So Vinner was taking my appearance more seriously than all his chat about the new man and the melting pot on the beach might have suggested. I found my own reflection in one of the fragments. I had no idea if he could have recognized my face with these gold-rimmed spectacles and beard. I had no idea what those years now meant to him that lay between him and the dust and heat of that African capital on the verge of war where we had seen him for the first and last time. For him, certainly, it could only be a past he had suppressed, voluntarily wiped from his memory, relegated to the dull prehistory of his own life before his glorious present. Nor had I any idea in what manner the fact of having betrayed you was preserved, carried with him, tolerated in the brief moments of truth and solitude he could not avoid.
"Watch out for sunstroke," he warned as he left me. "And thieves. They can smell foreigners five miles off. Especially the young blacks and the Latinos, too. What a crew!"
"I see, I thought the melting pot…"
"Now, look, that's just between the two of us, as one Russian to another. Don't repeat what I said or you'll get yourself lynched."
That evening the taxi moved along slowly, often held up by cars trying to park near restaurants, and by the crowd of young vacationers embarking on their night of celebration. There was a fine, warm drizzle. The tanned skins of these very skimpily dressed young passersby shone with a dark gloss. Even more than on the beach one sensed their lust for life, their nonchalant insistence on happiness. As I had asked him to, the driver left Destin, following the coast. There was much too much traffic in those streets for it to be clear if I had been awarded an escort. I took a last glance through the rear window and asked for us to return the way we had come. I was aware that it was of no importance to understand what Vinner knew or did not know and how he might be preparing to respond to my appearance. I had neither to protect myself nor, above all, to imagine how my life might be after this trip to Destin. All that remained for me to live through was concentrated in the here and now.
The taxi dropped me in a quiet, narrow street, a street of small villas that already seemed fast asleep. One could hear the rain, heavier than a moment ago, and somewhere in the depths of the thick vegetation the voices from a television set, probably the dialogue from some science fiction film portraying a civilization in the twenty-fifth century All that remained of the sparkle at the town's center was a halo of faded brightness in the sky. As I walked along, the sound of conversations between men of future centuries gradually passed out of earshot and I could only hear the rain. I recognized Vinner's house from the wrought-iron ornaments on the gate.
The darkness was punctuated by bluish areas around the street lights. The alternation between this harsh glare and the dark foliage transformed my arrival there into a strange negative of my first visit, the day before, in the morning sun. Everything was repeated so precisely that it left me the leisure to observe brief gaps of absurdity and silence between words and actions.
The caretaker appeared, dressed in a windbreaker, looked at me through the gate and disappeared into the sentry box. The intercom hissed, I spelled out my name, then the name of the man who had recommended me. The caretaker's drawling questions came back at me, unchanged since the day before, as if in the rhyming refrains of a children's game. Vinner came out onto the front steps, a cluster of small lights flashed on, marking the curve of the path that led toward the gate. He came up, blinking in the drops of rain, and saw me. He smiled, rapidly erasing a slight twitch of annoyance or alarm that remained lurking in one of the lines of his forced grin. Before he could reach the gate a powerful but completely silent dog interposed itself and reared up at me, the whole of its long, muscular body seething with barely contained energy. Vinner invited me in, still smiling, like someone who has been disturbed just as he was nodding off for the night.
"Over here in the West you know, arriving like this at ten o'clock at night without warning is the best way to give your acquaintances a heart attack. Try doing it in Paris or London. Ringing the bell on the off chance and when the door opens announcing, as we used to do in Russia, 'It's like this, I was just passing in the street and I saw your light was on. So I decided to come up.' A cardiac arrest guaranteed! Well, that's a slight exaggeration. Come in, I've got some good whisky."
I realized that within a few more seconds this tone would again make it impossible to say what I had to say. Vinner s words had the same anesthetizing effect as his gurglings with a straw in the frothy milk of his glass, and the efforts of that obese vacationer standing up with the plastic armchair clamped to the rolls of flesh on her haunches.
"I forgot to give you something," I said in a very neutral voice, feeling in my bag.
The dog tensed even more and uttered a throaty, menacing growl. I went on speaking in Russian with the slightly sheepish air of an absentminded person.
"I expect your dog is trained to react to nervous gestures. I won't make any. I have a gun with a silencer and I shall shoot through the bag at the slightest refusal on your part. For a start, tell the caretaker to go away and take the dog with him."
He complied. His voice remained cheerful, but he could not conceal a quavering note nor, in particular, his Russian accent, which was suddenly more marked. The caretaker grasped the dog by its collar and disappeared to the bottom of the garden. The dotted line of lights along the path went out and Vinner's face was now only lit by the bluish haze coming from the street lamps. He tried to smile, started to speak… and fell silent, hearing his wife's voice through an open window, gently reprimanding the children.
I told him the name I had been using at the time when we first met. I reminded him of the arrival of the two of them, Yuri and Yulia, their naïveté, so well feigned, their disappearance. I spoke of you, your remorse at not having been able to protect them, of your attempts to find them again. I realized that in fact I had very little to say to him. My ringing cry, long since prepared ("You betrayed her, you bastard!"), which was to be followed by the gunshot, seemed unbelievably false and did not fit this man in beach sandals, with a drop of rain suspended from the end of his nose. His wife's voice became clearer. "No, you're not going out, Dave. I said 'no,' do you hear me? First of all because it's raining and look at you. You're in bare feet. No. Go find your slippers." I saw Vinner's eyes glance toward the lighted window of the house for a second. I broke off, as if preparing my final peroration, but, in reality, not knowing how to end this monologue that was telling him nothing new. He threw a similar rapid, oblique glance at my bag, still open with my hand in it, pretending to be looking for a lost object. We saw one another for a moment with a total reciprocal understanding, with a sharp awareness of what we both were, standing here in the rain, sharing a past that made our lives logically impossible and at the same time perfectly ordinary, like his beach sandals, like my bag bought the day before at the airport.
At that moment there was a brief pause in the hissing of the raindrops, a second of complete silence, and from the damp, still depths of the darkness there emerged a faint yawn, a woman's sigh, followed by the grating of a window being closed. We looked at one another. Instinctively I lowered my voice. I surprised myself by talking to him about what I had not intended to say, about what it seemed to me unthinkable to tell.
"Near the harbor there were docks where they crammed in all the opponents of the regime, mixed up together with several who were under suspicion. She was among them. As she had admitted nothing, the Americans had handed her over to the local rulers, those paramilitary choppers-off of heads. A week later, when one of their chiefs had the idea of trading her in negotiations with the government forces, he didn't dare show her. A week of rape and torture. She no longer had a face. They preferred to kill her."