Hear Our Defeats

by Laurent Gaudé

  “We cannot stay here, Your Excellency . . . ” The sound of airplanes is coming closer. “We have to hurry, Your Excellency . . . ” The plane swoops down. Everyone in the tiny cave freezes. The strident sound of engines in a dive. And then gunfire, everywhere above them, shattering the rock, exploding in their ears. It is as if the earth were trembling. Another plane is following, already. Soon they’ll be bombing. They have been hiding in this little cave in Aya for two days; they concealed the entrance with a silk curtain and the cave is full of the heavy smell of the incense they have been burning day and night for the dead who fell at Maychew. When the first bomb explodes one hundred meters from the entrance the priests around Haile Selassie begin to pray. “Your Excellency . . . quickly!” So he gets up, surrounded by these men who have been watching over him as attentively as a mother, and they rush out of the cave. Run. Lose your breath. Run before the planes finish their circles in the sky. Feel the stones slipping beneath your feet but keep on running, flat out. Run, because that is what the vanquished do.

  Assem went into the archeological museum. The man at the ticket counter repeated insistently that for him the visit would begin in one hour, at the café across the way. He didn’t reply. This is the appointment he has been waiting for. He has an hour to kill. So he walks around the tombs in the first room. There is everything in Beirut, antiquity and frenzy, ruins and dollars. He looks at the spouses’ majestic sculpted faces on the lid of the tomb, they lie side by side but slightly raised on their elbows; how serenely they plunged into death, leaving the world to its noise. And the bas-reliefs below them are a mêlée of bodies, swords, combat. Greeks against Trojans. It is war: the blows delivered, the severed bodies. He looks at this commotion of death—the cries and moans, and then these spouses looking so calm, while the crowd swarms just beneath them. Will he enjoy such serenity at the moment of his death, like some Roman patrician? He hears the shouting welling up within him. He remembers. The road between Sirte and Misrata, and the dictator was there, a few meters ahead of him. The crowd all around were yelling and stamping their feet, and they did not yet know whether they wanted to escort the man or pull him to pieces. He remembers. Overexcited bodies paying no attention anymore to the blows they deliver. Assem would have to get a bit closer there to see him, Gaddafi, or rather what remained of him, bruised and wild, his face distorted, eyes blackened, his lip split; Gaddafi had lost all resemblance to the arrogant lord Assem had met a few years earlier during the dictator’s state visit, where he slept at night in his Bedouin tent in the courtyard at the Élysée Palace, humiliating his host, France. He remembers. How the voices around him saturated the air. He had to act like everyone else, shout and adopt the same abrupt, violent gestures, just to keep his place there, in that first circle of an enraged people. The spouses of the museum in Beirut look so calm. Can they not hear the cries of the crowd, the slurred words Gaddafi is still trying to say, promising them gold if they would let him go in peace? Can they not hear the firing of automatic rifles expressing joy at the capture of the dictator? He thinks again of Leptis Magna, he had wanted to visit the site a few months earlier, back when he was an instructor for the rebels, and there, the firing of heavy weaponry seemed incongruous. They were so small, so insignificant with their struggle to bring about the fall of Tripoli. The Roman columns overlooked the sea like steles of time, and next to their immobility the cracking of weapons could only seem ugly. At the time he had felt, as he feels today, that he belonged to this other era, an era of urgency and war, where action was called for, and he had left the site with the same sadness weighing upon him as now, as he leaves the spouses behind on their catafalque; they watch him walk away and back out into the danger of the Beirut streets, into the heat and noise and the tiny concerns of one life among so many others, while they go on staring at eternity with a smile.

  Get away. Run, head down. He is just a rat fleeing from the eyes of the Italian eagle that wants to devour him. He will remember this all his life, these long days spent hiding in the shelter of vegetation or in villages. For a long time he will remember these nights when they had to keep marching, relentlessly, toward Addis Ababa. He ordered his men to make a detour through Lalibela. He was able to go down into the rock-cut church, a jewel of Christendom in Africa, and he prayed. What did he ask God, there, in the shadow of this cross-shaped church dug into the ground? What did the rat ask? Now he knows—and will remember all his life—what it means to be trapped, to be hunted by the victors, and have only a god to talk to, while outside the men are anxiously watching the sky, not daring to interrupt him during his prayers but hoping those prayers will not last too long, because they mustn’t linger. There is nowhere he can stay. He is constantly having to strike camp. He advances during the night, while Marshal Badoglio and the Duce sleep in silk sheets, dreaming of supremacy amid odors of mustard gas.

  At UNESCO’s request, the French Institute in Erbil has arranged a small office for her. It’s hot, but she is glad to have a place where she can hold her interviews. Several people are already waiting in the corridor. Word has gotten around that there is a lady who is looking for information about the museum in Mosul. The first visitor is a young man who asks her if she can find a place for him and his family to spend the night. She tries to explain that she cannot help him, that this is not why she is here, that this is the wrong place to ask.

  “Just a place for me and my children . . . ”

  “I’m sorry. I don’t deal with that.”

  “I’m from Mosul.”

  “When did you leave?”

  “A few hours before they got there. I didn’t want to leave, but there was no other option.”

  “Do you know what happened at the museum?”

  “They’re destroying everything.”

  “Did you see it?”

  “Everything, like I said. Everyone saw it. That is why they came. To kill us. And raze the city.”

  She can tell she won’t learn anything from this man. The more he speaks, the shriller his voice. He is getting agitated. His hands are trembling. She knows there’s nothing she can do for him. So she gets up and thanks him for coming, wishes him good luck and lets him go back out into the chaos of a city that is searching, calling out, running this way and that for something to drink and a place to sleep.

  “Tell them to repeat that. Tell them there’s still time to bomb the train.” The radio officer resends the message. General Graziani waits, tensely. He cannot believe Mussolini would refuse. The Negus is there in that fugitive train. They can intercept the train, reduce it to rubble, finish him off. Is he hesitating? The General knows what must be done. This is no time to dilly-dally. If he managed to find Omar Al-Mukhtar in Libya, it’s because he knows you cannot dither. Isn’t that why the Duce chose him? He hounded the leader of the Libyan uprising until he had him in the palm of his hand. He offered him amnesty in exchange for his surrender, and when Al-Mukhtar refused he ordered to have him hanged. And it didn’t bother him one way or the other. As it would not bother him one way or the other to bomb the Negus’s train. They are blacks. Finish them off. Does the Duce want to reconquer Ethiopia the way they reconquered Cyrenaica and Tripoli, yes or no? He is getting impatient. Still no answer. The train is getting away from them. With every second that goes by the Negus’s chances of survival are increasing. He doesn’t like it. This is not the way you win wars. The radio crackles. The soldier listens attentively, then turns to him: “The answer is no, sir. They said to let him escape.” In any case it’s too late, thinks Graziani, disgusted. The Negus has gotten away from him. Will he learn, someday, that his life was decided at this very moment? Can he, seated comfortably now in his compartment, imagine that his fate has been decided? He will flee across his country, trying to reach his capital, oblivious of the fact that there were eagles in the sky that circled over him for a moment then decided to leave off their circles and vanish.

  The men who were waiting in
the corridor have left. Maybe they overheard her say that she could do nothing to help refugees and went to try their luck elsewhere. There is only one old gentleman, with a neatly trimmed white beard, wearing a jacket that is too warm for the temperature in the corridor. But he hasn’t removed it, and it doesn’t even seem to bother him. There is some dust on his shoulders. “Dust from Mosul . . . ” she thinks, and feels moved. The city is so close. He enters her office, timidly. He doesn’t look her in the eye. She greets him and asks if he is from Mosul. He nods.

  “You know,” she says, “that I’m not here to help refugees. I work for the Iraqi museums.”

  He looks at her with a certain expression in his eyes, as if he were about to own up to a misdeed.

  “I live across the street from the museum,” he says quietly. “Sometimes the guard gives me the key when he knows he can’t be there to open in the morning. It doesn’t happen often, but sometimes he gets held up . . . ”

  “Do you know anything about what they have done?”

  “I saw them arrive . . . from my window.”

  “You were still in Mosul when they arrived?”

  “Yes. I left the first night. I was lucky. Now, it’s harder. But my son is courageous and the first night he found a way.”

  “The museum?”

  She doesn’t dare ask her question. The man looks at her and continues his story.

  “They showed up in three four-wheel drives with loudspeakers. They declared that they were taking possession of the city, and that the artwork in the museum was sacrilegious. A few of them went inside. You could hear them making a lot of noise. I think they smashed everything . . . ”

  “Did you see them take any objects out of the museum?”

  “No.”

  He is still hesitant. Then, his voice almost fearful, he adds, “But I took this.” And from his jacket pocket he takes a little package wrapped in cloth and sets it on the table. She looks at it. He lowers his eyes. She opens the package, gingerly. Inside is a pair of earrings from the Sumerian era . . .

  “I went in at night. There were still some guards outside but I know a way in from the back, to the meeting room. I didn’t go to the main room of the museum, I was too frightened. But along the corridors there were a lot of broken vases. And this . . . So I took it. Not for me. You understand? But I thought it shouldn’t stay there . . . ”

  She thanks him. Tells him how important it is, what he did. She says again that he acted wisely, and praises his courage. He gets up, still a bit awkward, then disappears without a word.

  He orders a café blanc. He is sitting on the terrace of a little café just opposite the museum. He observes every passerby, every car that goes past. He eavesdrops on the conversation at the next table, between two elderly men, until they get up, say goodbye to the owner, and leave. He tries to make the most of such moments because he knows they are the last calm moments he will know for a long time, but he already feels the tension in his body. In his mind he recites verses by Mahmoud Darwish, to delay the moment when he will once again be a professional, a French intelligence agent who for ten years has been carrying out missions of targeted assassination, here in the Middle East, or in the Sahel. “Will you die in Beirut . . . ” but he doesn’t remember the rest. His mind is too distracted by the people in the street. He can feel the tension rising inside him. He ferrets deeper into his memory: “Beirut/The night . . . No night denser than this,” and he remembers Mahmoud Darwish, how twice he went to see him, once when the Palestinian poet was in Paris, at the Hôtel Madison, opposite the church of Saint Germain des Prés. He had found him at the bar, alone. It must have been eleven o’clock. He introduced himself, hesitantly: should he make up an identity, say that he was a bookseller or a professor or something? He still remembers: the moment he approached him, the man looking at him, and then he knew he would not lie, and held out his hand and said, “Monsieur Darwish? I work for French intelligence . . . but I would like to know if you would be willing to talk with me about poetry for a few minutes?” And the man did not shudder or even seem surprised. He gestured to the armchair across from him. Assem sat down and they spoke. “If this autumn is the last, let us apologize, for the breaking and backwash of the waves . . . ” They talked, and Darwish didn’t ask him anything personal. Just as they were about to part, as they were shaking hands, the poet said these words, looking him deep in the eye: “Don’t let the world steal the words from you.” He pictures him there again, with that face of stone, and this is the first time he has thought about that moment. It was years ago. And he has to confess that he has let the world steal the words from him. There have only ever been acts. Action takes over everything, leaves no room for anything else. Action with its intoxication and intensity, leaving everything else so insipid in comparison. What good were words in that crowd on the road between Sirte and Misrata, while he was gripping his 9mm, ready to shoot if the situation got out of hand, and Gaddafi’s face there a few meters away from him, hovering in and out of sight with the swaying of the crowd? What use were words when no one could hear anything but shouting and gunfire and the crowd going wild with joy? No one was in any state to speak or to listen to any words, and Gaddafi looked like a floored boxer, or a battered woman. All you could hear was the crowd yelling as they pushed and shoved, and the Kalashnikovs fired in the air to celebrate the dictator’s capture. He feels as if he is about to lose his words again. In a few minutes someone will show up, surely armed, and take him to the place where Job is hiding. Danger is imminent; he must be on his guard. They may decide to kill him now, on this terrace, to send the message to France not to get involved, that they know perfectly well that it is the Americans who have sent him, or simply because Job has gone crazy, and wants to destroy everything around him. Assem must be vigilant, on edge. Words no longer have a place and yet he clings to them, does not want to let them go. He knows that he is more himself when he keeps his words inside him, or that in any case he is closer to the truth of the world. Again he sees Darwish’s face, remembers the line, “My homeland, a suitcase,” and then suddenly, superimposed upon the poet’s face in his memory is the face of the young Kurdish combatant, Shaveen, as she was when he saw her for the first time, outside the entrance to the camp at Kawergosk, where he had gone to get her in the pick-up. Shaveen, one of a group he was there to train, and who, when he had asked who she was fighting for, had pointed to the refugees’ tents and said, “For them.” And he had envied her her strength. Who was he fighting for? The interests of France? Yes. But those interests changed so often . . . Before he found himself on the road to Sirte, among the crowd screaming madly with pleasure at having the tyrant in their hands at last, he had been in charge of protecting Gaddafi . . . But Shaveen did not hesitate. Her face was the face of victory. That is what he told himself: he envied her because even if she did not manage to halt the advance of Islamic State, even if she was killed by enemy fire one day, she could not lose. Something in her would never be soiled, never defeated. She was fighting for the families in the tents who crowd together at night in a fug of human warmth and the smell of charcoal. Whereas he—when could he ever say he had won? He had carried out so many successful missions. Men had been eliminated. But had he won? Words have left him. Every time he has had to immerse himself in the thick of the action, poetry has fallen silent, and Darwish looks at him in the depths of his memory, at the Hôtel Madison; but yet again he has to accept the departure of words, because a car has just pulled up, at speed. Stopping abruptly in front of him. A man jumps out, not even bothering to hide the automatic in his hand. He looks to the left, to the right, opens the back door and motions to Assem to get in.

  He resigns himself to leaving Lalibela. They have to keep moving, hide in their own country. The enemy has won. The Italian troops are about to march on Addis Ababa. When will he ever be back here? There are days when he thinks about the possibility of organizing an internal resistance, of fightin
g every inch of the way. But he knows that Ethiopia needs a political voice, and it is up to him to carry that voice to Europe. So he advances, obstinately, reaches Magdala, then Fiche. There, five cars and five trucks are waiting for him. At last he can sit down and catch his breath. He is a fugitive in his own land. Is he really about to flee? He will be the first king of kings to leave his people behind. When he reaches Addis Ababa he can tell it is no longer even an issue. There is no other option. There is something frenzied about the mood in the capital. His generals tell him: the men are deserting. No one wants to fight anymore. The police authorities tell him that scenes of looting are becoming increasingly common. He mustn’t stay here. There is the sound of gunfire in broad daylight. Addis Ababa is panicking, rearing up, going mad. He is no longer in control. And so he leaves, abandons everything: the palace, the Ethiopian people, his dreams of armed resistance, his valiant subjects; he leaves as a deposed monarch, humiliated by the world that has let him die and never raised a finger, he leaves with his wife for Djibouti, and he stops talking, cannot say a word, he is ashamed, this man, the descendant of the victors of Adwa, he is ashamed and does not speak because now the words have abandoned him.

  Sullivan Sicoh stands by the tombstone and gazes at the name etched on it: Jasper Kopp. It’s strange to think that this man who saved his life is dead and that they will never meet. He tries to picture Jasper Kopp on his way every morning to Creech Air Force Base, taking his seat in the cockpit with a colleague, shutting himself away like that, for a few hours, from the rest of the world . . . No, not the rest of the world, just the quiet suburb where he lives, the supermarket, the children, and immersing himself in a world of camera images, aerial views, zooms, radio commands. He tries to picture Jasper Kopp staring at the images from the far corners of the earth that reach him after a time lag of only a few seconds, Jasper Kopp flying over Afghanistan every day then going home again at night. He tries to picture Jasper Kopp kissing his children goodnight, gliding over the Taliban mountains, doing his shopping at the supermarket, blowing up vehicles on a straight road or pulverizing the caves where vague shapes have been moving. How much of the schoolyard in Kalafgan did Jasper Kopp see? What were the last images his screen showed him before the explosion? Did he see a child running after a ball? Did he try to go back on the order to fire, or could he only watch with terror as the Hellfire3 advanced, inexorably, to bomb that building and turn him into a mass murderer? Is it possible to say that the two of them were together: he, Sullivan, dragged facedown along the ground by a crowd of angry men, eating dust and kicks, while Jasper Kopp was floating in the sky, his gaze encompassing the houses, then all at once releasing death, launching his missile at the school, which in no time would be nothing but smoke? Were they together? The man lying there beneath that tombstone committed suicide because he fired that day. Kopp was the only one who knew his secret. Can you die by virtue of being too far away from the battlefield? By virtue of killing at the same time you pick out your yogurt? By virtue of triggering explosions with your fingertips while you kiss your children on the brow to wish them a peaceful night’s sleep? Can you die from remaining intact, untouched, out of reach of the blows, the cries, the smoke and the rubble? The women screaming in Kalafgan: Sullivan had heard them, whereas Jasper Kopp, that day, heard only the piped music in the supermarket on his way home, and perhaps his wife asking him how his day went. And if she did, what did he reply? Did he say that he saved an American soldier who was about to get lynched? Did he only tell her about that, or did he also tell her that he had wiped a school off the map, and that the mothers of Kalafgan would weep for the rest of their lives because of this cursed day? Sullivan looks at the grave and he knows his secret is there at his feet, beneath the thick moist earth of this American cemetery, and that it will stay there until he, Sullivan Sicoh, decides to reveal it. He will choose the time and the place. And when he does, he knows that Jasper Kopp will at last be able to give a cry of relief from his grave. He will scream the shame that overwhelmed him, pound against his coffin, and that will be good. He will feel the same wrenching grief as the women of Kalafgan, and only then will anyone be able to say that they were truly all together that day, in northern Afghanistan—Sullivan, Jasper Kopp, and the grieving mothers, sharing the same wound, moaning from the same defeat.