Free Requiem for a Lost Empire by Andreï Makine Page B

and the ghosts of those nine characters who had invaded your life.
       My angry words remained unspoken. In our fragmented lives where the unforeseen was becoming the only logic, this table, wiped clean, that you were about to set, the way you did before the fighting began, this simple action made perfect sense. "I'll soon be finished," you said, standing up, and talked about the couple who were due to replace us. That, among other things, was our task: to prepare the ground for the colleagues who would take over the network after the end of the war. I noticed a slight cut on your left hand marked with blood. The sharp edge of a splinter, no doubt. Absurdly, amid all these deaths, this tiny wound pained me greatly.
       That night I told you about the child who learned to walk around a block of granite stuck in the middle of the house built by his father.
       The words I had held back when I saw you on the terrace welled up a year later. We were in the house belonging to a couple of doctors sent by a humanitarian organization, this being our identity at that rime. The villa next door was empty. Its owners had left as soon as the first skirmishes in the streets had begun. And now from their garden came the piercing cries of peacocks which the soldiers were amusing themselves by torturing. One of the birds, its neck broken, was writhing on the ground, the other lay there, spitted by an iron bar. Glancing occasionally at this massacre, I was stirring papers and photographs in a bucket, where they were slowly being consumed by smoky little flames. There was nothing left to steal in our house, it had already been ransacked. But after a week of looting such activities were becoming more and more unmotivated, almost an art form, like the torture inflicted on the peacocks. And I knew from experience that it was an unmotivated search that was often the most dangerous. The soldiers shot down the last of the birds, the most agile, spraying it with bullets-a maelstrom of feathers and blood-then made off toward the center of the city, guided by the bursts of gunfire. I crushed the ashes, mixed them up and threw them into the middle of a parched flower bed. And set about waiting for you, that is to say, rushing out regularly into the chaos of streets invaded by yelling surges of people, who seemed to be simultaneously pursuing one another and running away from those they were pursuing. I encountered a road block, allowed myself to be searched, tried to argue. And reflected that if they refrained from killing me it was because the infernal din prevailing in the city was such that the soldiers could not hear me, otherwise my very first word would have unleashed their fury. I returned home. I saw the empty house, with its window overlooking the garden next door, in the middle of which a peacock was pinned to the ground by a stake. You were somewhere in this city. In distress, I guessed at your presence, perhaps in the wealthy quarter, with its cluster of glass towers, two of which were currently surmounted by smoke, or else in the poor quarter, in the alleys near the canal encrusted with filth. I went out again, hurried toward each crowd gathering around a person who could be heard giving orders or whose execution was being prepared. In one courtyard, as if this square had been cut off from all the madness of the city, I came upon a seated woman leaning against a wall, who seemed far away, her eyes open wide, her cheek distorted by a ball of khat, which her tongue was slackly moving around. And in the street men were dragging a half-naked body along the ground, which passersby tried to trample on with roars of delight.
       When you came home there was still enough daylight to see the fine tracery of cuts on your face. "The windshield…" you murmured, and you stood facing me for a few seconds, staring at me in silence. On your forehead the scratches you had wiped clean when you came in were once more filling with blood. I was