I sensed that this man on the scaffold was your final argument. I did not attempt to put in context his words as a condemned man. A minute before death they had a right to stand unqualified. I was watching you as you talked and sadly noticing all the signs that your smile could no longer cover up: the strands of silver spreading through your hair, the fine blue line of a vein imprinted on your temple. You interrupted my look, which was no doubt too searching, by taking a newspaper out of your bag. "Read that," you said.
It was a short column reporting the death of a certain Grinberg, a critic of the Soviet government who had spent several years in the camps, had been expelled to the West, and had run a dissident radio station. The reporter noted that Grinberg had died in Munich in a tiny flat, forgotten by everybody, with a jumble of papers on his bedside table: his writings that no longer interested anyone, bills that he was unable to pay, letters.
"Can you guess who they're talking about?"
For a few seconds I delved into my memories both in Russia and the West. Grinberg… No, the name meant nothing to me.
"The man who spun that top in the art gallery in Berlin, do you remember? Almost… ten years ago. You see, he's lost his battle as well."
We sat for a moment without speaking. Then you got up, leaving the newspaper on the next table, and murmured, "I'm not going to play the gypsy and tell your fortune, but if you don t want to serve 'the new masters' it's time for you to go. Yes, go, withdraw from the game, get yourself forgotten, disappear. After all, it'll only be one more change of identity."
That night you tried to hold back your tears, so as not to wake me. I was not asleep but remained still, knowing that in your thoughts, and in these tears, I was already living under that new identity, in that distant life without you.
I had used up too many lives to consider the one I was embarking on without you in the West as a real wrench from the past. The Western World was, in truth, too familiar to us to deserve the harsh and weighty name of exile. You were right; to begin with, at least, it was no more than another identity. And I already knew that the best way to adopt a country, to adapt to it as quickly as possible, was to imitate. Basically, integration means no more than imitation. Some people are so successful at this that they end up expressing the character of a country better than its natives, very much in the manner of those professional impersonators who can take such and such a well-known personality and set alongside him a copy that is more authentic than the original, a distillation of all his physical mannerisms, a digest of all his tricks of speech. And yet it is at the moment when he has succeeded that a foreigner discovers the unspoken goal of this game of imitation: to make oneself similar in order to stay different. To live as they live here as a way of protecting your remote and distant self. To imitate to the point of splitting yourself in two and, by letting your double speak, gesticulate, and laugh for you, to escape back in your thoughts to those whom you should never have abandoned.
At first my conviction that I should see you again within a short space of time was only natural. By imitating daily life and material survival I was earning the right to this expectation, to journeys to European cities where meeting you seemed likely. I told myself it would not even be a case of rediscovering one another but quite simply of your quiet voice one evening on the telephone, or your figure emerging from the flood of faces and coats on a railroad platform. I cannot recall how many months it was before this confidence began to fade. At the same moment, perhaps, when I realized I had never stopped talking to you, rehearsing with you over and over, the years I had spent with you, justifying myself, in fact, in a desperate attempt at truth.
The idea then came to me of making a precise note of dates, places, recollecting names, signposting our shared past. It felt like finding oneself in the kingdom of the dead. Several countries, including our own, had meanwhile disappeared, their names and frontiers had changed. Among the people you and I had mixed with, fought against, or assisted, some were living under other identities, others were dead, still others had settled down into this modern era, in which I often felt like a phantom, a ghost from an increasingly archaic age. But, overwhelmingly, my striving after precise details was taking me away from what we had truly experienced. I tried to make a list of the political forces at work, the causes of conflicts, the notable heads of state. My notes resembled a strange reportage emanating from a nonexistent world, a void. I realized that in place of this inventory of facts, with its pretensions to historical objectivity, I should be describing the quite simple, often invisible, subterranean fabric of life. I recalled you sitting on the threshold of a house, your eyes lost in the light of the sunset. I again saw that young soldier's arm, that wrist with a leather bracelet, in the shell of a gutted armored car. The beauty of a child who, a few yards away from the fighting but a thousand leagues removed from all its madness, was building a little pyramid from still-warm cartridge cases. With tightly shut eyes, I traveled back to that house on the shores of a frozen lake, the drowsiness of that house you had sometimes told me about. More and more often I found myself admitting that what was essential was condensed into these glimpses of the past.
One day, answering the telephone, I thought I could hear your voice, almost inaudible in the susurration of a call that seemed to be coming from the other end of the world. I called out your name several times, mine too, the last ones we had been known by. After a dull crackling, a faultless connection was made, and I heard, too close to my ear now, a swift singsong delivery in an Asiatic language (Vietnamese or Chinese, perhaps), a very shrill and insistent woman's voice, giving continuous little giggles or sobs, it was impossible to tell which. For several days the sound of that brief, infinitely remote whispering stayed in my mind, that impossible double of your voice, swiftly obliterated by the screeching of the Asian woman.
The whispering, which I had thought I could recognize as your voice, reminded me of an evening in days gone by, in that city on fire outside our window with its torn mosquito netting. I remembered how the proximity of death and our complicity in the face of this death had given me the courage that night to tell you something I had never previously admitted to anyone: the story of the child and the woman hiding deep in the mountains, the words crooned in an unknown language.
I knew now that I was incapable of telling the truth of our age. I was neither an objective witness, nor a historian, and certainly not a wise moralist. All I could do was to continue that story, interrupted then by the coming of night, by the journeys that awaited us, by fresh wars.
I began to talk, seeking simply to preserve the tone of our conversation in the dark long ago, the bitter serenity of words spoken with death close at hand.
The words I silently addressed to you conjured up the white-haired woman and the child once more-but ten years after the night of their escape. A December evening, a little town lost in snow close to a switching yard, a few miles away the shadow of a big city, the city which its inhabitants, in their confusion, still call by the name that has been taken away from it, Stalin's. The woman and the child are sitting in a room that is low and meagerly furnished but clean and well-heated, on the top floor of a massive wooden house. The woman has changed little in ten years, the child has turned into an adolescent of twelve with a thin face, a shaven head, his hands and wrists red with cold.