Requiem for a Lost Empire

by Andrei Makine

  Shakh made me talk about your departure, about the months preceding it, about the colleagues we saw at that time. I told him how we had been besieged in that revolving restaurant in the middle of a blazing city, and, going back in time, about the weeks spent in London, and, still further back, about the disappearance of the couple who were supposed to replace us, Yuri and Yulia. Your remorse at not having been able to protect them.

  "What was he like, this Yuri?" Shakh suddenly interrupted me.

  "Fair-haired, quite hefty, an engaging smile."

  "That I know. I've seen the photos. Have you heard him speak English?"

  "Er-no, why?"

  Shakh did not reply, stared hard at me, then rubbed his brow.

  "What's almost sure is that she spent a certain amount of time in America. I have the address, the contacts. But after that there was this great upheaval at the Center and a good deal of disruption in the departments and it's from that moment on it's difficult to keep track of her. We can talk about it at the end of the month, if you like. I guess I'll have a clearer picture by then."

  Shakh had come to our meeting with a suitcase that still had baggage labels on it. As he set this bag down beside our table it reminded me vividly of the nomadic life you and I had led, a life this man was still leading, in an endless round of cities and hotels, of winter mornings in empty cafés where the coffee machine hisses and a customer, leaning on the counter, talks to the barman who nods his head without listening. And that suitcase. He caught my eye and announced with a smile, "The most precious item is not in the suitcase but here." He gave a little pat to a leather briefcase that lay on the bench. "Two million dollars. That's the price they want for this pile of papers. The complete technical documentation for a combat helicopter. A marvel. I wonder how the engineers, who haven't been paid for months, can go on making machines of this quality. Beside it, the American Apaches are flying tin cans. But Russia remains true to herself. The engineers get nothing and the mafiosi who organize the leakage buy themselves villas in the Bahamas. This briefcase will return to Moscow tomorrow, but, you know, the craziest thing is that I don't know if the people at the Center will be really pleased to have it back. It's quite likely that the very person there who takes delivery of it was actually hoping to be paid a commission for selling it."

  Guessing what his work was now, I thought again of the trapeze artist without his safety net. I knew from experience that in extreme cases this total lack of protection could become a great advantage. Doubtless Shakh was playing it that way. The void that was all that lay between him and death freed him. He no longer had to take account of death, nor to master fear, nor to check parapets or fire exits in advance. He met people taking briefcases out of Russia crammed with secrets for sale, he passed himself off as an intermediary for an American arms manufacturer, negotiated, asked for time for an expert opinion. The sellers, he knew, were no longer agents of the old school, with their well-honed tactics and refinements like lethal umbrellas. These people thought little and killed quickly and often. It was his indifference to death that confounded them, they took this indifference as a guarantee of his all-American respectability. And he was successful because he surpassed all the degrees of risk imaginable.

  I remarked to him, ineptly and in absurdly moralizing tones, that this could not last. At that moment the waiter set down our cups and inadvertently stubbed his toe against the suitcase placed under the table. Shakh smiled and murmured at the man's retreating back, "He should have been more careful. This case is mildly radioactive. Yes, I've actually been transporting the components of a portable atomic bomb in it. I'm not joking. You can't imagine what they manage to smuggle out of Russia now. I sometimes tell myself they'll end up by dismantling the whole country, or what's left of it, and shipping it to the West. But this bomb is a delightful toy. Total weight sixty-four pounds, length twenty-seven inches. A dream for a petty dictator who wants to command a bit of respect."

  He took a drink, then continued in more somber tones, "You're right, one can't play the way I'm playing now for long. It can only work nine times out of ten. But, you see, if I still thought we could win I don't think it would even work once. Maybe the real game begins when you know you're going to lose. And we've lost already. This helicopter in my briefcase, it's still going to land in America, by another channel, a little bit later, and they'll have it all the same. Just as they'll have all the talented research scientists who are starving in Moscow. As one day they'll have the whole planet under their thumb. With Europe it's a done deal. Those are not separate nations anymore, they're hired help. If the Americans decide to bomb some transgressor nation tomorrow, with one voice all those lackeys will respond 'yes sir, no sir, three bags full, sir.' Of course they'll be allowed to keep their national folklore. You know, the way each girl in a brothel has her speciality. The French, true to tradition, will write essays about the war and lend their palaces for negotiations. The English will assume an air of dignity; the brothel madam always has one girl with a bit of class. And the Germans will be the zealous whore, trying to ensure her past errors are forgotten. The rest of Europe is a negligible quantity."

  "And Russia?"

  I asked with no ulterior motive and certainly with no desire to cut him off, but that was how Shakh must have taken it. He fell silent, then continued with an apologetic air, "Forgive me, I'm rambling. I've played the role of the American tycoon shopping for secrets so many times that I've ended up loathing him. A basic and visceral anti-Americanism, as the Parisian intellectuals would say. No, one shouldn't be a bad loser. You know I once told… our friend about Sorge's death. I expect she thought I was giving her a patriotic propaganda lesson, maybe I went about it the wrong way. But I quite simply wanted to say that in that last moment on the scaffold he, the loser, with the noose around his neck, achieved victory. Yes, by shouting out words people would find laughable today: 'Long live the Communist International!' Who can tell what'll carry more weight in the balance between good and evil: all the victories in the world or the raised fist of that agent everyone had betrayed."

  "And Russia?"

  I repeated it in a neutral voice, intentionally abstracted, leaving him the possibility of not replying. But his reply amazed me by its confessional tone.

  "Several times I've had the same dream: I'm crossing the Russian frontier by train. It's winter, white fields as far as the eye can see, and I know there will be nothing but these infinite snows right up to the end. It's twenty-two years now since I went back there. The last person I knew there, who's still alive, is our friend: you'll find her again in the end. The other Russians I have all known abroad. As for those who come here to sell me helicopters on paper, they're a new breed already. The ones who are going to run the show down here after us."

  He looked at his watch, leaned forward to pull out his suitcase, and, already poised to leave, remarked with a wink, "Since you're burning with curiosity to know what's in this case, I'll tell you the scenario. This evening two fine specimens of the new breed are coming to stay at the same hotel as me. They'll wait until it's night and break into my room. Not finding me there, they'll attack the suitcase. The vigilant French police will already have been alerted. The specimens will be deported to Moscow and met at Sheremetyevo airport. And there will be an attempt to plug the breach through which these combat helicopters and other toys dreamed up by our hungry engineers keep flying away."

  He ordered a taxi and, as we were waiting for it by the door, we heard the swirling torrent of news blaring out above the bar; a mixture of strikes, wars, elections, sport, deaths, goals scored. "Nothing amazes me any more in this world," said Shakh, staring at the gray, rain-soaked street. "But for the German aircraft bombing the Balkans to have had the same black crosses on their wings as they had at the time they were bombing Kiev and Leningrad does seem like a really badjoke."

  "It'll be easier to talk about her over there."

  I already knew what he was going to say. I had sensed it from his
voice on the telephone. Then from his face. From his silence in the car. At moments the pain of what I was going to learn still seemed remediable-as if all it needed was for us to do a U-turn, dash to an airport, land in a city where your presence, even if under threat, even if improbable, could be divined at one of those addresses I could completely reconstitute from memory: the street, the house, the traces left by our presence there several years before. A second later I realized that Shakh was going to tell me about a death (for me your name and your face were not yet associated with this death) that had happened some time ago.

  He talked about it as we walked along a country road between two rows of bare trees, their trunks blue with lichen, engulfed in brambles. Someone who did not know him would have thought he was weeping. From time to time he wiped from his cheeks the melted flakes of the snow that had surprised us on our journey. But he spoke little and in a toneless voice. When his words broke off I again began to notice the whistling of the wind and the tramp of our feet on the sodden path. The pain made the world less and less recognizable. I saw myself walking beside an old man miles from anywhere, among lackluster fields, a man I knew to be on the run, at the end of his tether, who was at home nowhere, a man who was telling me, as he mopped the trickles of water from his face, that he now knew almost the exact date of your execution. But this precision only served to make more improbable the death he was announcing and the need to connect this death with you, still so intensely alive the previous day and now separated from us, separated from this cold spring morning by a year and a half of nonexistence. The path itself, which ran beside an old stone wall, was marked by unreality, for, according to what Shakh had just said, we must picture you passing this way more than twenty years before, at the start of your life in the West. What was also unreal was the notion that this very spot could have helped him to break the news.

  He told me the date of your death and now it was no longer possible to avoid linking you with this loss. The world became empty, thunderous, hollow. A place where your name rang out repeatedly, like the echo of a vain incantation. By a hasty reflex in the face of death, in deference to the proprieties, the image of a coffin surrounded by wreaths and weeping faces flashed into my mind. Shakh's voice began again, as if to sweep away the vision of this funereal pomp. He spoke of a death preceded by interrogations, tortures, violations. And of burial in a mass grave, among anonymous bodies.

  At that moment we emerged into a vast courtyard in front of an old farmhouse converted into a restaurant. I walked behind Shakh like an automaton, crossed the yard from one end to the other, passed very close by the crowd gathered around a bridal pair. I saw the guests with a clarity that hurt my eyes: a woman's hand, with veined fingers clutching a little patent leather purse; the bride's bare forearms, her skin rosy and covered in goose pimples; the closed eye, as if in sleep, of the young man filming the ceremony with a little camera. Everything about this gathering seemed so necessary and so absurd, as it moved slowly toward the restaurant's open door. Everything had a point, both the old fingers gripping the black leather, and the youthful arms shivering beneath the icy drops. And nothing could have been stranger. Just for a moment, in a notion that verged on madness, I thought it might be possible to join them, very simply to tell them of my grief. A man emerged from the crowd and seemed to be urging us to go in more quickly, then realized his mistake and adopted an air of offended surprise. The path continued around the farm building and led back into the avenue where Shakh had left the car. As we passed, a large gray bird stirred among the branches and launched out obliquely in a low, irregular flight over the emptiness of the fields studded with raindrops. I suddenly thought that to plunge into this springtime void, to vanish into its indifference, would be a salutary step so easy to take. A body crumpled up behind the bushes, the temple brown with blood, the arm flung out by the recoil from the gun. Shakh stopped, looked in the same direction as myself and seemed to guess my thought. His voice had the firmness you adopt when addressing a man who has drunk too much and needs to be reprimanded. "If she had talked we would not be here. Neither you nor I." Still drowning in the torpor of the void, I felt I was closer to that body than to this man speaking harsh words to me, closer to that imagined suicide than to myself. He swung round, started walking again and said in a muted voice, "I have the name and address of the man who turned her in."

  The death of someone close to you affects not the future but that immediate past you realize you have been living through in the futile pettiness of daily routine. Sitting next to Shakh, I noticed on the back seat the briefcase which several weeks previously had contained the technical documentation, whose market value he had told me with a smile. I remembered the tone of our meetings, their deliberate lightheartedness, the triviality of the days that had preceded and followed them. My fruitless speeches for the defense during the course of those social gatherings, the fat man peddling his cinematic trash, the business with Shakh's suitcase, the suitcase-bait that had amused me like something from a spy novel. These snatches must now be measured against your absence, against the impossibility of finding you anywhere in the world, against the infinity of this absence.

  Nor, doubtless, was it lost on Shakh that death is this infinite unit of measurement. Speaking to me of the man who had betrayed you, he mentioned a droll detail but pulled himself up at once. "He lives in Destin, Florida," he was saying. "I hope he doesn't speak French: a name like that would be enough to make you superstitious." He broke off, regretting his tone, and finished drily, "His office, by the way, is in a place called Saint Petersburg. You should feel at home there."

  Your death did not affect the future, for this imagined time, I now realized, was compressed into a single, very simple moment I had carried in my mind for years: in the crowd at a station, in a passing throng of faces, I met your eyes. I had never pictured any other future for us beyond that.

  From now on there was also my vision of an inert body slumped behind the bare thickets next to a country road. I could see myself like this and the comfort of such a way out was especially tempting because of its practical ease. One evening the agreeable weight of the pistol was cradled in my palm for a long time. Next morning, as I consulted my watch, it occurred to me that in these days emptied of meaning, only my meeting with Shakh at noon would mark a time, a date, and give the rest of this life a semblance of necessity.

  He spoke. His voice conjured up the little town of Destin, Florida, then a man, a former Russian who called himself Val Vinner, an ordinary turned agent, whose only distinguishing feature was to have betrayed you. His profile was coming together like a jigsaw puzzle from which several pieces were still missing. Prudent, ambitious, very proud of his success. Working for American intelligence, he ran the network that dealt with the transfer of scientists from the East. He had managed to persuade his new employers that importing a scientist whose head is crammed with secrets was more profitable than sending agents to glean the same secrets on the spot. Listening to Shakh, I had the strange impression that the incomplete mosaic formed by Vinner's life was becoming my own life, that this still-blurred shape was giving me a future.

  "He travels all the time as a procurer, especially in Eastern Europe," explained Shakh, "but there's a chance that during the spring break he'll spend a few days with his family. You should go the day after tomorrow at the very latest. Try to see him right away. He's very suspicious. You'll say you've come on behalf of one of his best friends. I'll give you his name. This friend is currently in China on a mission, virtually incommunicado. That gives you at least four days. If he resolutely refuses all contact, mention his mistress in Warsaw. In America that can be persuasive-"

  He broke off and stared at me, screwing up his eyes slightly.

  "Unless you've decided quite simply to liquidate him?"

  This question dogged me during the night. I did not know what I would do when I met Val Vinner. Extort a confession from him, blackmail him and so force him to justify himself at length, p
itifully. See him tremble, humiliate him-or, as Shakh put it "quite simply" kill him? A pistol with a silencer, my armed hand concealed behind a map of Florida, the appearance of a lost tourist. Vinner, who is sitting in his car, agrees to help, opens the door, leans toward the map. "Yes, you're on the right road." Then he throws his head back and freezes in his seat. I lock the door and close it-he's sure to have smoked glass windows! During the course of that sleepless night there came a time when my brooding on all these methods of vengeance suddenly laid bare a hidden motive, the one I was trying to conceal from myself. In every night there comes a moment of great lucidity, of ruthless sincerity, from which one is generally protected by sleep. This time I had no protection. My thoughts were brutally exposed. There was nothing I could do against the admission that came back time and again, more and more clearly: I was going to America in the hope of hearing Vinner say that your death was not the long torment that Shakh had spoken of. That it was… an ordinary death. And that, in any case, I could not have prevented it, even if I had been at your side. That you had not suffered. That I was not answerable for this death to… To whom?

  I got up to interrupt the flood of these admissions. But their sharpness now acquired the force of a living voice: "You want to see this unfrocked spy in the hope that he'll grant you absolution. Like a good old-fashioned Orthodox priest."

  As the night was ending I dozed off into a sleep that retained the extreme clarity of that forced confession. But its lucidity turned into light and the edge of my grief into ice. The cold of a snowfall on a winter's day, of snow slowly chilling my brow. I saw again the wooden house you had often told me of, with its low front steps, whence one could see, beyond the fir branches, the shores of the frozen lake. After waking, I continued for a long time to experience the coolness of that day you had told me about, white and tranquil. In the aircraft, as I mentally fitted together all I knew about Vinner, playing over like chess moves all his possible reactions, I found myself from time to time far away in a fit of forgetfulness, on the shores of that lake, surrounded by the measured slumber of the snow-clad trees. At one moment, in a brief excess of grief, I thought I had grasped something which, expressed in words, faded and only told part of the truth I had sensed. "We could have lived together in that winter's day!" No, what I had just grasped went far beyond that imagined possibility. The moment I had glimpsed was shattered by words into shards of regret, remorse, hatred. I turned my thoughts once more, and with malicious joy, to the doses of mounting fear I should contrive to inject into my visits to Vinner. Then I accused myself of seeking exoneration, of secretly hoping for the account of a gentle death from him, even of wanting to kill him so as not to hear what he knew. Finally, to put an end to this verbal torture, I went back over my chess moves one by one.