Requiem for a Lost Empire (30 page)

   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 The place was empty: the Germans had withdrawn during the night, the main body of Russian troops was held up by fighting farther north and would only appear on this road toward evening.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.

   We drove back through the little German town, traveling through it in the opposite direction: the warehouses, the tavern, the viaduct, the window with lace curtains. Watching the procession of housefronts washed out by the rain, you murmured softly and without emotion: "I quite likely have cousins who live in these parts. Maybe even my father. The world is such a small place."

   On that return journey you told me about the house in the north of Russia where you spent the first years of your childhood. About the clock with its weights and the chain that your mother often rewound, for fear that the knot in it should stop the march of time. Your mother had died when you were three and a half. Your only memory of her was of that winter's day with the flakes dreamily swirling, the forest slumbering beneath the snow and the lake no one dared to cross, on ice that was still too thin, having just begun to spread over the water's brown surface. And, in the midst of this calm, a faint anxiety lest that knot in the chain might at any moment interrupt the passage of the snowy hours.

   I wrote down your name and the name of the German town near which you were born. And I realized that the sheet of paper came from the bunch Vinner had given me. Never before had the traces of our past seemed to me so derisory and fleeting. I remembered how, several years previously, in talking about our past, you had said to me, in tones that seemed wistful about the elusiveness of all testimonies: "It must be possible to tell the truth one day…" The truth was there on that sheet of paper. A message destined for no one, with no hope of convincing anyone. Like all the ghosts we carried within ourselves. The soldier in front of the lines of barbed wire, his hand raised to his face, smashed by a splinter from a grenade. The couple in their mountain refuge surrounded by armed men.

   The shuffling feet slipped along the corridor, and stopped outside my door (a nurse? someone sent by Vinner? such anxious thoughts would be inextinguishable until death, thanks to a survival reflex). This reminded me uselessly of the brevity of my reprieve. Strangely enough, this period of time under threat now seemed very long, almost infinite. Sufficient for telling the truth that needed no other addressee than you, one that would be told without my needing to argue a case, offer justification, convince. It was very simple, independent of words, of the time that was left for me to live, of what others might think of it. This truth corresponded to a saying I had heard long ago, whose haughty strength and humility had always appealed to me: "I have not been called upon to make you believe, but to tell you." I did not think this truth, I saw it.

   I saw the soldier who had just fallen, a hand reaching out toward his smashed face. I saw him not at the moment of his death but in the early light of a morning that no longer belonged to his life but was still his life, the very sense of his life. I saw him sitting beside other soldiers on the benches of an army truck. Their eyes watched the road through the open tarpaulin at the rear. They were silent. Their faces were serious and as if illuminated by a great pain finally overcome. Their tunics, bleached by the sunlight, bore no decorations, but at chest height retained the darker traces left by medals that had been removed. The truck passed through the still-sleeping suburbs of a great city, stopped in a street shrouded in half-light. The soldier jumped to the ground, saluted his comrades, followed them with his gaze as far as the corner. Adjusting the knapsack on his shoulder, he walked in through the entrance to a building. In the courtyard, in that stone well with echoing walls, he raised his head: a tree that seemed to be the only thing awake at the dawning of this day and, above its branches with their pale foliage, a window at which a lamp was shining.

   The truth of the soldier's return was undemonstrable, but for me it had the force of a life-and-death wager. If it made no sense nothing made sense any more.

   I also saw, within me and very remote from me, the man and the woman standing motionless in the night on the bank of a watercourse. The outlines of the mountains were incised into the air's resonant transparency. The current of the stream carried the stars along, thrust them into the shadow of the rocks, into shelter from the waves. The man turned, looked for a long time at the half-open door of a wooden house, at the ruddy glow from a fire dying down between the heavy stones of the hearth and the tall, straight flame from the candle on a fragment of rock in the middle of the room.

   It was not a memory or a moment lived through. I simply knew that one day it would be so, that it already was so, that this couple were already living in the silence of that night.

   You know, I shall have to go soon. But before leaving I shall have enough time to tell you what is essential. The winter's day I can see, which one part of me is beginning to inhabit. A muted day, traversed by slowly eddying flakes. A time will come when everything is like that moment in winter. You will appear amid the snowbound sleep of the trees, on the shore of a frozen lake. And you will begin walking on the still-fragile ice; every step you take will be deep pain and joy for me. You will walk toward me, letting me recognize you at every step. As you draw closer you will show me, in the hollow of your hand, a fistful of berries, the very last of them, found beneath the snow. Bitter and frozen. The icy steps on the wooden stairway will give off a crunching sound that I have not heard for an eternity. In the house I shall remove the chain from the weight-driven clock so as to undo the knot. But we shall no longer have any need of its hours.