VIII
PARIS
Sitting on the exam table, she buttons up her blouse. The doctor has examined her breasts. His hands were cold. She was startled. Then she concentrated, as if she wanted to see what his hands were feeling, to search with him for the enemy, encircle him in her curves, make him feel her desire to live, to resist. “You have to think about yourself a bit more . . .” said Dr. Hallouche, looking at her through his glasses with a kindly smile. Now he is looking at her records. “You are going to need all your strength for this fight. Do you have support, from friends and family?” She doesn’t immediately answer. Support? Yes, she does. From all the men she has loved. Those whose names she remembers, Marwan, Assem, and those whose names she never knew. Yes, she has support. The statues she’s handled. Assyrian jewels. The great colossuses of Khorsabad, which are there inside her, because this is her life. And Botta is there, too, Mariette Pasha, Hormuzd Rassam, is that something she can tell him? Is that what he is asking?
Night is falling on Addis Ababa. Mount Entoto is slowly disappearing. There is not a breath of air. Assem returns to the Hotel Mekonnen on foot. The humidity is everywhere—on the bodies of the women in the market, on the facades of buildings, in the unceasing commotion in the street; there is humidity in the gazes of passersby and the fatigue of children. He feels sad and is in no hurry as he walks because he does not want to get there too early. He does not want to lie down in that empty, soulless little room, with the ceiling fan his only clock. He does not want to wake up tomorrow morning in a sweat—humid . . . humid . . . enough to make your body melt—and go to his appointment with Job. It’s going to be ugly. The Americans will be in position. He has just come from a meeting with them at the embassy. The tone has changed. They are not asking him to evaluate Sullivan Sicoh anymore. They are not asking him to have an opinion. He is the bait and that’s all. They spent twenty minutes explaining what would happen: they will leave him the time to say hello and have a little chat, but before much time goes by he’ll have to find a way to get outside. At which point he will confirm that Job is indeed there, then all he’ll have to do is vanish and they’ll take care of the rest.
She was silent for so long after Dr. Hallouche’s question that he understood. He doesn’t ask again. With his sensual Lebanese features, his broad hands—when he was palpating her she had not noticed they were so big—he is now telling her about the protocol and what it implies, what they are going to do to her body. He is speaking softly, as if she were a child, and when he has finished he smiles and says, “Do you have any questions?” Yes, she does. Am I going to die? Does she have the right to ask that question, the only one that she is, literally, dying to ask? Is she going to die? Yes, of course she is going to die. That is not how she should frame it. Soon? Is she going to die soon? But she says nothing, she restrains herself and quietly says “no.” So he picks up his appointment book and says, “When can you come back? We should start as quickly as possible.” And it is as if he were answering the question she didn’t dare ask. So she opens her diary, gets a bit muddled, and suddenly Cavafy’s lines come back to her: “Body, remember, not only how much you have been loved . . . ”, and in addition to those lines it is Assem’s voice that fills her, the precise texture of his voice, the rhythm of his phrasing: “Body, remember . . . ” and it fills her with strength, it is as if he had just embraced her and whispered into her ear, for her alone to hear, something that is right, not comforting, not cheerful, but true. So she raises her chin and Dr. Hallouche sees a determination in her that surprises him, and in a firm voice she says, “Next week, whenever you like.”
When he reaches Haile Selassie Street, a car pulls up to him. The driver leans out the lowered window and says, “Taxi?” He waves him away and the car slowly moves on. He keeps walking. His thoughts return to Sullivan Sicoh. He remembers when Job talked about Chris Kyle and Eric Maddox, the heroes of the nation who had come home, back to civilian life, their bellies bloated with beer, their evenings spent at the bar telling the story of the attack near Fallujah for the umpteenth time, their eyelids drooping, their voices ever furrier. Job’s voice had been filled with disgust. Maddox and his lectures, his microphone clipped to his ears, his shirtsleeves rolled up to his elbows, pacing back and forth onstage as if he were doing stand-up and punctuating his stories with well-worn little jokes. He had talked about all that and in his voice there was terror. Was his decision to go back and forth between Beirut and Addis so he could get away from that civilian life? To prolong the danger so he would never return to life as it used to be? Because he could tell that peace would finish him off, even more surely than a night in a helicopter in the Afghan sky? Assem understands. He remembers his last trip to Iraqi Kurdistan. When he went to train young Shaveen’s group. On the way back he had a stopover in Vienna. He remembers the hours he spent in the terminal . . . He had just left Erbil and the Kurdish training camps. He had just left Shaveen’s upright gaze, Shaveen who was fighting because her sister had been kidnapped by Islamic State during the capture of Mount Sinjar. He had just left the refugee camps, all those mothers with exhausted faces looking at their children playing in the mud, cursing their inability to offer them anything better. He had left all that behind, and scarcely two hours later, all of a sudden as he disembarked, his jacket still redolent of Kurdistan, there were the duty-free shops as far as the eye could see, and Viennese waltzes for background music in every corridor. It was December, so of course there were toys on display everywhere, and fake Santa Clauses too . . . He’d been paralyzed, he didn’t know what to do, couldn’t speak or eat a thing. This was the same world. Barely a two hour flight away. The same world: there was a saleswoman with her hair in braids and a ridiculous Tyrolean dress showing off her cleavage, so that businessmen would stop and buy a box of chocolates or a sausage wrapped in cellophane, and that saleswoman lives in the same world as Shaveen with her automatic weapon slung over her shoulder, or the barefoot children in the camp at Kawergosk, who haven’t realized yet, because they’re still too little, how their mother is fading away with every day that goes by, and soon she won’t have any smiles left. This is the same world, an ugly world for having such differences, side by side. And the blond-braided saleswoman imperceptibly tapping her foot to the rhythm of the supermarket waltz has no clue that Shaveen exists, just as the Peshmerga have no time to think about the fact that somewhere there might be a place with piles of watches in plastic boxes, and sausages sold to the swirl of waltzes. To move from one world to the other is the hardest thing. And perhaps that is what finished Job off . . . After the night in Abbottabad, after the aircraft carrier and the ceremony where the remains were thrown to the sea, they were asking him to go home, to his Michigan backwater, so he could shake his neighbors’ hands, drive his pickup to the nearest breakwater, and fill up his fridge with yogurts? How can anyone do that and not be torn from some small part of oneself with each passage from one world to the next?
Hannibal doesn’t say a word. He hasn’t spoken to anyone in two days. The swell is causing the ship to pitch. As far as the eye can see there is nothing but gray sky melting into the metallic color of the sea. He is leaving the Roman coast to return to Carthage, abandoning his victories and his legend. The Romans are no longer trembling. At what point did fear change sides? Was it when Scipio managed to capture Cartagena, taking with him an enormous booty of gold and equipment? Everything had always depended on what would happen there, on the Iberian peninsula. It is the key to this total war that has spread from Gibraltar to Greece. For a while he and his brothers had thought they would be able to unite the two Punic armies, his own and Hasdrubal’s. He was meant to come down off the hills of Calabria to head back north, and Hasdrubal would land his ships north of Rome and march south. But Hasdrubal lost at the Metaurus. And he is there, now, at his brother’s feet, on the deck of this salt-sprayed ship, in that stinking sack. He is there, returning to his native land, defeated. Neither he nor Mago will see Cart
hage again. Hannibal had his brothers’ support in battle but now he is taking them back to their mother, in pieces. One day his men brought him a wicker basket sent by the Romans themselves, and that day tore his soul open. In the basket was Hasdrubal’s head, unrecognizable, his face swollen, his mouth dry, his hair soiled with mud. They sent him his brother’s head to unnerve him, to make him go wild with rage, to drive him mad. He has had the battle of the Metaurus explained to him dozens of times. He was told that when Hasdrubal knew he was losing, he charged straight at the enemy. He didn’t want to survive his defeat. He knew only too well that if the battle of the Metaurus was lost the two armies would never be united, and that if they could not do that, it would be impossible to conquer Rome. So he charged straight at the enemy lines, to die in battle. Mago too perished. He fell from his horse, his thigh pierced through. His men managed to get him away from the battle and onto one of the ships anchored off Genoa, but he died onboard, carried off by a fever in an unbearable stench of pus and incense. Hannibal thinks about his brothers, and about this war that has devoured those he loved most, and he remains silent, for only silence can shroud so many dead.
Assem walks through the streets of Addis Ababa; often, as soon as he is out of earshot, a child turns around and tugs at his mother’s dress and says, in a conspiratorial tone, “Mama, did you see, the white man . . . ?” He goes on walking and thinks to himself that he is not sure he’ll be able to survive the revolution the day Auguste tells him he’s done a good job, and that he doesn’t have any other missions for him just now, he can go home and get some rest. He would like to talk about this with Job. Tomorrow. In the neighborhood of the Lion of Judah, on the fourth floor of the building where he’s expected, but he knows they won’t be able to have that kind of talk. They won’t be given the time. And the farther he walks, the more he begins to suspect that he is betraying Sullivan Sicoh. And he hopes that Sicoh, with his hallucinatory insight, will have thought of everything. He hopes that Job is using him, using them, using everyone, and will know how to escape.
A military victory. That is what they need. Petersburg must fall. Or Atlanta. One of the two Confederate cities they have been besieging for months. They must fall, otherwise Lincoln will not be reelected. That is what Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee are banking on. They are playing for time. If they can fend off a siege until the fall, the Union will vote for the Democrats and a peace treaty will be signed. Only a military victory can save the Union, because everything is getting bogged down, nothing is working. Grant smokes one cigar after the other, he can no longer sleep. To his wife, who writes him letters full of tenderness and concern, he would like to reply that between them lies a pool of blood. He sometimes thinks that the best thing would be to leave her. What kind of life is possible after all this? How can he forget the smell of gunpowder, the sight of dead bodies? He has been at war for too long. Young men have died following his orders. And yet Julia goes on talking to him about Lincoln, exhorting him to cling to the president’s words. She must be able to sense that he is losing his way. In all her letters she repeats that History will vindicate them, that the abolition of slavery is considerable progress, but he no longer hears her, does not even reread her letters in an effort to let her words touch him. Everything seems too remote. Only Sherman’s letters bring him some calm. Because they speak the same language. In the latest one his friend informs him of the death of young McPherson, a brilliant officer, thirty-three years old, slain on horseback outside Atlanta because he refused to surrender. Sherman wept when they brought him the body. How many more young men like this one will he have to bury? The nation’s finest. How many such men might have lived and gone on to lead the country? McPherson had exceptional talents. “He will eclipse Grant and me,” Sherman liked to say, to anyone who’d listen, and now McPherson is nothing but a dead body, and you go and pay your last respects, but never again will he serve any purpose. Such a waste. Entire months of waste. He does not want to hear talk of just causes, of fighting for freedom. He cannot take it anymore. He just wants Sherman to conquer Atlanta. Only that will stop the bloodletting. Atlanta must fall, or Petersburg. But for now, nothing has changed.
He crosses the Mediterranean, returns to Carthage, and he knows that an era of politics, with alliances and betrayals, is about to begin. For the first time in thirteen years the initiative to fight is no longer his. It is Rome that is onstage now, Rome that provokes him by sending him his brother’s head, the way he had provoked them by burning the land in Tuscany. He has known ordeals and suffering before now, he has known horror, the fear of the battlefield, guts spilling to the ground and men moaning their last, but in the end there was always victory, every time. And that was enough. Never have any of his men wanted to revolt, never have there been any plots or uprisings or insurrection. Not the slightest grunt of disobedience. Even Alexander the Great was abandoned by his men on the banks of the Hyphasis. Hannibal, no. They obeyed him. But henceforth they will begin to fear. Henceforth defeat will be there in camp in the evening, wearing them down every day a bit more. He must lead his army in spite of everything, keep his composure, stand firm. The Carthaginian camp is going to break up. And if he wants to come out on top, he will have to win the other war, the one not waged on the battlefield: he must silence Hanno, and prevent Masinissa from transferring his allegiance. He gazes out to sea with the bag containing his brother’s head always at his feet, and he hopes that if he must lose, he too will be fortunate enough not to survive the defeat.
Most of the men go screaming to the front because they cannot do otherwise, they are too afraid. Not Sherman. The heat is stifling. Drops of sweat trickle down his scalp beneath his hat, but he sits ramrod straight on his horse. The men are looking at him to give themselves strength, he knows this. Just as he knows that in these moments of brutal combat, he enjoys the privilege of staying calm. Where this gift came from, he has no idea, but that is the way it has always been. He is mad. He has never hidden it. Everyone says as much: Sherman is demented. Some sort of unhealthy melancholy is eating away at him. He has mood swings and is prone to what his men call “eccentricities”—but not here, never. Under fire, that all goes away. He sees things clearly. And instead of paralyzing him, the danger surrounding him enhances his powers of concentration. He knows this is a gift, to remain calm in battle. Grant is the same. As are all the great warriors of History, those who are capable of seizing an opportunity amid the fray, of finding a breach, reversing the course of events. He is calm. He can see which way the battle will go: everything depends on the railroad line south of Atlanta. So he orders the charge there, because that is where everything can give way.
Assem walks down Haile Selassie Street as night is falling. He is haunted by his uncle’s voice. It enervates, exhausts him. It is the last thing he wanted to remember today, but it seems his mind has decided to make him even more distraught. His uncle Damien, professor of international policy at Sciences Po, lover of poetry, who gave him volumes of poems by Pasolini, Darwish, and Césaire, to acquaint him with the rebellious voice of the world. He hears him now, in the dimly lit streets of Addis Ababa, he hears his uncle saying: “A free man, for Christ’s sake! That is what your father would have liked.” He doesn’t want to remember this because it makes him too sad, but he has to, the memory won’t leave him alone. He had just informed his uncle that he was leaving for the military academy at Saint-Cyr. He said it with joy, and his uncle, across from him, kept his solemn face and summoned his father’s memory: “A free man . . . That is what your father wanted for his son!” And it is like a slap in the face. He does not want to fall out with this man he loves, this man who has raised him since he was ten years old, when he lost both parents to an automobile accident, he does not want to shout, because his uncle has done everything for him and will go on to help him even more, introducing him one day, when he comes back from Saint-Cyr, to a former director of the external intelligence agency; but also, and above all, introducing him
to the poetry of Éluard and Neruda. He does not want to shout, nor does he, he simply goes away. They will never speak about it again. His uncle will never reproach him, he will even support him when he can, but that phrase still lingers: “A free man . . . ” He has never forgotten. Did he betray his father’s spirit by enlisting in the army? Has he, Assem, been free these twenty years, from one mission to the next? And isn’t that what Sullivan Sicoh wants: to be free of the army, of following orders, to be free of himself, of everything, and live according to his own lights, in the darkness?
Hear Our Defeats Page 13
