Elias will retain from all this the piano stool he had seen the previous day when he brought a dispatch to the presidents secretary. A quite ordinary black stool, like the ones the Central African tyrant’s “pianists” had spun round on. Details, yes, but it was perhaps the first time that he perceived with such intensity the supreme absurdity that ruled the lives and deaths of human beings. Before they left, the Soviets showed the members of the Angolan delegation a short documentary film. It was an account of the conflict between perfidious Somalia and faithful Ethiopia. Panoramic shots displayed the titanic disembarking of hundreds of armored vehicles, entire squadrons, countless artillery pieces. A complete prepackaged war, handed on a plate by the empire to its Ethiopian protégé. And then the results: arid stretches of the Ogaden in Ethiopia, covered in Somalian corpses and the debris of their weapons. At its close, the camera, no doubt mounted on a helicopter, swooped down over endless columns of distraught prisoners. The film had no sound track, and this silence gave the images an even more crushing force, a bleak and categorical argument. It was a lesson, yes. The Angolan leaders were supposed to appreciate the weight of the vengeance that fell upon the enemies of the empire.
Moscow. An hour with Anna.
Elias had an extremely brief meeting with Anna, on the very last evening of that visit to Moscow. Agostinho Neto s body, the entrails cleaned of all trace of poison, had already been prepared to be sent back to Luanda. In subdued tones the members of the delegation, some devastated, some relieved, were discussing the film they had just seen. Elias managed to escape, rang up from a public phone box, learned that Anna was celebrating her husband Vadims birthday with friends. She went down into the park where Elias was waiting for her, and they began walking under the mild September rain by a light reminiscent of the soft blue haze of a spring they had never lived through together. At first sight Annas face seemed to him coarsened by a fixed smile intended for her guests, by smooth, impersonal makeup. Little by little the showers banished this fixity from her features, and he saw, perhaps only with the vision that lay hidden in his heart, the young woman who once used to lead him through the snow-covered streets of Moscow. The one who believed in a knight brave enough to go down into the arena and bring back a glove for his fair lady. The one who boarded the train with the scent of a forest In winter clinging to the gray wool of her dress… They hardly spoke, and before parting (she had to hurry back to rejoin the guests, doubtless already uneasy about her absence), they embraced with such violence that he slightly grazed his lip in this clumsy and feverish kiss.
The logic of history.
I know they saw one another again in Africa on several occasions, even during the years when the USSR’s Imperial adventure on the black continent was drawing to a close. Lucapa, Kinshasa, Maputo, Mogadishu… Elias spoke little of them to me, and it was especially those few days spent in Moscow at the time of Neto’s death that he sought to describe to me, as if they offered a digest of all the contradictions of his life as a fighter. He told me things he did not have time to recount to Anna, and in any case would never have told her. Details that suddenly offered proof of the madness of history Yes, piano stools and a dozen whores trained to spin round on them at a hand clap. And that stool where a young woman sits before supervising a man s death agony with professional calm. And beyond the farcical insanity of these coincidences, millions of men pitched against one another in the name of a hatred that will appear stupid the next day, after these men have been bled to death. So then another hatred will have to be invented and dressed up in humanistic or messianic rags, placated with the sound of tank tracks on the tarmac of ruined cities, with the roar of big guns firing on unarmed men. And all of this so that in a great hall where the walls are hung with pelts, a man, weary of massacres, wealth, and female flesh, should rest his heavy and nauseated gaze on the backsides of women as they spin round on their piano stools. And so that another man, an occasional poet, should suddenly let his glass of brandy slip onto the carpet and tumble out of his armchair, his eyes rolling upward, at the feet of a woman whose breasts he has just been fondling. The circle is complete. History has done its work.
There are a few loose ends, of no use to the specialists who will be writing it: that diamond merchant, his face crushed into a glittering mound of gemstones, and in a documentary film about the war between Ethiopia and Somalia, a sequence that probably passed unnoticed by the makers, a goat wounded by shrapnel thrashing about around its stake as the columns of victorious armored vehicles surge past.
All he had to counter to the insanity of this farce, in truth, was his love.
London. Postscript to history.
I saw him again in London, scarcely two years before the disappearance of the USSR, before the “end of history,” as proclaimed by a Japanese visionary, whom everyone took seriously at the time. It was the honeymoon between Russia and the West, a great “phew!” of relief at the grinning softness of the empire that, with Gorbachev, was learning to smile and calling this “democracy” For the first time, perhaps, I perceived in Elias’s words the sarcasm of a man betrayed. “You 11 see,” he had said. “You’re going to become best friends with the USA, ultra-obedient students of capitalism. When the USSR no longer exists…”
Such remarks seemed preposterous at the time. The empire had lost none of its power and was capable, as some years previously, of waging several wars at once, in Afghanistan, in Ethiopia, in Angola… Unwilling to contradict him for fear of upsetting the one within him whose life had been lived in the name of a dream, I adopted the somewhat condescending tone (I now realize) authorized by the crushing weight of our country when addressing our allies, the “auxiliaries” of the USSR’s messianic project. Half seriously and half in jest, I remarked that you can’t make a revolution “in kid gloves” and that history, as Lenin said, “is not the sidewalk on the Nevsky Prospekt.” I had heard these maxims tossed out like epigrams, from Elias’s own lips.
He seemed not to have heard me, his gaze suddenly fixed on what no one apart from himself could see. His voice became very calm, detached. “For such a dream of fraternity to succeed there would have to be people like Kar-bychev. Yes, there would have to be a faith that drives out the little buzzing insect within us, that little fly, the fear of dying. But, above all, we should have to know how to love. Just simply to love. Then it would be unthinkable for a woman thrown to the ground to have her collarbone smashed with the kick of a boot…”
I now remember clearly how on that night in London he told me about General Karbychev, the prisoner transformed by the Nazis into an ice statue. And I sensed then, as never before, the extent to which Elias was alone, as alone as a man upright beneath lashing cascades of water as they turn him into a block of ice.
What I had taken for a fanciful prophecy came to pass soon afterward: the empire closed down the war in Afghanistan, was beaten hollow at Mavinga in southern Angola, prepared pathetically to abandon Ethiopia… I ran into Elias in Luanda just after the defeat at Mavinga, where the Soviet instructors turned out to be such hopeless strategists. He was emerging from a hospital where he had been treated for a number of wounds on the arms and face. I was expecting some reference to his disagreement with the battle plan, the tactical intelligence the commanders had ignored… I imagined a bitter but also grievously triumphant tone, the attitude of one who had got it right and had not been listened to. None of that. He tightened the strip of bandages around his head, smiled at me: “I have the feeling they’re going to send us all to the Horn of Africa soon. Closer to the happier Arab lands. Look, IVe got my Lawrence of Arabia headdress on already. The war no longer makes any sense, you know. There are people fighting on both sides only interested in filling their own pockets. And, if they’re lucky one day having a dozen naked pianists on piano stools of their own. Ring down the curtain!”