Requiem For A Lost Empire

1

It has always been my conviction that the house that sheltered their love, and later my own birth, was much closer to the night and its constellations than to the life of that vast country they had managed to escape without leaving its territory. The country surrounded them, encircled them, but they were elsewhere. And if, in the end, it discovered them, hidden deep in the woods in the Caucasus, this was the chance outcome of a game of symbols.

For it was a symbolic tie that, in one way or another, linked every inhabitant of the country to the mythical existence of the master of the empire. In their mountain refuge they believed they were free of the cult the country, indeed the entire globe, had built up around an old man who lived out his days consumed by the fear that he had not killed those likely to kill him. Adored or hated, he had a place in everyone's hearts. By day he was acclaimed, when night fell he was cursed in feverish whispers. But these two had the privilege of never bringing his name to mind. Of thinking only about the earth, the fire, the swirling waters of the stream by day Of loving one another, loving the constancy of the stars by night.

Until that moment when the dictator, now almost halfway through the last year of his life, called them to order. Despite his morbid obsessions, irony was no stranger to him: he often smiled through his mustache. They did not wish to come to him? He would go to them. The mountain that towered above the narrow valley

where their house lay hidden reverberated with explosions. Was the construction of a dam that would bear his name being embarked on? An artificial lake created to his greater glory? A power transmission cable set up that he had decided should bring light to remote villages? Was a mineral deposit being uncovered that would be dedicated to him? They only knew that, whatever the nature of these works, the master of the empire was making his presence felt.

After each explosion, fragments of rock shot up above the mountaintop then hurtled down the slope, now sticking fast in the tangles of the underbrush, now parting the smooth surface of the stream. Some of the slabs came to a halt just yards short of the fence that screened the house. Each time they caught sight of a fresh stone missile, the man and woman would leap up, holding out their arms instinctively, as if they could block the bounding fall that snapped tree trunks and tore up broad swathes of the forest floor.

When the explosions fell silent they exchanged looks and had time to say to themselves that their presence had not been discovered, so the place was really safe, or perhaps (they dared not believe this) their clandestine, criminal way of life was finally going to be accepted. The last salvo was unlike the others: it sounded to them like a stray echo that had been delayed. The slab of rock that detached itself from the mountaintop was different too-flat, rounded, and, in a manner of speaking, silent. Its fall was almost soundless. It struck a tree, stood on edge, and revealed its true nature. It was a granite disk, sliced off by the whim of the explosion, rolling faster and faster. The man and woman made no move, mesmerized both by the speed of its rotation and the improbable slowness with which the action was unfolding in front of their eyes. A tree trunk barring the path of this stone wheel was not smashed but sliced, like an arm by a saber. The thickets that might have stopped it seemed to part to let it through. It avoided another tree with the sly agility of a big cat. The dusk veiled some of the stages in its descent-they heard, before seeing it, the dry shattering of the fence.

The disk did not destroy their house. It embedded itself in it, as if in clay, plunging into the heart of it, tearing up the floor and coming to a halt, still bolt upright.

Standing about a hundred yards away from the house, the man lashed out in the direction of the mountaintop, threatening someone with raised fists, and let fly an oath. Then, walking like an automaton, approached their home, which still seemed to be mutely quivering from the impact. The mother, nearer to the door, did not step forward but fell to her knees and hid her face in her hands. The silence had returned to its original essence-the incisive purity of the peaks against a sky still radiant with light. All that could be heard now was the man's halting footfalls. But almost audible in its intensity was the unknowable prayer, silently murmured by the woman.

Making their way into the room, they saw the granite disk, even more massive there under the low ceiling, embedded between the deeply furrowed floorboards. The child's cradle, which hung in the middle of the room (they were wary of snakes), had been grazed and was rocking gently. But the cords had not given way and the child had not awakened. The mother held him tight, still incredulous, then allowed herself to be convinced, heard the life in him. When she looked up, what the father saw in her eyes was the trace of a dread that was no longer related to the child's life. It was the echo of her terrible prayer, the vow she had made, the inhuman sacrifice she had offered in advance, to the one who would keep death at bay. The father did not know the name of this dark and vigilant god. He believed in fate or, quite simply, chance.

Chance willed it that the explosions did not start again. The man and woman, who accepted each day of silence as a gift of God or of fate, were not to know that artificial lakes were no longer needed, since the one to whom they were dedicated had just died.

The news of Stalin's death would be brought to them, three months later, by a woman with white hair, a lithe and youthful step, and eyes that did not judge. The only one who knew their secret refuge, she was more than a friend or relative. She came as night fell, greeted them, and spent several seconds stroking the surface of the granite slab, whose presence in their house no longer amazed the couple and seemed as natural to the infant as the sun at the window or the fresh scent of the clothes hanging up outside the wall. The word "rock" would be one of the first he learned.

It was from that infant, no doubt, that I inherited both the fear of naming things and the painful temptation to do so. An infant, borne away one night by the white-haired woman who, as she made her escape, did her utmost for him not to be aware of it. At first she was successful, until she came to cross a narrow suspension bridge above the stream. The infant was dozing with open eyes, and did not seem surprised. He recognized the warmth of the woman's body, the shape and strength of the arms holding him tight. Despite the darkness, the air had the same scent as usual, the pleasantly sharp tang of dead leaves. Even the mountains, now black, and the trees tinted blue by the moon did not amaze him: often the sun's fierce light at noon would seem to turn the ground and the foliage around their house black.

But halfway across the little bridge, as it sways on its ropes, suddenly everything changes. The infant does not see the worn slats on which the woman is moving falteringly forward, nor the gaps left by the missing ones, nor the phosphorescent foam on the stream. But he senses, without knowing why, that the woman carrying him is afraid. And this fear in an adult is as strange as the abrupt maneuver by which she grips the collar of his little shirt in her teeth, reaches out with her arms to cling to the ropes and leaves him dangling in the dark air. Her stride-almost a leap-over the broken slats is so long that the child feels as if he is flying. The pebbles on the bank crunch under the woman's feet. She unclenches her jaw, takes the infant in her arms again. And hastily puts her hand over his mouth, anticipating the cry that this being, who is beginning to understand, was about to utter.

For the infant their nocturnal escape coincided with that unique moment when the world becomes words. Only the day before everything was still fused together into a luminous mixture of sounds, skies, familiar faces. When the sun went down, his father would appear on the threshold of the house-and the joy of the setting sun was also joy at seeing this smiling man whom the sun brought home, or was it, perhaps, the father's return that sent the sun plunging into the branches of the forest and turned its rays copper? His mother's hands smelled of clothing washed in the icy waters of the stream, a fragrance that scented the first hours of the morning, mingling with the breeze that blew down from the mountains. And this flow of air was inseparable from the quick caress with which his mother's fingers strayed into his hair when she woke him. Occasionally, amid this tissue of lights and scents, a rarer note: the presence of the woman with white hair. Sometimes her coming coincided with the retreat of the last snows toward the mountaintops, sometimes with the blooming of those great purple flowers on their tall stems that seemed to light up the underbrush. She would come and the infant would notice an extra clarity in all that he saw and breathed. He came to associate this mysterious happiness with the little suspension bridge that the woman used to cross when she spent a few days in their house.

On that particular night it was the same woman, gripping his shirt collar in her teeth and carrying him over the little bridge as it set snares for them with its broken slats. When she collapsed amid the thickets she just had time to stifle the infant's cry. He struggled for a second, then froze, alarmed by quite a new sensation: the woman's hand was trembling. Silent now, he observed the world disintegrating into objects he could name, and which, once named, hurt his eyes. This moon, a kind of frozen sun. This bridge, a secret herald of happiness no longer. The smell of the water, no longer associated with the coolness of his mother's hands. But above all, this woman, sitting in the darkness, her anxious face turned toward impending danger.

He recalled that their whole journey, begun well before sunset, had been nothing other than a slow slide toward a world riven by strangeness and fear. They had started by walking through the forest, up hill and down dale, at a pace too fast for an ordinary stroll. The sun had gone down without waiting for his father's smile. Then the forest had thrust them out onto a level, open space and the child, not believing his eyes, had seen several houses lined up along a road. Before that there had only been one house in the world, theirs, hidden between the stream and the wooded flank of the mountain. The house, unique, like the sky or the sun, impregnated with all the scents given off by the forest, in tune with the yellowing of the leaves that covered its roof, attentive to changes of the light. And now this street lined with houses! Their multiplicity hurts his eyes, provokes a painful need to respond. The word "house" forms in the infant's mouth, leaving an insipid, hollow taste. They spend a long while in an empty courtyard behind a fence, and when the child grows impatient and utters the word "house," to indicate that he wants to go home, the woman hugs him to herself and stops him from speaking. Over her shoulder he becomes aware of a group of men. Their appearance leaves him totally baffled. To himself he says "people," the word he had heard spoken at home with a slight anxious hesitation. People, the others, them… Now he sees them in flesh and blood, they exist. The world is growing bigger, teeming, destroying the singularity of those who hitherto surrounded him: his mother, his father, the white-haired woman. By saying "people," he feels he has done something irreparable. He closes his eyes, opens them again. The people disappearing at the end of the street all look alike in their dark jackets and pants and their long black boots. He hears the woman heave a deep sigh.

During the night, after crossing the little suspension bridge, words assault him, force him to understand. He understands that what was missing from the houses in the village, where they have just seen "people," was the great stone disk. These houses were empty, their doors were wide open and no glint of mica shone in the gloom of their rooms. A sudden doubt assails him: what if the house has no need of the gray rock at its heart? What if their own house was not a proper house at all? The conversations between adults that he used to retain in his memory as simple rhythms now bristle with words. He understands scraps of these words, remembered in spite of himself. The story of the rock, its appearance, its strength. They often spoke of it. So, it was an aberration: even his mother's action one night when she fixed a candle in the long fissure on the slab of rock.

All at once his family's life seems to him very fragile in the face of this threatening world, where the houses get by without granite disks and the inhabitants all wear black boots and vanish up a road that has no ending. The child senses confusedly that it is because of these "people" that their family has been obliged to dwell in the forest and not in the village where the others live. He goes on deciphering the words he recalls from the adults' conversations and is more and more afraid. He has not seen his parents since the sunshine of the afternoon, a separation, he senses, that could last indefinitely in this world without limits.

The hand smothering his cry seems unfamiliar, for it is trembling. He remains silent for a moment. In the darkness below their hiding place footfalls can be heard on the pebbles at the stream's edge, voices, a brief metallic grating sound. The infant struggles, he is about to free himself from the hand restraining his sobs, to cry out for his mother; he has recognized his father's voice down there. He wants no more of this world where everything is booby-trapped by words. He does not want to understand.

Through the breathlessness of his struggles he suddenly hears a melody. A hardly audible music. A soft, almost silent singsong that the woman murmurs in his ear. He tries to grasp the words. But the phrases have a strange beauty, devoid of meaning. A language he has never heard. Quite different from that of his parents. A language that does not require understanding, just immersion in its swaying rhythms, in the velvety suppleness of its sounds.

Mesmerized by this unknown language, the child falls asleep and hears neither the distant gunshots, multiplied by echoes, nor the long-drawn-out cry that just reaches them, laden with all the despair of love.

Had it not been for you, I would have left behind forever that infant falling asleep in the heart of the Caucasian forest, as we often abandon and forget irretrievable fragments of ourselves that we judge too remote, too painful, or simply too difficult to acknowledge. But one night you made a remark about the truth of our lives. I must have misunderstood you. I was certainly mistaken about what you meant. Yet it was this misapprehension that caused the forgotten child to be reborn in me.

Later on I attributed my confusion to the stress of all the dangers, long-term and immediate, that made up our existence at that time. To our wanderings from country to country, from language to language, to all the masks that our profession imposed on us. And, still more, to that love we superstitiously refused to name, myself knowing it to be unmerited, you believing it had already been declared in instants of silence in cities at war, where we might well have died without ever experiencing such moments at the end of the fighting that restored us to ourselves.

"One day it must be possible to tell the truth…" These were the words, uttered with a mixture of insistence and resigned bitterness, that misled me. I pictured a witness-myself! Confused, lost for words, stunned by the enormity of the task. To tell the truth about that age whose course our own lives had here and there stumblingly followed. To testify to the history of a country, our country, that had succeeded, almost in front of our eyes, in building itself up into a formidable empire, only to collapse in a cacophony of shattered lives.

"To tell the truth one day." You were silent, half lying beside me, your face turned toward the rapidly maturing night outside the window. The netting of the mosquito screen could clearly be seen against the hot, dark background. And in the middle of this dusty rectangle a zigzag tear was becoming more and more visible: the blast from one of the last shells had cut into this fabric that separated us from the city and its death throes.

"To tell the truth…" I did not dare object. Uneasy at the role of witness or judge you were assigning to me, I mentally ran through all the reasons that made me incapable or even unworthy of such a mission. Our age, I told myself, was already receding and leaving us on the shore of time, like fish trapped by the ebbing of the sea. Bearing witness to what we had lived through would have meant speaking of a vanished ocean, evoking its ground swells and the victims of its storms, while faced with impassive undulations of sand. Yes, preaching in the desert. And our native land, that crushing empire, that Tower of Babel cemented together by dreams and blood, was it not disintegrating, story by story, vault by vault, its glass-lined halls turning into batteries of funhouse mirrors, its vistas into dead ends?

The weariness of sleepless nights gave substance to these words. I saw the desert and the tiny puddles of water sucked in by the sand, the colossal ruined tower, drowning in long red banners, a liquid red, a whole river of purple.

You slipped off the bed. I woke up, ready, when suddenly awakened, as for many years now, to abandon our current dwelling, to reach for a gun, to reply calmly to anyone who might be hammering at the door. This time the reflex was unnecessary. The silence of the city was broken only by occasional uncoordinated shots, and a brief rumble of trucks, swallowed up at once by the density of the night.

You went over to the table. In the darkness I saw the pale touch of your body, colored by reflected light from a fire at the other end of the street. "To tell the truth…" All my waking energy became focused on this impracticable notion. As I watched you moving through the dark room I resumed my silent refusal.

You speak of truth. But all my own memories have been falsified. Ever since my birth. And I could never bear witness for other people. I don't know their lives and I don't understand them. As a child I never knew how they lived, all these normal people. Their world stopped at the door of our orphanage. When one day I was invited to a birthday party in a normal family-two little girls with long braids, parents brimming with goodwill, all as it should be, jam in little silver-plate dishes, table napkins I didn't dare touch-I thought they were making fun of me and at any minute they were going to admit it and kick me out. I still remember it with morbid gratitude, you see, as if by not dismissing me they had performed an act of superhuman generosity. Just think of it, tolerating this young barbarian with a shaven head and hands nearly blue with cold, sticking out of sleeves that were too short. And to top it all, the son of a disgraced father. So how can you expect me to be an impartial witness?

You switched on a flashlight, I saw your fingers in the narrow beam, the glint of a needle. "To tell the truth about what we have lived through." I raised myself on one elbow, wanting to explain to you that I understood nothing about the age that was already slipping away beneath our feet. And that the whole shambles of it made me think of the innards of the armored vehicle I had seen the day before at the center of the city, when taking refuge from bursts of gunfire. Ripped apart by a rocket, it was still smoking and displayed a complex mixture of dislocated machinery, twisted metal, and lacerated human flesh. The force of the explosion had made this chaos astonishingly homogeneous, almost orderly. The electric cables looked like blood vessels, the dashboard, battered and splashed with blood, was like the brain of a rare creature, a futuristic war beast. And, buried somewhere in this lava of death, the radio, undamaged, blared forth its quavering rallying calls. Such a scene was not new to me. Only the sudden, sharp realization that I did not understand was quite new. Sheltering in my hiding place, I said to myself that these men who were killing one another under a cloudless sky lived in a land where epidemics were palpably more efficient at this than armaments; that the cost of one rocket would have sufficed to feed a whole village in this African country; that the money spent on that vehicle would have funded the sinking of hundreds of wells; that the blame for this war must be laid at the door of the Americans and ourselves, for we were fighting each other through intermediary nations, and also of the former colonial powers, who had corrupted the Eden-like state of these lands. But that primitive paradise was a myth, too, for men had always fought, with lances in the past, with rocket launchers today; and the only thing to distinguish the deaths of the occupants of the burned-out armored car from the carnage of their ancestors was the complex fashion in which their deaths, deaths both so individual (beneath a layer of torn-off armor I saw a long, very slender, almost boyish arm with a fine leather bracelet on the wrist) and so anonymous, were swallowed up by the interests of remote powers, their thirst for oil or gold, the cut and thrust of their bureaucratic diplomacy, their demagogic doctrines. And even by the petty concerns and anticipated pleasures of that arms dealer I had seen, two days before the fighting broke out, getting onto the plane for London. He had given his name as Ron Scalper and seemed like a very ordinary sales representative. He sought to accentuate his ordinariness by handing over his briefcase to security with a tourist's naive clumsiness, mopping his brow in front of the person checking his passport. Yes, that soldier's death was insidiously linked to the relief this man feels once he is seated in the plane, turning up the ventilation control and closing his eyes, already transported into the antechamber of the civilized world. By the same tortuous routes, that wrist, with its leather bracelet, reaches out into the life of the woman whom the man on the London plane can already picture, offering herself naked, yielding to his desire, the young mistress he has earned for himself by taking all those risks. Our age, I thought, is nothing more than a monstrous organism that digests gold, oil, politics, and wars, and secretes pleasure for some, death for others. A gigantic stomach that churns up and blends together things that, in our shame and hypocrisy, we keep separate. The young mistress, at this very moment moaning beneath her arms dealer, would utter a cry of indignation if I told her her happiness (for, no doubt, they call it happiness) is inseparably linked to that childish bracelet stained with grease and blood!

I got up, wanting to confide these thoughts to you in all their despairing simplicity: no, I do not begin to understand this grotesque organism, for there is nothing to understand. I crossed our room in the darkness streaked with reflections from the flames, I joined you at the window.

"One day it must be possible to tell the truth." I was going to give you my reply: the truth about our age was a young body steeped in beauty creams, the human flesh the arms dealer treated himself to, in exchange for his rocket launchers. And this trade, the tragicomic outcome of global maneuvers, had ordained that today, in that precise spot, a soldier, wearing a leather band on his wrist, should be blown to pieces by an explosion. The truth was absolutely logical and absolutely arbitrary.

Just as I was about to say this to you, I noticed what you were doing. Hands raised halfway up the window, you were darning the torn mosquito screen. Long stitches of pale thread, movements very slow, guided by the needle as it felt its way in the darkness, but there was also another slowness, that of a deep reverie, of a lassitude so great that it no longer even sought rest. It seemed to me that never before had I happened on you in such a relaxed state, at a moment in your life of such perfect harmony with yourself, with what you were to me. You were the woman whose shoulders my hand caressed lightly when they seemed cold in the sweltering heat of the night. A woman whose infinite singularity and troubling uniqueness, as the being I loved, I was aware of as never before and who, that night in this ravaged city, inexplicably found herself living so close to death, whether accidental or intended. A woman who was drawing two edges of fabric together on a night when the fighting had stopped. And who, noticing my hand at last, inclined her head, letting my fingers rest beneath her cheek and was already becoming utterly still, in a half sleep.

Your presence was one of total strangeness. And at the same time of completely natural necessity. You were there and the murderous complexity of this world, this tangle of wars, greed, vengeance, and lies found itself face to face with a truth beyond dispute. This truth was poised in your gesture: a hand closing up two pieces of fabric against a night glutted with death. I sensed that all the testimonies I could have offered were overtaken by the truth of that moment, snatched from the madness of men.

I did not dare, and in any case I would not have known how, to question you about the meaning of your words. I kissed the back of your head, your neck, the start of the fragile rosary of your vertebrae, transfixed by the tenderness a woman's body inspires when she is totally absorbed in a task she cannot interrupt. And so it was as a simple response to your desire for truth that I began telling you about the birth of the world in the eyes of that infant lost among the mountains. His fear of understanding, his refusal to name things, his life being saved by the music of an unknown language. He hesitated for a moment on the brink of our games of pleasure and death, then let himself sink back once more into the fraternal intimacy of the universe. The woman who held him in her arms went on softly singing her lullaby, even as the sound of gunshots reached them from the other bank of the stream. The unknown language was her mother tongue.

I embarked on this story beside the window, beside the rectangle of netting you were darning, I finished it in a whisper, leaning toward your face relaxed in sleep. I thought you had dozed off and missed the ending. But after my last words, without saying anything, you gave my hand a gentle squeeze.

There were times, long before I knew you, when I did go back to that night in the Caucasus and the sleeping child. These returns to the past allowed me to take refuge from sudden excesses of grief, horrors that were too overwhelming. They marked a dotted line of brief resurrections along the course of my life, following each of the temporary deaths that punctuate our lives. One such death had assailed me on the day when a fellow pupil, the leader of one of the little gangs that were rife at our orphanage, spat some crumbs of tobacco from his cigarette stub in my direction and hissed with explosive scorn, "Look, everyone knows about your father. The firing squad shot him like a dog!" Or another time when, out for a stroll, I chanced upon a woman deep in the long grass of a gully, half naked and drunk, being taken in brutal haste by two men, who puffed and panted with little false laughs and oaths. Against a dark background of lush June vegetation, her rotund, obese body was blinding in its pallor. She turned her head, and I recognized the simpleton whom the townspeople called by a little girl's pet name, Lyubochka. And then there was that birthday party with dishes of silver plate. Everyone tried to behave as if I were just like the others, tried not to notice my clumsy actions or to anticipate them. And their kindness was so evident that there was no longer any doubt: I would never be like them, I would always be that youth whose hands were red with cold, dogged by his past, who, if asked about his background, would sometimes stammer out truths that people took for wild lies and sometimes lie to reassure the curious. And there would always be, as there was that day, a very young child who would tug at his sleeve and ask him, "Why aren't you laughing with us?"

After each of these deaths I would once more find myself in my Caucasian night: I would see the face of the white-haired woman, her eyes fixed on my eyelids; I would listen to her song, crooned in a language whose beauty seemed to stand guard over this moment in the darkness.

Later on, when studying medicine, I tried to put an end to these returns to the past, seeing them as a sign of sentimental weakness, shameful for a prospective army doctor. I stopped being ashamed of them when I realized that night had had nothing in common with the soft-heartedness wrung from us by a happy childhood. For there had been no happy childhood. Only that night when, venturing across the frontier into the world, the child took fright and, through the magic of an unknown language, was able to retreat for a little longer into his earlier universe.

This was the universe I always returned to in my flights from the suffocations of life. And when, having joined the army, I found myself looking after soldiers in the undeclared wars waged by the empire at all four corners of the globe, little by little this night of the child became the sole remaining trace that allowed me to go on recognizing myself.

One day this trace was obliterated.

At first I convinced myself that the very last wounded man did exist. At the end of the very last war. Wars, I told myself, 'were small now, local, or so the diplomats said. So, logically, an end to them was thinkable. But I discovered soon enough that it was the big wars that came to an end, not the little ones; these were simply a continuation of the others in peacetime. For the first few months, perhaps a whole year, I kept a diary: customs of the country, characteristics of the inhabitants, scraps of life stories that wounded men confided to me. Then on to another country, another war, and I perceived that the differences in terrain and customs were increasingly blurred by the routine of fighting, with its monotony of suffering and cruelty, which is the same under every sky. Ethiopia, Angola, Afghanistan… Now the pages of my diary disgusted me, with their tone of the nosy tourist and the detachment of the observer who plans to leave tomorrow. By now I knew that I would not be leaving. My dreams were no longer peopled with human faces but with the gaping grins of wounds. Each had its singular smile, sometimes broad and fleshy, sometimes with an indented gash blackened with burns. And, like the filter on a camera, the same light colored all these dreams, the color of dirty blood, of rust on the carcasses of armored vehicles, of the reddish dust raised by helicopters bringing fresh wounded to the hospital. Often the same vision woke me: what I was stitching up was not the gaping grin of a wound but lips trying to speak. I would get up and, for several seconds after being switched on, the light seemed to alleviate the raging furnace where an old electric fan kept churning away. My watch showed it was the hour at which soldiers returned from night operations. Standing at the mirror, I would try to reassemble the man I must once more become in the morning. I would make the effort for several seconds, then return to the child hidden in the mountains of the Caucasus.

One day this refuge lost its power. A soldier who had had both arms amputated escaped during the night, loomed up in front of the sentry with a threatening cry, and was killed by a burst of gunfire. The authorities preferred to call it an attack of madness rather than suicide. That evening, after a day in which there had been two men seriously burned and another amputation, I realized I had almost forgotten the suicide of the night before. When I went to bed I had to wait for the blissful weightlessness of morphine before admitting that within me there was no longer any place, no longer any moment, where I could hide.

Thus I lived, letting each new day obliterate the anguish of the previous one in the panic-stricken looks of the newly wounded. The only measure of time left to me was the all-too-evident progress in perfecting the weapons used by our soldiers and their enemies. I no longer remember in which war it was (it may have been in Nicaragua) that we first encountered strange bullets with a displaced center of gravity. They had the appalling characteristic of traveling through the body in an unpredictable way and lodging in parts that are the most difficult to reach. Some time after that cluster bombs appeared, ever more ingenious shells filled with needles that seemed to be dragging us into a macabre competition in which our normal surgical instruments frequently turned out to be ill adapted. And then one morning, the helicopter that was due to pick up the wounded and dead following a battle did not return. We learned it had been shot down by a new portable missile. From that morning onward what our ears detected in the throb of the propellers was a dull vibration of distress.

I had no time to reflect on the underlying causes of these wars. Besides, all the discussions I had with other doctors or with officer-instructors always used to end up in the same little geopolitical dead end. The world was becoming too small for the two vast, over-armed empires that shared it between them. They collided with another, like two icebergs in the bottleneck of a strait, they disintegrated at the edges, breaking countries in half, tearing nations apart; avoiding the worst while in disputed zones there was continual friction. Hiroshima and Vietnam sufficed to establish who was the aggressor: America, the West. Some of our number, the most prudent or the most patriotic, left it at that. Others would add that America, this convenient enemy, justified a good many absurdities in our own country. In return, our baleful existence helped the Americans excuse their own. This, they concluded was the price of global equilibrium. These sober conclusions would often be swept away a few hours later by an armored vehicle in flames whose steel shell echoed with the cries of people being burned alive or, as on the last occasion, by the death of the wounded man reaching out with his stumps toward bursts of submachine-gun fire. I made an effort not to comprehend these deaths, lest I make light of them in our discussions of strategy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"It's more complicated than that."

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

"I'll write you…"

"But…"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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…"

The masses of water crashing against the cargo ship now seemed more rhythmical, as if resigned to the logic of the resistance offered them by this ludicrous vessel. I heard the counsellor get up and in the sudden flare of a match his face seemed to me aged, deeply etched. His voice had the slightly disappointed tone of someone who had been getting ready to spring a surprise but has missed the right moment to announce it: "Well, that's it. We're on the Red Sea. We won't be tossed about quite so much now." Perhaps it was slight irritation at having to break off his story to announce the news. He resumed it again but brought it to a swift conclusion.

"On account of our duels at chess Ethel nicknamed me 'Shakhmatov' or 'Shakh' for short. She knew Russian. There are only two or three people left who know this nickname… Goodnight!"

In the years that followed he occasionally spoke of the Rosenbergs again. One day he told me why, at the moment of their arrest, he was sure they would confess. "Because if I'd had those two children, that's what I would have done," he said.

With the passage of time, I also came to realize how his storytelling had allowed me to forget my fear, that egotistical and humiliating fear of losing one's life just when things are promising to turn out well.

Last of all, that night taught me Shakh's nickname, which was known to very few people. You were one of them.