Free Requiem for a Lost Empire by Andreï Makine

three years. Tucked away in a dusty corner on a shelf, this album, with its cheerful aura of routine married life, was more convincing than the most carefully fabricated life story. Now it lay beside the soldier's body in this half-burned city, and what was strangest of all was to picture one of the townspeople leafing through it one day, believing it was a real family history, endearing at every stage, with all those sentiments that constantly recur, and the children growing up from one photo to the next.
       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