Requiem for a Lost Empire (11 page)

   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.

3

   The horse turned its head slightly, its eye violet, reflecting the brilliance of the sunset, the sky clear and cold. Nikolai slipped his hand beneath its mane, gently patted its warm neck, heard a brief, plaintive sigh in reply. They were walking along the edge of a forest which, at nightfall, seemed endless and gave off the scent of the last sheets of ice lurking in the thickets. Nikolai knew that at any moment the horse would repeat the maneuver, a look turned toward its rider, an imperceptible slowing down of its pace. He would then have to chide it gently, in a soft voice, "For shame, lazybones! He wants to turn in already. Very well, if that's how it is, I'll have to sell you to the bandits. See how you like that." At these words the horse lowered its head, with an air at once resigned and sulky. After their two years at war together it even understood its rider's jokes.

   These hours of dusk were the best time to avoid meeting anyone. You could still see where the horse was putting its feet but in the open camps scattered across the plain the soldiers were already lighting fires and it was easier to skirt around them. He had to avoid the Reds, whose troops he had just quit. To avoid the Whites, for whom he was still a Red. To steer clear of armed bands, who varied their color to suit their looting. And the forest in spring, with the leaves still in bud, offered poor protection.

   He had already been riding for more than a week, first traveling up the course of the Don, then turning off toward the east. The steppe, up till then monotonous and flat, was now broken up by forests and valleys. There were more villages. During the first days he took his direction from the river and from the sun. Everywhere it was the same limitless Russian soil. But the closer he came to his own village the more his perception seemed to sharpen. As if the lands he was crossing had changed in scale, so that places came into focus with more and more detail. The day before, still dimly, he thought he had recognized the white steeple of the district capital. That morning a bend in a river, with the bank all trodden down at the approach to a ford, reminded him of a journey he had made before the civil Avar. Now he was almost sure he could travel clear of the forest before nightfall and link up with a road they used to take to go to the fair in the town. Yes, the corner of the forest, then a sandy slope, then, off to the right, this road. Half a day's trot from home.

   During his long journey Nikolai had seen fields strewn with the bodies of men and horses left behind after a battle, villages populated by corpses hanging in front of doorways, and also that face he had at first taken for his own reflection when he peered into a well, before realizing… Dead people, fire, ruined houses no longer surprised him as long as he was a part of that immense ragged army, marching toward the south, driving the Whites before it. Killing and destruction was what war was all about. But now in the silence and emptiness of sunny days in May, and, above all, in the radiance of the evenings, the battlefields and deserted villages he skirted around were detached from the war, from its logic, from its causes, which a week earlier had seemed to justify everything. No more logic now. A field abandoned, as if capriciously. No sod turned, no seed sown for two springs. And there, on a slope running down to a little stream, the blackened, swollen carcass of a horse. And the cawing that rent the silence as the horseman approached.

   Yet at the start of the war, it was the capriciousness of it that had carried him away. The commissars' talk was all of the new world, and the first novelty was that you could give up plowing. Just like that, on a whim. He was twenty-four at the time and not easily imposed on, but the freedom they offered him was too tempting: to do no plowing! It was intoxicating. They also said the bloodsuckers must be killed. Nikolai remembered Dolshansky, the landowner to whom their village had once belonged. Dolshanka, it was called. And he tried to picture this ancient nobleman as a bloodsucker. It was not easy. Among the peasants only the oldest had experienced serfdom. The village was rich. Dolshansky, long since ruined, lived in more poverty than some of the peasants, and had only one obsession: he spent his time carving the wood for his own coffin. No, it was better to picture the bloodsuckers in general, then one's anger mounted and slashing, shooting, and killing became simpler.

   The horse lowered his head. His pace slowed and Nikolai felt a slight jolt: the filly walking behind, attached to a rope, was moving sleepily along and each time they slowed down it bumped its head against his horse's hindquarters. Nikolai smiled and thought he could hear something like a stifled laugh in the horse's brief snort. He did not scold him, simply whispered, "Come along, Fox, we've not far to go. Once we're past the forest we can rest!"

   It was not his red coat but his cunning that had earned the horse this name. To begin with Nikolai had thought he was simply stubborn. In one of the first battles Fox had refused to launch into the attack with the others. Some fifty cavalrymen were due to come surging out of a copse and bear down on the soldiers preparing to ford a river with a convoy of wagons. The commanding officer had given the sign, the cavalry hurtled forward, accompanied by a whirlwind of broken branches. But Nikolai's horse reared up, pranced about on the spot, wheeled around, and would not go. He had beaten him savagely, kicking his sides with his heels, whipped him furiously, smacked his muzzle. The worst of it was that the success of the attack seemed a foregone conclusion. On the riverbank the soldiers, taken by surprise, did not even have time to pick up their rifles. And he, meanwhile, was still struggling with that damned horse. The cavalry were a hundred yards from the enemy, they were already crowing with delight when two machine guns, in a terrible flank assault, began to mow them down with the precision of an aim calculated in advance. The cavalrymen were falling before they realized it was a trap. Those who succeeded in turning around were pursued by a squadron that emerged from the scrub covering the bank. It was with only a handful of survivors that Nikolai returned to the camp. He still believed the business with his horse was pure coincidence and that he would have to get used to its peevish temperament. Later the coincidence repeated itself. Once, then twice, then three times. His horse would come to him, recognizing his whistle above the din of a camp of a thousand men and thousands of animals. Would lie down, obeying his word of command, would stop or break into a gallop, as if reading his mind. It was then that Nikolai began to call him "Fox" and to have that grim affection for him that arises in war, amid the mud and the gore, when in the first minutes after a battle each becomes violently aware that the other is still alive, silently close at hand, something even more astonishing than his own survival.