I remarked to him, ineptly and in absurdly moralizing tones, that this could not last. At that moment the waiter set down our cups and inadvertently stubbed his toe against the suitcase placed under the table. Shakh smiled and murmured at the man's retreating back, "He should have been more careful. This case is mildly radioactive. Yes, I've actually been transporting the components of a portable atomic bomb in it. I'm not joking. You can't imagine what they manage to smuggle out of Russia now. I sometimes tell myself they'll end up by dismantling the whole country, or what's left of it, and shipping it to the West. But this bomb is a delightful toy. Total weight sixty-four pounds, length twenty-seven inches. A dream for a petty dictator who wants to command a bit of respect."
He took a drink, then continued in more somber tones, "You're right, one can't play the way I'm playing now for long. It can only work nine times out of ten. But, you see, if I still thought we could win I don't think it would even work once. Maybe the real game begins when you know you're going to lose. And we've lost already. This helicopter in my briefcase, it's still going to land in America, by another channel, a little bit later, and they'll have it all the same. Just as they'll have all the talented research scientists who are starving in Moscow. As one day they'll have the whole planet under their thumb. With Europe it's a done deal. Those are not separate nations anymore, they're hired help. If the Americans decide to bomb some transgressor nation tomorrow, with one voice all those lackeys will respond 'yes sir, no sir, three bags full, sir.' Of course they'll be allowed to keep their national folklore. You know, the way each girl in a brothel has her speciality. The French, true to tradition, will write essays about the war and lend their palaces for negotiations. The English will assume an air of dignity; the brothel madam always has one girl with a bit of class. And the Germans will be the zealous whore, trying to ensure her past errors are forgotten. The rest of Europe is a negligible quantity."
"And Russia?"
I asked with no ulterior motive and certainly with no desire to cut him off, but that was how Shakh must have taken it. He fell silent, then continued with an apologetic air, "Forgive me, I'm rambling. I've played the role of the American tycoon shopping for secrets so many times that I've ended up loathing him. A basic and visceral anti-Americanism, as the Parisian intellectuals would say. No, one shouldn't be a bad loser. You know I once told… our friend about Sorge's death. I expect she thought I was giving her a patriotic propaganda lesson, maybe I went about it the wrong way. But I quite simply wanted to say that in that last moment on the scaffold he, the loser, with the noose around his neck, achieved victory. Yes, by shouting out words people would find laughable today: 'Long live the Communist International!' Who can tell what'll carry more weight in the balance between good and eviclass="underline" all the victories in the world or the raised fist of that agent everyone had betrayed."
"And Russia?"
I repeated it in a neutral voice, intentionally abstracted, leaving him the possibility of not replying. But his reply amazed me by its confessional tone.
"Several times I've had the same dream: I'm crossing the Russian frontier by train. It's winter, white fields as far as the eye can see, and I know there will be nothing but these infinite snows right up to the end. It's twenty-two years now since I went back there. The last person I knew there, who's still alive, is our friend: you'll find her again in the end. The other Russians I have all known abroad. As for those who come here to sell me helicopters on paper, they're a new breed already. The ones who are going to run the show down here after us."
He looked at his watch, leaned forward to pull out his suitcase, and, already poised to leave, remarked with a wink, "Since you're burning with curiosity to know what's in this case, I'll tell you the scenario. This evening two fine specimens of the new breed are coming to stay at the same hotel as me. They'll wait until it's night and break into my room. Not finding me there, they'll attack the suitcase. The vigilant French police will already have been alerted. The specimens will be deported to Moscow and met at Sheremetyevo airport. And there will be an attempt to plug the breach through which these combat helicopters and other toys dreamed up by our hungry engineers keep flying away."
He ordered a taxi and, as we were waiting for it by the door, we heard the swirling torrent of news blaring out above the bar; a mixture of strikes, wars, elections, sport, deaths, goals scored. "Nothing amazes me any more in this world," said Shakh, staring at the gray, rain-soaked street. "But for the German aircraft bombing the Balkans to have had the same black crosses on their wings as they had at the time they were bombing Kiev and Leningrad does seem like a really badjoke."
"It'll be easier to talk about her over there."
I already knew what he was going to say. I had sensed it from his voice on the telephone. Then from his face. From his silence in the car. At moments the pain of what I was going to learn still seemed remediable-as if all it needed was for us to do a U-turn, dash to an airport, land in a city where your presence, even if under threat, even if improbable, could be divined at one of those addresses I could completely reconstitute from memory: the street, the house, the traces left by our presence there several years before. A second later I realized that Shakh was going to tell me about a death (for me your name and your face were not yet associated with this death) that had happened some time ago.
He talked about it as we walked along a country road between two rows of bare trees, their trunks blue with lichen, engulfed in brambles. Someone who did not know him would have thought he was weeping. From time to time he wiped from his cheeks the melted flakes of the snow that had surprised us on our journey. But he spoke little and in a toneless voice. When his words broke off I again began to notice the whistling of the wind and the tramp of our feet on the sodden path. The pain made the world less and less recognizable. I saw myself walking beside an old man miles from anywhere, among lackluster fields, a man I knew to be on the run, at the end of his tether, who was at home nowhere, a man who was telling me, as he mopped the trickles of water from his face, that he now knew almost the exact date of your execution. But this precision only served to make more improbable the death he was announcing and the need to connect this death with you, still so intensely alive the previous day and now separated from us, separated from this cold spring morning by a year and a half of nonexistence. The path itself, which ran beside an old stone wall, was marked by unreality, for, according to what Shakh had just said, we must picture you passing this way more than twenty years before, at the start of your life in the West. What was also unreal was the notion that this very spot could have helped him to break the news.
He told me the date of your death and now it was no longer possible to avoid linking you with this loss. The world became empty, thunderous, hollow. A place where your name rang out repeatedly, like the echo of a vain incantation. By a hasty reflex in the face of death, in deference to the proprieties, the image of a coffin surrounded by wreaths and weeping faces flashed into my mind. Shakh's voice began again, as if to sweep away the vision of this funereal pomp. He spoke of a death preceded by interrogations, tortures, violations. And of burial in a mass grave, among anonymous bodies.
At that moment we emerged into a vast courtyard in front of an old farmhouse converted into a restaurant. I walked behind Shakh like an automaton, crossed the yard from one end to the other, passed very close by the crowd gathered around a bridal pair. I saw the guests with a clarity that hurt my eyes: a woman's hand, with veined fingers clutching a little patent leather purse; the bride's bare forearms, her skin rosy and covered in goose pimples; the closed eye, as if in sleep, of the young man filming the ceremony with a little camera. Everything about this gathering seemed so necessary and so absurd, as it moved slowly toward the restaurant's open door. Everything had a point, both the old fingers gripping the black leather, and the youthful arms shivering beneath the icy drops. And nothing could have been stranger. Just for a moment, in a notion that verged on madness, I thought it might be possible to join them, very simply to tell them of my grief. A man emerged from the crowd and seemed to be urging us to go in more quickly, then realized his mistake and adopted an air of offended surprise. The path continued around the farm building and led back into the avenue where Shakh had left the car. As we passed, a large gray bird stirred among the branches and launched out obliquely in a low, irregular flight over the emptiness of the fields studded with raindrops. I suddenly thought that to plunge into this springtime void, to vanish into its indifference, would be a salutary step so easy to take. A body crumpled up behind the bushes, the temple brown with blood, the arm flung out by the recoil from the gun. Shakh stopped, looked in the same direction as myself and seemed to guess my thought. His voice had the firmness you adopt when addressing a man who has drunk too much and needs to be reprimanded. "If she had talked we would not be here. Neither you nor I." Still drowning in the torpor of the void, I felt I was closer to that body than to this man speaking harsh words to me, closer to that imagined suicide than to myself. He swung round, started walking again and said in a muted voice, "I have the name and address of the man who turned her in."