this was the halving of the price of a barrel of oil. The new team would sell oil to pay for the arms already delivered. These would need to be regularly renewed, in accordance with the advice of the decision makers. And, in order to get the right choices made, the advisers would project the videos filmed by the Peeping Toms, showing the weaponry in totally authentic combat conditions.

  You began talking to me about this transparency a few minutes after a soldier's death. We had heard him running up the stairs, shooting at the men pursuing him. The door to the restaurant was not barricaded-we knew this would have infuriated any attackers and deprived us of a slim chance of survival. There had been the crackling of several bursts of gunfire, magnified by the echo from the various floors, then an explosion. It was impossible to know if the hand grenade had been thrown by the fugitive or his pursuers. In any event, they had not climbed any higher and the soldier lay dead on the landing outside the restaurant. I no longer recall which side he was fighting for. I was simply struck by his youth.

  We had covered his body with a tablecloth and it was then that you talked about the people in their New York or London offices dressing up these wars with all the trappings of news stories, articles, broadcasts, in-depth surveys. They pretended to forget about the price of a barrel of oil. They spoke of ancestral enmities, humanitarian catastrophes, the shackling of the democratic process.

  "Just you wait. They'll blame this carnage once again on the rivalry between Bantu and Nilotic peoples," you said. It was such a bitter gibe that I did not recognize you.

  "But I thought they were all Bantu in this region."

  "Some tame anthropologist will discover as many ethnic groupings as are needed. And they'll be taught that they've always been sworn enemies and all they have to do is kill each other. Or someone will remember that the president they don't want made a visit to Qaddafi or Fidel twenty years ago. And across all the screens in the world, on every radio station, he'll be portrayed as a bloodstained terrorist. And the firm that organizes this blitz will have its fee paid thanks to the reduction in the price of oil. What was it old Marx said? 'Offer a capitalist a three hundred percent profit and there's no crime he won't commit.' It's still topical."

  In silence we contemplated this model of a city that looked, in the dusk, like the fires of a nomad camp. The two armies, entrenched in their positions, were waiting for morning. In the distance, above the American contingent, one could see the shafts of light beamed toward the ground by helicopters already swallowed up in the darkness. I believed I could guess your thoughts and, to distract you, I began to tell you about my meeting in Milan with one of these P.R. virtuosos. His tongue loosened by drink, he claimed that his firm could create a political personality, give him a profile, have him acclaimed, and then within ninety-six hours demolish him and present him as a t
otal villain, without public opinion being aware of having been manipulated. "Yes, ninety-six hours, four days," he had boasted. "But on one condition. It must happen on the weekend. That's when critical faculties are at a low ebb. Besides, every break in routine makes it easier to reshape the collective memory. And as for the summer vacation, believe you me, there's enough time then to get public opinion used to the idea of Saddam Hussein being the next president of the United States."

  Instead of smiling I saw your face grow tense, you closed your eyes and shook your head slightly, as if to suppress a sudden pain. You were already a long way away from this city, from this war, at once so real and such a sham. You were away in some past and I did not know if your pain was derived from an excess of sorrow or too great a joy. I drew you to me and it was at that moment, as if by some stupid and aggressive mockery, that the lights came on again. I rushed to the light switches-through the uncurtained windows our silhouettes would have been visible all over the city. But the tape deck hidden at the back of the bar remained connected and in the darkness we listened to the ebb and flow of a saxophone in a melody that, for its part, had nothing aggressive about it. It was a gust of weary notes that occasionally slid, as if along a razor blade, to the brink of a fall, a shout, a sob, then returned to a deep and rhythmic breathing, painting a picture in the darkness of the end of a long race, the end of a struggle, the weariness of a man on the night of a lost battle. The melody broke off but for a time in the darkness we went on hearing its silent rhythm.

  That night I told you about my last meeting with Sasha, her solitude in the middle of an endless steppe, about that moment when her story had reached its conclusion, leaving me with a picture of a mother and father bowed over their child one night in the Caucasus.