The old couple walk back close to the restaurant where we sit at the table. Relieved of their burden, the man and woman nevertheless walk as before, one behind the other, with the same heavy tread. Elias watches them walking away, then, without changing his tone, continues: “And with death it’s the same. When I was young I lacked all modesty, I dreamed of it being heroic, flamboyant. On the barricades, in some way or other… One day I learned how Antonio Carvalho died, my first master in Marxism. They tortured him appallingly to make him denounce me. Mine was the eye that got in their way, the ‘man from Moscow’ to be got rid of. Carvalho defeated them all because he smiled! Yes. He said nothing, just smiled. Right to the end…”
We fell silent, our eyes directed toward the ocean, toward the darkness pockmarked with flares from the oil rigs. By day and night, deep in the dense waters, steel tubes suck in the earth’s black blood. This oil is transformed into arms, then into the red blood of human beings.
Elias gives a slight shake of his head: “You say: two scraps of film with that fat pig fucking her… It’s not as simple as that. Under pressure from the Americans, that fellow had big plans. To create a real Zairean army equipped by the United States. An army of professionals, no longer those gangs of pillagers and drunkards Mobutu has at his disposal. If it had worked, we’d have had another war. And we’d have lost it. We managed to sideline that young man with his weakness for beautiful blond women… Another war. Yes. We’ve already reached seven hundred thousand dead since we started building the radiant future. And those seven hundred thousand include Carvalho. And that child buried with his gas mask on his head…”
He is aware of a note of justification in his words, the eternal reasoning of spies: devious maneuvers, this necessary evil in order to prevent a much greater evil. Yes. the ousting of one crook to save thousands of innocents… the old argument revolutionaries and other benefactors of humanity generally put forward. We exchange glances, aware of what can lie hidden behind this “necessary evil.”
Ellas begins to talk with a more relaxed, almost amused, air: “Its true that Zairean looked very like the sergeant who interrogated us at Lunda Norte. That scar from a bullet in the shape of an asterisk. But it wasn’t him. Just a man of the same type. An ambitious career soldier thrust toward the top either by ourselves or by the Westerners. One of those pawns they try to turn into a leader. Sometimes they crack. Sometimes they succeed, and you get Bokassa, Idi Amin, Mengistu, and the rest. If you can call that success. Yes, the same mold. The ingredients are always similar: money, an almost sensual desire for power, the flesh of women. I’ve met humans in this mold in Guinea-Bissau, in Brazzaville… To begin with you actually think you’re meeting the same person. And it’s not so much their physique that’s deceptive. There are big ones and little ones. No, it’s… their eyes, which seem to be saying: I’m ready for anything. Like that Zairean you saw. To ride in the limousine with that fat blond, he was ready to cover a whole country in graves.”
We walk to the end of a jetty where we can feel the keen nocturnal force of the wind off the open sea. Elias s shirt flaps around his body making him look thinner, more fragile. In my mind’s eye I have a sudden vision of him, alone, assailed by a crowd of men whose faces are impossible to make out, they look so alike. Men cast in that mold, I tell myself, against whom he strives to fight… It is a losing battle, and he knows it. History, whose course he dreamed of changing, is in fact nothing more than an elegant metaphor, and a man staring at a woman’s broad thighs as she sits on a car seat, yes, often the hungriness of such a stare counts for more in this metaphor than the noblest of ideals and the commitments to causes made by heroes.
Beneath our feet, in the marine depths, the steel tubes continue to pump the black blood that will turn into money, arms, the red blood of the dead, bought female flesh. I want to say this to Elias, to shake his faith, to mock his obstinacy. Two months previously I had seen Anna at a reception at the Soviet embassy in Maputo, where her husband had been posted. She reminded me of a big smiling doll, uttering bland inanities, batting her eyelashes with the regularity of an automaton. I was positioned somewhat to one side, and I could see that the fingers of her left hand were kneading the handle of her handbag, her thumbnail was tearing the leather, and this tensed hand was the only true and living part of this clockwork doll.
“Two months ago, at Maputo,” I say, “I ran into… Anna.”
Maputo. Beyond words.
I take a breath before deciding to tell him what I think of this woman, what a Russian can think of this Russian woman, and what might perhaps be missed by an African or, quite simply, the man who loved her and still loves her. I don’t have time to go on. Elias starts to talk very softly, his gaze lost in the supple motion of the waves slipping along the jetty. An evening, the same gathering of guests in an embassy garden, the same expressions, either rigid or, on the contrary, animated by the grimaces of social chitchat, the same routine conversations where no one listens to anyone. He is separated from Anna by a few feet of this air laden with hypocrisy. They cannot speak to one another; they must not betray their past in any way, not a gesture, not a smile. For them to stand so close to one another without recognizing one another is the best way of pretending to be strangers. She looks like a big, beautiful doll, he thinks, and doubtless everyone else thinks the same. He has aged, she must be telling herself; his hair is turning gray, there’s that scar on his temple, and his wrist in the plaster cast concealed by the sleeve of his shirt. She lets this doll do the talking for her, he thinks, and is becoming just as I knew her in Moscow, that quivering of the eyelashes is exactly as it used to be… For several minutes, as the guests come and go across the garden, they are left alone. Without turning his head toward Anna, Elias recites the names of streets in Moscow at random. She repeats them, in a hesitant echo, then grows bolder and murmurs: “So you haven’t forgotten them…” Other names, precious passwords, are whispered: those of little stations far away in the middle of the taiga. The beautiful doll smiles at a couple who greet her in passing. Anna whispers again, her lips hardly open: “I’ve had a letter from Sarma. They’re asking when you’ll come back… So glad to meet you… Oh, very lovely! Especially the Maputo game reserve and Inhaca Island…” The doll speaks to a couple, an extremely suntanned man, a pale, sickly looking woman. Elias moves away, carrying with him just the melody of that “when you’ll come back…”
That night in Cabinda I believe I have understood what he truly experienced at Sarma: a life that comes into being when history, having exhausted its atrocities and promises, leaves us naked beneath the sky, confronting only the gaze of the one we love.
Some weeks after that encounter with Anna at the reception he almost died in an ambush to the north of Mox-ico. He hardly mentioned it to me, not wanting to strike a warrior’s pose. All I remember is the comment he made softly, as if to himself: “When death stares us coolly in the eye we perceive that in our lives there have been a few hours of sunlight or of darkness, a few faces to which we return continually and that what has kept us alive, in fact, is the simple hope of finding them again…”
Moxico. Games for grown-ups.
For us, the years that will follow are to be a time of defeat, flight, scattering. Elias will live through them without any change of attitude, as if the goal he has always pursued had not lost all meaning. One day I will learn that he has conducted negotiations single-handedly with the men of UNITA in southern Moxico and succeeded in avoiding the resumption of fighting. Just on that occasion, just in that area, saving the lives of the inhabitants of just one village. I will remember what he said about the modesty of the tasks he henceforth set himself. In the conflagration Africa was entering into at that time, this modest success will seem to me more important than all the planning for the planet. Throughout the discussions in a hut in the village a child was playing at the other end of the room; sitting on the ground, she was building a pyramid of empty cartridge cases from a machine gun, on top of a wobbly table. When the argument was at its height, and Elias no longer had any hope of reaching agreement, and therefore of remaining alive once the bargaining broke down, the whole edifice of cartridge cases collapsed with a metallic clatter. The grownups looked round. The child froze, contrite. Elias remembered that village in Kivu half burned in the war and a little girl curled up between the legs of a low table, the child trembling so much that the piece of furniture seemed alive… He began talking again with the arrogant strength of one no longer concerned about his own survival. This indifference in the face of death, as he already knew, gives one a great advantage over those who have yet to come to terms with their fear of dying.