Requiem for a Lost Empire (23 page)

   For a few instants our weariness, our remoteness, made us invisible. The soldiers streamed into the dining room, riddling the nooks and crannies with bullets wherever darkness and smoke lingered, transforming the kitchen into a long cascade of shattered glass. And yet there we were in front of them, by the broken window where one could breathe, standing pressed against each other. For us everything came down to this embrace, to a few words guessed at through the gunfire, from the movement of our lips.

   An instant later they discovered our presence. The barrel of an automatic rifle began to poke me in the back, a butt struck us across the shoulders, as if to separate us. Then they drew back, noting the distance necessary for the execution, to avoid getting themselves sprayed with blood. After three days of siege and three sleepless nights the world outside our bodies was blurred, flaccid. The mind floundered, trying to grasp the hardness of death amid this softness and, without growing alarmed, fell back into somnolence. The only fragment of lucidity was the soldier's arm, seen in a sidelong glance, when I lifted my face from yours for an instant: he was wearing a slender leather bracelet on his wrist. "This one won't shoot," I thought with irrational conviction. "No, he won't shoot us."

   Like us, they noticed the sliding beneath their feet. For some time now the electric current had been restored and the restaurant was revolving. The picture window framed the fire in the port and, a moment later, the minaret and roofs of the old town. The tape deck struck up again the same flow of weary notes. Its breathy rhythms isolated us even more. We were alone and for a little time still remained in this life, but already felt detached from our entwined bodies, which the yelling soldiers were manhandling. They needed two ordinary condemned people, two bodies standing with their faces to the wall. Our embrace made them uneasy. For them we were a couple of dancers on a tiny island defined by the tea-colored light, the table with a bunch of artificial flowers, the saxophonist's breathy notes. The brassy swaying of the music suddenly took off into a dizzying flight: it was simultaneously laughter, shouting, a sob. Anyone who followed it, in its madness, could only have fallen to his death from this vibrant cliff. There was a click from a magazine being engaged. You raised your eyes toward me, very calm eyes, and said to me, "Till tomorrow, then."

   His voice, disdainful and very sure of itself, cut through the bawling of the soldiers. Later you referred to him as an "extraterrestrial." My first impression was precisely that: a cosmonaut captured by the denizens of some planet. He was a GI, escorted by Africans, who made his way into the dining room. His equipment surpassed even what could be seen in films about intergalactic warfare: a helmet with a built-in microphone and a transparent visor, a flak jacket, and a belt that looked like a chastity belt, for it extended down at the front to protect the genitalia; thick padded leggings that covered his knees, gloves with ringed fingers; and, in particular, an infinite number of little balls, capsules, and bottles attached to his webbing, or thrust into the innumerable pockets of his jacket. No doubt these were all the possible antidotes and serums, all the flashlights, all the filter pumps. He stood a head taller than his indigenous escorts, who surrounded him respectfully and watched him as he spoke. Confronting our perplexity, they all began shouting at the same time, demanding a reply from us. It was simply their din that now stopped us understanding. And I heard myself exclaiming, still a stranger to myself, "Look, first tell your bodyguards to keep quiet!"

   I saw you smiling, realized what an absurd expression I had used, and laughed as well. "Bodyguards" had just slipped out.

   Later on we often found ourselves picturing this military novelty: the intrepid American warrior flanked by a dozen bodyguards, a new method of going to war. And, in truth, the United States was terrified of the idea of having to send body bags back to America, especially during presidential elections.

   These long underground passages of our remembered past would often open out onto the smiling banality of the present and, on that day, onto a reception room and a woman trying unsuccessfully to dislodge a tiny pastry, a petit four topped with a drop of cream, which she was being offered by a waiter. While tormenting this pastry, which was stuck to the others, she went on talking to me and her voice, already smoothed off by the triviality of social conversation, became completely automatic: "It was, you know, so moving. And awfully well documented… All those clips from the archives…" What brought me back from the past was not her words but the glass in her left hand that was tilting and on the brink of spilling its contents. I grasped her hand. She smiled at me, finally succeeding in capturing the petit four. "You know, there's a great deal in what he says. It's, you know, incredibly powerful!" Her mouth rounded as she spoke, and her tongue slipped out delicately and captured a morsel from the petit four. At last I realized where I was, in this room next to a woman praising a film that had just been shown in preview. Back in the underground tunnel of my memories I was still seeing the soldier who had been shot a moment before and whom we covered with a tablecloth; the smell of that African city in flames was still in my nostrils; and in the deepest galleries, in the most remote years, other cities appeared, other faces frozen by death. The woman seemed to be waiting for me to reply. I agreed with her, echoing her last remark. I must return to the present.

   To get my bearings again in this Parisian present, all I needed to do was to identify old acquaintances in their new guise. The blond woman talking to me about the film was always the same blonde. I had encountered her a hundred times at gatherings like this, where I hoped to discover traces of you. Since our previous encounter she had simply grown ten years younger, altered the color of her eyes and the oval of her face, lengthened her nose, altered her name and profession. She was a different person, of course, but still a perfectly formed specimen of this golden feminine type, smiling and so vacuous as to be almost agreeable. A little farther off, in a polite scramble around the tables, I saw the ex-ambassador, that massive, graying man who on this occasion was an ex-minister. He had less hair and had adopted a more nasal, but still ironic, voice. Making deft use of a pair of tongs, he was serving his wife as she held out her plate. He was making jokes and the people around him were smiling, even as they struggled to slip their forks through the bobbing and weaving of arms to obtain their slice of cake or their portion of salad.

   I once again located the young man of fifty, the intellectual with a hot line to the truth. He was now older than a couple of weeks ago and, instead of the black curls he had last time, he had chosen a sleek ash gray hairstyle, but what he was saying could have been said, word for word, by his double who had held forth about the "phantom country." He had already filled his plate and was in conversation now with a very corpulent man sporting a ponytail and dressed in black, the maker of the film that had just been screened. Sitting in a little circle of guests, the two of them unintentionally formed a variety double act, the thin one and the fat one, and their remarks corresponded to this physical difference: the thin one, the intellectual, modulated and elaborated on the fat one's deliberately crude remarks based on his "gut feelings." The fat one, the artist, was apt to begin his sentences by saying, "Personally, I don't give a damn for the official history" before going on to explain how "you have to swallow the archives raw." It was a remark from a woman that drew me toward their circle. Tall, bony, with a masculine profile (I recalled the literary journalist who had played the role of this Parisian type last time), that evening she was an official of the Ministry of Culture. "You should show your film in Moscow. They ought to know these facts as well," she said to the filmmaker with the authority of one who provides subsidies.

   "In Moscow…" I was used to picking up these Russian references. But more crucial still than this reflex was the desire to see the face of the person who could have made that film. From where I was I could only see his very broad back and the ponytail dangling over his black silk shirt. I went up to them.

   The film was called
The Price of Delay
and was black and white, for it consisted mainly of archive film from the Second World War. During the opening minutes it showed Soviet soldiers, eating, coming and going, laughing, sitting and smoking, dancing to the sound of an accordion, washing in a river. Then Stalin loomed up, tugging at his pipe, looking both jovial and cunning, and, in the tones of a verdict being delivered, the commentary declared that this man was guilty of… (here there was a pause)… slowness. The advance of his armies was much less rapid than it could and should have been. The result: thousands and thousands of deaths in the camps, which could have been liberated much sooner by this army that had moved at a snail's pace. The archive film moved on to piles of bodies, lines of barbed wire, squat buildings with their chimneys belching out black smoke. And again, without transition, one saw the soldiers with their broad laughing faces, a close-up of a smoker blowing elegant white smoke rings in the air, another of a soldier, with his fur
shapka
pulled well down over his eyes, sleeping under a tree. And a few images further on we again saw the living skeletons in their striped pajamas, their eyes distended with suffering, naked, emaciated bodies which no longer looked like human beings. The commentary began adding up figures: the delay accumulated by these lazy soldiers, the number of victims who could have been saved… There were several ingenious technical devices in the film. At one moment the screen was split in two. On the right-hand side the scenes were shown in slow motion, focusing on the soldiers moving at a sleepwalker's pace. And the left-hand side, with speeded-up film, showed a mass grave being rapidly filled with corpses in striped clothing. In the final sequence these two juxtaposed realities faded and the image came through of the armored vehicles and the American soldiers sweeping in, as liberators, through the gateway to a camp.

   I should not have intervened. All the more because I knew how useless it would be. Or at least I should have done it differently. I talked about the front that extended well over a thousand miles between the Baltic and the Black Sea, about the forced march offensives Stalin launched to save the American troops defeated in the Ardennes, about the crude arithmetic of the numbers of soldiers who had to die in their thousands every day just to shift the front line a few miles farther west.

   At this moment the fat filmmaker, deeply ensconced in his armchair, crossed his legs and knocked over the glass the woman next to him had put on the floor. He roared with laughter and apologized, the woman gave him a paper napkin with which he patted his splashed pants bottoms, and everyone stirred, as if liberated by this interlude. And it was in the tones of a cocktail party argument that he exclaimed to me, gruff and ironic, "Look, I don't give a damn for all that official history, Stalin, Zhukov, and all that claptrap. What I do is open an archive like a can of beans. I wolf it all down. And then I spit it out onto the screen, just as it stands."

   He must have realized that, after having "wolfed it down," he could not then spit it out just as it stood, and quickly corrected the image in more aggressive tones: "Don't tell me you're going to come out with all that old stuff about twenty million Russians killed in the war!"

   The intellectual with the ash gray hair elaborated with, "The great trump card of nationalist propaganda."

   The conversation became general.

   "The German-Soviet pact," interrupted the ex-minister.

   "If it hadn't been for the Americans Stalin would have invaded the whole of Europe," said a woman, still young, who spoke like someone reciting a lesson.

   "You know those twenty million must have included everyone who died of old age. Over four years that's quite a crowd!" wisecracked the ex-minister.

   "The Katyn massacres…" chimed in the official from the culture ministry.

   "Our duty to remember…" added the intellectual.

   "Repentance…" intoned a man who a few minutes earlier had collided with a woman at the salad table and had made an apologetic face: exactly the same as now when speaking of repentance.

   "Listen, it's very simple. In the archives I slaved over in Moscow it's as plain as the nose on your face. If the Russians hadn't dragged their feet in Poland and Germany at least half a million men could have been saved. Hold on, it can't hurt to do a bit of number crunching."

   The filmmaker took a daybook out of his pocket with a cover that opened out onto a little pocket calculator. Several people leaned forward to follow his explanations better. I could hear my own voice, as if from outside myself, booming away above these bowed heads. I tried to say that, when liberating a camp the soldiers could not use artillery or assault grenades, and that often they had to go in without shooting because the Germans sheltered behind the prisoners, and that out of two hundred men in a company only a dozen were left at the end of a battle.

   The ringing of a telephone buried in someone's bag interrupted these wasted words. People began patting their pockets, rummaging in their bags. In the end the filmmaker grabbed the machine out of his own jacket pocket. Cursing, he swung his body out of the armchair and moved away a few paces. Without him the conversation split up into couples and was lost in the general hubbub of the room.

   I made my way through the crowd, seeking to rid myself of a feeling of nausea at having said too much. But the words I had just spoken came back to haunt me in increasingly irreparable tones: "Without artillery… With their bare hands… Human shields…" In the looks I encountered I felt I was sensing the ironic tolerance people have for what is, at the end of the day, a harmless gaffe. It struck me that I should have found it easier to make myself understood by that Wehrmacht officer barking out his orders on the square in the Brest Litovsk citadel than by these people sipping their drinks.