Requiem for a Lost Empire Read Online Free PDF Page A

crashed in front of the instructor's very eyes… When describing this battle the instructor sometimes said "Jewish," sometimes "Israeli": in his mouth the latter term became a kind of superlative of the first, to indicate the degree of spite and malignancy. However, like a true poet, he acknowledged the value of this evil genius, without whom History might have marked time and possibly lost one of its finest pages.
       The voice booming out on the other side of the wall, which exasperated me so much to begin with, was on the point of lulling me into amused indifference when suddenly I got to the heart of its secret. It was from poets like this that wars derived their effectiveness and staying power. This pure passion, this believer's enthusiasm, was essential: no geopolitical strategies were a substitute for it.
       The military lectures that I listened to, bent over the bodies of patients undergoing operations, drove me to reflect, in a way that was simultaneously very direct and somewhat oblique, on the stunning poverty of my experiences with the women I had met and believed I was in love with. Mentally I made facetious comparisons between the technical ingenuity of the weapons whose praises were sung by the instructor (all those self-sealing fuel tanks and decoy-projectors) and the rudimentary mechanics of my own love affairs. I was not yet thirty at the time and my cynicism sometimes had a thin skin. "I've had what I chose to take from those women," I told myself, though not believing it. "What they wanted to give me… All we could have expected from affairs like that…" As I worked away at my phrase-making, I was striving to compete with the perfection of those machines, at least through my combinations of words.
       "Curiosity!" All at once the word, long sensed subconsciously, suddenly rang harshly true. The woman who had returned to Moscow three days earlier had been curious about me. And this curiosity had led us into an intense affair in which we played our parts to perfection from start to finish, without any risk of love. Like a deep-sea diver she sounded me out with her body, explored the man who had intrigued her, storing up memories, like those of an exotic country seen for the first time. On the last night before her departure she had not come to me, she had "too many suitcases to pack." I had a sneaking suspicion that already I missed her. But with no great effort of cynicism I contrived to reduce this sense of loss to one for the tactile softness of her breasts, the angle of her parted knees, the rhythmic breathing of her pleasure.
       "What the instructor would call technical features," I now thought, recalling that the women who had preceded her (one had worked at the embassy, the other I'd met in Moscow…) had also had the same curiosity, like women explorers. The very distant memory returned that had pursued me since childhood: the birthday party with a family who are generous enough to invite a young, shaven-headed barbarian to join them, two little girls studying me with curiosity, taking minute soundings. Their parents have doubtless warned them that this would not be a child like the others, one without a family, without a home of his own, and who has very likely never tasted jam. Sometimes all these "withouts" seem to the two fair-haired sisters like inconceivable privations, sometimes like a vague promise of freedom. They observe me with the feigned nonchalance of a zoologist walking around an animal with his head in the air, so as not to frighten it, while scrutinizing its every movement out of the corner of his eye.
       I translated the curiosity of those little girls into the language of women. I was still the same strange beast who did not behave like the others, that is to say did not save up the pay he earned in all those countries at war, did not aspire to a career, had no plans. For women this life "without" held the promise, now clear, of an affair without the burden of