Requiem for a Lost Empire

by Andrei Makine

  The darkness was punctuated by bluish areas around the street lights. The alternation between this harsh glare and the dark foliage transformed my arrival there into a strange negative of my first visit, the day before, in the morning sun. Everything was repeated so precisely that it left me the leisure to observe brief gaps of absurdity and silence between words and actions.

  The caretaker appeared, dressed in a windbreaker, looked at me through the gate and disappeared into the sentry box. The intercom hissed, I spelled out my name, then the name of the man who had recommended me. The caretaker's drawling questions came back at me, unchanged since the day before, as if in the rhyming refrains of a children's game. Vinner came out onto the front steps, a cluster of small lights flashed on, marking the curve of the path that led toward the gate. He came up, blinking in the drops of rain, and saw me. He smiled, rapidly erasing a slight twitch of annoyance or alarm that remained lurking in one of the lines of his forced grin. Before he could reach the gate a powerful but completely silent dog interposed itself and reared up at me, the whole of its long, muscular body seething with barely contained energy. Vinner invited me in, still smiling, like someone who has been disturbed just as he was nodding off for the night.

  "Over here in the West you know, arriving like this at ten o'clock at night without warning is the best way to give your acquaintances a heart attack. Try doing it in Paris or London. Ringing the bell on the off chance and when the door opens announcing, as we used to do in Russia, 'It's like this, I was just passing in the street and I saw your light was on. So I decided to come up.' A cardiac arrest guaranteed! Well, that's a slight exaggeration. Come in, I've got some good whisky."

  I realized that within a few more seconds this tone would again make it impossible to say what I had to say. Vinner s words had the same anesthetizing effect as his gurglings with a straw in the frothy milk of his glass, and the efforts of that obese vacationer standing up with the plastic armchair clamped to the rolls of flesh on her haunches.

  "I forgot to give you something," I said in a very neutral voice, feeling in my bag.

  The dog tensed even more and uttered a throaty, menacing growl. I went on speaking in Russian with the slightly sheepish air of an absentminded person.

  "I expect your dog is trained to react to nervous gestures. I won't make any. I have a gun with a silencer and I shall shoot through the bag at the slightest refusal on your part. For a start, tell the caretaker to go away and take the dog with him."

  He complied. His voice remained cheerful, but he could not conceal a quavering note nor, in particular, his Russian accent, which was suddenly more marked. The caretaker grasped the dog by its collar and disappeared to the bottom of the garden. The dotted line of lights along the path went out and Vinner's face was now only lit by the bluish haze coming from the street lamps. He tried to smile, started to speak… and fell silent, hearing his wife's voice through an open window, gently reprimanding the children.

  I told him the name I had been using at the time when we first met. I reminded him of the arrival of the two of them, Yuri and Yulia, their naïveté, so well feigned, their disappearance. I spoke of you, your remorse at not having been able to protect them, of your attempts to find them again. I realized that in fact I had very little to say to him. My ringing cry, long since prepared ("You betrayed her, you bastard!"), which was to be followed by the gunshot, seemed unbelievably false and did not fit this man in beach sandals, with a drop of rain suspended from the end of his nose. His wife's voice became clearer. "No, you're not going out, Dave. I said 'no,' do you hear me? First of all because it's raining and look at you. You're in bare feet. No. Go find your slippers." I saw Vinner's eyes glance toward the lighted window of the house for a second. I broke off, as if preparing my final peroration, but, in reality, not knowing how to end this monologue that was telling him nothing new. He threw a similar rapid, oblique glance at my bag, still open with my hand in it, pretending to be looking for a lost object. We saw one another for a moment with a total reciprocal understanding, with a sharp awareness of what we both were, standing here in the rain, sharing a past that made our lives logically impossible and at the same time perfectly ordinary, like his beach sandals, like my bag bought the day before at the airport.

  At that moment there was a brief pause in the hissing of the raindrops, a second of complete silence, and from the damp, still depths of the darkness there emerged a faint yawn, a woman's sigh, followed by the grating of a window being closed. We looked at one another. Instinctively I lowered my voice. I surprised myself by talking to him about what I had not intended to say, about what it seemed to me unthinkable to tell.

  "Near the harbor there were docks where they crammed in all the opponents of the regime, mixed up together with several who were under suspicion. She was among them. As she had admitted nothing, the Americans had handed her over to the local rulers, those paramilitary choppers-off of heads. A week later, when one of their chiefs had the idea of trading her in negotiations with the government forces, he didn't dare show her. A week of rape and torture. She no longer had a face. They preferred to kill her."

  "I didn't know."

  He said this in a dull and broken tone of which his voice had seemed to me incapable.

  "Yes, you did. You knew very well. During that week you were listening to interrogations taped by the Americans. Interrogations of her."

  "I didn't know."

  "What interests me is what you do know. Everything you know about those days. To the very last word. You were a methodical man. You even kept certain objects that belonged to her, isn't that right? Photos… Everything you know, written down. To help you, I'll ask you questions. Yes, an interrogation, you're quite used to them."

  "But I kept nothing! I remember nothing!"

  We turned. In the silent respite between two onslaughts of rain the gravel grated beneath footfalls, like the crunch of broken glass.

  Vinner's wife seemed not to notice my presence. Upright, with an air of ruffled dignity, she stopped a few yards away from us.

  "What is it, Val?"

  Her tone of voice and a slight raising of her chin summed up the whole of their life as a couple: sure, I have a husband with a strange past, whose profession is pretty hard to explain to our friends, but my tact and my remote serenity make it all perfectly acceptable.

  "I forgot to give your husband this scientific journal which he'll need tomorrow," I announced, taking a magazine from my bag.

  She smiled distractedly, as if she had just noticed me in the darkness, and moved away, saying good night to no one in particular. In the middle of the path, beside a little lamp, she bent down to pick up a small plastic spade left there by the children. The fabric of her dressing gown, very fine, like satin, revealed the line of her back, the breadth of her hips. In a quite unreal vision I found myself thinking about the night they would spend together, the nights he always spent beside this beautiful woman's body, their pleasure.

  "Don't complicate things," I said to Vinner, moving toward the gate. "I have nothing to lose. But you have a fine life ahead of you. That's worth a few admissions. Tomorrow I'll wait to hear from you. And don't forget that I'm working in tandem, as the marksmen say. If I'm waked up by the police at four a.m., my colleague will be forced to wake you up at four-thirty. Sweet dreams."

  He phoned me at nine and proposed that we should meet in two days' time at his office in Saint Petersburg.

  In the foyer of my hotel there was a bookshelf squeezed between two plants with broad glossy leaves: from it I took down three or four volumes at random to occupy those two rainy days, to stop me thinking about Vinner. I tried to identify with the characters in these American novels, to believe in the lives of an honest, warmhearted horse breeder, or a naive young woman from the country ensnared by the big city. But in a roundabout way my mind kept returning to our nocturnal conversation. I vaguely envied those authors who knew everything about the slightest mood swings of their heroes, who guesse
d their intentions, even when "after that, without knowing why, Hank always avoided taking the North Falls Road." I felt I could understand the attraction of these pages, turned by so many hands, all these fictional worlds. It was the comfort of omniscience, the vision of chaos vanquished, pinned down, like a hideous insect in a glass case.

  Thinking about Vinner, I did not even know whether, during our conversation in the rain, he had been afraid, had felt guilty, had believed me really prepared to shoot him and his wife. I did not know if the change in his tone of voice was assumed or not. I did not know his order of preference for ways of getting rid of me: the police, a contract killer, an amicable outcome. I did not know if he was particularly perturbed by my appearance. In a nutshell, I had no idea what was going on in his head.

  I closed the book and pictured Vinner going back up to his house after my departure, shutting the door, going through all the little rituals of bedtime hygiene, lying down beside his wife. I sensed that these daily gestures verged on madness. But what would be real insanity would in fact be for me to picture Vinner lying beside that beautiful woman's body I had recently glimpsed through the satiny fabric of her dressing gown, to picture him caressing her, to picture them making love. For it was quite possible that everything might happen in precisely that way: the trivial hygiene routine, their bedroom, their bodies. I told myself that a real book should have copied this improbable sequence of real actions. A man learns what Vinner had learned, goes up to his house, washes, goes to bed, draws his wife to him, squeezes her breasts, caresses her thighs, enters her, faithfully following all the small singularities of their sexual ritual.

  My two days' wait was spent between this phantasmagoria of imagined actions and snatches of reading and an increasingly clear mental certainty: whatever happened, I would leave without having learned what Vinner, to use the language of the novels filling that hotel bookshelf, felt in his heart of hearts.

  He met me in front of the entrance to the building. A third Vinner, I thought, recalling the first one, the charismatic guide to the seaside paradise, then the second, a man in sandals disturbed on a quiet evening at home. And now this businessman in a dark suit who wove together into a single swift sequence a cold smile of greeting, a thrust against the copper of the revolving door, and this warning, expressed as a brief, uncompromising statement: "We will have to leave our bags at the desk. They've installed a metal detector." He was already handing his own to the attendant.

  As he walked into his office he made a quick sign with his head in the direction of two men who were in the process of shifting bulky cardboard cartons around. "Sorry about the mess, but we're in the middle of moving offices: I hope their presence won't disturb you." I recognized one of the movers as the reader of newspapers I had seen reflected in a fragment of mirror on the pillar at the restaurant the day we had lunch. The cartons were placed just behind the armchair Vinner offered me. The speed with which he embarked on this meeting smacked of a well-prepared operation. He had doubtless managed to contact our alleged mutual friend in China, or else the man had already returned. Furthermore, over two days he had been able to verify that I was in Destin on my own. Glancing at the cartons, I noticed that some of them were big enough to hold a man's body.

  "I owe you something," he said, opening a drawer in his desk. "The journal you gave me so as not to alarm my wife. Here it is back, but with something extra."

  Vinner handed me an English newspaper. He had certainly envisaged a theatrical effect but could not have been aware of the force of the shock. There were various articles on the arms traffic controlled by the Russian Mafia. Photos, statistics. And suddenly this headline: "Death of one of the barons of the nuclear network." Very clearly in the photograph I recognized the face of Shakh.

  I did not take in Vinner's opening remarks. He was probably asking me if I had known the man in the photograph well. I gave no reply, still blinded by the expression of the eyes, the movement of the lips I sensed behind the immobility of the photo. All the article did was to list the usual components of the criminal web: dubious contracts, the leakage of military technologies from a Russia in decay, exorbitant commissions, rivalries, the settling of accounts, the death of an "arms baron." As I was skimming through these paragraphs I caught up with Vinner's voice. Curiously enough, it sounded the same vaguely contemptuous and triumphant note as the style of the article.

  "… a strange character. I only met him once and that was for highly technical reasons. And he could find nothing better to do than talk about the war. His war, that is. It was so beside the point that I almost asked him if he'd driven a tank himself. I thought that would bring him to his senses. And then-"

  I noticed that the two men behind my back had stopped their commotion but were still in the room. I interrupted Vinner, "He would have told you he had. First of all in the Leningrad area, then in the battle of Kursk."

  "In the ' Saint Petersburg ' area, you mean? Ha, ha…" "I don't know if we should start pronouncing it in the American way."

  "That'll come in time. Anyway, what an irony of fate! He who struggled so valiantly with the arms traffickers is shot down and labeled as a Mafia man. What an end to his career! It's true that he didn't have the good fortune that you have of working 'in tandem,' as you put it. A loyal companion can always come to your aid or, if need be, rehabilitate your honor posthumously. But in his case…"

  He went on talking with an increasingly disdainful smile. I was sure now that on the evening of our meeting in the rain he had been very much afraid and much too uneasy to think about his wife's beautiful body and that he had spent the past two days in humiliating anxiety, which he was attempting to dispel through this contemptuous conqueror's tone. I also understood that I was highly unlikely to be leaving that office alive. The two men behind my armchair were no longer even pretending to move the cartons around. But Shakh's death had thrust me into a strange remoteness whence I viewed Vinner: his face resembled a twitching mask. I interrupted him again, and, as I was speaking, I became aware of his tenseness as he listened to me and also the tautness of my own lips.

  "You promised me some notes on… on you know who."

  "I haven't been able to get very much together but… here."

  He passed a folder to me, held shut with elastic bands. There

  was a somewhat mechanical precision about his gesture, as if he were

  afraid I would refuse it, as if the sequence of actions in this office

  were dependent on the precision of this handover. Without taking my eyes off his face, I took the folder, put it on my lap. Vinner stared hard at me, then threw a rapid glance at my unmoving hands. I guessed he was waiting for me to lower my gaze, to start tugging at the elastic bands. Everything was geared to this moment of distraction. A floorboard creaked behind my back. I began talking very softly so as not to upset the unstable equilibrium.

  "I would like to pass on to you the greetings of a person who is very dear to you, who lives in Warsaw. I could also offer you some documents recounting the story of your loving relationship but one folder wouldn't be enough. There are cassette tapes, films. I suggest we meet tomorrow morning at nine a.m., on a pretty beach near Destin, far from all those metal detectors. You will come alone, with your reports under your arm. I imagine what you've given me today is a bunch of virgin sheets."

  I opened the folder: a single photo had been slipped in between the blank pages, it seemed to be all part of the presentation. Out of the corner of my eye I intercepted a signal with his head that Vinner gave his men. They started work again.

  As I went out I gave one of the cardboard cartons a kick. "Thanks for giving me the chance to see my own coffin." Actually, this little dig occurred to me as an afterthought, when I was back at the hotel. At the moment of my departure all there was between us was the banal awkwardness of two men who cannot shake hands.

  That evening, when I was back in Destin, I read the page from the English newspaper that had published the photo of Shakh. Weari
ness, disgust, and fear now flooded in on me with the delay of a shock wave. But the strongest of these delayed emotions was surprise. I could not bring myself to believe that Shakh was dead. Or rather, granted that they had succeeded in killing him, I nevertheless pictured him alive and living a freer life than my own, one I sought vainly to understand. It now seemed to me like the lives of those soldiers in the war, protecting an army's withdrawal and sacrificing themselves, knowing that their deaths would enable the retreating troops to gain a few hours. I thought of the strange existence of such men in that interval, consciously accepted, between life and death. A few hours, perhaps a day. A fresh intensity in their eyes and a relinquishing of everything that only yesterday had still seemed important.

  As long as one stayed on the bench that was half sunk in the sand one did not notice the wind's force. In that sheltered space behind the dune the first light of the morning already made it seem like a fine sunny day, idle and warm. Only on getting up did one feel the breeze that had made the sea white and stung one's face with tiny pricks of sand. But, even as I sat there, I could see whirlwinds arising on the ridge of the dune for a moment, then settling again with a dry rustling sound as they collided with the tall tufts of tangled plants. Two or three times, launched from the beach, a kite sliced the air above the ridge then disappeared, swerving in a tensed, hissing trajectory.

  I had risen well before dawn, without having really slept, and, as I approached the sea, I had caught it still in its vigilant, nocturnal sluggishness. I had swum in the midst of a darkness rhythmed by long silent waves, gradually losing all awareness of what awaited me, all memory of the country massed behind the coastline ("America," "Florida," a perplexed voice within me proclaimed), all connection with a date, a place. Occasionally a livelier wave rose up out of the blackness, covered me with its foam, disappeared into the night. I recalled the man I was going to see again (an involuntary memory: Vinner's cheek with a fine scratch left by the razor). I was surprised to realize that my hatred of this man was the very last link that still connected me to the lives of those who lived on this sleeping coastline, to their time, to the multiplicity of their desires, their actions, their words, that would start up again once it was morning. Vinner's face faded and I returned to that state of silence and forgetfulness that one day, without finding the right word for it, I had called an "afterlife," it being, in fact, all the life that was left to me to live out, in what was now a bygone age, that past I had never succeeded in leaving behind. I had remained sitting on the sand for a long time, leaning against the hull of an upturned boat. The night above the sea formed a deep, black, vibrant screen, like the restless darkness behind closed eyelids. Against this nocturnal background the memory drew faces from long ago, a figure lost among those ruined days, a look that seemed to be searching for me across the years. You. Shakh. You… The ghosts of this afterlife did not obey time. I saw people I had hardly known, people who had died well before I was born: that soldier, his glasses spattered with mud, carrying a wounded man on his back; that other one, lying in a field plowed up by shellfire, his lips half open, and a nurse holding out a tiny mirror toward them, hoping, or not hoping, to capture a slight trace of breath. I also saw the one who had told me of these soldiers, a woman with silvery hair, at rest in the endlessness of the steppe, gazing at me across that plain, across time, as it seemed to me. A man, too, with a face of quartz, a strip of bandages around his forehead, who smiled as he spoke, defying the pain. Shakh walking along in a crowd in an avenue in London; he was keeping our rendezvous, but had not yet seen me and I surprised him in his solitude. You, at a dark window lit by the ruddy glow of fires in neighboring streets. You, your eyes closed, lying beside me one night after the fighting was over, telling me about a winter's day, the forest silent under the snows, a house one could discover by crossing a frozen lake. You…