You got up, went in, taking the water with you. I had a strong physical sense of how you were dreaming of days in a past totally foreign to this city, to this life. And even when, later in the night, it seemed that all there was of you was just your ardent body, the element of remoteness was still there. As we embraced, my hand squeezed your forearm and my fingers rediscovered those four notches cut in the flesh, scars from a burst of gunfire long ago. They were deep grooves that felt as if they had been incised by the claws of some large beast letting slip its prey.
We had to cross the country by car and leave it by sea. About sixty miles from the capital, on the far side of the uncertain line of the front, we drove off the road that was churned up by explosions. The mined area was ringed with bodies blown to smithereens, colorful piles of blankets and clothes and the carcasses of vehicles. The local who was escorting us spoke of "cunning" mines, that chose whom to kill. "Four women walked over it and nothing happened to them. Then a woman with a child came along and the mines woke up," he said, pointing to where the carnage happened.
We knew that, thanks to a pneumatic device, the detonators on these mines were activated only after several sets of pressure, so as to allow a whole column of vehicles to move onto the minefield. A column of vehicles, or a crowd of women and children escaping from their burned village. The celebrated Italian mines.
Perhaps it was on that day, on that road gutted by mines, that for the first time I thought about an end to the life we had been leading for several years. Resuming his seat in the vehicle, our guide confided in us, "The Russians deceived us. To begin with they promised paradise, all peoples are brothers and all that. Then we saw they didn't believe in it themselves. And now that they've gone forever we are killing one another for nothing."
I glanced at you to see whether, like me, you had picked up that "forever." But you seemed not to be listening, your gaze fixed on the blue radiance of the sea that appeared to our right at each upward turn of the road. At that moment I had the impression I was betraying you. Like a soldier 'who, on learning of imminent surrender and armistice, deserts his post without warning those who are still fighting.
This involuntary betrayal seemed to have no consequences. There continued to be cities that emptied at the sound of the first gunfire, as if at the drumming of the first spots of rain on a corrugated tin roof. (One day, as the westerners were hurrying off toward the aircraft in a rainstorm of great warm drops, their dread of the bullets beginning to reach the fringes of the airport was comically confused with their eagerness to protect themselves from the downpour.) There were ships maneuvering ponderously in bays that were too narrow and heading toward the open sea so slowly that we thought we could picture the rage of the passengers, glaring hard from the deck at the coastline already going up in flames, as if to push it away. We would stay. We knew that, after the fever of the fighting and the looting, the conquerors would be in need of diplomatic recognition, money, arms. At such times one could obtain results within a few weeks that in normal times would take years of work. The only difficulty was staying alive.
Nothing changed. Least of all the impression that dogged us in our rapid transits from Europe to Africa. Everything that in the North was words, discreet consultations, slow approaches to a key person, turned in the South into cries of pain, the whistling of bullets and bitter hand-to-hand fighting, as if a horrible, unbridled process of translation had become established between these two continents.
And yet it was in Africa that one day I again felt as if I were hiding from you what I could perceive more and more clearly: the end.
Two months after the conclusion of hostilities they arrived to take charge of the network following our departure. We were struck by their youth, like a reminder of ourselves several years previously, at the time of our first meeting in Berlin. What touched us as well was that they had cheerfully told us their actual first names, which had the comic assonance of the masculine and feminine variants: Yuri and Yulia. We were not used to confidences of this type, our own lives being confined to our borrowed identities. At the moment of going away you had a preoccupied air, like a mother anxious to forget nothing when she leaves the children on their own. They were to renew contact with us in Milan three months later. They did not come. We spent four days waiting for them. The Center spoke of a canceled mission. Shakh, whom I managed to contact in the United States, was perplexed, like a chess player robbed of a pawn and on the verge of discovering he has been cheated. He gave us the order to return to Africa. We found our old house without any trace of a forced departure or search. The tranquillity of the rooms had the sly alertness of a trap. The Center's response was as muddled as before. What this opacity signaled was no longer just a simple setback but a more wide-ranging collapse. An end. I decided to talk to you about this, then changed my mind. Out of cowardice, no doubt. Once again I felt I inhabited the skin of that soldier who, in the furthest outpost of an empire, is the first to learn the news of defeat and makes his escape without warning the last remaining fighters. Moreover, we knew what prison and torture could mean in countries like this in wartime. Especially for a woman. Yulia and Yuri…
The resumption of fighting dispelled these feelings of remorse in us. The city was bombed, we left the house and spent a long inconclusive day in one of the big hotels in the capital, abandoned by the westerners, looted, refurbished during the months of truce, and once more derelict. We were still hoping we could remain in the city. The bedroom had been made up a few days previously and it was eerie to see the bed with the sheets straightened and turned down by a professional hand, the little "do not disturb" card on the door and to know that the walls of the corridor were spattered with blood in several places and that in the foyer on the floor below prisoners had been tortured and raped. Now the hotel stood empty and through the window at the end of the corridor one could see the sea, dominated by the gray, asymmetrical shape of an American aircraft carrier. Its vast bulk-it looked as if it had been carved out of a monstrous bluish muscle-seemed to be blocking all movement of waves upon a flattened, slack sea.
One section of the troops defending the city had been driven back toward the coast, the soldiers took up a position on the first floor of the hotel, the impending victors surrounded the building, machine-gunning the windows in the expectation that the smoke would drive the besieged men out into a hail of bullets. We had time to cross the hotel garden, to skirt its little marina, and to reach the edge of the water. We knew that a boat would be evacuating the last of our military instructors. Out of breath, we stopped in the middle of the little beach where you could still see rows of white plastic beach chairs. And at that moment time was shattered, went into turmoil- a sequence of mad dashes and complete standstills. The sand ensnared our footsteps, as in a bad dream where running is impossible. The military vehicle that pulled out from beside the hotel building grew rapidly larger, bearing down on us, and already the first bullets were riddling the hulls of the dinghies upended on the sand. My shout was cut short and had no effect on you. You remained standing, your hand raised in a gesture of greeting that seemed to me absurd. The magazine slithered in my grasp like a piece of wet soap. As I fired I thought I was aiming at the vehicle's scowling face-the evil grin of the radiator grille and the dull eyes of the headlights.