Instead of smiling I saw your face grow tense, you closed your eyes and shook your head slightly, as if to suppress a sudden pain. You were already a long way away from this city, from this war, at once so real and such a sham. You were away in some past and I did not know if your pain was derived from an excess of sorrow or too great a joy. I drew you to me and it was at that moment, as if by some stupid and aggressive mockery, that the lights came on again. I rushed to the light switches-through the uncurtained windows our silhouettes would have been visible all over the city. But the tape deck hidden at the back of the bar remained connected and in the darkness we listened to the ebb and flow of a saxophone in a melody that, for its part, had nothing aggressive about it. It was a gust of weary notes that occasionally slid, as if along a razor blade, to the brink of a fall, a shout, a sob, then returned to a deep and rhythmic breathing, painting a picture in the darkness of the end of a long race, the end of a struggle, the weariness of a man on the night of a lost battle. The melody broke off but for a time in the darkness we went on hearing its silent rhythm.
That night I told you about my last meeting with Sasha, her solitude in the middle of an endless steppe, about that moment when her story had reached its conclusion, leaving me with a picture of a mother and father bowed over their child one night in the Caucasus.
Shortly before sunrise a shell hit the wall of the hotel; in the bar a row of glasses slid down one by one and smashed on the counter. The bursts of gunfire were already penetrating into the foyer on the ground floor, and moving toward the upper floors. I broke a window in the kitchen, then another on the landing, hoping to find a fire escape. But there was only an old, dry bird's nest that crumbled away from a cornice and fell among the soldiers milling around and shooting. We knew from experience that ropes, drainpipes, staircases leading onto roofs, and other lifesaving devices only existed in adventure films. The acrid smoke swirled around the banisters, gradually filling the dining room of the restaurant.
Time vibrated, taking its cue from the renewal of the attacks, the tumult of the explosions, and the deafening silence of the brief lulls. Our eyes fastened upon a table, the place settings, the little bouquet of artificial flowers, the sun and the sea outside the window- the tranquillity of breakfast in a hotel-and for a second it was difficult to imagine that a few stories below a soldier, his legs riddled with bullets, was crawling along the corridor to hide in a bedroom. During one of these pauses we tried to leave via the terraced garden and, just when we were close to the spiral staircase, encountered gunfire. It was the last of the old regime's troops. They thought it was an attack coming from the upper floors. We retreated up the staircase now reverberating with gunshots. I had an eyebrow nicked by a ricochet. You turned as you ran, saw my forehead all bloody, but I had time to intercept your look, to calm it with a wink. The bullets fired at us provoked a new round of gunfire. In the end the attackers had the building surrounded.
During the course of that day, amid all the flurries of our sudden dashes for survival, our eyes would collide with a quick glance, without words, grasping in a flash all that our life was and all that awaited us. These glances, when our eyes met, comprehended everything up to the very end. But translated into thought, words whispered inside one's head, this comprehension became improbable: "This woman who is so dear to me will fall, die within an hour, within a couple of hours."
They were already fighting on the staircase outside the restaurant door. What could be heard in the shouting was the hysterical ferocity of those who are certain they have won. The bursts of gunfire were shorter, people were being finished off. They were no longer fighting, they were hunting down, flushing out, finishing off. The smoke now smelled of the steam from water poured on flames. Outside the window night was falling, encouraging the soldiers to fight it out as fast as possible before dark.
For a few instants our weariness, our remoteness, made us invisible. The soldiers streamed into the dining room, riddling the nooks and crannies with bullets wherever darkness and smoke lingered, transforming the kitchen into a long cascade of shattered glass. And yet there we were in front of them, by the broken window where one could breathe, standing pressed against each other. For us everything came down to this embrace, to a few words guessed at through the gunfire, from the movement of our lips.
An instant later they discovered our presence. The barrel of an automatic rifle began to poke me in the back, a butt struck us across the shoulders, as if to separate us. Then they drew back, noting the distance necessary for the execution, to avoid getting themselves sprayed with blood. After three days of siege and three sleepless nights the world outside our bodies was blurred, flaccid. The mind floundered, trying to grasp the hardness of death amid this softness and, without growing alarmed, fell back into somnolence. The only fragment of lucidity was the soldier's arm, seen in a sidelong glance, when I lifted my face from yours for an instant: he was wearing a slender leather bracelet on his wrist. "This one won't shoot," I thought with irrational conviction. "No, he won't shoot us."
Like us, they noticed the sliding beneath their feet. For some time now the electric current had been restored and the restaurant was revolving. The picture window framed the fire in the port and, a moment later, the minaret and roofs of the old town. The tape deck struck up again the same flow of weary notes. Its breathy rhythms isolated us even more. We were alone and for a little time still remained in this life, but already felt detached from our entwined bodies, which the yelling soldiers were manhandling. They needed two ordinary condemned people, two bodies standing with their faces to the wall. Our embrace made them uneasy. For them we were a couple of dancers on a tiny island defined by the tea-colored light, the table with a bunch of artificial flowers, the saxophonist's breathy notes. The brassy swaying of the music suddenly took off into a dizzying flight: it was simultaneously laughter, shouting, a sob. Anyone who followed it, in its madness, could only have fallen to his death from this vibrant cliff. There was a click from a magazine being engaged. You raised your eyes toward me, very calm eyes, and said to me, "Till tomorrow, then."
His voice, disdainful and very sure of itself, cut through the bawling of the soldiers. Later you referred to him as an "extraterrestrial." My first impression was precisely that: a cosmonaut captured by the denizens of some planet. He was a GI, escorted by Africans, who made his way into the dining room. His equipment surpassed even what could be seen in films about intergalactic warfare: a helmet with a built-in microphone and a transparent visor, a flak jacket, and a belt that looked like a chastity belt, for it extended down at the front to protect the genitalia; thick padded leggings that covered his knees, gloves with ringed fingers; and, in particular, an infinite number of little balls, capsules, and bottles attached to his webbing, or thrust into the innumerable pockets of his jacket. No doubt these were all the possible antidotes and serums, all the flashlights, all the filter pumps. He stood a head taller than his indigenous escorts, who surrounded him respectfully and watched him as he spoke. Confronting our perplexity, they all began shouting at the same time, demanding a reply from us. It was simply their din that now stopped us understanding. And I heard myself exclaiming, still a stranger to myself, "Look, first tell your bodyguards to keep quiet!"