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Through the breathlessness of his struggles he suddenly hears a melody. A hardly audible music. A soft, almost silent singsong that the woman murmurs in his ear. He tries to grasp the words. But the phrases have a strange beauty, devoid of meaning. A language he has never heard. Quite different from that of his parents. A language that does not require understanding, just immersion in its swaying rhythms, in the velvety suppleness of its sounds.
Mesmerized by this unknown language, the child falls asleep and hears neither the distant gunshots, multiplied by echoes, nor the long-drawn-out cry that just reaches them, laden with all the despair of love.
Had it not been for you, I would have left behind forever that infant falling asleep in the heart of the Caucasian forest, as we often abandon and forget irretrievable fragments of ourselves that we judge too remote, too painful, or simply too difficult to acknowledge. But one night you made a remark about the truth of our lives. I must have misunderstood you. I was certainly mistaken about what you meant. Yet it was this misapprehension that caused the forgotten child to be reborn in me.
Later on I attributed my confusion to the stress of all the dangers, long-term and immediate, that made up our existence at that time. To our wanderings from country to country, from language to language, to all the masks that our profession imposed on us. And, still more, to that love we superstitiously refused to name, myself knowing it to be unmerited, you believing it had already been declared in instants of silence in cities at war, where we might well have died without ever experiencing such moments at the end of the fighting that restored us to ourselves.
"One day it must be possible to tell the truth…" These were the words, uttered with a mixture of insistence and resigned bitterness, that misled me. I pictured a witness-myself! Confused, lost for words, stu
"To tell the truth one day." You were silent, half lying beside me, your face turned toward the rapidly maturing night outside the window. The netting of the mosquito screen could clearly be seen against the hot, dark background. And in the middle of this dusty rectangle a zigzag tear was becoming more and more visible: the blast from one of the last shells had cut into this fabric that separated us from the city and its death throes.
"To tell the truth…" I did not dare object. Uneasy at the role of witness or judge you were assigning to me, I mentally ran through all the reasons that made me incapable or even unworthy of such a mission. Our age, I told myself, was already receding and leaving us on the shore of time, like fish trapped by the ebbing of the sea. Bearing witness to what we had lived through would have meant speaking of a vanished ocean, evoking its ground swells and the victims of its storms, while faced with impassive undulations of sand. Yes, preaching in the desert. And our native land, that crushing empire, that Tower of Babel cemented together by dreams and blood, was it not disintegrating, story by story, vault by vault, its glass-lined halls turning into batteries of funhouse mirrors, its vistas into dead ends?
The weariness of sleepless nights gave substance to these words. I saw the desert and the tiny puddles of water sucked in by the sand, the colossal ruined tower, drowning in long red ba
You slipped off the bed. I woke up, ready, when suddenly awakened, as for many years now, to abandon our current dwelling, to reach for a gun, to reply calmly to anyone who might be hammering at the door. This time the reflex was u
You went over to the table. In the darkness I saw the pale touch of your body, colored by reflected light from a fire at the other end of the street. "To tell the truth…" All my waking energy became focused on this impracticable notion. As I watched you moving through the dark room I resumed my silent refusal.
You speak of truth. But all my own memories have been falsified. Ever since my birth. And I could never bear witness for other people. I don't know their lives and I don't understand them. As a child I never knew how they lived, all these normal people. Their world stopped at the door of our orphanage. When one day I was invited to a birthday party in a normal family-two little girls with long braids, parents brimming with goodwill, all as it should be, jam in little silver-plate dishes, table napkins I didn't dare touch-I thought they were making fun of me and at any minute they were going to admit it and kick me out. I still remember it with morbid gratitude, you see, as if by not dismissing me they had performed an act of superhuman generosity. Just think of it, tolerating this young barbarian with a shaven head and hands nearly blue with cold, sticking out of sleeves that were too short. And to top it all, the son of a disgraced father. So how can you expect me to be an impartial witness?
You switched on a flashlight, I saw your fingers in the narrow beam, the glint of a needle. "To tell the truth about what we have lived through." I raised myself on one elbow, wanting to explain to you that I understood nothing about the age that was already slipping away beneath our feet. And that the whole shambles of it made me think of the i