Requiem for a Lost Empire by Andreï Makine Read Free Book Online

shudder slipped in, like a blade between loose-fitting plates of armor. All that had changed was that, as a boy, I was afraid people would discover the truth: to this fear and shame was now added the certainty that I had no means of making people understand the truth, and that I should never meet anyone to whom it could be confided.
       I experienced this unease on finding myself in a cramped cabin on a ship that, while it was still secured, was already pitching under the first lashes of the storm. As we lay face to face on our narrow bunks our heads were so close that we could have whispered in one another's ears. At once my childish reflex was aroused: I pictured the counsellor questioning me about my early life. A moment later I called myself a fool, realizing that he knew everything. I faced a man who, although our situation lent itself to an exchange of confidences, would not seek to delve into my past. It was then that his proposal for "a change" in my life struck me as an offer that would liberate me. Indeed this thrilling liberation had already begun taking place with the speed of a blissful dream. Stepping aboard the ship I had been liberated from my name and the passport that documented it. In exchange, the counsellor had furnished me with another one: my first false papers, and a name that I was repeating inwardly in order to make it mine, along with a few notes on my new biography that I must learn by heart. I was perfectly well aware that the ease with which this metamorphosis was embarked on was simply a well established recruitment technique and that there was nothing improvised about his proposal to "change my life." At each fresh step in this direction the counsellor provided a kind of brief waiting time, to give me the opportunity to draw back-to refuse to exchange passports, not to embark with him on this dubious-looking little cargo ship, not to accept the pistol he handed me. I later came to understand that, for him, an approach of this kind and this change of identity was a sequence of almost automatic maneuvers, a routine he went through without paying any attention to my excitement. But at the time his actions appeared to me like the deft arrogance of a conjuror who, disdaining all acknowledged appearances, was liberating me by means of his shell game artist's legerdemain of the thing that weighed most heavily upon me: myself
       When he left the cabin for a few minutes I took out my new passport and spent a long time studying this face, my own, made unrecognizable by the information on the previous page. The man in the photograph seemed to be eyeing me with disdain. I felt passionately envious of his liberty.
       When night came this jealousy consumed me with an animal fear, with a lust for survival that I would not have imagined myself capable of. In the darkness of the cabin I had the illusion that, battered by the waves, the ship itself was turning to liquid, melting like a block of ice. I could hear water everywhere-outside the hull, in the corridor, and suddenly, streaming across the floor of the cabin! I reached down with frenzied haste and patted a dry metal surface that vibrated beneath my fingers. My hand also brushed against my shoes, prudently lined up in absurd anticipation. I lay down again, hoping the counsellor had not guessed the reason for my restlessness. He remained silent in the darkness and appeared to be asleep. Without a porthole, our cabin felt to me like a steel coffin that had just become detached from the ship. I imagined it slowly descending into the glaucous depths of the waters. That pair of shoes neatly arranged beneath my bunk. The pistol that would rust in its case. It shifted slightly as the vessel pitched, and seemed to be caressing me under my arm, next to my heart. For me, all the treachery of life was concentrated into that caress: fully conscious, in possession of a new passport, with an identity that had finally set me free, I was going to die a slow