In the end I dared to say it to you. I yelled it in your ear, trying to overcome the noise filling that crazy airplane and the night sky around it, in darkness torn into blinding shreds by salvos from antiaircraft batteries.
The plane was evacuating the remnants of a war that the empire had lost beneath this southern sky The bowels of the machine were piled high with the living, the wounded, and the dead, wrapped in long sheaths of black plastic. The mound of these cocoons stirred in the shadows, alongside the cases of ammunition and the tangle of weapons that looked like a huge metallic spider. The living, slumped down in the midst of this chaos, each resorted to their own stratagems for dealing with fear. Some tried to talk at the tops of their voices, drawing their neighbors' heads toward their mouths, others stopped their ears and, with their faces twisted into a grimace, huddled in upon themselves. Some slept and were confused with the dead. And when the plane began tipping over sharply on one wing and the wounds came back to life in this new position, the cries of the wounded redoubled and beyond the cocoons the grating of the metallic spider could be heard. I held you by your shoulders and my lips, enmeshed in your hair, burned your cheek and ear with these truths, carved into the stifling blackness of that flying cemetery. I was proclaiming the end, defeat, the pointlessness of the lives we had used up, the stupid blindness of Shakh, the misery of the peoples we had dragged into a suicidal enterprise. You seemed to be listening to me, then, when suddenly the aircraft went into a tight spiral and the howling of the wounded drowned out all other sounds, you broke away from me and, taking a flask from your knapsack, slipped in among bodies seated and lying there toward the front, where the flashlights of the nurses could be made out.
We arrived in Moscow after an absence of two and a half years and, as ever, spent little time there. Those years had coincided with the start of the great upheavals of '89 to '91. There was still a touch of grotesque comedy about recently acquired wealth, the new roles were not yet learned by heart, the new language remained hesitant. The actors made faux pas. Like the beggar trying to catch the warm gusts of air emanating from the door of a big store-a genuine war veteran, no doubt, but one who had attached all kinds of cheap insignia to his jacket to swell the numbers. These gilded disks eclipsed the tarnished silver of the medal "For Gallantry" that was hard won in the war. Or those two women waiting for clients outside a hotel for foreigners. Monumental in their fur coats, they seemed as immovable and unapproachable as statues of empresses. Their scenario consisted of pretending they had just emerged from the hotel, but the snow where they maintained their vigil had long since become pitted with little holes from their stiletto heels. "One day," I thought, "they, too, will have the right to a place in a heated window and even a little Christmas tree with a string of flashing lights."
It was a few blocks away from that hotel, beside the entrance to a restaurant, that we were caught up in the bibulous surge of a banquet that came streaming out onto the sidewalk. A score of men and women were roaring with laughter and congratulating one another on their great idea: to go and get themselves photographed between courses in front of the nearby Kremlin towers. "Get going, you guys!" yelled the ringleader. "Maybe they'll be putting up eagles instead of red stars tomorrow. This'll be a historic picture!" We stepped back to the edge of the sidewalk to let them pass. It was comic to see the clothes from fashion magazines on bodies that were too hefty or too square, all this stylish luxury combined with their broad, red, laughing faces. The women were rubbing their shoulders, shivering exaggeratedly with the cold, the men grabbed them by the waist, squeezed them, pawed them. One of them lifted his partner in the air and her dress rode up to reveal massive thighs, robustly and aggressively immodest. The ringleader banged with his fist on the door of a huge Mercedes and out jumped a sleepy man, his driver or his bodyguard, who handed him a camera. There was something undoubtedly legitimate and at the same time obscene about their merriment. I could not find a way to disentangle the two. I was waiting for your reaction but you walked along, saying nothing, occasionally raising your face toward the swirling of the snow.
"Behold, the new masters of the country!" I ventured at last, looking back toward the crowd of them as they returned to the restaurant. You said nothing. We were walking along an avenue beneath the walls of the citadel, beneath the towers surmounted by their mistily crystalline red stars. Faced with your silence, I wanted to provoke you, to compel you to reply, to drag you from your calm. "The masters change but the servants remain. How many years have we spent snuffling around like dogs in all those stinking little wars? And all for the greater glory of a dozen senile idiots barricaded in behind that wall! And now you're ready to do the same job all over again for that bunch of money-grubbers and their bimbos bursting out of their designer dresses!" I stopped, turned toward you, awaiting your response. But you went on walking, your gaze somewhat lowered toward the footprints ahead of us, which the snow was patiently obliterating. Soon there were a dozen paces between us, then a score, so that you looked to me as if you were all alone amid the trees with their snow-covered branches, very remote, and quite detached from the life I had been mocking. A moment before, stung by your absent air, I was on the point of turning my back and leaving you. Now that at every step you were becoming more and more of a stranger to me, I felt you within me with a violence that made my eyes swim. You were going away and I could feel the warmth of your breath in the night air, the coolness of your fingers inside your gloves, the beating of your heart beneath your coat. You turned. You were already so far away that I could no longer make out whether you were smiling or looking at me with sadness. I went toward you with a sense of finding you again after a protracted separation, at the end of an infinitely long walk.
By an absurd coincidence the merrymakers from the Moscow banquet caught up with us again in a restaurant in Paris. They were not the same people, of course, but their wealth came from the same source, they were pulling the same faces. We were looking for a quiet corner and this half-empty dining room was it. Thirty minutes later they made their appearance and settled at a long table that had been reserved. Trapped, we stayed to listen to them. There was no longer any need for me to talk to you about the "new masters," or about the years we had used up for nothing, or about the end. You understood what my thoughts might be, watching them giving vent to coarse guffaws with their mouths full, their monolithic backs, their fingers studded with rings. I could imagine what your answers might be. Later, in a little café where we went to escape them, you spoke quite calmly about the age we had seen come into being, which was now about to end.
"Ten years ago, or maybe more, I used to think just like you: all these wars to paper over the cracks of a shattered doctrine? All these efforts to please the doddering old fools in the Kremlin? One day, unable to bear it any longer, I said this to Shakh. Like you. For the glory of what cause? Toward what sunlit chasms? He listened to me and… began speaking about Sorge. I was simply furious. I said to myself, 'That's it, he's going to give me a propaganda lesson: "Richard Sorge, the hero of our time, the superman of our intelligence system, who passed on the date of Hitler's invasion, was betrayed by the bureaucrats of Moscow…" et cetera, et cetera. Ancient history.' But Shakh simply told me about Sorge's last moments. I only knew, like everyone else, that the Japanese had executed him in forty-four after three years of imprisonment. That's all. Well, at that final moment, standing on the scaffold, Sorge called out in a strong, calm voice, 'Long live the Red Army! Long live the Communist International! Long live the Communist Party of the Soviet Union!' Old-fashioned, isn't it? Grotesque? I said as much to Shakh, in milder terms, it's true. And he surprised me yet again. 'Do you think,' he said, 'Sorge didn't know the true worth of Stalin and his clique? He certainly did, and how! But it was by dying like that that he could show what those sons of bitches were really worth!' "