Later on, during the night, I would sense that this past, photographed but never lived, aroused in you a memory of ourselves, of our actual life together, that we paid such little attention to under our borrowed identities. Our life had left behind no photos, no letters, had led to no exchange of confidences. Suddenly the counterfeit album reminded us that we had had these three years of routine complicity, an imperceptible closening of ties, an affection we avoided calling love. Far away there was our country, the weary empire whose physical mass we were ever aware of as the magnet that drew our thoughts, even through the African night. There were its scents and its winter smoke above the villages, the snows in its little towns, mute beneath the blizzards, its faces scarred by forgotten wars and exiles with no return, its history, in which the victorious din of sounding brass often gave way to weeping, to a silence cadenced by the tramp of a column of soldiers after a defeat in battle. And, buried deep in this snow and those muddy roads, there were the years of our childhood and youth, inseparable from the pulse of joy and sorrow, from that living alloy that we call our native land.
Your words came like an echo of that distant presence: "It must be possible one day to tell the truth."
I felt caught in the act of having shared your train of thought. But above all I felt obliged to bear witness to the truth that had arisen behind the forged photos in a family album. What truth? Again I saw the corpse of the soldier stretched out on the ground, the young man who had just confiscated several banknotes from us in the name of revolutionary justice. I recalled that the previous day I had seen a burned-out armored vehicle and the arm with a leather bracelet on its wrist, an arm protruding from a chaotic jumble of metal and flesh. The wearer of the wristband was the enemy of the young revolutionary. They were about the same age, had perhaps been born in two neighboring villages. Those who called themselves revolutionaries were supported by the Americans, those who had been defeated were, until the fall of the capital city, in receipt of arms from us and aid from our instructors. The two young soldiers were certainly not aware of the vastness of the forces opposing one another behind their backs.
Was that the truth you were referring to? I doubted it. For to be truthful one would also have to speak of the arms salesman, maybe at that very moment lying between the thighs of his young mistress, scrupulously attentive to his own hard-won pleasure. The two messages you had slipped into your fan must be decoded: delayed and now useless information about the fighting already ended. Those two columns of figures that could have cost us our lives. And we should have died in the guise of a certain Canadian couple, whose existence would have been authenticated by the cheerful banality of a photograph album.
You got up. In the darkness I was aware that you seemed to be waiting for a response. I sat up as well, ready to admit my confusion: for this truth you had spoken of was constantly changing, giving rise to little murky, fleeting, sprawling truths. The tragedy of the massacres was sullied by my chatting with the arms salesman at the airport, by the vision of his chubby body, hard up against that of his naked mistress. Our arm-wrestling with the Americans was becoming mired in a political demagoguery revised so many times that we now found ourselves supporting a regime held to be conservative while they had their money on the victory of the revolutionaries. These labels no longer had any meaning, revolution meant access to oil wells. As for our own personal truth, all it amounted to was this score of faces, young and old, surrounding us on the pages of a photo album, these nearest and dearest whom we had never known.
I was about to say all that to you when, thanks to the glow from the fire that was petering out in the next street, I saw what you were doing, standing up in front of the window, your arms raised, repairing the torn mosquito netting. I guessed at how the tentative needle was working its way upward in the darkness, drawing together the panels of dusty fabric. With a newfound joy I sensed that this moment had no need of words. There you were, in the identity most faithful to yourself, in all the truth of the silence that followed a setback in our efforts to understand each other. And beneath the whole accumulation of masks, grimaces, and alibis that made up my life, there was just one day that seemed to match your truth.
Hesitantly, as if I had only just learned the words I was speaking, I began to tell you about the infant falling asleep in the depths of a forest in the Caucasus.
One day, in another city, in another war, I once more came upon you in silent contemplation. The windows onto the terrace had been shattered by an explosion and the table on which we often took our meals was strewn with shards. You were picking them up patiently, not saying a word, sometimes crouching, sometimes leaning with one hand on the back of a chair. You were wearing next to nothing, so suffocating was the heat of the Gulf at this moment of low tide. I saw your body and the mixture of fragility and strength that was apparent in your movements. The innocently carnal play of nakedness that does not know it is observed. A trunk with muscular curves, the firm outline of a leg, then suddenly, as if betrayed, this delicate collarbone, almost painful in its childish outlines.
Something rebelled in me. At its start this task of picking up the pieces always seems endless. But, above all, it was you, your life spared in the face of so many threats, over so many years, now being idiotically used up on this most rare evening of respite. A week before the fighting broke out we had finished piecing together a network of arms sales: nine intermediaries across Europe, buying and selling, so as to line their pockets on the way and, as always in this kind of traffic, to cover their tracks. To begin with the whole thing had looked seamless, impenetrable. Shakh had succeeded in obtaining a copy of the first of these contracts and had sent it to us in London. A banal transaction, even if, in reading the list of weapons supplied, we could readily picture their harvest of death on the ground. Otherwise an arms sale like thousands of others. It was you who had detected the anomaly, the first link that was to enable us to work our way along the chain: nowhere in this contract was there any mention of technical assistance after delivery. As if the purchasers had no intention of using all these armored vehicles and rockets. You had mentioned resale via a third country. We tugged at the link and managed to gain access to this strangely unwarlike first purchaser. Then, another… Nine, until we reached the people in this ravaged city who were killing, and getting themselves killed, with the weapons listed in that contract. Commissions worth millions of dollars. And, among the beneficiaries, a fully operational Minister of Foreign Affairs.
Crouched by the window, you went on picking up the fragments of glass. Calm, resigned, unbearable in the tenderness of your silent presence, because of the madness of it, because of the injustice of fate that had assigned this house to you with its shattered windows, and this intimacy with death and the ghosts of those nine characters who had invaded your life.
My angry words remained unspoken. In our fragmented lives where the unforeseen was becoming the only logic, this table, wiped clean, that you were about to set, the way you did before the fighting began, this simple action made perfect sense. "I'll soon be finished," you said, standing up, and talked about the couple who were due to replace us. That, among other things, was our task: to prepare the ground for the colleagues who would take over the network after the end of the war. I noticed a slight cut on your left hand marked with blood. The sharp edge of a splinter, no doubt. Absurdly, amid all these deaths, this tiny wound pained me greatly.