Requiem For A Lost Empire

2

Everything expressed by their voices, their bodies and, no doubt, their thoughts that night seemed to me tinged with theatrical exaggeration. Their excessively enthusiastic judgments in front of this statue, before that picture. Their smiles, contorted with too much happiness. And, behind these rapt expressions, the all-too-evident lack of attention to what they were being shown. And the overly urbane and almost gleeful hypocrisy with which they kept promising to meet for lunch one day. And the glances of the men, eyeing the women's figures quite blatantly, then immediately affecting icy indifference and poise.

At first I told myself that in an art gallery such an exaggeration of sentiments, either felt or simulated, must stem from the physical, and hence sensual, warmth of the works exhibited. A mistaken supposition, for the pictures 'were all bloodlessly and coldly geometric and the sculptures-cubes superimposed on one another and truncated cylinders-looked hollow despite the weight of their bronze.

I then attributed these excessive reactions to the schizophrenia of this city cut in two, divided like two hemispheres of a brain, each with its own very personal vision of the world, its own customs and foibles. Berlin, where the streets ran headlong into the Wall, then reappeared on the other side, both similar and unrecognizable. In the western hemisphere of this war-disordered brain people felt themselves to be charged with a special mission, none more so, I thought, as I made my way slowly through the crowd of them, than the guests at the very first exhibition in this new art center. In their eyes these great, brightly lit rooms were becoming an outpost of the Western World, confronting the alarming boundlessness of the barbaric lands that began beyond the Wall. Each of their gestures was projected onto the screen of the darkness that stretched away toward the east. Every word, every smile produced a reaction out there in that unpredictable blackness. Each truncated cylinder hurled defiance from its pedestal at the realistic paintings and sculptures of human forms that were being exhibited in the eastern hemisphere. The guests felt themselves to be observed by attentive eyes-jealous, hostile, or admiring. It was because of how they were seen from the other side of the Wall that they acted out these exaggerated emotions, going into ecstasies over a canvas, greeting a new acquaintance, sizing up a body or a face at a glance.

A waiter came and offered me champagne. I took the glass, thinking with a smile that what was almost a caricature of the Western World seemed like this because I was seeing it for the first time. I was still seeing it from beyond the Wall. It could not but be theatrical.

At the other end of the room, through the coming and going of the crowd, I caught sight of Shakh, dark suit, bow tie, his gray head inclined toward his interlocutor. I knew we should pretend not to know one another and that, just as he was leaving, someone would introduce us. This someone would be a woman whom I had never met but whom I should seem to have known for a long time. At the moment of this artificial introduction Shakh would be standing next to a dealer in rare stamps. In the most natural way I should make his acquaintance, so as to be able to meet one of his regular customers at his store a few days later, a specialist in arms sales and a passionate collector of stamps devoted to the world of flowers. Perhaps in the end it was our own playacting, woven into the worldly charade of that reception, that made me think of the theater. It was amusing to see the stamp dealer walking past within a few inches of me, not suspecting my existence. It was as if I were not merely hidden in the wings, but actually invisible on stage, among actors speaking their lines and playing their parts.

The feeling I had was a kind of highly lucid intoxication. I believed I could hear the intimate heartbeat of the Western life into which I must merge. This fusion had the discreet violence of carnal possession. I had to struggle mentally not to admit to being happy. This Berlin quintessence of the Western World was giving me back the aggressive lust for life I had thought was in terminal hibernation within me.

I had been aware of this reawakening already in Moscow, during the months of study and training, preparing me for my new work abroad. This preparation removed me further and further from the person I had been before. And it was not the fact of learning intelligence techniques or doing night parachute drops that confirmed this discontinuity. It was the pleasure of becoming a man with no past, of stripping myself down to this body trained for future action. Of being nothing but this future and, as for my past, to have only an invented life story, well rehearsed and learned by heart.

A couple stopped in front of a picture and I could hear the remarks of the woman, whose shoulder was almost brushing against mine. For her the pale spread of colors over the canvas was "You know, awfully strong, gutsy. And that red, you know, totally dominates the background." I turned my head slightly. Young, dark-haired, extremely elegant, her face truly transported by her contemplation. I admired her. All the Western World was there in this ecstatic hypocrisy in front of a feeble daub that had to be viewed as a work of genius. This shared lie was their unwritten constitution, the password to their social world, their genteel nonconformism. Their prosperity, the brilliance of this palace of the arts, and this woman's body, almost arrogant in its well-manicured beauty, were all underwritten by this unspoken agreement. As I looked at the woman, then at the picture, I experienced that mixture of fascination and disgust that the West had always aroused in the East. I was seized by a sudden impulse to squeeze the glass in my hand more and more tightly, to crush it, to see the couple turn around, to see the reflection of the blood in their eyes, to await their reaction with a smile.

At this moment I caught sight of you.

I saw a woman whose face was known to me thanks to the photos I had been shown during the final briefing for my mission. I knew her life, that borrowed life, as fictitious as my own life story, which she knew in her turn. She came in, not from the direction of the street, but through the vast bay window that opened onto a large garden. I had doubtless missed her first appearance in the room. And now she was returning after seeing the bulkiest of the sculptures exhibited in the open air.

My first impression left me perplexed: you resembled the woman who had just been showering praises on the picture. Dark-haired, like her, the same cut to your suit, the same complexion. At once I understood the reason for my mistake. You moved with the same assurance as she, responded to other people's greetings with as much ease, and your perfect mingling with the crowd of guests made you physically similar to the gushy woman. Now that you were coming to meet me I noticed the differences: your hair was darker, your eyes slightly slanting, your brow higher, your mouth… No, you were nothing like her.

As you crossed the room, people stopped you two or three times and I had time to observe you through the looks others gave you, looks of exaggerated lust, appraising your body; possessing you. I pretended to catch sight of you, I began moving toward you, dodging between groups in conversation. It was at the moment when our eyes met that I saw passing across your brow what looked like the shadow swiftly dissimulated, of very great weariness. I was vexed with you for thus, very briefly, puncturing the elation of the first day of my new life. But already you were talking to me like an old acquaintance and letting me kiss you on the cheek. We sauntered about, just like the others. Then, when we saw Shakh in the company of a man with a large, smooth, bald pate, we walked toward the garden bay, so as to be hailed in passing.

An unexpected scene brusquely interrupted this well-regulated playacting. A crowd gathered. A man who could not be seen over the heads of the throng gave a speech like a fairground barker's, in mangled German, reminiscent of that spoken by German soldiers in comic films about the war. We wormed our way into the throng and saw the man displaying a large spinning top to the crowd. His patter was already provoking laughter.

"The Soviets produce these in their arms factories. This means that first of all they can cover up the production of missiles and, secondly, they can give pleasure to children. Even though this machine weighs more than a shell and makes as much noise as a tank. Look!"

The man crouched and pressed down several times on the point of the top to activate the spring concealed inside its nickel-plated body. The toy hurtled into a waltzing rotation, with a tinny clatter, describing wider and wider circles, and forcing the spectators to retreat amid peals of laughter. Some of them, like one guest with patent leather shoes, tried to push the creature away with the tips of their toes. The owner of the top looked triumphant.

"I'm not mistaken, it's him, isn't it?" I asked you, as I moved out of the way of the people beating a retreat.

"Yes. He's aged amazingly, hasn't he?" you said to me, studying the man with the top.

He was a well-known dissident, expelled from Moscow, who lived in Munich. The toy made a last few turns and came to a standstill amid the applause of the guests.

We joined Shakh and the philatelist. This first contact took place as planned, down to the last word. But the vision of the top passed in front of my eyes from time to time.

Going out into the garden, we stopped for a few minutes among the large structures of bronze and concrete for which there had not been enough room inside the gallery. The trees were already turning yellow. "Under autumn leaves," you remarked to me with a smile, "all these masterpieces are much more bearable." And you added, in a voice that seemed to be hesitating over the need for these words, "I'm older than you. My childhood was in the first years after the war. Poverty that made us gnaw stones. I can remember the rare few days when we 'weren't hungry. Real treats. And worst of all, no toys. We didn't know what they were. And then one day someone brought us a box filled with treasures for the New Year: brand new tops that still smelled of paint. Exactly like that one just now. Later on, when they started making dolls and all the rest, we were already too old for toys…"

I was on the brink of telling you that, despite those few years' difference between us, I too had known those great tops and that I loved their smell and even the clatter they made. I said nothing because then I should have had to talk about the child lost in the night in the Caucasus. And yet for the first time in my life that past now seemed to me admissible.

We never know where objects and gestures from the past will one day rise to the surface again, nor how, in the accumulation of years we have lived through. The spinning top in the Berlin art gallery came back to my mind three years later in the middle of that great war-torn African capital. The soldiers who had that day come to search the house where we were living went away carrying our few possessions with them. Two or three garments, a television set, some paper money you had purposely left out on the desk. As they left they were caught in the fire of a heavy machine gun that suddenly raked the fronts of the houses from the end of the street. The group scattered to recover their breath in a narrow alley. Only the last of them was hit as he ran. Caught on his side, he began turning around on the spot, his arms open wide and still laden with confiscated objects. Bullets of this caliber often transform the movements of a person running into a swift waltzing motion, like a top, I thought, and I saw the same memory reflected in your eyes.

During the search they had made me stand facing the wall, like a child being punished. As the mistress of the house you were from time to time asked to open a drawer, offer a glass of water. You performed these tasks without ever interrupting the swishing of an improvised fan: some of the revolutionary leaflets with which the streets were strewn and which had made their way into the houses through broken windows. Between these sheets of paper you had slipped the photos and coded messages that we had neither had time to send to the Center nor to burn. That would have been the one really dangerous discovery. Curiously enough, those leaflets in your hand wove a fragile protective zone around our lives that clearly made the soldiers uneasy. I sensed this tension, I understood it in these young armed men. They were struggling against the temptation to fire a short burst, which would have freed them from our watching eyes and restored the joyful savagery to their looting. But there were these slogans for revolutionary justice, freshly printed on the fan of leaflets. There was also the loudspeaker on a truck that had been showering the streets with appeals for calm and proclaiming the benefits of the new regime ever since the morning. Turning my head slightly, I could see hands stuffing into the bag a transistor, a jacket, and even the lamp clamped to the edge of the table, which you were helping to unfasten, while successfully avoiding giving an indication of the comic side of your involvement. You knew that the slightest change of mood might provoke the pent-up anger and the brief spitting of an automatic rifle. The soldier who removed the lamp also expropriated the banknotes left out on the desk. And, as this action looked more like simple theft than the others that had preceded it, he thought it politic to justify it by talking, in tones both menacing and moralistic, about corruption, imperialism, and the enemies of the revolution. These were the didactic and pompous tones of the loudspeaker. Ceaselessly repeated, such slogans ended up infiltrating even our thoughts and it was in this style that, in spite of myself, I formulated a silent observation, "The money that you have coveted is the end of your revolution. The serpent of cupidity has stolen into your new house."

When they had gone I turned around and saw you sitting there, still mechanically waving your fan of leaflets. The disorder in the room now matched the chaos outside, just as if this had been the purpose of their visit. Through the window we saw them quietly moving up the street, and a second later there came their flight under the crackle of bullets and the waltzing death of the soldier, revolving several times on the spot and scattering the confiscated objects all around him, those familiar fragments of our daily life. He collapsed, I glanced at you, guessing that you had the same memory: "That top…"

The evening of the private viewing in Berlin seemed infinitely remote. And yet scarcely three years had elapsed. I had a vision of the faces that were reflected then in the nickel-plated surface of the toy launched by that man with the forced laugh of a fairground barker. The dark-haired young woman swooning in front of a pallid canvas. Shakh speaking to the philatelist. And also the man who had succeeded in kicking away the top with the tip of his patent leather shoe. I had later chanced to pass the woman in a restaurant: in conversation with a friend, she was commenting on the menu and her descriptions were just as enthusiastic as the one she had earlier reserved for the picture. So she was less hypocritical than I had thought, I said to myself, just a little excessive in her praises. The philatelist continued to spend more than half his life in his shop piled high with stacks of stamped envelopes and albums, without having the least suspicion that he had entered our world of espionage for a few hours and left it again, unaware of what was happening to him. As for the man who had changed the trajectory of the spinning top by giving it a little kick, two years later he had lost his post as first secretary to a Western embassy in East Berlin, on account of an amorous liaison. It was Shakh who had told us of this misadventure. "He was not a novice, he knew that bed is the best trap for a diplomat. But it's a little like dying, it's something that only happens to other people." We thought the story would stop there: the tale of one of those stupid men in their fifties who swallow the amorous encounters set up for them hook, line, and sinker. But there was a detail that made Shakh continue. There was in his voice a chess player's fascination for an elegant series of moves. "The scenario was of a pathetic banality.

Even in intelligence schools I don't think they give such obvious examples any longer. On the other hand, as regards psychology, hats off to our East German colleagues. Here's how it was. The diplomat makes the acquaintance of a young Aryan beauty, falls for her, but remembers the need to be prudent. He hesitates. The young woman introduces him to one of her friends. Younger still and even more irresistible. The wretched diplomat doesn't resist. The first girl treats him to a terrible scene of jealousy and leaves him forever. Now he's completely reassured: have you ever seen a jealous female spy? Confident of his charm, he forges ahead. The sequel is an ultra classic case, even the subsequent reaction of his wife-and this scared him more than his own country's legal sanctions…"

After the house search that day it was you who talked about the ghosts reflected in the brilliant spinning of a top. You knew that after all those hours, when our deaths could have been caused by one word too many or a gesture that might have annoyed the soldiers, what we needed was to move, to talk, to laugh about that diplomat who was ready to sell all the secrets in the world, provided his wife did not learn of his misconduct. As you talked you were putting our house back in order, filling the gaps that had been left by the objects carried away.

I listened to you distractedly, conscious that it was not the substance of these stories that mattered. In the gleaming top I could see a young man in a dark suit, a glass of champagne in his hand. This self of mine that looked like a brilliant caricature, with his lust for living, his feverish anticipation of the new life, his haste to immerse himself in the seductive complexity of the Western World, with a pistol in his armpit and an ice-cold glass in his burning hand.

Our life had rapidly erased that caricature, turning as it did into an exhausting hunt for men who manufactured death. Those who invented weapons in the sheltered comfort of laboratories, those at the highest levels who made decisions about their production and later their use, those who sold them and resold them, those who killed. From this human chain all we needed was to seize upon just one tiny link of information, an address, a name. And it was often in countries at war that the chain could be uncovered most easily. We would settle there under one identity or another (in that African city we were representatives of a geological prospecting company), we would endeavor to meet the person who was supplying arms to feed the imminent fighting. "Fighting that very likely wouldn't break out if there were not all these means of killing," I said to myself, two days before the start of the massacres, as I was talking to an arms salesman about to catch a plane to London. In the early days I used to think it would have been simpler to shoot down this Ron Scalper, him and his like, they were so palpably insignificant compared with the carnage that resulted from their trade. But this desire had been left behind among the fantasies of that young man with his glass of champagne in the middle of a Berlin gallery. In reality one had to cherish this salesman with all possible solicitude, for he was the first link that could uncover the whole chain. At the airport he had given me his London address-our next destination.

We went on joking, so as to forget the few hours we had lived through, when death was sickeningly promiscuous. You observed that a man who feels himself to be seductive becomes very nimble, like the diplomat with the patent leather shoes, slipping his foot between the legs of the other guests and deflecting the top with the adroitness of a soccer player. I told you about my impulse to kill the arms salesman I had accompanied to the airport two days earlier and my regret that such radical solutions are only effective in spy films. Picking up the books that the soldiers had flung to the ground during their search, I went over to the window and caught sight again of their ill-starred comrade lying in the road and of two furtive figures who emerged from a side street in the already encroaching dusk, went over to the corpse, picked up its booty scattered in the dust, and disappeared into their hole. You came and stood beside me, noticed a detail I had missed, and murmured with a smile, "Look, our album."

It was a big photograph album that the robbers of the dead man had left behind when they carried off the lamp and the clothes. An album in which the snapshots, cunningly contrived and carefully arranged in order, were designed to confirm the identity we were living under at that time: a couple of Canadian prospectors in charge of a geological search. Family photos, of a family that had never existed, with no other reality than that of these smiling faces of our purported nearest and dearest and of ourselves, in the settings of vacations or family reunions. This reconstruction had, of course, been made not for the benefit of looters in a hurry but for scrutiny by professionals, such as we had already had occasion to undergo during those three years. Tucked away in a dusty corner on a shelf, this album, with its cheerful aura of routine married life, was more convincing than the most carefully fabricated life story. Now it lay beside the soldier's body in this half-burned city, and what was strangest of all was to picture one of the townspeople leafing through it one day, believing it was a real family history, endearing at every stage, with all those sentiments that constantly recur, and the children growing up from one photo to the next.

Later on, during the night, I would sense that this past, photographed but never lived, aroused in you a memory of ourselves, of our actual life together, that we paid such little attention to under our borrowed identities. Our life had left behind no photos, no letters, had led to no exchange of confidences. Suddenly the counterfeit album reminded us that we had had these three years of routine complicity, an imperceptible closening of ties, an affection we avoided calling love. Far away there was our country, the weary empire whose physical mass we were ever aware of as the magnet that drew our thoughts, even through the African night. There were its scents and its winter smoke above the villages, the snows in its little towns, mute beneath the blizzards, its faces scarred by forgotten wars and exiles with no return, its history, in which the victorious din of sounding brass often gave way to weeping, to a silence cadenced by the tramp of a column of soldiers after a defeat in battle. And, buried deep in this snow and those muddy roads, there were the years of our childhood and youth, inseparable from the pulse of joy and sorrow, from that living alloy that we call our native land.

Your words came like an echo of that distant presence: "It must be possible one day to tell the truth."

I felt caught in the act of having shared your train of thought. But above all I felt obliged to bear witness to the truth that had arisen behind the forged photos in a family album. What truth? Again I saw the corpse of the soldier stretched out on the ground, the young man who had just confiscated several banknotes from us in the name of revolutionary justice. I recalled that the previous day I had seen a burned-out armored vehicle and the arm with a leather bracelet on its wrist, an arm protruding from a chaotic jumble of metal and flesh. The wearer of the wristband was the enemy of the young revolutionary. They were about the same age, had perhaps been born in two neighboring villages. Those who called themselves revolutionaries were supported by the Americans, those who had been defeated were, until the fall of the capital city, in receipt of arms from us and aid from our instructors. The two young soldiers were certainly not aware of the vastness of the forces opposing one another behind their backs.

Was that the truth you were referring to? I doubted it. For to be truthful one would also have to speak of the arms salesman, maybe at that very moment lying between the thighs of his young mistress, scrupulously attentive to his own hard-won pleasure. The two messages you had slipped into your fan must be decoded: delayed and now useless information about the fighting already ended. Those two columns of figures that could have cost us our lives. And we should have died in the guise of a certain Canadian couple, whose existence would have been authenticated by the cheerful banality of a photograph album.

You got up. In the darkness I was aware that you seemed to be waiting for a response. I sat up as well, ready to admit my confusion: for this truth you had spoken of was constantly changing, giving rise to little murky, fleeting, sprawling truths. The tragedy of the massacres was sullied by my chatting with the arms salesman at the airport, by the vision of his chubby body, hard up against that of his naked mistress. Our arm-wrestling with the Americans was becoming mired in a political demagoguery revised so many times that we now found ourselves supporting a regime held to be conservative while they had their money on the victory of the revolutionaries. These labels no longer had any meaning, revolution meant access to oil wells. As for our own personal truth, all it amounted to was this score of faces, young and old, surrounding us on the pages of a photo album, these nearest and dearest whom we had never known.

I was about to say all that to you when, thanks to the glow from the fire that was petering out in the next street, I saw what you were doing, standing up in front of the window, your arms raised, repairing the torn mosquito netting. I guessed at how the tentative needle was working its way upward in the darkness, drawing together the panels of dusty fabric. With a newfound joy I sensed that this moment had no need of words. There you were, in the identity most faithful to yourself, in all the truth of the silence that followed a setback in our efforts to understand each other. And beneath the whole accumulation of masks, grimaces, and alibis that made up my life, there was just one day that seemed to match your truth.

Hesitantly, as if I had only just learned the words I was speaking, I began to tell you about the infant falling asleep in the depths of a forest in the Caucasus.

One day, in another city, in another war, I once more came upon you in silent contemplation. The windows onto the terrace had been shattered by an explosion and the table on which we often took our meals was strewn with shards. You were picking them up patiently, not saying a word, sometimes crouching, sometimes leaning with one hand on the back of a chair. You were wearing next to nothing, so suffocating was the heat of the Gulf at this moment of low tide. I saw your body and the mixture of fragility and strength that was apparent in your movements. The innocently carnal play of nakedness that does not know it is observed. A trunk with muscular curves, the firm outline of a leg, then suddenly, as if betrayed, this delicate collarbone, almost painful in its childish outlines.

Something rebelled in me. At its start this task of picking up the pieces always seems endless. But, above all, it was you, your life spared in the face of so many threats, over so many years, now being idiotically used up on this most rare evening of respite. A week before the fighting broke out we had finished piecing together a network of arms sales: nine intermediaries across Europe, buying and selling, so as to line their pockets on the way and, as always in this kind of traffic, to cover their tracks. To begin with the whole thing had looked seamless, impenetrable. Shakh had succeeded in obtaining a copy of the first of these contracts and had sent it to us in London. A banal transaction, even if, in reading the list of weapons supplied, we could readily picture their harvest of death on the ground. Otherwise an arms sale like thousands of others. It was you who had detected the anomaly, the first link that was to enable us to work our way along the chain: nowhere in this contract was there any mention of technical assistance after delivery. As if the purchasers had no intention of using all these armored vehicles and rockets. You had mentioned resale via a third country. We tugged at the link and managed to gain access to this strangely unwarlike first purchaser. Then, another… Nine, until we reached the people in this ravaged city who were killing, and getting themselves killed, with the weapons listed in that contract. Commissions worth millions of dollars. And, among the beneficiaries, a fully operational Minister of Foreign Affairs.

Crouched by the window, you went on picking up the fragments of glass. Calm, resigned, unbearable in the tenderness of your silent presence, because of the madness of it, because of the injustice of fate that had assigned this house to you with its shattered windows, and this intimacy with death and the ghosts of those nine characters who had invaded your life.

My angry words remained unspoken. In our fragmented lives where the unforeseen was becoming the only logic, this table, wiped clean, that you were about to set, the way you did before the fighting began, this simple action made perfect sense. "I'll soon be finished," you said, standing up, and talked about the couple who were due to replace us. That, among other things, was our task: to prepare the ground for the colleagues who would take over the network after the end of the war. I noticed a slight cut on your left hand marked with blood. The sharp edge of a splinter, no doubt. Absurdly, amid all these deaths, this tiny wound pained me greatly.

That night I told you about the child who learned to walk around a block of granite stuck in the middle of the house built by his father.

The words I had held back when I saw you on the terrace welled up a year later. We were in the house belonging to a couple of doctors sent by a humanitarian organization, this being our identity at that rime. The villa next door was empty. Its owners had left as soon as the first skirmishes in the streets had begun. And now from their garden came the piercing cries of peacocks which the soldiers were amusing themselves by torturing. One of the birds, its neck broken, was writhing on the ground, the other lay there, spitted by an iron bar. Glancing occasionally at this massacre, I was stirring papers and photographs in a bucket, where they were slowly being consumed by smoky little flames. There was nothing left to steal in our house, it had already been ransacked. But after a week of looting such activities were becoming more and more unmotivated, almost an art form, like the torture inflicted on the peacocks. And I knew from experience that it was an unmotivated search that was often the most dangerous. The soldiers shot down the last of the birds, the most agile, spraying it with bullets-a maelstrom of feathers and blood-then made off toward the center of the city, guided by the bursts of gunfire. I crushed the ashes, mixed them up and threw them into the middle of a parched flower bed. And set about waiting for you, that is to say, rushing out regularly into the chaos of streets invaded by yelling surges of people, who seemed to be simultaneously pursuing one another and running away from those they were pursuing. I encountered a road block, allowed myself to be searched, tried to argue. And reflected that if they refrained from killing me it was because the infernal din prevailing in the city was such that the soldiers could not hear me, otherwise my very first word would have unleashed their fury. I returned home. I saw the empty house, with its window overlooking the garden next door, in the middle of which a peacock was pinned to the ground by a stake. You were somewhere in this city. In distress, I guessed at your presence, perhaps in the wealthy quarter, with its cluster of glass towers, two of which were currently surmounted by smoke, or else in the poor quarter, in the alleys near the canal encrusted with filth. I went out again, hurried toward each crowd gathering around a person who could be heard giving orders or whose execution was being prepared. In one courtyard, as if this square had been cut off from all the madness of the city, I came upon a seated woman leaning against a wall, who seemed far away, her eyes open wide, her cheek distorted by a ball of khat, which her tongue was slackly moving around. And in the street men were dragging a half-naked body along the ground, which passersby tried to trample on with roars of delight.

When you came home there was still enough daylight to see the fine tracery of cuts on your face. "The windshield…" you murmured, and you stood facing me for a few seconds, staring at me in silence. On your forehead the scratches you had wiped clean when you came in were once more filling with blood. I was silent, too, stunned by the words that had just come into my mind but could not be spoken, "In any event you wouldn't have died." Or rather, "Even if you'd died it would have changed nothing between us." I was particularly struck by the serenity, almost joy, that these strange, unspeakable, apparently cruel words had given me. I had tumbled into a dazzling light, far, far away from this city, somewhere beyond our life. I began speaking to you in harsh tones, harsher and harsher the more touching and vulnerable you became in your evening routines: you undressed, went into the bathroom, asked me to help. I poured out a stream of water, drawing more from time to time from our reservoirs, the vessels that stood along the wall, and I continued talking, almost shouting, working up my indignation as if to convince myself that my luminous tumble had been simply an illusion brought on by tension.

"Do you know what our lives remind me of? Those samurais from World War Two who lay low in the jungle and remained at war fifteen years after the fighting had ended! No, it's worse than that. At least they laid down their weapons when they learned the truth. While we… It's true, we're about as much use as those madmen who ended up shooting at ghosts. We're chasing ghosts, too! We spent six months getting close to that idiot of a military attaché. Three months in Rome at the height of summer to arrange an informal ten-minute interview. I loathe that city! When I'm in that tourist bazaar I become a fool. We had to spend all those hours in that moth-eaten archive because our man was fanatical about uncial script or whatever that stupid stuff was. Then we had to locate him here- pure chance, of course. A chance about as broad as a shotgun cartridge in the magazine of a pistol. Of course our little strategists at the Center need their spectacular, instant results to earn their promotions. So now, quick as a wink, we have to recruit some guy the service has had its eye on for years. And to crown it all, he's just leaving. Did you hear his perfectly pleasant laugh? 'Oh, what excellent timing! The fighting's breaking out just when, as it happens, I was planning to take my leave.' And off he goes. Six months of work and several good chances of being bumped off in this filthy tropical climate. And all for nothing. No, sorry, I nearly forgot. We've obtained one piece of information of the first importance. The mines that are going to blow up the people here are of Italian manufacture. I guess you'll get a citation for that. Why are you laughing?"

I could see your smile reflected in the mirror in front of which you were drying your hair, tilting your head first one way, then the other. You did not answer me, gathering up your hair behind your head. The corners of your eyes stretched toward your temples and gave you the look of an Asian woman. I was silent, suddenly realizing that my sense of tumbling into the light had not been imaginary. That vision of clarity and space, taking us far away from the world, had come from your face, from your look, from that procession of days that lost itself in your half-closed eyes. "Even if you'd died it would have changed nothing between us." You came over to me and for a long moment laid your brow against my shoulder. And that night when I got up to take over the watch from you and let you sleep, you told me you were not sleepy. You began to talk about a day in winter, a house on the shores of a frozen lake. In this house there was a clock driven by weights, the chain had been tied in a knot by some wretched joker. This knot obliged your mother to raise the weights quite frequently. She had to watch out lest the knot should jam the machinery. And this vague domestic uneasiness contrasted in the child's head with the calm that prevailed around the lake, in the snow-covered forest.

I went out just before sunrise, after you had gone to sleep. I picked up the bodies of the peacocks, skirted the fence, and dragged them toward the ruins of a house. As I retraced my footsteps I frequently had to stoop to pick up the feathers that, in the gray light of dawn, punctuated the path with their dimmed iridescence.

Three days later it was already possible to cross the city again, negotiating here or there the right to pass through a tollgate consisting of two rusty barrels and a length of cable barring the route. The war was moving away from the capital, withdrawing into the interior of the country. At one crossroads, at a still furtive market, I was able to buy some vegetables and a wheaten pancake. When I returned I saw you from a long way off, beside the entrance that led to the garden. This was the one we used now, so as not to show ourselves in the street too much. You were seated on the threshold, your hands resting in your lap, your eyelids half closed. Close beside the door the water in the bucket you had just fetched shone violet, like the sunset sky. Seeing me at the end of the garden, you waved your hand slightly and I had this simultaneously clear and disconcerting thought: "There is the woman I love, waiting for me under a beautiful evening sky, at the door of this house, which we shall shortly be leaving forever, in this country where we nearly died." I repeated, "A woman I love," just to gauge how poor the word was. I longed to tell you what you were to me, what your silence and your patient calmness meant on the threshold of a house we should never see again.

You got up, went in, taking the water with you. I had a strong physical sense of how you were dreaming of days in a past totally foreign to this city, to this life. And even when, later in the night, it seemed that all there was of you was just your ardent body, the element of remoteness was still there. As we embraced, my hand squeezed your forearm and my fingers rediscovered those four notches cut in the flesh, scars from a burst of gunfire long ago. They were deep grooves that felt as if they had been incised by the claws of some large beast letting slip its prey.

We had to cross the country by car and leave it by sea. About sixty miles from the capital, on the far side of the uncertain line of the front, we drove off the road that was churned up by explosions. The mined area was ringed with bodies blown to smithereens, colorful piles of blankets and clothes and the carcasses of vehicles. The local who was escorting us spoke of "cunning" mines, that chose whom to kill. "Four women walked over it and nothing happened to them. Then a woman with a child came along and the mines woke up," he said, pointing to where the carnage happened.

We knew that, thanks to a pneumatic device, the detonators on these mines were activated only after several sets of pressure, so as to allow a whole column of vehicles to move onto the minefield. A column of vehicles, or a crowd of women and children escaping from their burned village. The celebrated Italian mines.

Perhaps it was on that day, on that road gutted by mines, that for the first time I thought about an end to the life we had been leading for several years. Resuming his seat in the vehicle, our guide confided in us, "The Russians deceived us. To begin with they promised paradise, all peoples are brothers and all that. Then we saw they didn't believe in it themselves. And now that they've gone forever we are killing one another for nothing."

I glanced at you to see whether, like me, you had picked up that "forever." But you seemed not to be listening, your gaze fixed on the blue radiance of the sea that appeared to our right at each upward turn of the road. At that moment I had the impression I was betraying you. Like a soldier 'who, on learning of imminent surrender and armistice, deserts his post without warning those who are still fighting.

This involuntary betrayal seemed to have no consequences. There continued to be cities that emptied at the sound of the first gunfire, as if at the drumming of the first spots of rain on a corrugated tin roof. (One day, as the westerners were hurrying off toward the aircraft in a rainstorm of great warm drops, their dread of the bullets beginning to reach the fringes of the airport was comically confused with their eagerness to protect themselves from the downpour.) There were ships maneuvering ponderously in bays that were too narrow and heading toward the open sea so slowly that we thought we could picture the rage of the passengers, glaring hard from the deck at the coastline already going up in flames, as if to push it away. We would stay. We knew that, after the fever of the fighting and the looting, the conquerors would be in need of diplomatic recognition, money, arms. At such times one could obtain results within a few weeks that in normal times would take years of work. The only difficulty was staying alive.

Nothing changed. Least of all the impression that dogged us in our rapid transits from Europe to Africa. Everything that in the North was words, discreet consultations, slow approaches to a key person, turned in the South into cries of pain, the whistling of bullets and bitter hand-to-hand fighting, as if a horrible, unbridled process of translation had become established between these two continents.

And yet it was in Africa that one day I again felt as if I were hiding from you what I could perceive more and more clearly: the end.

Two months after the conclusion of hostilities they arrived to take charge of the network following our departure. We were struck by their youth, like a reminder of ourselves several years previously, at the time of our first meeting in Berlin. What touched us as well was that they had cheerfully told us their actual first names, which had the comic assonance of the masculine and feminine variants: Yuri and Yulia. We were not used to confidences of this type, our own lives being confined to our borrowed identities. At the moment of going away you had a preoccupied air, like a mother anxious to forget nothing when she leaves the children on their own. They were to renew contact with us in Milan three months later. They did not come. We spent four days waiting for them. The Center spoke of a canceled mission. Shakh, whom I managed to contact in the United States, was perplexed, like a chess player robbed of a pawn and on the verge of discovering he has been cheated. He gave us the order to return to Africa. We found our old house without any trace of a forced departure or search. The tranquillity of the rooms had the sly alertness of a trap. The Center's response was as muddled as before. What this opacity signaled was no longer just a simple setback but a more wide-ranging collapse. An end. I decided to talk to you about this, then changed my mind. Out of cowardice, no doubt. Once again I felt I inhabited the skin of that soldier who, in the furthest outpost of an empire, is the first to learn the news of defeat and makes his escape without warning the last remaining fighters. Moreover, we knew what prison and torture could mean in countries like this in wartime. Especially for a woman. Yulia and Yuri…

The resumption of fighting dispelled these feelings of remorse in us. The city was bombed, we left the house and spent a long inconclusive day in one of the big hotels in the capital, abandoned by the westerners, looted, refurbished during the months of truce, and once more derelict. We were still hoping we could remain in the city. The bedroom had been made up a few days previously and it was eerie to see the bed with the sheets straightened and turned down by a professional hand, the little "do not disturb" card on the door and to know that the walls of the corridor were spattered with blood in several places and that in the foyer on the floor below prisoners had been tortured and raped. Now the hotel stood empty and through the window at the end of the corridor one could see the sea, dominated by the gray, asymmetrical shape of an American aircraft carrier. Its vast bulk-it looked as if it had been carved out of a monstrous bluish muscle-seemed to be blocking all movement of waves upon a flattened, slack sea.

One section of the troops defending the city had been driven back toward the coast, the soldiers took up a position on the first floor of the hotel, the impending victors surrounded the building, machine-gunning the windows in the expectation that the smoke would drive the besieged men out into a hail of bullets. We had time to cross the hotel garden, to skirt its little marina, and to reach the edge of the water. We knew that a boat would be evacuating the last of our military instructors. Out of breath, we stopped in the middle of the little beach where you could still see rows of white plastic beach chairs. And at that moment time was shattered, went into turmoil- a sequence of mad dashes and complete standstills. The sand ensnared our footsteps, as in a bad dream where running is impossible. The military vehicle that pulled out from beside the hotel building grew rapidly larger, bearing down on us, and already the first bullets were riddling the hulls of the dinghies upended on the sand. My shout was cut short and had no effect on you. You remained standing, your hand raised in a gesture of greeting that seemed to me absurd. The magazine slithered in my grasp like a piece of wet soap. As I fired I thought I was aiming at the vehicle's scowling face-the evil grin of the radiator grille and the dull eyes of the headlights.

Dazed by my fear, I saw the shadow before I heard the noise. For a moment it blotted out the sun above my hiding place behind the boats. I raised my head. Its outline was very easy to recognize: an Mi-24, the combat helicopter used by the empire on all continents. I detected the movement of its two guns-and almost immediately, in the area of the vehicle that was now only a few dozen yards away, there was a ball of fire from the explosion. The machine landed, covering us with a whirlwind of sand and uprooting the straw parasols around the hotel swimming pool. Its steely ponderousness contrasted jarringly with this little tropical tourist paradise. As I climbed in, I saw on its fuselage the traces of direct hits, some hidden under a layer of gray-green paint, other, more recent ones showed a glint of bare metal. The blast from the takeoff flung the parasols around, likewise a blue sheet beside the pool, and outside the window the beach, the sea, the hotel building, which was already engulfed in smoke, were rapidly thrust back. I tried not to think about the people inside, surrounded and still fighting.

On the deck of the ship where we landed it was the red flag of the empire that caught our eye. And also the tired paint covering its contours of steel. In heading for clear water, the ship was obliged to cross the inner sea marked off from the boundless ocean by the presence of the American aircraft carrier. This vast yet closed-in expanse was defined by the escort frigates. We advanced slowly, as if feeling our way, although in brilliant light. On our left the aircraft carrier grew larger, dominated us, flattened us on the surface of the water. It seemed to be ignoring us. A plane took off, forcing us to cover our ears, another landed on the deck, mastering its terrible energy in a few seconds. Simply by their positioning the escort vessels indicated the fine dotted line of the course we were authorized to take.

"It's like being on the battleship Potemkin confronting the government squadron," you said, your eyes laughing in a face smudged with black.

That may have been the last time in our lives I saw you smile.

I saw Shakh a month later in a big German city where everything was ready for the Christmas holiday. He entrusted some documents to me that I was to pass on to a contact agent, made jokes about the change in climate that I must have noticed and about the very German seriousness of the holiday preparations. I guessed what a man of his age might feel in the midst of the festive animation in this city, in this country where, as a young man, he had fought in the war. He fell silent, sunk in that past, then returned to the memory that prevailed over all others and talked again about the Rosenbergs. I noticed now that the lines of his face had become more angular and that his shoulders remained slightly raised, as if by a self-imposed physical discipline. Listening to him, I did not say to myself, "He's rambling…" but rather, "His is a totally different generation! One that can't see, or doesn't want to see, that we've moved into a new age." What was most surprising was that, in spite of myself, I saw you as belonging to the same generation, even though Shakh could have been your father. Age in years had nothing to do with it. Yours was the generation who… I suddenly grasped it with perfect clarity: a generation who did not believe it was the end. The end of the empire, the end of its history. And that this history and the men of this history would be forgotten.

"When they were executed," Shakh was saying, "I made a naive vow, I was naive, like all believers. Yes, I vowed to fight on until a monument had been erected to them, a real one, a big one at the very heart of New York City. But they haven't done it, not even in Moscow."

When he had gone I spent a long time roaming through the streets beneath a kind of snow, little gray stinging granules. Toward evening the weather became milder and real snowflakes fluttered down in the glow from the street lamps. Children congregated in front of shop windows in which mechanical Santa Clauses ceaselessly drew beribboned gifts out of their sacks. In the cathedral, in a more dignified and static replica of this, the three kings around the crib offered their presents, too. And the festive atmosphere was even in evidence in the street where there were near-naked young women smiling at the passersby from inside some of the wide bay windows on the first floor. Beside the chair on which each woman displayed herself, sometimes with open thighs, sometimes kneeling on the seat to show off curved buttocks, there was a little Christmas tree glittering with a string of flashing fairy lights. Before settling down in the bar where the agent was to find me, I plunged in among wooden booths, a noisy, festively decorated village that occupied the whole cathedral square. The warmth of the braziers was cut into by waves of cold, the voices, warmed with alcohol, lost their Germanic harshness, and for me a glass of mulled wine had the taste of an existence quite different from mine, yet very close at hand. At the bar, I reflected on this nearness as I became aware from a clock above the counter of the increasingly obvious lateness of the man I was to meet. A time came when the delay was such that, instead of the person expected, other individuals might well accost me, show me their cards, ask me to follow them. Such delays were generally the result of a series of setbacks. Mentally I pursued the series to its logical conclusion: the discovery of the two diskettes that Shakh had passed on to me, arrest, interrogation, a long prison sentence that I would have to serve somewhere in this country. It suddenly seemed to me so simple to get up, walk out into this brightly lit city, and lose myself in the evening crowd, in its wooden villages decorated with fir branches. My current identity, my papers, made me humdrum, invisible. I could have crossed the increasingly open frontiers of this new old Europe, settled down either here or elsewhere. The memory, already very remote, of my first day in the Western World came back to me: Berlin, the private showing, and the stamp dealer who had for several hours, without knowing it, entered our games of espionage. Entered them and left them again forever. I should imitate him. Like him, I had a profession. I could close this parenthesis and return to it. Our lives, after all, are wholly made up of parentheses. The art is knowing how to close them at the right moment.

I glanced at the clock, ordered another drink. I recalled that, as I was strolling through the streets, I had encountered a scene that came back to me now with its whiff of bourgeois happiness: on the steps of a large private house a doctor in a white coat was bidding good-bye to an elderly patient who was accompanied by his aged wife. It was clear that the doctor was enjoying the coolness of a few snowflakes landing on his bare head and found it pleasant to step outside his office and make this show of courtesy, especially toward this particular patient, possibly his last before the holiday began.

Before we moved on again it was you who told me about the death of the man I had been vainly waiting for in that city with its fairy tale decorations. An anonymous hotel room, a body that no one claimed, his belongings painstakingly searched. No doubt they were looking for those two diskettes he had not had time to collect. So I had been waiting for a dead man…

I would never find the courage to admit to you that while I was waiting for him I had felt envious of a respectable German doctor baring his head to the flurries of snow. And that I had placed you, alongside Shakh, in that blinkered generation who were living in another era.

When you told me about the agent's death you also spoke of Yulia and Yuri and I realized you had been trying to gather up at least those scraps of information that generally accompanied the disappearance of people like ourselves: a hotel room buzzing with police, a burned-out car on waste ground. "I should have warned them, well, explained to them that…" You looked at me, as if seeking help. "You should have explained to them," I thought, "that it was too late to have any illusions."

In the end I dared to say it to you. I yelled it in your ear, trying to overcome the noise filling that crazy airplane and the night sky around it, in darkness torn into blinding shreds by salvos from antiaircraft batteries.

The plane was evacuating the remnants of a war that the empire had lost beneath this southern sky The bowels of the machine were piled high with the living, the wounded, and the dead, wrapped in long sheaths of black plastic. The mound of these cocoons stirred in the shadows, alongside the cases of ammunition and the tangle of weapons that looked like a huge metallic spider. The living, slumped down in the midst of this chaos, each resorted to their own stratagems for dealing with fear. Some tried to talk at the tops of their voices, drawing their neighbors' heads toward their mouths, others stopped their ears and, with their faces twisted into a grimace, huddled in upon themselves. Some slept and were confused with the dead. And when the plane began tipping over sharply on one wing and the wounds came back to life in this new position, the cries of the wounded redoubled and beyond the cocoons the grating of the metallic spider could be heard. I held you by your shoulders and my lips, enmeshed in your hair, burned your cheek and ear with these truths, carved into the stifling blackness of that flying cemetery. I was proclaiming the end, defeat, the pointlessness of the lives we had used up, the stupid blindness of Shakh, the misery of the peoples we had dragged into a suicidal enterprise. You seemed to be listening to me, then, when suddenly the aircraft went into a tight spiral and the howling of the wounded drowned out all other sounds, you broke away from me and, taking a flask from your knapsack, slipped in among bodies seated and lying there toward the front, where the flashlights of the nurses could be made out.

We arrived in Moscow after an absence of two and a half years and, as ever, spent little time there. Those years had coincided with the start of the great upheavals of '89 to '91. There was still a touch of grotesque comedy about recently acquired wealth, the new roles were not yet learned by heart, the new language remained hesitant. The actors made faux pas. Like the beggar trying to catch the warm gusts of air emanating from the door of a big store-a genuine war veteran, no doubt, but one who had attached all kinds of cheap insignia to his jacket to swell the numbers. These gilded disks eclipsed the tarnished silver of the medal "For Gallantry" that was hard won in the war. Or those two women waiting for clients outside a hotel for foreigners. Monumental in their fur coats, they seemed as immovable and unapproachable as statues of empresses. Their scenario consisted of pretending they had just emerged from the hotel, but the snow where they maintained their vigil had long since become pitted with little holes from their stiletto heels. "One day," I thought, "they, too, will have the right to a place in a heated window and even a little Christmas tree with a string of flashing lights."

It was a few blocks away from that hotel, beside the entrance to a restaurant, that we were caught up in the bibulous surge of a banquet that came streaming out onto the sidewalk. A score of men and women were roaring with laughter and congratulating one another on their great idea: to go and get themselves photographed between courses in front of the nearby Kremlin towers. "Get going, you guys!" yelled the ringleader. "Maybe they'll be putting up eagles instead of red stars tomorrow. This'll be a historic picture!" We stepped back to the edge of the sidewalk to let them pass. It was comic to see the clothes from fashion magazines on bodies that were too hefty or too square, all this stylish luxury combined with their broad, red, laughing faces. The women were rubbing their shoulders, shivering exaggeratedly with the cold, the men grabbed them by the waist, squeezed them, pawed them. One of them lifted his partner in the air and her dress rode up to reveal massive thighs, robustly and aggressively immodest. The ringleader banged with his fist on the door of a huge Mercedes and out jumped a sleepy man, his driver or his bodyguard, who handed him a camera. There was something undoubtedly legitimate and at the same time obscene about their merriment. I could not find a way to disentangle the two. I was waiting for your reaction but you walked along, saying nothing, occasionally raising your face toward the swirling of the snow.

"Behold, the new masters of the country!" I ventured at last, looking back toward the crowd of them as they returned to the restaurant. You said nothing. We were walking along an avenue beneath the walls of the citadel, beneath the towers surmounted by their mistily crystalline red stars. Faced with your silence, I wanted to provoke you, to compel you to reply, to drag you from your calm. "The masters change but the servants remain. How many years have we spent snuffling around like dogs in all those stinking little wars? And all for the greater glory of a dozen senile idiots barricaded in behind that wall! And now you're ready to do the same job all over again for that bunch of money-grubbers and their bimbos bursting out of their designer dresses!" I stopped, turned toward you, awaiting your response. But you went on walking, your gaze somewhat lowered toward the footprints ahead of us, which the snow was patiently obliterating. Soon there were a dozen paces between us, then a score, so that you looked to me as if you were all alone amid the trees with their snow-covered branches, very remote, and quite detached from the life I had been mocking. A moment before, stung by your absent air, I was on the point of turning my back and leaving you. Now that at every step you were becoming more and more of a stranger to me, I felt you within me with a violence that made my eyes swim. You were going away and I could feel the warmth of your breath in the night air, the coolness of your fingers inside your gloves, the beating of your heart beneath your coat. You turned. You were already so far away that I could no longer make out whether you were smiling or looking at me with sadness. I went toward you with a sense of finding you again after a protracted separation, at the end of an infinitely long walk.

By an absurd coincidence the merrymakers from the Moscow banquet caught up with us again in a restaurant in Paris. They were not the same people, of course, but their wealth came from the same source, they were pulling the same faces. We were looking for a quiet corner and this half-empty dining room was it. Thirty minutes later they made their appearance and settled at a long table that had been reserved. Trapped, we stayed to listen to them. There was no longer any need for me to talk to you about the "new masters," or about the years we had used up for nothing, or about the end. You understood what my thoughts might be, watching them giving vent to coarse guffaws with their mouths full, their monolithic backs, their fingers studded with rings. I could imagine what your answers might be. Later, in a little café where we went to escape them, you spoke quite calmly about the age we had seen come into being, which was now about to end.

"Ten years ago, or maybe more, I used to think just like you: all these wars to paper over the cracks of a shattered doctrine? All these efforts to please the doddering old fools in the Kremlin? One day, unable to bear it any longer, I said this to Shakh. Like you. For the glory of what cause? Toward what sunlit chasms? He listened to me and… began speaking about Sorge. I was simply furious. I said to myself, 'That's it, he's going to give me a propaganda lesson: "Richard Sorge, the hero of our time, the superman of our intelligence system, who passed on the date of Hitler's invasion, was betrayed by the bureaucrats of Moscow…" et cetera, et cetera. Ancient history.' But Shakh simply told me about Sorge's last moments. I only knew, like everyone else, that the Japanese had executed him in forty-four after three years of imprisonment. That's all. Well, at that final moment, standing on the scaffold, Sorge called out in a strong, calm voice, 'Long live the Red Army! Long live the Communist International! Long live the Communist Party of the Soviet Union!' Old-fashioned, isn't it? Grotesque? I said as much to Shakh, in milder terms, it's true. And he surprised me yet again. 'Do you think,' he said, 'Sorge didn't know the true worth of Stalin and his clique? He certainly did, and how! But it was by dying like that that he could show what those sons of bitches were really worth!' "

I sensed that this man on the scaffold was your final argument. I did not attempt to put in context his words as a condemned man. A minute before death they had a right to stand unqualified. I was watching you as you talked and sadly noticing all the signs that your smile could no longer cover up: the strands of silver spreading through your hair, the fine blue line of a vein imprinted on your temple. You interrupted my look, which was no doubt too searching, by taking a newspaper out of your bag. "Read that," you said.

It was a short column reporting the death of a certain Grinberg, a critic of the Soviet government who had spent several years in the camps, had been expelled to the West, and had run a dissident radio station. The reporter noted that Grinberg had died in Munich in a tiny flat, forgotten by everybody, with a jumble of papers on his bedside table: his writings that no longer interested anyone, bills that he was unable to pay, letters.

"Can you guess who they're talking about?"

For a few seconds I delved into my memories both in Russia and the West. Grinberg… No, the name meant nothing to me.

"The man who spun that top in the art gallery in Berlin, do you remember? Almost… ten years ago. You see, he's lost his battle as well."

We sat for a moment without speaking. Then you got up, leaving the newspaper on the next table, and murmured, "I'm not going to play the gypsy and tell your fortune, but if you don t want to serve 'the new masters' it's time for you to go. Yes, go, withdraw from the game, get yourself forgotten, disappear. After all, it'll only be one more change of identity."

That night you tried to hold back your tears, so as not to wake me. I was not asleep but remained still, knowing that in your thoughts, and in these tears, I was already living under that new identity, in that distant life without you.

I had used up too many lives to consider the one I was embarking on without you in the West as a real wrench from the past. The Western World was, in truth, too familiar to us to deserve the harsh and weighty name of exile. You were right; to begin with, at least, it was no more than another identity. And I already knew that the best way to adopt a country, to adapt to it as quickly as possible, was to imitate. Basically, integration means no more than imitation. Some people are so successful at this that they end up expressing the character of a country better than its natives, very much in the manner of those professional impersonators who can take such and such a well-known personality and set alongside him a copy that is more authentic than the original, a distillation of all his physical mannerisms, a digest of all his tricks of speech. And yet it is at the moment when he has succeeded that a foreigner discovers the unspoken goal of this game of imitation: to make oneself similar in order to stay different. To live as they live here as a way of protecting your remote and distant self. To imitate to the point of splitting yourself in two and, by letting your double speak, gesticulate, and laugh for you, to escape back in your thoughts to those whom you should never have abandoned.

At first my conviction that I should see you again within a short space of time was only natural. By imitating daily life and material survival I was earning the right to this expectation, to journeys to European cities where meeting you seemed likely. I told myself it would not even be a case of rediscovering one another but quite simply of your quiet voice one evening on the telephone, or your figure emerging from the flood of faces and coats on a railroad platform. I cannot recall how many months it was before this confidence began to fade. At the same moment, perhaps, when I realized I had never stopped talking to you, rehearsing with you over and over, the years I had spent with you, justifying myself, in fact, in a desperate attempt at truth.

The idea then came to me of making a precise note of dates, places, recollecting names, signposting our shared past. It felt like finding oneself in the kingdom of the dead. Several countries, including our own, had meanwhile disappeared, their names and frontiers had changed. Among the people you and I had mixed with, fought against, or assisted, some were living under other identities, others were dead, still others had settled down into this modern era, in which I often felt like a phantom, a ghost from an increasingly archaic age. But, overwhelmingly, my striving after precise details was taking me away from what we had truly experienced. I tried to make a list of the political forces at work, the causes of conflicts, the notable heads of state. My notes resembled a strange reportage emanating from a nonexistent world, a void. I realized that in place of this inventory of facts, with its pretensions to historical objectivity, I should be describing the quite simple, often invisible, subterranean fabric of life. I recalled you sitting on the threshold of a house, your eyes lost in the light of the sunset. I again saw that young soldier's arm, that wrist with a leather bracelet, in the shell of a gutted armored car. The beauty of a child who, a few yards away from the fighting but a thousand leagues removed from all its madness, was building a little pyramid from still-warm cartridge cases. With tightly shut eyes, I traveled back to that house on the shores of a frozen lake, the drowsiness of that house you had sometimes told me about. More and more often I found myself admitting that what was essential was condensed into these glimpses of the past.

One day, answering the telephone, I thought I could hear your voice, almost inaudible in the susurration of a call that seemed to be coming from the other end of the world. I called out your name several times, mine too, the last ones we had been known by. After a dull crackling, a faultless connection was made, and I heard, too close to my ear now, a swift singsong delivery in an Asiatic language (Vietnamese or Chinese, perhaps), a very shrill and insistent woman's voice, giving continuous little giggles or sobs, it was impossible to tell which. For several days the sound of that brief, infinitely remote whispering stayed in my mind, that impossible double of your voice, swiftly obliterated by the screeching of the Asian woman.

The whispering, which I had thought I could recognize as your voice, reminded me of an evening in days gone by, in that city on fire outside our window with its torn mosquito netting. I remembered how the proximity of death and our complicity in the face of this death had given me the courage that night to tell you something I had never previously admitted to anyone: the story of the child and the woman hiding deep in the mountains, the words crooned in an unknown language.

I knew now that I was incapable of telling the truth of our age. I was neither an objective witness, nor a historian, and certainly not a wise moralist. All I could do was to continue that story, interrupted then by the coming of night, by the journeys that awaited us, by fresh wars.

I began to talk, seeking simply to preserve the tone of our conversation in the dark long ago, the bitter serenity of words spoken with death close at hand.

The words I silently addressed to you conjured up the white-haired woman and the child once more-but ten years after the night of their escape. A December evening, a little town lost in snow close to a switching yard, a few miles away the shadow of a big city, the city which its inhabitants, in their confusion, still call by the name that has been taken away from it, Stalin's. The woman and the child are sitting in a room that is low and meagerly furnished but clean and well-heated, on the top floor of a massive wooden house. The woman has changed little in ten years, the child has turned into an adolescent of twelve with a thin face, a shaven head, his hands and wrists red with cold.

The woman, her head bowed toward the lamp, is reading aloud. The adolescent stares at her face but does not listen. He has the look of one who knows a brutal and ugly truth, a look fully aware that the other person is in the process of camouflaging this truth beneath the innocent routine of a habitual pastime. His eyes focus on the woman's hands as they turn the page and he cannot help pulling a quick, dismissive face.

The boy knows that this room, with its reassuring coziness, is hidden away in a great dark izba, a log house swarming with lives, cries, arguments, sorrows, bouts of drunkenness. You can hear the long-suffering sobs of a woman in the room next door, the tapping of a cobbler's little hammer in the apartment opposite, the cry of a voice calling after clattering footsteps, amplified by the stairwell. And under the windows, in the winter dusk, the ponderous passing of trains, whose loads can be glimpsed-long tree trunks, blocks of concrete, machinery under tarpaulins.

The boy tells himself that this woman reading aloud is totally foreign to him. She's a foreigner! From a country that, to the inhabitants of that town, is more remote than the moon. A foreigner who has long since lost her original name and answers to the name of Sasha. The one trace that still links her to her improbable native land is this language, her mother tongue, which she is teaching the boy on Saturday evenings, when he obtains permission to leave the orphanage and come to this great black izba. He stares at her face, her lips, as they emit strange sounds, which, nevertheless, he understands.

Who is she in reality? He remembers old stories she used to tell him, now overlaid by the new experiences of his childhood. It seems she was the friend of his grandparents, Nikolai and Anna. One day she took the boy's father, Pavel, into her house. She is the woman who crossed a suspension bridge, holding onto the worn ropes and carrying the child by his shirt gripped in her teeth.

These shadowy figures, who are the boy's only family, seem insubstantial to him. He listens to what the woman is reading: through the canopy of foliage a young knight catches sight of a castle keep. The boy's face sharpens, his lips tighten into a defiant grin. He is getting ready to tell this woman the truth that he now knows, the brutal, bald truth she is trying to cover up with her "canopies," "keeps," and other fancy, old-fashioned rubbish.

It is a truth that burst forth that morning at the orphanage when a little gang leader, surrounded by his henchmen, yelled these words at him, half words, half spittle, "Look. Everyone knows about your father. The firing squad shot him like a dog!"

All the truth in the world was concentrated in this spat-out remark. It was the very stuff of life. His assailant certainly could not tell how the boy's father had died, but he knew that's all there was in their orphanage: children of parents fallen from grace, often former heroes, who had died in prison, executed so as not to tarnish the country's image. The children invented fathers for themselves who were polar explorers trapped by ice, pilots who were missing in the war. Now this spittle-word has deprived him forever of a tacitly agreed fiction.

The woman breaks off from her reading. She must have sensed his inattention. She gets up, goes to the wardrobe, takes out a hanger. The boy gives a little cough, preparing a harsh tone of voice in which to interrogate, accuse, mock. Especially to mock these Saturday evenings, once a paradise to him, as she read aloud amid the clatter from the railroad and the drunken sobs, there at the heart of that great snow-covered, grudgingly inhabited void which is their country. He turns to the woman, but what she says anticipates by a second the words he already feels burning in his throat.

"Look, I've made this for you," she says, unfolding a shirt of coarse gray-green cotton. "A real soldier's tunic, wouldn't you say? You could wear it on Monday."

The boy takes the gift and remains dumb. With a mechanical gesture he strokes the fabric, notices the lines of stitching, absolutely regular although done by hand. By hand… with sudden pain he thinks of her right hand, the hand wounded by shrapnel, those numb fingers that must have been forced to master the to-and-fro of the needle. He understands that all the truth in the world is nothing if you omit this hand streaked with a long scar. That the world would make no sense if one forgot the life of this woman, come from abroad, who has unflinchingly shared the destiny of that great white void, with its wars, its cruelty, its beauty, its suffering.

He sinks his head lower and lower so as not to show his tears. The woman sits down, ready to begin reading again. Just before her first sentence he blurts out in a halting whisper, "Why did the firing squad kill him?"

The woman's reply does not come straight away. From one Saturday to the next, it will take several months. She will speak of a family in which, little by little, the boy comes to recognize people who had previously only existed in the misty legends of his childhood. Her recital will reach its conclusion one summer's evening after the sun has set, in the still warm and fluid air that bathes the steppes.

It was this light that I had in my mind's eye as I told my silent story, relating to you what Sasha had told me.