Requiem for a Lost Empire

by Andrei Makine

  I had stood up when I noticed that the sand was beginning to be colored by the first glow of the morning. The night, still this negative that sheltered me, was going to evolve into the sunlit shades of blue of a day by the sea. It would fill with tanned bodies and shouts, imprint itself as a happy holiday snapshot. I had hurried to extricate myself from this snapshot in the making, gone up onto the dune (from the top of it, in the distance, one could see the first houses and the terrace of the café where Vinner was due to join me in two and a half hours' time), and taken my place on this bench, sheltered from the wind that was already blowing the tops off the waves.

  The sun-drenched silence of the place, sheltered by the dune and, behind it, the scrub, filtered out the sounds one by one: now a shout coming from the beach, now a car passing beyond the trees. These sounds seemed to come from very far away, isolated by distance, like signals from an alien world. This world, another holiday morning, was waking up all around me, routinely genial in its ways, making my presence here more and more incongruous. I was a man who had come from a forgotten age to demand satisfaction from a vacationer who, but for my arrival, would have been playing with his two children, making sandcastles or catching shellfish. One could hear voices more frequently and more distinctly, carried up from the beach by the wind. The hum of vehicles was becoming more continuous. There was a tone of triumphal tranquillity in the rhythm with which the sounds of the day were gradually coming together. I was a ghost whose presence could make absolutely no difference to it.

  But a brief jolt in these cadences drew me out of my drowsiness. The sound of a car stopping and driving off again at full tilt. It all happens so quickly that I am not aware in what order the noises come. "Someone's opened a bottle of champagne," suggests one thought numbed by the sun. But before this dull pop, suddenly matched by a burning pain in my shoulder, before this pain there is a leap: two adolescent boys come running down the dune, preceded by their kite which, buffeted by the wind, struggles on the slope, climbs again, then hurtles straight at me. I lean to avoid it. It tangles me up in its nylon threads. It is at this moment that someone opens a bottle of champagne behind the trees. The boys rush toward me, yelling apologies, and disentangle me. Their "sorry" is said in tones of: "Gee, we're sorry, but you'd have to be a total idiot to be sitting on that bench. It's bad enough with all those people getting in our way on the beach." During their maneuvering I have time to reconstruct the sequence of noises. First the appearance of the kite, grazing my head. The man who just fired at me (with a silencer: the "champagne"), aiming from his car that had stopped behind the trees, was put off his aim by the appearance of the boys. He did not fire a second shot. A professional would have had to do it, even if it meant bringing down a couple of kite flyers. I slip my hand under the beach towel around my neck. Fingers have a memory of old gestures on the bodies of the wounded: a flesh wound, nothing more, already a lot of blood. Mustn't frighten the children. They scramble off up the dune. The wings of their kite flap in the wind. They have noticed nothing.

  At the hospital reception desk it took me quite a long time to prove I was creditworthy. The receptionist explained to me in detail what type of medical insurance I needed in order to be admitted. The towel on my shoulder was no longer holding the blood and this was trickling down my arm. I managed to get her to accept my credit card. She telephoned a superior for reassurance. On the walls I looked at the photos showing off the most high-performance equipment the hospital had at its disposal. While she was talking the receptionist was wiping my card with a Kleenex tissue to remove the bloodstains, then she wiped her fingers with a swab soaked in alcohol.

  In the corridor where they made me wait I came upon a whole row of young cooks in their white uniforms, some of them with their hats on their heads. Each of them, all in identical postures, was holding an injured hand wrapped in an emergency bandage. They looked as if they were the victims of a mad killer bent on exterminating all kitchen staff. Tiredness at first stopped me realizing that these were simply accidents at work. Hundreds of restaurants along the coast, knives that cut a finger at the same time as a slice of steak. As I awaited my turn I thought again about Vinner's stinginess in hiring a killer who was not really professional, a cheap contract for the easy prey that I was. I recalled the receptionist explaining to me with faultless logic why I had no right to medical attention. This whole world, with its triumphal air, seemed to me quite simply pathetic, like an account book someone had tried to brighten up with a few picturesque seaside views.

  The nurse who came to fetch me thought I had lost consciousness. I was sitting motionless, my eyes closed, the back of my neck against the wall. In the questionnaire the receptionist had told me to fill in I had just discovered, at the very bottom, this form of words: "Person to contact in case of emergency" I had replied to all the other questions and I was getting ready to put a name beside this one… The name of a relative, of a friend. I thought of you. Of Shakh. In a flash of memory I pictured a white-haired woman at the heart of the steppe… I realized that you were the only people whose names I could have written on this line in the questionnaire. The only ones among whom I still felt alive.

  That night at the hospital I took out of my overnight bag the folder with the sheaf of paper Vinner had handed to me. Then the English newspaper; the photo of Shakh, the caption: "One of the barons of the nuclear network." That photo, that stupid caption. There would be no other record of his life.

  Opening the folder, I came upon a snapshot Vinner must have slipped in as bait. I studied it, recognized it. Long ago, after more than three years of our life abroad, I was spending two weeks with you in Russia. It was in February, the abundance of light already heralded the spring. Intoxicated by these days of sunshine, for a moment we believed we could live a life like other people, quietly accumulating memories, letters, photos. I had bought a camera and, to try it out, I had taken a first test shot, aiming the lens low. That had produced this strange photo: the ground covered in snow, a section of an old wooden fence, two shadows on the white surface, dazzling in the sunlight. We did not keep the photos taken during those two weeks. In the event of a search they could have betrayed us. Only this shot, with no identifying marks and no date, had come with us on our travels (you sometimes used it as a bookmark), indecipherable to other people.

  "No other record of her life." I silenced this thought before having really formulated it. Too late, for the truth was there, unstoppable. Soon everything would be reduced to that winter snapshot, from which I alone could still call to mind your features, picture one of the days of your life.

  My own disappearance, which for Vinner was only a question of organization, suddenly appeared in quite a different light from these cloak-and-dagger games. Dumbfounded, I saw myself as the last person who could speak about you, tell your real name, give you an existence among the living, if only through the ludicrous means of recollecting the past.

  Feverishly I set about seeking for some glimpses of our old life, glimpses of cities, of skies, moments of joy. They surfaced and quickly disintegrated under the touch of memory. I needed a more solid fact, a particle of you whose evidence would be beyond dispute. A certificate of civic status almost, I thought, with stupidly administrative but irrefutable information on it, like place and date of birth.

  Place and date of birth… I repeated these details that must surely hold your life back from the brink of oblivion, and recalled the day when I had learned them. A rainy day in Germany, on a journey that had exasperated me because of its lack of objective, when suddenly this objective arose. The story you told me.

  It was several months before the end of the nomadic life that had been ours for so many years. You mentioned a town to me in what, until recently, had been East Germany and we set off, soon crossing the abolished frontier. The contrast was still visible: "A tourniquet has come off," I said to myself, "and the benefits of the West will now flow into the limb constricted for so long. The benefits or maybe the poison. Both
, probably." We could already observe the start of this transfusion process. Roads were beginning to be mended, housefronts were being cleaned. But the rain that day was eliding the changes under the gray light of autumn, mingling the two Germanies with the same question: "How can they live in these dark, damp little towns that go to sleep at six o'clock in the evening?" In one street a window facing out onto a dirty, noisy crossroads gave me a glimpse of a very white lace curtain, a flowering plant, a crowd of little china vases and figurines-all of it only three yards away from the huge trucks thundering up a viaduct. And further on, in the low doorway to a tavern, men were gathered in folk costumes and their laughter mingled with the sounds of merry, strident music.

  This trip toward the east was becoming more and more painful to me. Before we set off you had vaguely explained to me that we had a contact to pick up in one of these towns I was in a hurry to drive through. Their ugliness and the poverty of the bare forests made the purpose of our trip uncertain in advance, held in suspension in the glaucous air of this rainy day. Absurd, like all our work now, I thought, recalling my first visit to Berlin, then still divided by the Wall. Your silence, the silence of someone who knows where she is going, weighed on me. It was when I saw the lace curtains and heard the din of the folk music that I began to speak, with assumed irony.

  "I know I've become suspect in your eyes and Shakh's. Heavens above! I've dared to question the value of our heroic mission. But, even as I crumble under your mistrust, I think I have a right to know what we're doing in this moldy little hole."

  My tone was simply a fresh attempt to provoke a real explanation, to make you voice the doubts I sensed in you. You looked at me as if you did not understand and all you answered was, "I don't know." Then, since I looked nonplussed, rousing yourself from your reverie, you added, "We're looking for the exact place where I was born. It can't be far away. It could be on the road out of this village. They've done a lot of building since then. I thought you might be interested. And as we had three hours to spare… It must be here. Under those warehouses. A pretty place to be born. Shall we walk a bit?"

  The outskirts of a town, corrugated tin warehouses, a terrain of withered grass where I parked the car. We took a few steps in driving rain and, as we studied the gray fields beyond the sheds, you told me about those long hours of sunlight, one fine day in March 1945.

  It had happened on that same road, narrower in those days and broken up by tank tracks. The warm steam rising from the fields in the dazzling sun mingled with the brief gusts coming from the patches of snow piled up in the shadow of the bushes. The place was empty: the Germans had withdrawn during the night, the main body of Russian troops was held up by fighting farther north and would only appear on this road toward evening. For the moment all one could see was these two clouds of dust, two groups of civilians advancing painfully toward one another. One, stretched out into a faltering line of some twenty people, was traveling toward the west. The other, more compact and less stricken with weariness, was walking toward the east. The first, survivors of a camp liquidated at the approach of the Russians, had been taken before dawn to a railroad station, from which they were to be sent farther west into the depths of the country. Halfway there, their guards had learned that the station was already under enemy attack. They had abandoned their prisoners and made themselves scarce. The prisoners had not altered the direction of their walk, they had simply slowed their pace. The others, those who were going toward the east, young women and a few adolescent boys, were members of the labor force rounded up by the Germans from the occupied Soviet territories and sent to Germany. Guessing the outcome of the war, the peasants, for whom these young people had been working, had got rid of their serfs, and were themselves fleeing west before the Russian offensive. One of the women was pregnant. Her master had stooped to inseminate an inferior race. She 'walked along, wailing continuously, her fingers joined beneath her enormous belly.

  The two groups drew closer to one another, halted near the crossroads, stared at one another in silence. Only a few minutes earlier the young women walking east had been convinced they had touched the extreme limits of misery: several days on the road without food, bitter cold at night, a burst of gunfire that morning from a German truck. Now no moaning could be heard in their group any longer. The pregnant woman, too, had fallen silent, leaning against the slatted side of an abandoned trailer. They stared in silence and simply had no conception of what they were seeing. The beings in front of them could not be recognized according to conventional attributes: Russians or Germans, men or women, living or dead. They were beyond such differences. You could meet their eyes only for as long as it took to perceive in them, as it were, the first steps of a staircase descending into darkness, although these eyes contained it in its entirety, down to the very depths. One who was lagging behind the line of prisoners had just fallen. He was carrying a strange wooden box solidly fixed to his forearm.

  The young women stare and do not understand.

  These prisoners are scientific material. That is why they have been spared. There are those among them whose faces are burned with liquid phosphorus: methods of treating the effects of incendiary bombs were being studied. The women have been burned by X rays: experiments in sterilization. Some prisoners are infected with typhus. Others wear striped garments that conceal experimental amputations. The medical case history of each one corresponds to the subject of a thesis, which the people conducting the experiments had counted on having time to complete. The man who has just fallen over is burdened by a box attached to his forearm filled with malarial mosquitoes. The Reich might have been called upon to fight the enemy in infested areas.

  The young women observe them, meet their eyes, catch sight of the first steps of that staircase descending into black night and turn their gaze away like children who will only venture a little way down a staircase into a cellar.

  On a road at right angles, coming from the north, a long dusty streak appears: a company sent on reconnaissance. A light armored car and a four-wheel-drive, soldiers already jumping down and running toward the crowd gathered at the crossroads. The young women begin weeping, laughing, embracing the soldiers. The prisoners are silent, still, absent.

  The child will be born under the spring sunshine on a great canvas cape, which the officer spreads out beside the road. The cord will be cut by a bayonet rinsed in alcohol, a blade that has been plunged so many times into men's entrails. When the young mother ceases crying out there will be a moment of silence poised in the lightness of the spring sky, in the scent of the earth warmed by the sun, in the coolness of the last snows. They will all gather round the square of canvas: the young bondwomen, the prisoners, the soldiers.

  This moment will endure, set apart from human time, apart from the war, beyond death. There is still no one in that sun-drenched space to give history lessons, to do the accountancy for the suffering, to judge who is more worthy of compassion than the others.

  There will be these young women who, on returning to their country, will be regarded as traitors until the day they die. These soldiers who on the following day will continue on their road to Berlin and half of whom will not see the end of the war. These prisoners, who will soon be dragooned into the ranks of the millions of anonymous victims.

  But at this moment there is only silence around the mother and her child, wrapped in a broad, clean shirt, which the officer has taken out of his knapsack. Where the roads cross there is this prisoner lying dead on the verge, with a box on his forearm in which mosquitoes buzz about, sucking the blood of the lifeless body. There is this woman with cropped hair and huge eyes in a transparent face, she who has helped the mother and who now raises her eyes toward the others, eyes in which they can see, as it were, a slow return from the pit of darkness. There is the child's first cry.