Requiem for a Lost Empire (16 page)

   On his way out of a ruined village at the start of the autumn he picked up a page from a torn newspaper, an issue from the previous week. Reading it, you might have believed the enemy had only just crossed the frontier and was about to be driven back any day now. That night there was fighting some sixty miles from Moscow.

   He had known for some time now why the Germans smiled when they fired. It was a grin that had nothing to do with joy, but was the unconscious grimace of a man whose hands are absorbing the recoil from a long burst of fire. Like most of his comrades in arms, Pavel was currently equipped with a German submachine gun, recovered in battle. And now they smiled like the Germans. And they no longer ran away in front of tanks, but dove into a trench, pretended to be dead, then got up and threw hand grenades. On awakening they would pry the panels of their greatcoats up from the frozen earth and turn their faces toward the birth of the light, hoping for sunshine. Moscow, which grew ever closer, lay somewhere within this chill vapor, they sensed it, like the swelling of bare veins, throbbing beneath the wind on that icy plain.

   He found himself saying that he had seen all that could be seen of death, that no massacred, broken, dismembered body could any longer surprise him with the capriciousness of its mutilations. And yet death remained astonishing. As on that morning by the bright light of the sun, which rose in the direction of Moscow. A soldier whose eyes had been burned in an explosion ran toward the tanks, blind, guided by the sound of the engines and his own agony, and rolled under the tracks, setting off a grenade. Or yet again that young German without a helmet, half lying beside an overturned field gun, his bloody hands pressed against his shattered sides, crying out in the whimpering voice of a child, weeping in a language that, until then, Pavel had only heard barked out and had believed to be made only for barking.

   And then, for an infinite second, there was the vision of his own body, lying there, inert among the snow-covered ruts. The explosion of a shell blotted out all sounds and it was in this silence of a vanished world that he saw himself as if from outside and very far away ("as if from the sky," he would later reflect): the body of a soldier in his mud-spattered greatcoat, his arms outstretched, his face flung back, looking up toward a glorious winter sun that would have shone with the same splendid indifference if no one had been left alive on this December morning. He was certain he had lived through those few moments of detached and painless contemplation, certain of having observed the fragile lacework of hoarfrost that surrounded the head of that unmoving soldier. His own head. When he regained consciousness at the hospital and could hear once more, he learned that they had almost abandoned him for dead on that field where there was no one else alive. Mainly to satisfy her conscience, a nurse had approached this corpse with its head trapped in a frozen puddle, had crouched down and held a little mirror to the soldier's lips. The glass had misted over slightly.

   On his return to the front at the end of the winter of 1942 he noticed that the world had changed during his absence. In the mornings now, as they resumed their military duties, they had the sun at their backs. And in the evening, during the last miles before they halted, the most wearisome ones, when their boots weighted down with mud seemed to be taking root in the earth, the sun was shining ahead of them to the west, in the direction of Germany. As if in the frozen fields near Moscow the points of the compass had been switched.

   There was a comforting logic to this turnaround by the sun. It was the only one in the war's capricious chaos. If he had had the time to reflect on it he would have noticed yet another piece of logic: there were fewer and fewer men in the ranks born, like him, at the very start of the twenties, men who had been fighting since the first day of the war. It was only years later that survivors of his generation might have the leisure to study a population census diagram arranged by age, a triangle with indented sides, like a pointed fir tree, widening toward the base. Moving down from the top to the level of 1920, 1921, and 1922 it would be deeply cut away, as if a mysterious epidemic had exterminated the men born in those years. Only one or two percent of them would be left. Branches pruned almost back to the trunk.

   In the fierce thrust of troops toward the west, Pavel had discovered that survival most often depended not on logic but on being aware of chaos's little tricks, its unpredictable whims that defied common sense. A victory could be more murderous than a defeat. The last bullet would kill someone exclaiming in relief at the end of the battle, the first man to light a cigarette. And, whatever happened, you could never say whether it was life-saving or lethal.

   It was as he walked through a town that had barely been retaken from the Germans that this notion had struck him of a victory cutting down more men than a lost battle. The streets, now empty, still had an uncertain, disquieting appearance, distorted by eyes that had bored into them when taking aim to fire; by breathless running from the corner of one house to the next. The dead looked as if they were searching for something they had lost in the dust of the courtyards, amid the rubble of gutted buildings. A few minutes before, the length of the silence, longer than a simple pause between bursts of fire, had proclaimed the end and the soldier crouching next to Pavel behind a section of wall had stood up, given a satisfied yawn, as he inhaled the damp air of that May evening. And sat down again immediately, then crumpled over on his side, a pinch of snuff still held between his thumb and forefinger. At the corner of one eyebrow, there was a hollow rapidly filling with blood. Pavel threw himself to the ground, thinking there was a hidden sniper. But, on examining the wound, he recognized the work of a stray piece of shrapnel, one of those bits of metal that came from heaven knows where at the end of a battle, unheralded by the sound of an explosion. Moreover, in the storm-darkened sky the thunder was imitating explosions with muffled rumbling at the other end of the town. Pavel got up and called to the medical orderlies who were running across the street with two bodies loaded on a stretcher.

   In the company of other soldiers he walked past houses pitted by shells, then, hearing the sound of running, turned the corner into a less damaged sidestreet and began checking the buildings, one after the other. In the last but one he found himself alone. Corridors, classroom doors, and, in the classrooms, blackboards with pieces of chalk in the grooves beneath them. Some of the windows were broken and in the half-light of a stormy evening he felt he recognized that very particular moment in May when the last lessons of the school year were dissolving in the joy of heavy showers of rain and wet clusters of lilac outside the open window, all in a stormy darkness that suddenly invaded the classroom and created a subtle, dreamy complicity between them and the teacher. On the blackboard in one of the rooms he saw this inscription, written up with scholarly application: "The capital of our country is Berlin." Teaching was being done in accordance with German programs drawn up for the "Eastern territories." Moscow was deemed to have sunk without trace to the bottom of an artificial sea. He emerged from the classroom and heard shooting in the corridor on the ground floor. Some German soldiers were still hiding in the building and it was not easy to track them down in these dozens of rooms, where all the time the eye was being distracted by the chalk handwriting on the blackboard, or the pages of some abandoned textbook.

   Pavel was not surprised that the memory of these empty classrooms was more tenacious than that of the battle itself, although he received a medal for it and the date of it was marked by victorious gun salutes in Moscow. He knew only too well the unpredictable caprices of war and what the memory retained of it. And it was also by a caprice of ill humor that the commanding officer refused him a week's leave, time to go to Dolshanka, which was less than sixty miles from the reconquered town. It was now the third year of the war, a year made up, like the previous one, of a thousand troop movements, painful advances and chaotic withdrawals. Amid this tangle of trajectories there was one fixed point, unchanged since he had left: his family house, the plantain leaves around the wooden front steps, the familiar creaking of the door. Despite all the towns burned to a cinder, despite all the deaths, the calm of this house seemed to be intact, down to the smile of his parents on the photo in the dining room: his father with his head turned slightly toward his mother, as if waiting for her to say something. In this town, so close to Dolshanka, a town half flattened by shelling, he had been seized by doubt. He just wanted to reassure himself that the photo was still smiling on the wall. His commanding officer's refusal struck him as a bad omen, which was confirmed several days later. They walked onto a minefield like a troop of blind men, into a fountain of shrapnel, into the pain, but, before the pain, the sight of a body cut in half and still crawling: the soldier with whom he had been discussing different fishing tactics an hour earlier. At the hospital he brooded on his grudge against the commanding officer. On the day he was allowed to get up and go out into the corridor he learned that their whole division had meanwhile been wiped out by the German artillery in an ill-conceived offensive. He experienced neither joy at having escaped nor remorse. War made everything one could say or think about it simultaneously true and false, and there was too much evil and too much good mixed up in every moment for one to be able to judge. One could only hold one's peace and watch. Beside the window a young soldier was learning how to light a cigarette, clasping it between the remaining stumps of his hands.

   Then came a day in March 1944 when, despite all the murderous caprices of chaos, Pavel thought he could discern a purpose, a great goal that could no longer be doubted. Some yards from their camp, in the middle of a gray plain, with no landmarks and no limits, some soldiers were digging in the ground and sticking a newly squared-off post into the hole. The smells of the freshly turned earth and the bark added a strange note to the inscription on a narrow horizontal panel that they nailed to the top of the post: "U.S.S.R." It was difficult to imagine that there, beneath their great muddy boots, between the stems of the dry plants, lay the frontier, that invisible dotted line he had seen only on maps at school. They had taken almost three years to get there from Moscow. Some of the soldiers were walking back and forth, amused at being able to travel abroad by taking a single step. That night the political commissar spoke to them about their country being "cleansed of Nazi defilement," and the "liberating mission" that was entrusted to them in enslaved Europe. Listening to him Pavel said to himself that the marker on the frontier was more eloquent than all the speeches in the world.

   He did not understand why crossing the frontier aroused a fear of dying in him. Perhaps because, for the first time in long months, the end of the war and a return home were no longer unthinkable. And, like a gambler who has won a lot and is afraid of losing it all during the last minutes of the game, he became aware of his winnings, of this life, preserved up until now amid so many deaths, which, with every day of fighting, became more precious and more threatened. In an inadmissible thought, he recognized that, so as not to die, he would have been ready to employ cunning, to drag his feet during an assault, to hide behind someone else's back, to pretend to fall. But he knew the laws of death, which often targeted such sly foxes and spared the daredevils.

   The hope that he might return home served only to sharpen his fear. He pictured himself marching down the street in Dolshanka, his chest covered with medals, and could imagine nothing more beautiful than that one moment. During hours of respite he found himself polishing his medals and the buckle on his belt while privately rehearsing a hundred times the same scene he dreamed of: the main street of his native village, the admiring looks of the villagers, himself making his way with blissful stateliness toward the house, whose silent, vibrant expectation he could imagine. During these preparations for his return, made between battles, he had the sensation of transporting a part of himself into the future, thus enabling it to escape from the war, to be living in the post-war era already.

   That day the clay he had found on a riverbank was dissolving like soap. The tarnished silver of his two "For Gallantry" medals grew bright, the silhouette of the infantryman in the middle of the red star shone like a layer of mica. He put the decorations away, cleaned his fingers with a handful of sand. The water on that April evening seemed almost warm. And in the stillness of the dusk a bird hidden in the willow groves was repeating two notes with joyful insistence.

   As he stood up he heard a brief guffaw. Soldiers from the company, he thought, taking advantage of the halt to bathe or wash their clothes. The guffaw rang out again but was too abrupt for it to be true laughter. Pavel made his way around the willow thicket, stepped over a thick, half-submerged tree trunk, pushed aside a cascade of branches, and saw them. A woman on her back on the beach by the river, her head toward the water, a man with his two hands clamped around her head to stop her crying out, another holding the woman's wrists, the third writhing on top of her.

   He had taken rapists by surprise before and had fired shots in the air to make them run away. And been cursed as a stupid motherfucker by the woman who was doing it for two tins of food. This time he must act quickly. The guffaws were those of a half-suffocated mouth. The woman managed to free her head, to gasp a mouthful of air and at once her face was smothered by a broad palm. Pavel beat a path through the branches, overturned the man who was twisting the woman's hands, knocked down the one who was crushing her mouth. And just had time, in a fraction of a second, to catch sight of the woman's face and recognize it. That is to say not to recognize it but to tell himself that he had certainly seen it before, or dreamed it, or imagined it. The first soldier hurled himself at him. Pavel dodged him and grasped the tunic collar of the one who was still lying there, made him topple over to one side and, before he could make out his face in the gloom, recognized the voice cursing. It was one of the company's officers.