Requiem for a Lost Empire by Andreï Makine Page B

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