He felt profound pity for this child, now grown into an adult. Instead of the scraps of dreams he could offer her, she ought to do everything possible to succeed in Moscow, far from those endless winters, from those phantom camps. She ought to marry this Vadim, this nice, gentle Daddy’s boy. If only that could make her happy…
Had he said all that in a moment of delirium? Had she replied? At all events it was during the flight that she told him her secret: to be admitted to the university she had lied and told them her father had been killed in the war. She lived in fear of being unmasked, sent back, ending up in Sarma…
Toward evening, during a few minutes of calm, he looked out of the window. Barely tinged with pink by a dull sun, a uniform white expanse lay there, the same ever since their departure. The freedom of these spaces was intoxicating, gave one the desire to travel through them in every direction, to land anywhere, to take off again. And yet amid this immensity Anna’s life traced a fragile line, suspended from a lie, stretched between this dreamed-of Moscow and the ice hell of her native village. A little like the glimpses of a road down below, amid fields under snow.
She came to see him every day while he was convalescing. They spoke little, disconcerted by the doomed nature of the choice that their trip had just laid bare: Moscow, Sarma, a calculated happiness here, at the cost of renouncing an improbable happiness back there. Destiny, a precise line that must be followed without deviation. The magnanimity of fantasies, the wretchedness of common sense. And the scent of the forest in winter clinging to a woman’s clothes as she climbs back on board a train…
One day with the vigor of restored health, he talked about the struggle that could change the face of the world, about playing a part in history… Anna listened to him, made a little uneasy by his enthusiasm. Then he realized that she had been born and lived in a country that had turned history into a divinity and sacrificed millions of lives to create a new humanity. He was disconcerted to realize that what he liked the most in this new world was the very debris of those old lives that had been sacrificed, the “human detritus,” the people of Sarma. It was among these outcasts that he had found true fraternity…
He tried to explain this to Anna and received a reply that was very just in its cruel candor: “You see, the people who live at Sarma don’t expect anything more from life. Perhaps that’s what makes them fraternal. They’re not… how can I put it… They’re not hungry. But I expect a great deal more from my life. Yes, I’m hungry. Later on, perhaps…”
For a long time Elias would retain in his memory the paradox of this hunger, which obliges us day after day to fritter away an existence we know to be false and empty, while the radiance of quite a different life is already known to us.
When the training sessions resumed again, he would reflect during the assault on the “presidential palace” that this scenario of revolution offered a perfect summation of human history: fine words, the thrill of battles and enmities, victories greedy for corpses, and, when its all over, far away from the victors, this calm, gray winters day, the scent of a wood fire, the intense sensation of being at one with oneself.
During his absence, the celluloid doll that marked the children’s room in the “palace” had lost its frilly dress and looked more than ever like a dead baby.
4
JUST AS HE WAS PREPARING TO LEAVE the “presidential palace,” the chief instructor told Elias to follow him. “There are people in Moscow who want to talk to you,” he informed him somberly Pointless to ask for more details; this secretive mentality was well known to him.
After an hour in a car they found themselves in an office containing monolithic wooden furniture and an abundance of telephones, as if to emphasize that serious matters were afoot. As two individuals greeted Elias without the faintest hint of a smile, the instructor melted into the background. From the first few moments he sensed that this conversation would be more a game of symbols than a genuine exchange. He, the simple young African, was going to have the privilege of glimpsing the machinery of Soviet power. They were going to dub him, to invest him with a mission… The two men, one tall and massive, who looked like a grizzled mastiff, the other dry and athletic, were not very forthcoming. “The interventionist aims of the USA,” “our military assistance to the forces of liberation,” “the Portuguese colonialists,” “probing the secrets of the enemy”: a few such set phrases merely formed the spoken framework for the scene. What was important was focused on the silence of the chief instructor, who had suddenly become a subordinate, the ringing of a telephone, and the grave reply of the gray-haired man: “Yes. Well be drafting a special report for the Politburo.” But above all, on the almost rocklike rigidity of these bodies, the calm ponderousness of gestures and looks designed to embody the unshakable strength of the regime. And it was only at the end, when everyone stood up, that the man-mastiff allowed himself a more informal tone of voice: “Things will be heating up soon in your Angolan homeland. We must be prepared. Well need you, young man… The commander” – he nodded toward the instructor – “will give you all the details…”
Elias was about to discover that these “details” encompassed the training he would receive as a future intelligence agent, his involvement in subversive operations undertaken in Africa, and, quite simply, his whole life, which from now on belonged to the Cause. The arrogant solemnity of the two individuals who had informed him of this, without even consulting him, infuriated him. But at once he recalled that these orders emanated from a power capable of flattening the world a thousand times over with nuclear thunderbolts. And that it confronted another, American, power, equally capable of incinerating the planet. And that in this struggle, in which man had long since been left behind, it might be possible to become a tiny cog, turning in the direction of good. And that for him this good would be for his homeland to become one where there were no longer cities out of bounds to black people.
The months that followed made of him what, as an adolescent, he used to dream of being: a professional revolutionary. What he would be until his death, in fact. Yet when talking to me about that training period, he would tell me: “You know, I became the kind of black man who runs the risk of bursting with the sense of his own importance. One of those Africans who wrinkles his nose up as if the whole world smelt bad. Fortunately some of the comrades with whom I was due to land in Angola were even more puffed up than me. It was really ridiculous. It sobered me up…”
What brought him down to earth in particular was the serene and pitiless fatefulness of his love for Anna. He was unable to tell her about the direction his life was now taking, but, not without a certain exultation, he gave her to understand that future horizons of dangers and battles in unknown lands were opening up before him. She listened to him in silence, attempting an uneasy smile. Very briefly he experienced a mixture of pity and triumphalism, that infamous combination that is present to a varying degree in all love. He at once felt ashamed, embraced Anna, and swore to return to her, despite the continents separating them. He truly believed in this promise!
Years later he would recall that brief moment of boast-fulness and his hasty repentance. He had never been superstitious, but that was the day, he would later tell himself, when his love for Anna, if it were to be preserved, should not have been tarnished by even that tiny degree of infamy. And she herself would much later confess to him that when she heard him talking about his likely departure for foreign lands, she had resolved to die rather than return to Sarma…