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

death. The man in the photo, whose liberty I had so envied, was going to go to the bottom after a short existence full of promise.
       I sat up on my bunk, clinging to the edge of it, as if I were perched on the brink of an abyss. And this brink tilted further and further, causing me to lose all notion of up and down. I uttered a plea and only afterward did I grasp the sense of what I had whispered: "They've got to do something. I don't want to die! Not now…"
       I had no idea if the counsellor had heard me. But a minute later his voice seemed to ring out from the bottom of the abyss. He spoke in a monotonous tone, as if he were talking to himself and had already begun his story a moment earlier. Astonishingly, this litany contrived to hold its own through the fury of the waves and the wind's hysteria, like the straight and even wake of a torpedo in a turbulent sea. At first my own repeated entreaty ("I don't want to die… Not now… please, not now…"), and especially my shame at having uttered it, had stopped me following the thread. But as what he was describing was totally remote from our own situation (he was talking about a desert), I finished by finding in the strangeness of his story the unique point on which my fevered mind could focus.
       … A town, or rather a number of streets, had sprung up in the middle of a desert in Central Asia. Houses four stories high, all identical, with empty window frames and gaping doorways, as if the builders had abandoned their work just before completion. And yet the inhabitants could already be seen: sometimes you could glimpse a face in a window opening, sometimes when the sun flooded the inside of a room, a complete human figure. Outside, in enclosures protected from the sun by corrugated iron, there were animals asleep or scattered along the fence. A flock of sheep, some camels, horses, dogs. A single road led into the town, linking these three or four streets and then petering out in the sand. At the central crossroads there stood an enormous cube, formed from well-dovetailed planks, reminiscent of the casing around a statue that was being prepared for unveiling to the public at some forthcoming celebration.
       The violence of the wave that crashed down onto the cargo ship was such that all sounds stopped for several seconds. It was impossible to tell whether the engines had suddenly cut out or terror had paralyzed all my senses. The ship was listing, hurtling faster and faster down a watery slope, and seemed no longer able to halt its flight. And it was in this silence, as if to break the spell and relaunch the functioning of the machinery, that the voice of the counsellor sounded again. He must have realized that his story was unintentionally maintaining a level of suspense that was not at all his purpose, and he brought it to an end in a few sentences that cleared up the mystery.
       "The cube on the central square was our first atomic bomb. The townspeople were convicts condemned to death, being used as guinea pigs. The town had been especially constructed for this first test. We overflew it several times. The convicts waved to us. They didn't know what was due to happen the next night. No doubt some of them, even though they were in chains, hoped to see their sentences commuted. They were already beginning to like this town, where the windows had no bars. In the aircraft all the instruments that measured radioactivity were stuck at red. That night, at the moment of the explosion, we were more than nine miles away from the town. The order was to remain lying on the ground, not to turn around, not to open our eyes. For the first time in my experience I felt the earth leap into life. It moved beneath me. There was a shock wave that scattered the bodies of those who had tried to stand up. And also the howling of those who had turned around and been blinded. And the heavy shuddering of the earth beneath our bellies. The next day, on the way back to the