Requiem for a Lost Empire (9 page)

   I went out just before sunrise, after you had gone to sleep. I picked up the bodies of the peacocks, skirted the fence, and dragged them toward the ruins of a house. As I retraced my footsteps I frequently had to stoop to pick up the feathers that, in the gray light of dawn, punctuated the path with their dimmed iridescence.

   Three days later it was already possible to cross the city again, negotiating here or there the right to pass through a tollgate consisting of two rusty barrels and a length of cable barring the route. The war was moving away from the capital, withdrawing into the interior of the country. At one crossroads, at a still furtive market, I was able to buy some vegetables and a wheaten pancake. When I returned I saw you from a long way off, beside the entrance that led to the garden. This was the one we used now, so as not to show ourselves in the street too much. You were seated on the threshold, your hands resting in your lap, your eyelids half closed. Close beside the door the water in the bucket you had just fetched shone violet, like the sunset sky. Seeing me at the end of the garden, you waved your hand slightly and I had this simultaneously clear and disconcerting thought: "There is the woman I love, waiting for me under a beautiful evening sky, at the door of this house, which we shall shortly be leaving forever, in this country where we nearly died." I repeated, "A woman I love," just to gauge how poor the word was. I longed to tell you what you were to me, what your silence and your patient calmness meant on the threshold of a house we should never see again.

   You got up, went in, taking the water with you. I had a strong physical sense of how you were dreaming of days in a past totally foreign to this city, to this life. And even when, later in the night, it seemed that all there was of you was just your ardent body, the element of remoteness was still there. As we embraced, my hand squeezed your forearm and my fingers rediscovered those four notches cut in the flesh, scars from a burst of gunfire long ago. They were deep grooves that felt as if they had been incised by the claws of some large beast letting slip its prey.

   We had to cross the country by car and leave it by sea. About sixty miles from the capital, on the far side of the uncertain line of the front, we drove off the road that was churned up by explosions. The mined area was ringed with bodies blown to smithereens, colorful piles of blankets and clothes and the carcasses of vehicles. The local who was escorting us spoke of "cunning" mines, that chose whom to kill. "Four women walked over it and nothing happened to them. Then a woman with a child came along and the mines woke up," he said, pointing to where the carnage happened.

   We knew that, thanks to a pneumatic device, the detonators on these mines were activated only after several sets of pressure, so as to allow a whole column of vehicles to move onto the minefield. A column of vehicles, or a crowd of women and children escaping from their burned village. The celebrated Italian mines.

   Perhaps it was on that day, on that road gutted by mines, that for the first time I thought about an end to the life we had been leading for several years. Resuming his seat in the vehicle, our guide confided in us, "The Russians deceived us. To begin with they promised paradise, all peoples are brothers and all that. Then we saw they didn't believe in it themselves. And now that they've gone forever we are killing one another for nothing."

   I glanced at you to see whether, like me, you had picked up that "forever." But you seemed not to be listening, your gaze fixed on the blue radiance of the sea that appeared to our right at each upward turn of the road. At that moment I had the impression I was betraying you. Like a soldier 'who, on learning of imminent surrender and armistice, deserts his post without warning those who are still fighting.

   This involuntary betrayal seemed to have no consequences. There continued to be cities that emptied at the sound of the first gunfire, as if at the drumming of the first spots of rain on a corrugated tin roof. (One day, as the westerners were hurrying off toward the aircraft in a rainstorm of great warm drops, their dread of the bullets beginning to reach the fringes of the airport was comically confused with their eagerness to protect themselves from the downpour.) There were ships maneuvering ponderously in bays that were too narrow and heading toward the open sea so slowly that we thought we could picture the rage of the passengers, glaring hard from the deck at the coastline already going up in flames, as if to push it away. We would stay. We knew that, after the fever of the fighting and the looting, the conquerors would be in need of diplomatic recognition, money, arms. At such times one could obtain results within a few weeks that in normal times would take years of work. The only difficulty was staying alive.

   Nothing changed. Least of all the impression that dogged us in our rapid transits from Europe to Africa. Everything that in the North was words, discreet consultations, slow approaches to a key person, turned in the South into cries of pain, the whistling of bullets and bitter hand-to-hand fighting, as if a horrible, unbridled process of translation had become established between these two continents.

   And yet it was in Africa that one day I again felt as if I were hiding from you what I could perceive more and more clearly: the end.

   Two months after the conclusion of hostilities they arrived to take charge of the network following our departure. We were struck by their youth, like a reminder of ourselves several years previously, at the time of our first meeting in Berlin. What touched us as well was that they had cheerfully told us their actual first names, which had the comic assonance of the masculine and feminine variants: Yuri and Yulia. We were not used to confidences of this type, our own lives being confined to our borrowed identities. At the moment of going away you had a preoccupied air, like a mother anxious to forget nothing when she leaves the children on their own. They were to renew contact with us in Milan three months later. They did not come. We spent four days waiting for them. The Center spoke of a canceled mission. Shakh, whom I managed to contact in the United States, was perplexed, like a chess player robbed of a pawn and on the verge of discovering he has been cheated. He gave us the order to return to Africa. We found our old house without any trace of a forced departure or search. The tranquillity of the rooms had the sly alertness of a trap. The Center's response was as muddled as before. What this opacity signaled was no longer just a simple setback but a more wide-ranging collapse. An end. I decided to talk to you about this, then changed my mind. Out of cowardice, no doubt. Once again I felt I inhabited the skin of that soldier who, in the furthest outpost of an empire, is the first to learn the news of defeat and makes his escape without warning the last remaining fighters. Moreover, we knew what prison and torture could mean in countries like this in wartime. Especially for a woman. Yulia and Yuri…

   The resumption of fighting dispelled these feelings of remorse in us. The city was bombed, we left the house and spent a long inconclusive day in one of the big hotels in the capital, abandoned by the westerners, looted, refurbished during the months of truce, and once more derelict. We were still hoping we could remain in the city. The bedroom had been made up a few days previously and it was eerie to see the bed with the sheets straightened and turned down by a professional hand, the little "do not disturb" card on the door and to know that the walls of the corridor were spattered with blood in several places and that in the foyer on the floor below prisoners had been tortured and raped. Now the hotel stood empty and through the window at the end of the corridor one could see the sea, dominated by the gray, asymmetrical shape of an American aircraft carrier. Its vast bulk-it looked as if it had been carved out of a monstrous bluish muscle-seemed to be blocking all movement of waves upon a flattened, slack sea.

   One section of the troops defending the city had been driven back toward the coast, the soldiers took up a position on the first floor of the hotel, the impending victors surrounded the building, machine-gunning the windows in the expectation that the smoke would drive the besieged men out into a hail of bullets. We had time to cross the hotel garden, to skirt its little marina, and to reach the edge of the water. We knew that a boat would be evacuating the last of our military instructors. Out of breath, we stopped in the middle of the little beach where you could still see rows of white plastic beach chairs. And at that moment time was shattered, went into turmoil- a sequence of mad dashes and complete standstills. The sand ensnared our footsteps, as in a bad dream where running is impossible. The military vehicle that pulled out from beside the hotel building grew rapidly larger, bearing down on us, and already the first bullets were riddling the hulls of the dinghies upended on the sand. My shout was cut short and had no effect on you. You remained standing, your hand raised in a gesture of greeting that seemed to me absurd. The magazine slithered in my grasp like a piece of wet soap. As I fired I thought I was aiming at the vehicle's scowling face-the evil grin of the radiator grille and the dull eyes of the headlights.

   Dazed by my fear, I saw the shadow before I heard the noise. For a moment it blotted out the sun above my hiding place behind the boats. I raised my head. Its outline was very easy to recognize: an Mi-24, the combat helicopter used by the empire on all continents. I detected the movement of its two guns-and almost immediately, in the area of the vehicle that was now only a few dozen yards away, there was a ball of fire from the explosion. The machine landed, covering us with a whirlwind of sand and uprooting the straw parasols around the hotel swimming pool. Its steely ponderousness contrasted jarringly with this little tropical tourist paradise. As I climbed in, I saw on its fuselage the traces of direct hits, some hidden under a layer of gray-green paint, other, more recent ones showed a glint of bare metal. The blast from the takeoff flung the parasols around, likewise a blue sheet beside the pool, and outside the window the beach, the sea, the hotel building, which was already engulfed in smoke, were rapidly thrust back. I tried not to think about the people inside, surrounded and still fighting.

   On the deck of the ship where we landed it was the red flag of the empire that caught our eye. And also the tired paint covering its contours of steel. In heading for clear water, the ship was obliged to cross the inner sea marked off from the boundless ocean by the presence of the American aircraft carrier. This vast yet closed-in expanse was defined by the escort frigates. We advanced slowly, as if feeling our way, although in brilliant light. On our left the aircraft carrier grew larger, dominated us, flattened us on the surface of the water. It seemed to be ignoring us. A plane took off, forcing us to cover our ears, another landed on the deck, mastering its terrible energy in a few seconds. Simply by their positioning the escort vessels indicated the fine dotted line of the course we were authorized to take.

   "It's like being on the battleship Potemkin confronting the government squadron," you said, your eyes laughing in a face smudged with black.

   That may have been the last time in our lives I saw you smile.

   I saw Shakh a month later in a big German city where everything was ready for the Christmas holiday. He entrusted some documents to me that I was to pass on to a contact agent, made jokes about the change in climate that I must have noticed and about the very German seriousness of the holiday preparations. I guessed what a man of his age might feel in the midst of the festive animation in this city, in this country where, as a young man, he had fought in the war. He fell silent, sunk in that past, then returned to the memory that prevailed over all others and talked again about the Rosenbergs. I noticed now that the lines of his face had become more angular and that his shoulders remained slightly raised, as if by a self-imposed physical discipline. Listening to him, I did not say to myself, "He's rambling…" but rather, "His is a totally different generation! One that can't see, or doesn't want to see, that we've moved into a new age." What was most surprising was that, in spite of myself, I saw you as belonging to the same generation, even though Shakh could have been your father. Age in years had nothing to do with it. Yours was the generation who… I suddenly grasped it with perfect clarity: a generation who did not believe it was the end. The end of the empire, the end of its history. And that this history and the men of this history would be forgotten.

   "When they were executed," Shakh was saying, "I made a naive vow, I was naive, like all believers. Yes, I vowed to fight on until a monument had been erected to them, a real one, a big one at the very heart of New York City. But they haven't done it, not even in Moscow."

   When he had gone I spent a long time roaming through the streets beneath a kind of snow, little gray stinging granules. Toward evening the weather became milder and real snowflakes fluttered down in the glow from the street lamps. Children congregated in front of shop windows in which mechanical Santa Clauses ceaselessly drew beribboned gifts out of their sacks. In the cathedral, in a more dignified and static replica of this, the three kings around the crib offered their presents, too. And the festive atmosphere was even in evidence in the street where there were near-naked young women smiling at the passersby from inside some of the wide bay windows on the first floor. Beside the chair on which each woman displayed herself, sometimes with open thighs, sometimes kneeling on the seat to show off curved buttocks, there was a little Christmas tree glittering with a string of flashing fairy lights. Before settling down in the bar where the agent was to find me, I plunged in among wooden booths, a noisy, festively decorated village that occupied the whole cathedral square. The warmth of the braziers was cut into by waves of cold, the voices, warmed with alcohol, lost their Germanic harshness, and for me a glass of mulled wine had the taste of an existence quite different from mine, yet very close at hand. At the bar, I reflected on this nearness as I became aware from a clock above the counter of the increasingly obvious lateness of the man I was to meet. A time came when the delay was such that, instead of the person expected, other individuals might well accost me, show me their cards, ask me to follow them. Such delays were generally the result of a series of setbacks. Mentally I pursued the series to its logical conclusion: the discovery of the two diskettes that Shakh had passed on to me, arrest, interrogation, a long prison sentence that I would have to serve somewhere in this country. It suddenly seemed to me so simple to get up, walk out into this brightly lit city, and lose myself in the evening crowd, in its wooden villages decorated with fir branches. My current identity, my papers, made me humdrum, invisible. I could have crossed the increasingly open frontiers of this new old Europe, settled down either here or elsewhere. The memory, already very remote, of my first day in the Western World came back to me: Berlin, the private showing, and the stamp dealer who had for several hours, without knowing it, entered our games of espionage. Entered them and left them again forever. I should imitate him. Like him, I had a profession. I could close this parenthesis and return to it. Our lives, after all, are wholly made up of parentheses. The art is knowing how to close them at the right moment.