Requiem for a Lost Empire

by Andrei Makine

  The windows, protected by metal screens, sliced through the darkness with long rays of sunlight. These blinding blades cut into our eyes. After several seconds of sightlessness I made out two guards, one squatting beside the door, his submachine gun laid across his knees, the other watching the street through the slit between two sheets of steel. Two other men faced one another: seated with his back to the wall, a Yemeni with a glistening brown face and a multicolored turban that hung down onto one shoulder like a ponytail and, at the other end of the room, half reclining in an armchair, a very pale man, with a swathe of bandages across his brow-like a strange replica of the turban. His angular features, sharpened by weariness, seemed almost transparent beneath glistening sweat. Despite his white hair there was in his face the kind of youthfulness that surges up in elderly men at the moment of a mortal challenge. Our arrival interrupted their discussion. All one could hear now was the furious drumming of flies caught between the glass and the steel, the distant sounds of shooting, and the breathing of the wounded man, short gasps, as if he were about to burst into song but could not bring himself to do so.

  It was he who greeted us and began speaking, forcing his breathing to adopt a regular rhythm. The counsellor asked me to translate. The man stopped, to give me time to do this. But I remained silent, feeling myself to be at a vertiginous distance from this stifling room.

  The wounded man was speaking the same language that the sleeping infant had heard amid the mountains of the Caucasus, on the darkest night of my life.

  The man I had to keep alive and whose remarks I had to translate knew that his death would have simplified the bargaining. He told me this with an imperceptible smile, as I was giving him a further injection. "I feel like a fabulously rich old man, whose stamina is the despair of his heirs…" This was one of the sentences I chose not to translate. And indeed, from his very first words, a kind of double translation had become established between us: I did my best to interpret the arguments he put and those of his adversaries, but parallel to this, I was noting the revival within myself of this language that had remained mute for so many years.

  The object of their laborious verbal struggle quite soon became apparent to me in the form of a conundrum. The man in the turban, one of the military leaders of the rebellion, had captured three westerners. The wounded diplomat was trying to obtain their release. The counsellor was able to put pressure on the Yemeni because his troops were being armed and supported by us. In return for this service the diplomat was to guarantee the neutrality of France, which would turn a blind eye to our military involvement in the conflict. The deal was on the point of being concluded ten times but suddenly the Yemeni would lose his temper and begin to denounce the perfidy of the West and the great Satan of America. Each time his rage- sometimes expressed in blunt and rudimentary English, sometimes in a propagandist Russian that was no doubt learned in Moscow – seemed to sound the death knell for the negotiations, I was ready to get up. But neither the Frenchman reclining in his armchair, nor the counsellor, listening with his head tilted slightly toward me, seemed impressed by these crises; they waited in silence for them to come to an end, each one with his own manner of being politely indifferent. An aide de camp would come in and spend a long time whispering into the ear of the chief, who kept nodding as he gradually abandoned his air of fury. The discussion resumed and followed its already familiar circular course: the Yemeni liberates the hostages, the counsellor arranges the delivery of arms, the diplomat gives his word that his government will be discreet. I now understood that success depended not on the logic of the arguments but on some ritual of which only the Yemeni knew the secret and that the Frenchman and the Russian were trying to grasp. An "open sesame."

  This round of more or less identical sentences left me the leisure to feel the texture of the words I was translating, as one fingers the grain of the pages of an old book. The diplomat must have been aware of this subterranean translation and spoke in a more and more personal style, abandoning the eroded vocabulary one uses when faced with an interpreter whose command of the language is in doubt. For me, some of his words were more than twenty years old, dating from the period when I had learned them and they had lodged themselves in memory, very rarely used. As they rang out in this low-ceilinged, overheated room, barricaded with plates of steel, the sound of them opened up long, bright, windswept vistas. Mingled with this recollection, there was even a sense in me of childish pride, still intact, at mastering this uncommon language. During a further break in the negotiations the Frenchman referred ironically to a "navicert," the navigation certificate the counsellor and I would need in order to leave the city by sea. Hearing this word, I felt a child's comical triumph, for I knew the term thanks to Pierre Loti, and what the sound of it introduced into the stifling heat of the room was both the sea breezes of his novels and the chill of a long snowy evening cadenced by the rustling of turned pages.

  From time to time the discussion broke off because of the Frenchman. He would close his eyes for a few seconds, then open them wide in sockets that were becoming increasingly hollow: they were sightless, or at least did not see us. Beneath the trickles of sweat his face resembled a fragment of quartz, now milky, now translucent. I would treat him, knowing only too well that all these injections only served to prolong this absurd bargaining by one more round. I said this to him. His face of quartz lit up with the ghost of a smile: "You know, here in the Orient they often practice expectant medicine…" Again I had the impression of being face to face with a man from another era. Not so much because of his French, which was that of my books, but because of the calm, at once ironic and haughty, with which he confronted the cruel farce of the present, as if he were observing it from the height of a long and great history filled with victories and defeats.

  He resisted to the last, until the final accord late in the evening. Sensing that the game was won, he sat up a little in his armchair and even hurled a little dart at "Monsieur le conseiller" (who was promising several extra mortars to the Yemeni chief), "Your generosity will be your undoing, my dear colleague." The counsellor flashed a smile at him before listening to my translation, as if to show that they no longer needed to conceal their true professions beneath diplomatic covers, or to feign ignorance of the language.

  Next day a French helicopter from Djibouti took away the three released hostages (a couple of Germans and a Frenchwoman, a volunteer) and the body of the diplomat, who had died in the night. A slight distance away from this we witnessed the preparations. Waiting for takeoff, the rescued hostages exchanged addresses, invited one another to stay on vacation in France and Germany, then wanted at all costs to have a photo taken together with the crew of legionnaires. The body wrapped in a canvas sheet had already been loaded on board.

  "Our whole life is no more than expectant medicine, wouldn't you say?"

  The counsellor said it in French and fell silent, watching the passengers as they climbed into the helicopter uttering little admiring laughs. I examined his face turned in profile for a moment. No desire to impress could be read in it.

  "So why all that charade about an interpreter?"

  I deliberately adopted an emphatic, almost aggrieved tone.

  "Well, to begin with, you weren't just the interpreter! And in bargaining of this type it's sometimes useful to plead an error in translation… But, above all, think of this as a first step that could lead to other things, if you feel ready for a change in your life. You'll have time during the voyage to reflect on my proposal."

  The helicopter took off, sweeping away the footprints on the powdery soil. We followed it with our eyes for a moment. As it moved away, what the machine seemed to be drawing across the sky was a heavy blanket of tawny cloud that was coming up rapidly from the direction of the ocean.

  "One of the last of the Mohicans of the old school, that Bertrand Jansac," said the counsellor, turning away from the helicopter above the waters. "Or rather one of the last of the Mohicans, period… As for you and me
, our boat will soon be leaving under full sail but, alas, without the protection of a… what did he call it? a 'navicert.' Am I right?"

  Amid the torrent of actions and words of that last day a single phrase stuck in my mind and the temptation it presented gave a rhythm to all my thoughts: "If you feel ready for a change in your life…"

  I was twenty-eight. My life, with all its weight of human flesh and death, could have been that of a much older man. And yet the child within me would still wince whenever someone asked, either idly, or with real curiosity, "So, where were you born? What do your parents do?" I had long since learned to respond with lies or evasion, or by turning a deaf ear. But this made no difference. The childish shudder slipped in, like a blade between loose-fitting plates of armor. All that had changed was that, as a boy, I was afraid people would discover the truth: to this fear and shame was now added the certainty that I had no means of making people understand the truth, and that I should never meet anyone to whom it could be confided.

  I experienced this unease on finding myself in a cramped cabin on a ship that, while it was still secured, was already pitching under the first lashes of the storm. As we lay face to face on our narrow bunks our heads were so close that we could have whispered in one another's ears. At once my childish reflex was aroused: I pictured the counsellor questioning me about my early life. A moment later I called myself a fool, realizing that he knew everything. I faced a man who, although our situation lent itself to an exchange of confidences, would not seek to delve into my past. It was then that his proposal for "a change" in my life struck me as an offer that would liberate me. Indeed this thrilling liberation had already begun taking place with the speed of a blissful dream. Stepping aboard the ship I had been liberated from my name and the passport that documented it. In exchange, the counsellor had furnished me with another one: my first false papers, and a name that I was repeating inwardly in order to make it mine, along with a few notes on my new biography that I must learn by heart. I was perfectly well aware that the ease with which this metamorphosis was embarked on was simply a well established recruitment technique and that there was nothing improvised about his proposal to "change my life." At each fresh step in this direction the counsellor provided a kind of brief waiting time, to give me the opportunity to draw back-to refuse to exchange passports, not to embark with him on this dubious-looking little cargo ship, not to accept the pistol he handed me. I later came to understand that, for him, an approach of this kind and this change of identity was a sequence of almost automatic maneuvers, a routine he went through without paying any attention to my excitement. But at the time his actions appeared to me like the deft arrogance of a conjuror who, disdaining all acknowledged appearances, was liberating me by means of his shell game artist's legerdemain of the thing that weighed most heavily upon me: myself

  When he left the cabin for a few minutes I took out my new passport and spent a long time studying this face, my own, made unrecognizable by the information on the previous page. The man in the photograph seemed to be eyeing me with disdain. I felt passionately envious of his liberty.

  When night came this jealousy consumed me with an animal fear, with a lust for survival that I would not have imagined myself capable of. In the darkness of the cabin I had the illusion that, battered by the waves, the ship itself was turning to liquid, melting like a block of ice. I could hear water everywhere-outside the hull, in the corridor, and suddenly, streaming across the floor of the cabin! I reached down with frenzied haste and patted a dry metal surface that vibrated beneath my fingers. My hand also brushed against my shoes, prudently lined up in absurd anticipation. I lay down again, hoping the counsellor had not guessed the reason for my restlessness. He remained silent in the darkness and appeared to be asleep. Without a porthole, our cabin felt to me like a steel coffin that had just become detached from the ship. I imagined it slowly descending into the glaucous depths of the waters. That pair of shoes neatly arranged beneath my bunk. The pistol that would rust in its case. It shifted slightly as the vessel pitched, and seemed to be caressing me under my arm, next to my heart. For me, all the treachery of life was concentrated into that caress: fully conscious, in possession of a new passport, with an identity that had finally set me free, I was going to die a slow death. The man in the photo, whose liberty I had so envied, was going to go to the bottom after a short existence full of promise.

  I sat up on my bunk, clinging to the edge of it, as if I were perched on the brink of an abyss. And this brink tilted further and further, causing me to lose all notion of up and down. I uttered a plea and only afterward did I grasp the sense of what I had whispered: "They've got to do something. I don't want to die! Not now…"

  I had no idea if the counsellor had heard me. But a minute later his voice seemed to ring out from the bottom of the abyss. He spoke in a monotonous tone, as if he were talking to himself and had already begun his story a moment earlier. Astonishingly, this litany contrived to hold its own through the fury of the waves and the wind's hysteria, like the straight and even wake of a torpedo in a turbulent sea. At first my own repeated entreaty ("I don't want to die… Not now… please, not now…"), and especially my shame at having uttered it, had stopped me following the thread. But as what he was describing was totally remote from our own situation (he was talking about a desert), I finished by finding in the strangeness of his story the unique point on which my fevered mind could focus.

  … A town, or rather a number of streets, had sprung up in the middle of a desert in Central Asia. Houses four stories high, all identical, with empty window frames and gaping doorways, as if the builders had abandoned their work just before completion. And yet the inhabitants could already be seen: sometimes you could glimpse a face in a window opening, sometimes when the sun flooded the inside of a room, a complete human figure. Outside, in enclosures protected from the sun by corrugated iron, there were animals asleep or scattered along the fence. A flock of sheep, some camels, horses, dogs. A single road led into the town, linking these three or four streets and then petering out in the sand. At the central crossroads there stood an enormous cube, formed from well-dovetailed planks, reminiscent of the casing around a statue that was being prepared for unveiling to the public at some forthcoming celebration.

  The violence of the wave that crashed down onto the cargo ship was such that all sounds stopped for several seconds. It was impossible to tell whether the engines had suddenly cut out or terror had paralyzed all my senses. The ship was listing, hurtling faster and faster down a watery slope, and seemed no longer able to halt its flight. And it was in this silence, as if to break the spell and relaunch the functioning of the machinery, that the voice of the counsellor sounded again. He must have realized that his story was unintentionally maintaining a level of suspense that was not at all his purpose, and he brought it to an end in a few sentences that cleared up the mystery.

  "The cube on the central square was our first atomic bomb. The townspeople were convicts condemned to death, being used as guinea pigs. The town had been especially constructed for this first test. We overflew it several times. The convicts waved to us. They didn't know what was due to happen the next night. No doubt some of them, even though they were in chains, hoped to see their sentences commuted. They were already beginning to like this town, where the windows had no bars. In the aircraft all the instruments that measured radioactivity were stuck at red. That night, at the moment of the explosion, we were more than nine miles away from the town. The order was to remain lying on the ground, not to turn around, not to open our eyes. For the first time in my experience I felt the earth leap into life. It moved beneath me. There was a shock wave that scattered the bodies of those who had tried to stand up. And also the howling of those who had turned around and been blinded. And the heavy shuddering of the earth beneath our bellies. The next day, on the way back to the convicts' town, I pictured the havoc, the ruined houses, the charred carcasses of animals. I had known cities bombed during the war
… but this was beyond imagining. When the plane approached the place we saw a mirror. A vast mirror of vitrified sand. A smooth, concave surface that reflected the sun, the clouds, and even the cross of our plane. Nothing else. I was young enough to have an idiotic and arrogant thought: 'After this, nothing can ever trouble or frighten me again.' "

  He broke off and I guessed he was silent so as to listen. He seemed to be evaluating the drumming of feet above our heads, linking this to the exchange of shouts outside the door, measuring these sounds against the fury of the storm. As his voice took up the tale again it seemed to lend a semblance of order to the pandemonium.

  "Within less than a year there was none of that arrogance left. I was racing back and forth across the United States, a vast country where at that moment I felt like a rat being driven from one cage to the next with needles lodged in its brain. The Rosenbergs had just been arrested. The press accused them of having sold the American bomb to the Soviets, and the good citizenry awaited the verdict with a pretty carnivorous appetite. I had been working with the Rosenbergs for two years. In their apartment in New York there was a room converted into a photo laboratory where we prepared documents to send to the Center. It was in that room, by the way, that I had occasion to play chess with Julius. I knew the accusations leveled against them were absurd, out of all proportion, at any rate. They had no access to the secrets of the bomb. But public opinion needed a scapegoat. The Americans now knew that somewhere in the deserts of Central Asia we had exploded a bomb, copied from the one at Hiroshima, and thus ended their atomic supremacy. A real slap in the face. They must act ruthlessly. Some fanatic suggested the electric chair and this now seemed a real possibility. It was either a confession or the chair. I was convinced the Rosenbergs would talk. I had absolute faith in their friendship, but… How can I put it? One day I was coming out of the lab with Julius and caught sight of Ethel in the kitchen. She was sitting there, chopping vegetables on a little wooden board. The foolish notion struck me that she resembled a Russian woman. No, just a woman like the rest, a woman happy to be there, in the calm of that moment, chatting with her elder son as he stood there, leaning against the door frame, smiling at her. When I learned of their arrest I remembered that moment, that maternal look, and I said to myself, 'She'll talk…' I left New York. I fled from city to city, the country was closing in on me. In a damage control exercise the Center shut down all the networks, stopped responding to calls. And I was pretty sure it was prepared to sacrifice some of us, as one amputates a gangrenous hand. In fact it was in Moscow that the consequences of their arrest were to be the most severe. When Stalin learned the news he ordered a complete purge of the intelligence service. Hundreds of people prepared for the worst. Even if I'd succeeded in getting back to Moscow, I should simply have been returning to be executed. I moved from place to place, then lay low for a month or two in the anthill of a big city. Every morning I bought the paper. 'The Rosenbergs talk!' 'The traitors confess all!' I was expecting a headline of this kind. I thought of Ethel getting the supper ready and chatting with her elder son as he smiled at her. They told nothing. Dozens of interrogations, confrontations, threats mentioning the electric chair, blackmail over the lives of their children. They even sent very persuasive rabbis into Julius's cell. Nothing. Julius was executed first. They made the same offer to Ethel: her life in exchange for a confession. She refused. I was able to go back to Moscow. No purges took place at the Center. And many things had changed during that period when the two of them were being hounded. Stalin had died. The Americans hadn't dropped their bomb on Korea or China, as they were preparing to do. We'd had time to catch up with them in the home stretch, as it were. Atomic war was becoming a double-edged sword. In a word, the Third World War hadn't taken place. Thanks to the silence of that woman who used to chop vegetables on a little wooden board while chatting with her son…"