Requiem for a Lost Empire Read Free Page B

dealer treated himself to, in exchange for his rocket launchers. And this trade, the tragicomic outcome of global maneuvers, had ordained that today, in that precise spot, a soldier, wearing a leather band on his wrist, should be blown to pieces by an explosion. The truth was absolutely logical and absolutely arbitrary.
       Just as I was about to say this to you, I noticed what you were doing. Hands raised halfway up the window, you were darning the torn mosquito screen. Long stitches of pale thread, movements very slow, guided by the needle as it felt its way in the darkness, but there was also another slowness, that of a deep reverie, of a lassitude so great that it no longer even sought rest. It seemed to me that never before had I happened on you in such a relaxed state, at a moment in your life of such perfect harmony with yourself, with what you were to me. You were the woman whose shoulders my hand caressed lightly when they seemed cold in the sweltering heat of the night. A woman whose infinite singularity and troubling uniqueness, as the being I loved, I was aware of as never before and who, that night in this ravaged city, inexplicably found herself living so close to death, whether accidental or intended. A woman who was drawing two edges of fabric together on a night when the fighting had stopped. And who, noticing my hand at last, inclined her head, letting my fingers rest beneath her cheek and was already becoming utterly still, in a half sleep.
       Your presence was one of total strangeness. And at the same time of completely natural necessity. You were there and the murderous complexity of this world, this tangle of wars, greed, vengeance, and lies found itself face to face with a truth beyond dispute. This truth was poised in your gesture: a hand closing up two pieces of fabric against a night glutted with death. I sensed that all the testimonies I could have offered were overtaken by the truth of that moment, snatched from the madness of men.
       I did not dare, and in any case I would not have known how, to question you about the meaning of your words. I kissed the back of your head, your neck, the start of the fragile rosary of your vertebrae, transfixed by the tenderness a woman's body inspires when she is totally absorbed in a task she cannot interrupt. And so it was as a simple response to your desire for truth that I began telling you about the birth of the world in the eyes of that infant lost among the mountains. His fear of understanding, his refusal to name things, his life being saved by the music of an unknown language. He hesitated for a moment on the brink of our games of pleasure and death, then let himself sink back once more into the fraternal intimacy of the universe. The woman who held him in her arms went on softly singing her lullaby, even as the sound of gunshots reached them from the other bank of the stream. The unknown language was her mother tongue.
       I embarked on this story beside the window, beside the rectangle of netting you were darning, I finished it in a whisper, leaning toward your face relaxed in sleep. I thought you had dozed off and missed the ending. But after my last words, without saying anything, you gave my hand a gentle squeeze.
       There were times, long before I knew you, when I did go back to that night in the Caucasus and the sleeping child. These returns to the past allowed me to take refuge from sudden excesses of grief, horrors that were too overwhelming. They marked a dotted line of brief resurrections along the course of my life, following each of the temporary deaths that punctuate our lives. One such death had assailed me on the day when a fellow pupil, the leader of one of the little gangs that were rife at our orphanage, spat some crumbs of tobacco from his cigarette stub in my direction and hissed with explosive scorn, "Look, everyone knows about your father. The firing squad shot him like a dog!" Or another time when, out for a