Requiem for a Lost Empire (21 page)

   Very early in the morning Pavel got up, quite numbed by a night of watching, his head filled with fleeting visions of the day before. He slid open the heavy door of the freight car and suddenly stepped back a pace, alarmed, dazzled. Against a still-dark sky, beyond heavily wooded valleys, there gleamed the snowy peaks of the Caucasus, almost menacing in their beauty. Their faintly bluish bulk seemed to be growing closer with every second, towering over the train. And, thanks to their height, the whole space reared up vertically. It was impossible for someone who had always lived on the plain to imagine life at the foot of this silent grandeur.

   The young woman came to the door as well and looked out, tossing aside her long hair which the wind blew in her face. Through the clattering of the wheels Pavel cried out in admiration. She nodded her head but expressed neither surprise nor fear. She seemed not to be interested in the snowy peaks on the horizon but was studying the wooded hills and the rare villages, still slumbering.

   Pavel wanted to get off at the first opportunity, attracted by a large town the train stopped in for a few minutes. This vertical country seemed too foreign to him. The woman held him back.

   They jumped from the car when the train slowed down on a bend as it emerged from a long tunnel in the middle of the mountains.

   The woman walked quickly, climbing down the slope covered in trees and shrubs that were unfamiliar to Pavel. He followed her with difficulty, getting caught up in brambles that she knew how to avoid, slipping on little screes concealed beneath the heather. With no pathway the forest seemed virgin. Emerging onto the bank of a stream, the woman stopped. Catching up with her ("Does she want to shake me off or what?" he had said to himself a few moments earlier), and without being able to conceal his anxiety beneath a tone of bravado, Pavel asked, "So, are we going to climb up Kazbek mountain, while we're at it? Where are you taking me?" The woman smiled and it was at that moment he noticed how tired she was. Without replying she walked out over the pebbles and into the stream, plunged into it fully clothed, and remained still, letting the water wash her body, her face, and her dress with its frayed sleeves. Pavel wanted to call out to her, then changed his mind. He smiled and walked off toward the rocks that led into the river a little downstream. Everything suddenly seemed simple to him, as if foreseen by an unusual order of things that he had yet to fathom. He undressed behind the rocks and slipped into the water. The sun was already at its height and roasted their skin. Their clothes dried in a few minutes.

   During this halt on the bank he learned what he had already guessed. The woman was a Balkar. One of those Caucasian people deported in 1944. Some of them had tried to return secretly, but were caught well before they had seen the snow of the mountain peaks.

   She showed him her village in the distance: a deserted street, orchards with branches bowed down to the ground under a vain abundance of fruit, and in the yard of one house, hanging on a line, a row of washing in tatters.

   For reasons of prudence they settled several miles from there. From time to time Pavel went down into the empty village where he found a few carpenter's tools, a box of nails, an old tinder box. One day he saw wheel marks imprinted in the thick dust of the road. He identified them as a military four-wheel-drive. The months passed, the vehicle did not reappear. He said nothing to the woman. "My wife," he often thought now.

   The shelter they had built in the rocky fold of a valley was a day's walk from a little town with a railroad station. It was from this town that Pavel sent a letter to Sasha. She was the only one to know of their secret life. The only one to come and see them once or twice a year.

   She came, too, for the birth of their child and stayed longer that time. One evening Pavel was returning from the beehives set up on the other side of the valley at the edge of a chestnut forest. He crossed the stream, carrying a pail filled with fresh honey on his shoulder, and stopped to catch his breath at the foot of the little slope that led up to their house. Through the half-open door he saw the figures of the two women. Sasha was standing, a candle in her hand, his wife was sitting down, her face bent over the child. He heard not the words but just the music, slow and even, of their hushed conversation. He thought of Sasha with the wistful gratitude inspired by a person who expects no word of thanks, who never even thinks of such a thing, and who gives much too much for it ever to be possible to repay her. "If she were Russian she would never have dared to come here," he said to himself, realizing that this was a very imperfect manner of expressing the woman's nature. A foreigner, she took greater liberties with the weighty laws and customs governing the country: she did not consider them to be absolute, so they ceased to be absolute.

   From the place where Pavel had stopped he heard the rippling of the stream, the supple and resonant murmur that filled their house at night, merging with the sounds of the forest, the crackling of the fire. Below the rock, facing their house, the water was smooth and very black. The sky tossed into it the reflection of a constellation that swayed gently, changing its shape. He was amazed to think that man needed so little in order to live in happiness. And that in the world they had fled, this little got lost in innumerable stupidities, in lies, in wars, in the desire to snatch this little away from others, in the fear of having only this little.

   He lifted the pail and began climbing toward the house. His wife was standing on the threshold with their son in her arms. The child had waked up but was not crying. The stars cast a weak light on his tiny brow. They remained there for a moment in that night, without moving, without saying a word.

   She who was telling me the story of Pavel's life broke off the narrative at this nocturnal moment. I thought it was simply a pause between two words, between two sentences, and that the past would once more come alive in her voice. But little by little her silence merged with the immensity of the steppe surrounding us, with the silence of the sky that had the dense luminosity of the first moments after the sunset. She was seated in the middle of an endless expanse of undulating grass, her head tilted slightly upward, her eyes half closed, gazing into the distance. And it was when I realized there was nothing more to come, that I suddenly understood: the end of the story was already known to me. I already knew what would happen to the soldier, his wife, their child. The tale had been confided to me more than a year before, one winter's evening in the great dark
izba,
the day when the words a youth yelled at me had almost been the death of me. "The firing squad gunned your father down like a dog." After that, from one Saturday evening to the next, the story had continued, giving me what I had missed most at the orphanage-the certainty that I had been preceded on this earth by people who loved me.

   As I looked at this white-haired woman seated a few yards away from me, it was becoming clearer to me all the time that the real ending to her story was this silence, this tide of light hovering over the steppe and the two of us, bonded together by the lives and deaths of beings who now survived only in ourselves. In her words and henceforth in my memory. She did not speak but now I could picture her shade: in the depths of the house hidden in a narrow valley in the Caucasus. There she was, a woman holding a candle, smiling at a young mother as she walked in, carrying a child in her arms, at a man who was setting down on a bench a heavy pail covered with a cotton cloth.

   Mentally I spoke her name, Sasha, as if to ensure that the woman sitting on the grass of the steppe beside me was one and the same as that other who had so discreetly, so constantly, threaded her way through the life of my family. At that moment she made an effort to get up, no doubt noticing that the night was drawing in. Clumsily, I hurried to come to her aid, to offer her my arm, sensing for the first time the frailty of her body, the frailty of age, which at fourteen one finds hard to imagine. In this hasty gesture my fingers grasped her injured hand. I felt an instinctive trembling, that decorous reflex certain disabled people have when they do not want to cause alarm or elicit sympathy. She smiled at me and spoke in a voice that had rediscovered its serene and precise tones.

   After walking for several minutes I realized that I had left behind the book we used to take with us during those long days spent on the steppe beside the river. I told Sasha, ran back, and when I turned, saw her in the distance, all alone amid the limitless expanse filled with the translucency of the evening. I walked slowly, catching my breath, and watched her waiting for me in that absolute solitude, with the detachment that made her presence like a mirage. I was not thinking about the history of my family, of which she had just given me the last memories. I was thinking about her, herself, this woman who in a most discreet manner, almost accidentally, I might have believed, had taught me her language, and in that language had taught me about the land of her birth, the land that had never left her during her long life in Russia.

   From afar I recognized her smile, the gesture of her hand. And with ah the ardor of my youth I made a silent oath to give back to her one day her true name and her native country, just as she had dreamed of it in the endlessness of this steppe.

5

   "No, listen, let's face it, politically speaking the country's a corpse. Or rather a phantom. A phantom that would still like to frighten people but simply makes them laugh instead."

   They were talking about Russia. I did not intervene. If I occasionally found myself at very Parisian gatherings of this type, it was never to join in the conversation. I accepted invitations because I knew that, in this highly composite world, there was always a chance I might encounter a guest who, learning where I came from, would exclaim, "Well I never! Only yesterday I met a compatriot of yours in Lisbon, at So-and-so's place. Now, what was her name?" In this way, at any rate, I imagined that, by questioning this providential guest, I could locate a trace of you, hold onto it, narrow down its whereabouts to a continent, a country, a city. For more than two years I had been patiently revisiting the places where your presence seemed to me likely, cities where, even briefly, we had once lived together. From now on, instead of this questing (I had often told myself that, logically, those must be precisely the cities you would avoid), I took to listening for some clue that might slip out amid the cocktail party chatter, between a couple of pronouncements on the subject of political corpses or similar pieces of conventional wisdom.

   That day Russia-as-phantom scored a bull's-eye. The conversation took off.

   "A black hole that swallows up everything thrown into it," someone added.

   "They're allergic to democracy," affirmed the first.

   A woman reaching out with her cigarette toward an ashtray said, "I've read somewhere that they now have a shorter life expectancy than in some African countries."

   "That, darling, is probably because they smoke too much," declared her husband, playfully spiriting away her pack of cigarettes.

   Everyone laughed. They changed the subject. On the pretext of going for another drink, I moved away, eyeing their little group among other circles that were forming and breaking up on the whim of a look, a word, a moment of boredom. The woman stubbing out her cigarette was a kind of minuscule adolescent, despite being in her sixties. Her husband, a former ambassador, was a tall, heavy man who, all the while he was listening (that is to say, pretending to listen) was raising his eyebrows in greeting to people over the heads of his interlocutors, then rejoining the conversation, diving in with a glancing remark. There was another woman, a high priestess of Parisian culture with a masculine profile and a voice like iron. Her very thin body, the expression in her eyes, and the movements of her chin seemed to be full of militancy for some cause. Below her short-cropped hair, her neck with its almost childlike delicacy, the last refuge of her femininity, belied this militancy and even she may not have been aware of its beauty. His eyes slid over yet another woman, an absolutely classic blonde who smiled and whom one had the impression of having already met a thousand times, until one penetrated through this gilded, smiling carapace to an unknown stranger. Finally, the young man who had just been speaking about the "phantom country." He was young at fifty and always would be. Black jeans, a white shirt widely unbuttoned to reveal a pale chest, an artist's mop of hair, elegant round spectacles. More than from this style of dress, the illusion of youth derived from his knack of always being up-to-the-minute. What he actually said mattered little, for during his long life as a teller of truths he had been a Maoist, a communist, an anti-communist, a liberal, an anti-bourgeois living in the most bourgeois district possible; he had defended every cause and its opposite, but, above all, he knew what you had to say to be perceived as a controversialist, a revolutionary, someone who could think the unthinkable, even while uttering banal propositions he would strenuously oppose the next day. At that moment the thing to do was to denigrate the phantom country He was a master of the sound bite.

   As I was leaving I was stopped by a journalist I had met at one of these gatherings. "I'm going to cover your president's visit here with a Russian journalist. Maybe you know her, she's called…"

   Walking through the night streets I told myself that the chances of discovering you again under a Russian identity were virtually nil. Especially alongside "our" president. However, it was the only means I had left for eliminating one by one the women who were not you.

   The epithet "phantom country" haunted me for some time, like a tune you get on your brain but can't identify. And so did this regret: I should have intervened, tried to explain, told them that… Later, in the night, I thought about the phantom pain an injured man can feel after an amputation. He has an intense physical awareness of the life of the arm or leg he has just lost. I told myself that it was the same for one's native land, for one's country, lost or reduced to the state of a shade. It comes to life again within us, as both desolation and love, in the deepest throbbing of the severed veins.