Requiem For A Lost Empire

6

In my mind I had fashioned the town where Vinner lived out of the dark and humid stuff of the Parisian spring. I pictured the man himself dressed in an overcoat, his face clouded by rain and suspicion. Exhausted by sleepless nights, by my anticipation of our first meeting, I had not given a thought to the sun over the Gulf of Mexico. As we touched down, the light and the warm wind came surging into my imagined town, and the man in the somber overcoat was me. Traveling to Destin along the coast, I sensed the very particular atmosphere, at once carefree and nervous, of southern towns preparing for the holiday season. It could be detected in the noise made by a workman taking beach chairs out of a shed, in the smell of paint from the fresh lettering that promised a fantastic reduction for those dining early. At the hotel I rid myself of my Parisian clothes, like shameful and ridiculous witnesses beneath this clear sky.

I went out at once, not so much from fear of missing Vinner (I did not even know if he was at home) as in order to forestall a new wave of doubts. I followed Shakh's advice to go directly, without telephoning, without wasting time on normal reconnaissance in the area. Certainly the atmosphere of beach resorts, where everything is designed to lighten the load of things, contributed to the ease with which, half an hour later, I found Vinner's house on the corner of a street. Not a grayish structure, the impregnable fortress my imagination had constructed from the damp stone of Parisian apartment buildings, but a small one-story villa, set back in a garden dominated by several clumps of young palm trees. Behind the metal gate, to the left of the narrow path that led to the house, there was a parked car with an open trunk, which a man, who had his back to me, was cleaning with a small vacuum cleaner, reminiscent of a watering can. I pressed the bell. The man turned, unplugged the machine, left it in the trunk and, instead of coming toward me, which would have seemed natural, walked over to a little sentry box made of pale bricks, which stood beside the gate and was almost entirely hidden beneath the leaves of a creeper. I heard his voice very close to my ear on the intercom and at the same moment noticed the dark, flat eye of the surveillance camera. The voice was slow, thickly American. As I explained who I was, I was hardly aware of what I was saying, dazed by the comical vision I had just seen: a fifty-year-old with close-cut hair, a corpulent man rendered almost square by a white short-sleeved shirt open to his chest, this man who had been running his vacuum cleaner over the carpet in the trunk and who was now greeting my explanations with long drawn-out "Okays," this man was Val Vinner! An almost mythical being, given the evil he had wrought and the scale of what he had, negligently, destroyed, and here he was parading himself in all the banality of this little paradise beneath the palm trees, in the domestic peace of a holiday morning.

Patiently, and giving a very good imitation of the dull-witted amiability Americans devote to the explanation of details, the onetime Russian continued to question me about our mutual friend, now traveling in China, about the purpose of my visit. Suddenly what I saw beyond the gate eclipsed our conversation through the wall. A child, a boy of six or seven, walked around the car and came toward the entrance, clung to the bars, and stared at me curiously. His brother, not yet very steady on his feet, crossed the yard to join the older child. I was to learn later that the older child was the son of Vinner's wife but, seeing these two children, I felt like an emissary from a bygone age, an age since when this renegade had had the time to Americanize himself and found a family at least eight years old.

It was then that a man appeared on the front steps of the house and called to the children. I looked up. It took me a few seconds to overcome the improbability of this face under such a name and in this location. Then I recognized Yuri.

He came to the gate, took hold of the little one and detached him from the bars, despite his protests. The square man in the white short-sleeved shirt (a caretaker? a bodyguard? a gardener?) emerged from the sentry box and began to repeat the information he had gathered, mispronouncing my name, trying to make himself heard above the squeals of the child. But already Vinner was speaking to me in Russian and let me in through the door next to the sentry box.

"I'm really sorry but today I'm taking these two rascals to Miracle Strip Park. I've been promising them this since Christmas. Do you know this park? It's full of attractions for kids. There's even a giant roller-coaster, I don't know how many feet high. So is our friend well? China just now must be quite something. I think he's told me about you. Dave, quit shoving him or you won't get to come with us."

He uttered this threat in English, in that good comprehensible English that gives foreigners away, and threw me a glance in which feigned severity mutated into a father's smiling pride. I noted that his face had changed very little and that his eyes had even kept that youthful brightness that had so touched you in the old days. It was his body that had matured a good deal: he had a belly now and his forearms filled the short sleeves of his T-shirt with the flabby bulk you see in athletes who have given up exercise. A tall, fair-haired woman came out of the house, went in again at once and reappeared with a large red thermos. She came toward us, Vinner introduced me, she shook my hand, and I had time to notice that her face showed signs of morning-time distraction, that withdrawal women regularly permit themselves to inflict on their families. The children were shouting impatiently and pushing their father toward the car. I still had the map of Florida under my arm and a loaded pistol in my bag. With one hand I slung this bag over my shoulder and pushed it behind my back, just as one hides a sharp object from children.

Vinner proposed that we should meet again the next day.

That night, recalling his facial expressions, I realized that his features, even though attached to a hated name, had brought the sound of your voice back to life for me, the calmness of your gaze, a few days in our old existence, some of those moments of happiness lost among the wanderings and the wars.

Then, recalling Shakh's warning, in which he had given me the first ten minutes to attack and win, I recognized my defeat. I had a vision of Vinner's two children, hurtling down the roller-coaster. In any case, I was finding it harder and harder to define what victory might have been.

Contemplating the beach that stretched away a few yards from the terrace on stilts where we sat, Vinner had the proud and smiling air of the cocreator of this sun-drenched panorama. Rather as a Parisian, when showing a foreigner the Arc de Triomphe or the Louvre, always feels a little bit as if he were the architect, or at least one of the stone masons. He recited his commentary, pointing into the distance with his fork, and reeling off the names of fish and shellfish, gave a little laugh and threw me a wink at the sight of a pretty girl in a swimsuit walking past the terrace. And when a group of young men in bathing suits rushed toward the waves, shouting at one another as they ran and tossing a big beach ball back and forth over the heads of the vacationers, he smiled indulgently and explained that these disturbers of the peace were, alas, inevitable during the period of the "spring break." He pronounced this phrase with evident pleasure.

"It makes a change from the rain in Paris, doesn't it? And those anemic Europeans. I remember one day on a beach somewhere near… La Rochelle, was it? I'm probably getting mixed up. It was so depressing, all those appalling bodies, it looked like a museum of degeneration. Especially the women. And here, you can see, these young ones are bursting with health. And even the not so young, they're in good shape. And the air. Just smell it! Not an atom of nicotine. No one smokes. After two days in Europe I'm coughing and spluttering like an old man. And in Eastern Europe, forget it. It's worse than Chernobyl… She's not bad, that one. No, the other one, under the shower. Yes, maybe a bit too much, you're right. But the women here are all very athletic. Very healthy. In fact, you know that new man our propaganda promised us: here's where he's in the process of being born. Stalin thought he could forge him through a schizophrenic mix of terror and heroism. Hitler, via biological mes-sianism. But here they don't need brainwashing. Everyone understands that, as one of my friends says, it's better to be healthy, tanned, and rich than a Russian research scientist in Moscow."

When he spoke of America Vinner sometimes said "they," sometimes "we." I interrupted him two or three times to ask, " 'We' is who? The Russians or the Americans?" I did it from annoyance but also to avoid confusion between the "we" who were "putting a little order into this whorehouse of a world" and the "we" who "are only good at begging for handouts from the West, instead of getting on with the job." Smiling, he accepted the correction and, for several minutes, paid careful attention to his use of pronouns. The good "we" were fulfilling their onerous mission, as masters of the world, by punishing the guilty and defending the righteous, but above all by demonstrating, through their example, that the formula for universal happiness had been found and that it was within everyone's reach. A moment later the confusion returned and the bad "we" had embarked on "drinking, behaving hysterically like something straight out of Dostoyevsky, begging for dollars."

There were, it is true, many beautiful bodies on the beach's extremely pale sands. Both their youth and the relaxed insolence of their movements swept aside any attempt at criticism. The happiness was too evident, it was on their skin, in their muscles, in the stream of cars coming from the north to spill out these tanned bodies onto the sand and the terraces, or to carry them on toward other pleasures. Their exuberant vitality seemed to be saying: "Go ahead and grumble as much as you like. But we're the ones who are right!"

In any case, what Vinner was saying was more or less his regular recruitment test number, a well-worn speech for sounding out the opinions of research scientists he enlisted in Eastern Europe. He knew that you learn more about a man, not by letting him talk, but by talking to him and observing his reactions. Instead of objecting to it, I was trying to imagine the objections of previous listeners. What could they have said, faced with Vinner's guided tour of this paradise? Some of them, no doubt, nodded their heads for fear of displeasing their benefactor. Others, remembering their post-war Soviet childhood, would have embarked, with the aid of nostalgia, on a defense of poverty, which, it appears, promotes loftiness of thought. Yet others, the most ungrateful and generally the most independent, thanks to their scientific clout, would have dared to remind him that this oasis of the American Dream had its price and, with typically Russian exaggeration, would have begun talking about slavery, Hiroshima, napalm in Vietnam, and sometimes, in a fit of rage (what Vinner called "hysteria straight out of Dostoyevsky") rebelled, crying out, "Yes, of course you're the richest and the strongest! But that's because you pillage the whole world. Your damned America is draining our lifeblood! Do you think you can buy everything with your dollars?" At such moments Vinner would remain silent. He knew only too well the explosive but forgetful temperament of his former compatriots. But above all he was convinced that one really could buy everything. And that the hysteria was only a passing symptom on the part of a person he was in the process of buying.

It struck me that a further objection could be added to all of these: the wars started in order to test new weapons and those ended in order to lower the price of a barrel of crude oil. And a good many other negative aspects of things besides. But I let Vinner finish his performance, as one lets a guide complete the tour of a site of no interest. He did not have a coffee but some extremely frothy milk drink. And his concluding comments (he was speaking of the success of the "melting pot": "In the sun all cats are brown, isn't that so?") were accompanied by rhythmic gurgling and sucking noises. I reflected that the only counterargument in harmony with the genial tone of our meeting would have been to criticize the obesity of some of the vacationers around us. Vinner looked at his watch and hastened to bring matters to a close.

"I'll see what I can do. I can't make any promises. You know, we have plenty of doctors here and then some. But I have a friend who may be interested in your experience as a doctor in Chechnya. I should get a reply within-um-let's say four or five days."

That was the story I had quickly concocted with Shakh: an army doctor on the run from the Caucasus via Turkey, who had landed in America. Very sketchy, it had the advantage of corresponding to my former profession and being relevant to Vinner's. "Four or five days," that is to say not before the return of his colleague from China. I had an urge not to wait, to tell him who I was and why I had come. The obese woman next to us stood up and, as in a gag on television, almost walked away with the plastic armchair stuck to her backside. Vinner threw me a wink while noisily inhaling the rest of the froth from the bottom of his glass.

I needed words that would have eclipsed the sun, obliterated the whiteness of the sand, stilled the shouts and the peals of laughter. Words that would have been night, the dark, damp granite of cobbled streets, solitude. I realized that I had never left that night and that Vinner's seaside paradise was a future age into which I had strayed by mistake, and that in four or five days I would have to go back into my night.

"He forgot the sugar. I'll go and ask him for it."

I got up and went to the bar at the other end of the terrace. I had to wait for the barman to emerge from a cupboard where he was noisily stacking empty bottles. The ornamental pillar that extended upward from the counter to the ceiling was covered in small pieces of mirrored glass. One of the fragments gave a view of the table I had just left, as well as the one behind it, occupied by a young man reading a newspaper. Throughout our lunch I had been aware of the rustling of pages. Now, reflected in the mirror, I could see his face clearly. He had lowered the newspaper and was talking, without seeming to address anyone in particular. Vinner was turned slightly toward this mouth talking into thin air. A few seconds later he gave a little nod of his head. The man reading the newspaper picked up a bag placed under the table and left. His face, reflected on the pillar, jumped from one square of mirror to the next.

So Vinner was taking my appearance more seriously than all his chat about the new man and the melting pot on the beach might have suggested. I found my own reflection in one of the fragments. I had no idea if he could have recognized my face with these gold-rimmed spectacles and beard. I had no idea what those years now meant to him that lay between him and the dust and heat of that African capital on the verge of war where we had seen him for the first and last time. For him, certainly, it could only be a past he had suppressed, voluntarily wiped from his memory, relegated to the dull prehistory of his own life before his glorious present. Nor had I any idea in what manner the fact of having betrayed you was preserved, carried with him, tolerated in the brief moments of truth and solitude he could not avoid.

"Watch out for sunstroke," he warned as he left me. "And thieves. They can smell foreigners five miles off. Especially the young blacks and the Latinos, too. What a crew!"

"I see, I thought the melting pot…"

"Now, look, that's just between the two of us, as one Russian to another. Don't repeat what I said or you'll get yourself lynched."

That evening the taxi moved along slowly, often held up by cars trying to park near restaurants, and by the crowd of young vacationers embarking on their night of celebration. There was a fine, warm drizzle. The tanned skins of these very skimpily dressed young passersby shone with a dark gloss. Even more than on the beach one sensed their lust for life, their nonchalant insistence on happiness. As I had asked him to, the driver left Destin, following the coast. There was much too much traffic in those streets for it to be clear if I had been awarded an escort. I took a last glance through the rear window and asked for us to return the way we had come. I was aware that it was of no importance to understand what Vinner knew or did not know and how he might be preparing to respond to my appearance. I had neither to protect myself nor, above all, to imagine how my life might be after this trip to Destin. All that remained for me to live through was concentrated in the here and now.

The taxi dropped me in a quiet, narrow street, a street of small villas that already seemed fast asleep. One could hear the rain, heavier than a moment ago, and somewhere in the depths of the thick vegetation the voices from a television set, probably the dialogue from some science fiction film portraying a civilization in the twenty-fifth century All that remained of the sparkle at the town's center was a halo of faded brightness in the sky. As I walked along, the sound of conversations between men of future centuries gradually passed out of earshot and I could only hear the rain. I recognized Vinner's house from the wrought-iron ornaments on the gate.

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 guessed 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. Weariness, 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…

I had stood up when I noticed that the sand was beginning to be colored by the first glow of the morning. The night, still this negative that sheltered me, was going to evolve into the sunlit shades of blue of a day by the sea. It would fill with tanned bodies and shouts, imprint itself as a happy holiday snapshot. I had hurried to extricate myself from this snapshot in the making, gone up onto the dune (from the top of it, in the distance, one could see the first houses and the terrace of the café where Vinner was due to join me in two and a half hours' time), and taken my place on this bench, sheltered from the wind that was already blowing the tops off the waves.

The sun-drenched silence of the place, sheltered by the dune and, behind it, the scrub, filtered out the sounds one by one: now a shout coming from the beach, now a car passing beyond the trees. These sounds seemed to come from very far away, isolated by distance, like signals from an alien world. This world, another holiday morning, was waking up all around me, routinely genial in its ways, making my presence here more and more incongruous. I was a man who had come from a forgotten age to demand satisfaction from a vacationer who, but for my arrival, would have been playing with his two children, making sandcastles or catching shellfish. One could hear voices more frequently and more distinctly, carried up from the beach by the wind. The hum of vehicles was becoming more continuous. There was a tone of triumphal tranquillity in the rhythm with which the sounds of the day were gradually coming together. I was a ghost whose presence could make absolutely no difference to it.

But a brief jolt in these cadences drew me out of my drowsiness. The sound of a car stopping and driving off again at full tilt. It all happens so quickly that I am not aware in what order the noises come. "Someone's opened a bottle of champagne," suggests one thought numbed by the sun. But before this dull pop, suddenly matched by a burning pain in my shoulder, before this pain there is a leap: two adolescent boys come running down the dune, preceded by their kite which, buffeted by the wind, struggles on the slope, climbs again, then hurtles straight at me. I lean to avoid it. It tangles me up in its nylon threads. It is at this moment that someone opens a bottle of champagne behind the trees. The boys rush toward me, yelling apologies, and disentangle me. Their "sorry" is said in tones of: "Gee, we're sorry, but you'd have to be a total idiot to be sitting on that bench. It's bad enough with all those people getting in our way on the beach." During their maneuvering I have time to reconstruct the sequence of noises. First the appearance of the kite, grazing my head. The man who just fired at me (with a silencer: the "champagne"), aiming from his car that had stopped behind the trees, was put off his aim by the appearance of the boys. He did not fire a second shot. A professional would have had to do it, even if it meant bringing down a couple of kite flyers. I slip my hand under the beach towel around my neck. Fingers have a memory of old gestures on the bodies of the wounded: a flesh wound, nothing more, already a lot of blood. Mustn't frighten the children. They scramble off up the dune. The wings of their kite flap in the wind. They have noticed nothing.

At the hospital reception desk it took me quite a long time to prove I was creditworthy. The receptionist explained to me in detail what type of medical insurance I needed in order to be admitted. The towel on my shoulder was no longer holding the blood and this was trickling down my arm. I managed to get her to accept my credit card. She telephoned a superior for reassurance. On the walls I looked at the photos showing off the most high-performance equipment the hospital had at its disposal. While she was talking the receptionist was wiping my card with a Kleenex tissue to remove the bloodstains, then she wiped her fingers with a swab soaked in alcohol.

In the corridor where they made me wait I came upon a whole row of young cooks in their white uniforms, some of them with their hats on their heads. Each of them, all in identical postures, was holding an injured hand wrapped in an emergency bandage. They looked as if they were the victims of a mad killer bent on exterminating all kitchen staff. Tiredness at first stopped me realizing that these were simply accidents at work. Hundreds of restaurants along the coast, knives that cut a finger at the same time as a slice of steak. As I awaited my turn I thought again about Vinner's stinginess in hiring a killer who was not really professional, a cheap contract for the easy prey that I was. I recalled the receptionist explaining to me with faultless logic why I had no right to medical attention. This whole world, with its triumphal air, seemed to me quite simply pathetic, like an account book someone had tried to brighten up with a few picturesque seaside views.

The nurse who came to fetch me thought I had lost consciousness. I was sitting motionless, my eyes closed, the back of my neck against the wall. In the questionnaire the receptionist had told me to fill in I had just discovered, at the very bottom, this form of words: "Person to contact in case of emergency" I had replied to all the other questions and I was getting ready to put a name beside this one… The name of a relative, of a friend. I thought of you. Of Shakh. In a flash of memory I pictured a white-haired woman at the heart of the steppe… I realized that you were the only people whose names I could have written on this line in the questionnaire. The only ones among whom I still felt alive.

That night at the hospital I took out of my overnight bag the folder with the sheaf of paper Vinner had handed to me. Then the English newspaper; the photo of Shakh, the caption: "One of the barons of the nuclear network." That photo, that stupid caption. There would be no other record of his life.

Opening the folder, I came upon a snapshot Vinner must have slipped in as bait. I studied it, recognized it. Long ago, after more than three years of our life abroad, I was spending two weeks with you in Russia. It was in February, the abundance of light already heralded the spring. Intoxicated by these days of sunshine, for a moment we believed we could live a life like other people, quietly accumulating memories, letters, photos. I had bought a camera and, to try it out, I had taken a first test shot, aiming the lens low. That had produced this strange photo: the ground covered in snow, a section of an old wooden fence, two shadows on the white surface, dazzling in the sunlight. We did not keep the photos taken during those two weeks. In the event of a search they could have betrayed us. Only this shot, with no identifying marks and no date, had come with us on our travels (you sometimes used it as a bookmark), indecipherable to other people.

"No other record of her life." I silenced this thought before having really formulated it. Too late, for the truth was there, unstoppable. Soon everything would be reduced to that winter snapshot, from which I alone could still call to mind your features, picture one of the days of your life.

My own disappearance, which for Vinner was only a question of organization, suddenly appeared in quite a different light from these cloak-and-dagger games. Dumbfounded, I saw myself as the last person who could speak about you, tell your real name, give you an existence among the living, if only through the ludicrous means of recollecting the past.

Feverishly I set about seeking for some glimpses of our old life, glimpses of cities, of skies, moments of joy. They surfaced and quickly disintegrated under the touch of memory. I needed a more solid fact, a particle of you whose evidence would be beyond dispute. A certificate of civic status almost, I thought, with stupidly administrative but irrefutable information on it, like place and date of birth.

Place and date of birth… I repeated these details that must surely hold your life back from the brink of oblivion, and recalled the day when I had learned them. A rainy day in Germany, on a journey that had exasperated me because of its lack of objective, when suddenly this objective arose. The story you told me.

It was several months before the end of the nomadic life that had been ours for so many years. You mentioned a town to me in what, until recently, had been East Germany and we set off, soon crossing the abolished frontier. The contrast was still visible: "A tourniquet has come off," I said to myself, "and the benefits of the West will now flow into the limb constricted for so long. The benefits or maybe the poison. Both, probably." We could already observe the start of this transfusion process. Roads were beginning to be mended, housefronts were being cleaned. But the rain that day was eliding the changes under the gray light of autumn, mingling the two Germanies with the same question: "How can they live in these dark, damp little towns that go to sleep at six o'clock in the evening?" In one street a window facing out onto a dirty, noisy crossroads gave me a glimpse of a very white lace curtain, a flowering plant, a crowd of little china vases and figurines-all of it only three yards away from the huge trucks thundering up a viaduct. And further on, in the low doorway to a tavern, men were gathered in folk costumes and their laughter mingled with the sounds of merry, strident music.

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.