Requiem for a Lost Empire by Andreï Makine Page A

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!' "
       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