Requiem for a Lost Empire Read Online Free PDF

love, of a swift zoological exploration that would have no sequel in their main lives. With somewhat acid irony I told myself that, when it came down to it, I was very like that instructor bellowing away on the other side of the wall ("Four smoke grenade projectors are placed at the front of the vehicle, here and here…") who, apart from the uniform that was never creased, had nothing in his one and only suitcase other than an old suit and a pair of shoes from another era.
       It may well have been her youth or her lack of experience (she was just twenty-two and found herself abroad for the first time) that had led me to emerge from my zoological carapace. An interpreter at the embassy in Aden, she had a touch of sunstroke one day, they brought her to us at the hospital. I felt I could be of service, I already knew the Yemen well and, moreover, her vulnerability gave me a pleasant sense of being old and protective. It was an impression that felt like affection. And in making love her body still had the same resigned and touching frailty as on the day of her sunstroke. I came to hope that this attachment might continue, even though at the start of the civil war the embassy was leaving. "We'll meet again in Moscow," I told myself. "It's really time I settled down." It was the first occasion in my life that such thoughts had occurred to me.
       She left on one of the first planes to evacuate the embassy personnel and volunteer workers. What shocked me most was not her refusal to meet me again in Moscow but rather the sudden discovery that I dreaded such a refusal, a dread several days old.
       "It would be diplomatically delicate," she pronounced, smiling, but with an air of firmness that already transported her into a future where I did not exist.
       "Delicate as regards your fiance?" I asked, in a poor imitation of her irony.
       "It's more complicated than that."
       She intercepted my retort ("What could be more complicated than a fiancé?") by asking me to help her down with her suitcases. At the bus I saw her as she would be on arrival: a suit (the days in Moscow would still be cool), dress shoes in place of her sandals, the air of a young woman who has worked abroad, with all that this implied in a country it was difficult to leave in those days. I racked my brains for a polite but wounding remark that might, if only for a second, have rendered her weak, childish, surprised once more-the way I had loved her and dreaded losing her. Sitting by the window she was already eyeing me in a quite detached way, observing my shoes, gray with dust. "A man I made love with," she must have said to herself, and no doubt she experienced the moment of pity that grips us at the sight of a part of ourselves preserved in the body of someone who will henceforth be a stranger to us.
       "I'll write you…"
       "But…"
       We spoke that "but" in unison, she, straightening up in her seat, I, dodging the dust thrown up by the bus as it moved off. In the place where she was going I had only this vague address of a room in a communal apartment long ago rented to someone else. Here the crackling of gunfire on the outskirts of the city was already audible.
       I returned to the hospital on foot. Around the embassies people were gathering, the cars were all heading off in the same direction, toward the airport. It was amusing to see that, in spite of this turmoil, each nation remained true to itself. The Americans were blocking the road with the multiplicity of their means of transport and the ponderous, blithe arrogance of their preparations. The English were leaving the place as if this were merely a routine move, the banality of which did not merit a single extra word or gesture. The French were organizing chaos, giving one another orders, all waiting for the one person without whom departure was impossible, but who had already left. The representatives of the small countries sought the understanding of the big