Requiem for a Lost Empire

by Andrei Makine

  Curiously enough, it was thanks to a man who adored warfare that I was able to keep this salutary incomprehension intact.

  A professional instructor, short, robust, and impeccably turned out in his elite mercenary's uniform, he introduced soldiers to new weapons and engines of war, explained how to handle them, compared characteristics. The room in which he gave his classes was separated from our operating theater by a fairly thin wall. His voice, in my opinion, could have cut through the roar of a whole column of tanks. I heard every word.

  "This assault rifle has a tremendous rate of fire: seven hundred and twenty rounds a minute! It can easily be dismantled into six components and, as it's very light, you can fire it from a vehicle. And there are cartridge clips that take fifty rounds… This is a guided missile. It carries three warheads with an explosive charge that detonates after entering the target… With this caliber you can use armor-piercing rounds, explosive rounds, or even incendiary rounds."

  His voice was only interrupted by the much softer one of the interpreter and occasionally by questions from the soldiers. I ended up detesting his tone, which tried to be authoritative and informal at the same time.

  "Now look, my friend, if you don't tighten this fixing screw in properly, you'll be dead with the first shot…"

  It was as if, still in theory, he were forecasting the results that would soon turn up on our operating table, in the form of human flesh lacerated by all these brilliant explosive, incendiary, and armor-piercing devices. Thus it was that I formed a part of a single chain of death, linking the politicians who decided on the wars, this gallant instructor who provided training, and the soldiers who would die or be stretched out naked beneath our busy gloved hands. And I did not have the classic humanitarian's feeble excuse, for I was often healing people just to put them straight back into the chain.

  The notion of bursting into the lecture room and slitting this military man's throat in front of his listeners often occurred to me. It was a scene of rebellion from a movie about colonial wars, I would tell myself at once, for I perceived that the routines and lazy compromises of real life would gradually reconcile me to the voice on the other side of the wall.

  "Now this is what you might call a flying tank… The cockpit has a titanium shield… It can be used both for daytime and night fighting."

  So there I was, listening to him with my former anger gone. Like all talented speakers, he had a favorite topic. It was combat helicopters. He had flown several models before becoming an instructor. On this subject he waxed poetic. Through repeating the same tale to generations of soldiers, he had ended up creating a whole mythology in which he traced the birth of the helicopter, its teething troubles, the daring exploits of its youth, and, above all, the technical feats of recent times. This fabulous machine transported trucks, destroyed tanks, was loaded with equipment that protected it against missiles. I had the feeling that at any moment the voice on the other side of the wall might break into metric verse.

  "The Americans thought they had us beaten with their Stinger, but they don't have a prayer in hell. We're installing infrared jammers and decoy-projectors there, at the ends of the blades. And that's not all! Even if a piece of shrapnel punctures the fuel tank, no need to panic: from now on the tanks are self-sealing! And even if the copter goes into free fall, you're still okay. The seats will withstand a fall rate of a hundred and twenty feet per second. Just think: a hundred and twenty feet per second! And what's more, the self-detonating bolts blow off the doors, a moment later a chute inflates, and you can bail out without being carved up by the prop."

  There was a moment halfway through this epic poem where the officer-instructor's sincerity became beyond doubt. I ended up learning this episode by heart: at the height of the Yom Kippur War, in a sky riven by chopper blades, a helicopter from the Syrian army (a Soviet Mi-8 whose pilot had been trained by the instructor himself) was confronted by an Israeli Super-Frelon. And it was the very first dogfight between helicopters in human history! No one had ever foreseen that this machine could attack one of its own kind. With unprecedented perfidy the Israeli soldier opened wide the side door, aimed a machine gun, and riddled the Syrian helicopter. It crashed in front of the instructor's very eyes… When describing this battle the instructor sometimes said "Jewish," sometimes "Israeli": in his mouth the latter term became a kind of superlative of the first, to indicate the degree of spite and malignancy. However, like a true poet, he acknowledged the value of this evil genius, without whom History might have marked time and possibly lost one of its finest pages.

  The voice booming out on the other side of the wall, which exasperated me so much to begin with, was on the point of lulling me into amused indifference when suddenly I got to the heart of its secret. It was from poets like this that wars derived their effectiveness and staying power. This pure passion, this believer's enthusiasm, was essential: no geopolitical strategies were a substitute for it.

  The military lectures that I listened to, bent over the bodies of patients undergoing operations, drove me to reflect, in a way that was simultaneously very direct and somewhat oblique, on the stunning poverty of my experiences with the women I had met and believed I was in love with. Mentally I made facetious comparisons between the technical ingenuity of the weapons whose praises were sung by the instructor (all those self-sealing fuel tanks and decoy-projectors) and the rudimentary mechanics of my own love affairs. I was not yet thirty at the time and my cynicism sometimes had a thin skin. "I've had what I chose to take from those women," I told myself, though not believing it. "What they wanted to give me… All we could have expected from affairs like that…" As I worked away at my phrase-making, I was striving to compete with the perfection of those machines, at least through my combinations of words.

  "Curiosity!" All at once the word, long sensed subconsciously, suddenly rang harshly true. The woman who had returned to Moscow three days earlier had been curious about me. And this curiosity had led us into an intense affair in which we played our parts to perfection from start to finish, without any risk of love. Like a deep-sea diver she sounded me out with her body, explored the man who had intrigued her, storing up memories, like those of an exotic country seen for the first time. On the last night before her departure she had not come to me, she had "too many suitcases to pack." I had a sneaking suspicion that already I missed her. But with no great effort of cynicism I contrived to reduce this sense of loss to one for the tactile softness of her breasts, the angle of her parted knees, the rhythmic breathing of her pleasure.

  "What the instructor would call technical features," I now thought, recalling that the women who had preceded her (one had worked at the embassy, the other I'd met in Moscow…) had also had the same curiosity, like women explorers. The very distant memory returned that had pursued me since childhood: the birthday party with a family who are generous enough to invite a young, shaven-headed barbarian to join them, two little girls studying me with curiosity, taking minute soundings. Their parents have doubtless warned them that this would not be a child like the others, one without a family, without a home of his own, and who has very likely never tasted jam. Sometimes all these "withouts" seem to the two fair-haired sisters like inconceivable privations, sometimes like a vague promise of freedom. They observe me with the feigned nonchalance of a zoologist walking around an animal with his head in the air, so as not to frighten it, while scrutinizing its every movement out of the corner of his eye.

  I translated the curiosity of those little girls into the language of women. I was still the same strange beast who did not behave like the others, that is to say did not save up the pay he earned in all those countries at war, did not aspire to a career, had no plans. For women this life "without" held the promise, now clear, of an affair without the burden of love, of a swift zoological exploration that would have no sequel in their main lives. With somewhat acid irony I told myself that, when it came down to it, I was very like that instructor bellowing away on the other side of t
he wall ("Four smoke grenade projectors are placed at the front of the vehicle, here and here…") who, apart from the uniform that was never creased, had nothing in his one and only suitcase other than an old suit and a pair of shoes from another era.

  It may well have been her youth or her lack of experience (she was just twenty-two and found herself abroad for the first time) that had led me to emerge from my zoological carapace. An interpreter at the embassy in Aden, she had a touch of sunstroke one day, they brought her to us at the hospital. I felt I could be of service, I already knew the Yemen well and, moreover, her vulnerability gave me a pleasant sense of being old and protective. It was an impression that felt like affection. And in making love her body still had the same resigned and touching frailty as on the day of her sunstroke. I came to hope that this attachment might continue, even though at the start of the civil war the embassy was leaving. "We'll meet again in Moscow," I told myself. "It's really time I settled down." It was the first occasion in my life that such thoughts had occurred to me.

  She left on one of the first planes to evacuate the embassy personnel and volunteer workers. What shocked me most was not her refusal to meet me again in Moscow but rather the sudden discovery that I dreaded such a refusal, a dread several days old.

  "It would be diplomatically delicate," she pronounced, smiling, but with an air of firmness that already transported her into a future where I did not exist.

  "Delicate as regards your fiance?" I asked, in a poor imitation of her irony.

  "It's more complicated than that."

  She intercepted my retort ("What could be more complicated than a fiancé?") by asking me to help her down with her suitcases. At the bus I saw her as she would be on arrival: a suit (the days in Moscow would still be cool), dress shoes in place of her sandals, the air of a young woman who has worked abroad, with all that this implied in a country it was difficult to leave in those days. I racked my brains for a polite but wounding remark that might, if only for a second, have rendered her weak, childish, surprised once more-the way I had loved her and dreaded losing her. Sitting by the window she was already eyeing me in a quite detached way, observing my shoes, gray with dust. "A man I made love with," she must have said to herself, and no doubt she experienced the moment of pity that grips us at the sight of a part of ourselves preserved in the body of someone who will henceforth be a stranger to us.

  "I'll write you…"

  "But…"

  We spoke that "but" in unison, she, straightening up in her seat, I, dodging the dust thrown up by the bus as it moved off. In the place where she was going I had only this vague address of a room in a communal apartment long ago rented to someone else. Here the crackling of gunfire on the outskirts of the city was already audible.

  I returned to the hospital on foot. Around the embassies people were gathering, the cars were all heading off in the same direction, toward the airport. It was amusing to see that, in spite of this turmoil, each nation remained true to itself. The Americans were blocking the road with the multiplicity of their means of transport and the ponderous, blithe arrogance of their preparations. The English were leaving the place as if this were merely a routine move, the banality of which did not merit a single extra word or gesture. The French were organizing chaos, giving one another orders, all waiting for the one person without whom departure was impossible, but who had already left. The representatives of the small countries sought the understanding of the big ones.

  I did not succeed in gaining entry to the hospital. The soldiers were creating defensive positions around the building, sealing the main entrance, it was hard to know exactly why, and directing their mortar barrels skyward. I was to hear their noise on my own return journey. During the night, spent at the embassy, I tried to identify by ear which district of the city was the worst hit, picturing the empty wards at the hospital, my suitcase in a room on the first floor and, in a drawer, a seashell from the Red Sea, planned as a gift for the woman who had just left. Cynicism not being an attitude that flourishes at night, I failed to see the ridiculous side either of this shell (which ended up the next day beneath the rubble of the bombarded hospital) or of our leave-taking by the bus. And when I finally ventured to revive this mirthless mockery, I would see that nothing else was left in my life, just this exhausted irony and the shreds of useless memories.

  In the morning the city was in flames and as the fire advanced it seemed to be driving the last of the foreigners back toward the sea. I found myself on a beach among a crowd of my compatriots who were waving their arms in the direction of several small boats as they came toward us. Out at sea a massive white liner could be seen, a red flag stirring slightly in the wind. The little boats appeared motionless, stuck fast in the oily blue of the sea. A few hundred yards away from us, in the streets that led to the coast, soldiers were running, shooting, falling. Their deadly game was advancing toward us and at any minute now would compel us to join in. Hands reached out toward the to-and-fro of the oars, anguished and exasperated shouts stuck in people's throats. This desire not to be killed, idiotically, on the sundrenched beach took hold of me, contagious like all mass hysteria. I was on the brink of following the men heaving enormous suitcases onto their shoulders and walking into the water so as to increase the distance between lives that were suddenly feverishly precious to them and death. It was my lack of any luggage that brought me to my senses. What little I possessed had burned in the hospital destroyed by shells during the night. That morning a member of the embassy staff had lent me his razor.

  I sat down on the sand, observing the scene with an almost absentminded gaze. The number of suitcases the men were loading onto the boats astounded me. So somewhere there must exist a life, I said to myself, where all these things it was so difficult to transport were irreplaceable. I pictured this life, for which my own past had left me ill suited. I guessed at its delights: when augmented by the contents of the suitcases, it seemed to me quite legitimate and touching. As I stood up to assist in the loading process, I ran into a man, trying to climb on board alongside his luggage, who took me for a competitor. I drew back, he clambered up, avoiding my eye. Beyond a jetty a shell hurled up a thick geyser of sand. The man, already on board, quickly ducked, pressing his forehead against the leather of the suitcases. Someone yelled, "Quick, quick, we're leaving!" Another, who was still staggering about in the water, swore at him. People were jostling one another now, not hiding their fear.

  Just after that explosion I saw a man who had no luggage either, standing slightly behind me, apparently watching a quarrel between two candidates for departure. His first remark was not addressed to anyone in particular, "At moments like this one becomes quite naked." Then, turning to me, he added, "Since you have nothing to load on board, I should like to ask a service of you. On the express instruction of the ambassador…" He uttered these words in a tone that was at once respectful and jocular, thus conveying to me that his own authority needed no support from that of the ambassador, who had already left for home. I stared at his face, with a memory of having glimpsed it at an embassy reception. His features had stuck in my mind because he looked like the French actor Lino Ventura. I had forgotten him for the same reason, mislaying his face among images from films. Anticipating my question, he explained, "We shall leave together a little later…" He then threw a final glance at the boats overloaded with suitcases and I thought I saw in his eyes a brief flash of irony, which faded at once into a neutral expression.

  The jostling on the beach made us invisible. He led me toward a structure made of cement blocks, beyond which a four-wheel-drive vehicle was parked. We headed toward the city, which looked as if it were being drawn up into the sky by the smoke from the fires. As he drove along he told me his name (one of the names that I would come to know him by) and asked me to call him "counsellor" in the presence of the people we were about to meet. For a good few moments now I had been living as if at one remove from reality. The simplicity, almost indifference, with which the cou
nsellor explained to me the task that awaited me only served to accentuate the strangeness of the situation. "Your presence at these negotiations, or rather at this bout of haggling, will be doubly useful. One of the parties has been wounded and, well, in view of his age, the heat, the emotion… You See, we need to keep his old heart beating until the final agreement. Furthermore, if I'm not mistaken, you speak his language."

  At first I thought his detached tone was a pose, a bravado he was assuming for my benefit (his resemblance to the film actor was partly responsible for my misreading of this). But when we encountered crossfire in one street and he managed to avoid the bursts of gunfire by squeezing the vehicle close to a wall without abandoning his air of indifference, I grasped the simple fact that he was long accustomed to danger.

  We arrived in a district I did not know, and which, though only a few streets away from the fighting, seemed asleep. Only the traces of smoke on the ocherous surface of the houses and the cartridge cases we slipped on as we walked betrayed the presence of war. We crossed a courtyard and another linked to it, stopping before a narrow passageway that made one think of the entrance to a maze. Half a dozen soldiers who were sheltering there from the sun emerged, searched us, then allowed us to pass inside.