Requiem for a Lost Empire

by Andrei Makine

  At that moment, in front of the almost bare table, I saw the filmmaker turning a glass upside down, no doubt to see if anyone had been drinking from it. A young woman (the one who had announced that Stalin could have invaded Europe), obliged to shout because of the noise, was speaking to him 'with her mouth close to his ear, directing a whole pantomime of gestures at his ear as if this organ could see. Beyond the swaying of heads the intellectual with the ash gray hair was holding forth, surrounded by the figures of women, and his hands were making hypnotic passes. In the circle around the ex-minister and his girl-wife they were roaring with laughter.

  The idea of telling them about the soldier suddenly seemed unthinkable. No, I had simply to imagine his mute, invisible presence somewhere in this room, where the aromas of sauces and wine spilled on the carpet lingered. I should observe his gaze-first at the sequences of the film, then at these mouths, eating, tasting the wine, smiling, talking about the camps. The soldier's gaze did not judge, it focused on things and beings with a wry detachment and understood everything. It understood that the people in the room who spoke of millions of victims, of repentance, of the duty to remember, were lying. Not that the victims had not existed. The soldier still had their ashes stuck to his hands, to the folds in his tunic. But at the time of their martyrdom and their death each of them had a face, a past, that not even the serial number tattooed to their wrists had succeeded in obliterating. Now they were conveniently assembled into these anonymous millions, an army of the dead that was constantly being paraded about in the great bazaars of ideas. The soldier had no difficulty in grasping that the sinister building in the film, belching forth black smoke and producing human ashes, had become a real family business for the filmmaker and his friend. And, like good salesmen, this fat man with his pocket calculator and his thin friend with his dogmatic voice, they and their countless ubiquitous doubles uttered deafening rallying cries, hurled abuse at the indifferent, cursed the incredulous. They did not allow the millions of dead a moment's peace, reviving their torture in front of cameras, on the pages of newspapers, on screens. Every day they had to find something new. First it was the spuriously contrite face of a bishop collapsing into repentance. Next the police, like inconsolable penitents, asking forgiveness for the errors of their colleagues half a century ago. Then one day this brilliant notion! Why not accuse the soldiers who liberated the camps of being too slow? The thin men and the fat men were indefatigable in invoking the memory, but, curiously enough, the fuss they made provoked forget-fulness. For they talked about millions without faces, like those cascades of zeros that appeared on their pocket calculators.

  I knew that the soldier would not have taken the trouble to deny or debate. His gaze would have been silent. He would have observed the room and would no doubt have formed a single impression that summed up everything: ugliness. Ugliness of words, ugliness of thoughts, ugliness of the shared lie. The extraordinary ugliness of that young woman's face, leaning toward the filmmaker's ear, her young body, tall and lithe, contorted with the hypocrisy of the words the man was listening to with paternal indulgence. Ugliness of all these faces and these bodies, smooth through careful grooming, rubbing shoulders in the agreeable coziness of the in-crowd. The infinite ugliness of that France.

  No, the soldier would not have been thinking about all that. His silent presence would have placed him far away from these well-nourished bodies, these minds well versed in the conventional wisdom, far from the hypnotists of memory and the dealers in millions of dead. In this faraway place there was the barbed-wire entanglement on which he had fallen, transforming his own body into a bridge for those who followed him. Beyond his death, there was that instant when, in the liberated camp, the echo of the last shot fired faded away, those blurred minutes when the soldiers who had survived were roaming among the barrack huts with their gaping doors, among the bodies, disposed according to the whims of death, long minutes when they were getting used to feeling they were alive, to seeing the tranquillity of the sky, to being able to hear. In those first instants there was a wounded man, wearing the uniform of a penal company, a young soldier crumpled up against the wall of a hut, his hands pressed against his belly and filled with blood. He cried out, asking for water. But the others, still deafened by the last of the explosions, did not hear him. As the burning pain increased, it seemed to him that no one in the universe heard his cry. He was wrong. A man was coming toward him, very slowly, for he was afraid of falling. This man without flesh, without muscles, clad in striped rags, was moving like a child learning to walk and all his equilibrium was derived from an old bowl filled with water clutched in his hands. It was the water he had gathered from a drainpipe's tiny drips. Water that had already saved life. The wounded soldier saw the prisoner, saw his eyes sunk in his emaciated skull and fell silent. There was nothing more in the world, just these two pairs of eyes slowly approaching each other.

  Thinking about that prisoner gave me a feeling of joy I could not explain to myself I told myself simply that his look was not recorded by any pocket calculator adding up the millions, nor inscribed in any official martyrology. No one was forcing me to recollect him but he lived in my memory, a remarkable being in all the grievous beauty of his gesture.

  Threading my way toward the exit between the groups of guests, I passed the girl-wife. Through the noise I could only grasp the last part of the remark she addressed to me: "… really enthralling!"

  "Yes, it was extremely interesting," I said, echoing her tone of voice.

  She shook my hand, tugging on it slightly, which obliged me to lean over a little.

  "It was quite true what you said about the German-Soviet pact," she said, screwing up her eyes as a mark of complicity.

  "Well, it wasn't actually me who…"

  "And then that… what was it you were saying? Katyn! What a story! Mind you, I've never trusted the Poles."

  "Yes, well, but, it was really the Russians there, who…"

  "My daughter has a Russian friend, you know, a delightful young woman, very cultivated. She speaks three or four languages. She's been everywhere. You must meet her some time. She plays the violin as well."

  After hearing this detail I listened to the rest of the story distractedly. The violinist used to remark, "Scratch a Russian and you'll find a Tartar underneath." This turn of phrase delighted the girl-wife. Listening to her, I was waiting for a pause in the rhythm of her breathing that would enable me to take my leave. But the reserves of breath in that puny chest seemed inexhaustible. "Scratch a Pole, you know, and you'll find a…," she drew me toward her to round off her verdict. "Oh, but some of them are not like that at all!" I protested vainly.

  At that moment among the groups of couples behind the girl-wife, I saw a man's face in profile that seemed to me both familiar and unrecognizable. I stared at him. The profile seemed to be smiling at someone other than the person he was talking to. I taxed my memory but before I could fix on either a name or a place, the face disappeared behind the moving throng of guests.

  Between the end of one story and the immediate start of the next I succeeded in slipping in a brief word of good-bye and dove back into the crowd, wresting my hand away from the storyteller's grasp. The pact. Katyn. The terrible reputation of the Poles. This drawing room farrago, I told myself, was an indirect response to the lies of those hypnotists of memory. I saw them together, the filmmaker and the intellectual, a little apart from the others. A snatch of a sentence from their conversation cut through the din: "We'll get Jean-Luc's write-up tomorrow and then on Thursday…"

  In the concierge's lodge the television was flickering with the last minutes of a match. Standing on the threshold the man looked both weary and still buffeted by the excitement of the game. "Four one! I've never seen anything like it!" he exclaimed, noticing my glance at the screen and in no doubt that one could hardly fail to be surprised by this score. I realized that the match had been broadcast during the screening of the film.

  Near the exit a knot o
f people gathered, the one that forms at the end, the most talkative one, the slowest to disperse. I was waiting for these guests to slip, one by one, through the bottleneck of the door. Suddenly, disturbingly, for the second time I caught sight of a man's face, that discreetly smiling profile, whose smile, it was now clear to me, seemed aware of my presence. Like me, the man was waiting for the crowd to depart. I took a few steps toward him. He turned his head slightly. It was Shakh.

  "There must be a stage door somewhere." Shakh spoke these words softly, as if to himself, and, avoiding the throng that was still blocking the exit, he began to climb a staircase at the end of the foyer. I followed him.

  We found ourselves on the balcony of a glass-enclosed mezzanine floor that circled the room, which was already half empty of guests. The voices floating up sounded like those of vendors at the end of a street market, pointlessly loud and shrill among a mere handful of shoppers. You could also hear a series of suction-cup sounds, good-bye kisses accompanied by meows of politeness. The staff were moving the tables, rearranging the armchairs. As he walked along, Shakh looked at the room then turned, and I saw a weary expression on his face that seemed to be saying: "It's a hopeless case!"

  No doubt he knew this other exit that led us out, as is often the case with cinema buildings, into a nighttime street in which it is difficult at first to recognize the building fronts. "I listened to your speech for the defense just now," he said, when we were settled in a brasserie. "And I was certainly the only one listening," he added with a slight smile. We sat for a moment without speaking. Outside the windows of the brasserie groups of young people were parading past, celebrating their team's victory with loud chanting and the waving of brightly colored flags.

  "Yes, I listened to you, but I'd actually come to meet one of the film's sponsors… Would you like to guess who?"

  "Some official in the Ministry of Culture who finances pseudo-documentary rubbish like this with the French taxpayer's money?"

  "No, you're not even close."

  "A former left-winger who's become a press magnate and is still campaigning against Soviet imperialism?"

  "Not that either. I can see that, after years of idleness, you're losing your touch. Next guess."

  "No idea. Someone I know?"

  "A man you've met and who in those distant days used to be called Mr. Scalper. We always used to joke about how well the name suited him. Do you remember? Well, you knew him better than I did."

  "Yes, it all comes back. Ron Scalper, the arms dealer with almost artistic tastes. He used to leave two or three days before the killing started. It was as if he could smell the blood. And he had the habit of saying to the Peeping Toms who stayed behind to film the performance of his guns, 'Get some black-and-white pictures for me, with Africans in them. That generally turns out best.' We really wanted to scalp him. So has he moved into arts sponsorship?"

  "Well, he's been hugely successful since then. He runs a big American firm with several arms factories, a research institute, and some specialist journals. For rocket launchers he's one of the best in the world."

  "But that film? Is he trying to redeem himself or what? I can hardly see him shedding tears, not even crocodile ones, over the mass graves in the camps."

  "No, the film is simply high-class publicity. They have a department that looks after all this agitprop. The competition's very fierce in the arms trade, as you well know. It's no longer enough to show films shot by the Peeping Toms intended for a few officials. You have to work in-depth on public opinion in a country. Get people used to the idea that it's always been the Americans who came to the rescue and that these days the Russians can't even make a decent saucepan. The whole of Eastern Europe is going to be reequipped with American arms. Contracts worth tens of millions. Very soon the Americans won't have a single man on welfare. So it's worth financing a few films and running a few little wars, here and there, just to test the product."

  "And all that high society who were there just now. Do you think they'll remember anything about the film tomorrow?"

  "Ah, products like that aren't designed to make people remember but to make them forget. Forget the battle of Moscow, forget Stalingrad, Kursk. I've talked to the sponsor: the next episode's already in production. It's going to be called The Soldiers of Liberty. El Alamein, battles in the Pacific, the Normandy landings, the liberation of Europe -and that's the whole of the Second World War. And above all, not a word about the Eastern front. It never existed. Furthermore, and he told me this in all seriousness, ' El Alamein was the first great victory, the real turning point in the war!' In their war, that is."

  Shakh lowered his voice, smiled at me, and added in apologetic tones, "There! I've started repeating your speech for the defense." He fell silent, then, doubtless not wishing to leave the impression of a man who had lost his cool, continued in tones where no rancor could now be heard, "You know, when all's said and done, this trafficking in the past may also be a way for them to avoid thinking about it. I grumble because I've seen tank tracks covered in ground meat at the battle of Kursk. I remember the rainstorm beating down on those thousands of tanks that evening, the water boiling and rising up from the burning steel in clouds of steam. But dinosaurs like me will soon be gone. As for the new generation, try talking to them about Kursk. It would spoil their joie de vivre. Look at that idiot, he's going to get himself run over."

  In the street the soccer fans with their flags and bottles were marching along among the cars, which honked as they swerved to avoid them.

  "And in order to pass their exams they'll repeat what they've been taught: once upon a time there was a wicked man called Hitler who didn't like the Jews and killed six million of them and would have killed more if the Americans hadn't come down from heaven with their jeeps and their chocolate bars. And the hardest thing will be for them to learn the names of the camps by heart. But they'll invent some mnemonic device. That's how we learned the names of the Great Lakes of America: Erie, Michigan, Huron, Superior, Ontario. There's a kind of jingle to it, no? They're sure to find one for Buchenwald."

  In the feigned levity in his voice, I sensed the desire to keep at bay the questions we could not avoid. I stared at his face, which had aged the way the faces of men of action age: the dangers overcome are transformed into an outward appearance of steadfastness and lines of force expressing strength. And it seemed to me increasingly unlikely that within the next few minutes this man might tell me where I could find you.

  Shakh must also have noticed that we were talking about the film in order to avoid speaking about what our meeting had suddenly revealed. He fell silent and cocked his head a little to one side. Then, gazing out of the window he remarked, "That said, at the sight of all the Parisian glamor this evening, I was remarking to myself, as I often do when I come here, that our friend Jansac- you remember that agent we negotiated with in Aden who died shortly after the hostages had been released-yes, I was saying to myself that, instead of repatriating his body, the Legion would have done better to bury him down there, in a tomb cut into the black rocks looking out toward Aden, across the Strait of Bab el Mandeb. I find it hard to picture him living or dying here in this country, such as it has become."

  I waited no further and asked him about you. I knew that the initial tone of his voice would already tell me a great deal. He gave me a quick, hard look, probing me with an unspoken question, as if to say, "It's me you're asking?" But what he said dispelled this air of reproach immediately.

  "I don't know what's happened to her. I would certainly never have met up with you again in order to tell you of her death. Condolences from relations and friends was not her style. But, for your own sake, think carefully. It's often easier to live in vague hope. As long as you don't know…"

  "But that's it: I want to know."

  Shakh gave me another hard look, then he confided to me, as if reluctantly "Her last identity was German. A German who'd lived in Canada for a long time and returned to Europe. So you can forget you
r Russian quest. Don't waste your time. All you'll find among these Russian women living in Paris will be violinists from Saint Petersburg, Ukrainian prostitutes, and Muscovite wives. Sometimes all combined in one person. I'll be coming back through France in ten days' time and by then I think I'll know which country you need to look for her in."

  Before our next meeting I had time to take stock of what had changed in Shakh. It would have been easy to say he had aged. Or to explain the bitterness that showed through in his words by the disappearance of the country he had served for so many years. But there was something else. He was now working without any protection, like a trapeze artist whose safety net has been taken away, and worst of all, if he were caught, without the slightest hope of being traded for a westerner, as they used to do in the old days. I mentioned this to him when I saw him again. I said that in Moscow they were thinking more about opening Swiss bank accounts than spiriting away agents. He smiled. "Sooner or later, you know, we shall all be spirited away by the good Lord."

  That evening, on the day of our second meeting, we were indeed talking about those years when everything in Moscow had turned upside down. The years when the Kremlin was turning into a swollen Mafia tumor whose cancerous spread undermined the whole country. The years when, as in the panic after a lost battle, they were abandoning former allies, writing off wars, dismantling the army. The period when the collapse of the empire was tearing apart, link by link, the intelligence networks woven during the seventy years of its existence. The period when we never knew if an agent who failed to keep a rendezvous had been intercepted by the Americans or sold down the river by our own people. The period when one day I had watched you disappearing into the crowd at Frankfurt airport after a few deliberately inconsequential words of good-bye.