Hear Our Defeats

by Laurent Gaudé

  It will take a defeat or a victory. That’s the way it is. Hannibal knows this. So many men have died, and they demand to know in which camp History will place them, victors or vanquished. He is about to fight a battle here on these lands he left when he was still a child. An entire lifetime has gone by since the day he took command of the Punic army and crossed the Pyrenees. Years of war and blood, years of thinking, coming up with plans, imagining new tactics. And now he is back at the point of departure: the African coast of the Mediterranean. It is here that the war will come to an end. Everything is in place. Alliances have been forged or broken. Rome has always known how to create discord. Syphax found out about the secret accord between Rome and Masinissa. He flew into a rage and changed sides. For a long time the Roman empire had been allied with the king of the Masaesyli who reigned over western Numidia, but for Scipio this was not enough. He plotted in the shadows to turn Masinissa, the king of the Massylii, and never mind if the two of them were mortal enemies, never mind if, in all likelihood, he had to promise to each of them the other man’s kingdom, never mind, even, if Syphax ended up fighting on the same side as Carthage, outraged at the fact that Scipio brought about a rapprochement with his enemy. Everything is in place and History is clamoring for its battle. Peace proposals were presented, and turned down. The time for negotiations was extended as long as possible. Hannibal met with Scipio: the two men spoke in a tent that snapped in the wind. Two hours of talk that led nowhere. Rome does not want to negotiate. And deep down Hannibal thinks that’s as it should be. He would be ashamed to sign a mediocre peace agreement. He thinks again of his brother, beheaded, and of all the dead of all the past campaigns, and he knows they would have jeered at him in his nights of insomnia. Did he go through all that simply to sign a worthless treaty inside a Roman tent? It may yet happen . . . But not before he has had a chance to fight. And so he sets out his plans with a view to battle. He will position eighty elephants in the front line. And it could be that the Romans will turn pale at the sight of the mastodons. It will remind them of the forty elephants he had when crossing the Alps, how they poured onto the plain of Ticinus. Behind the elephants he will put the Gaulish mercenaries. They are capable of anything. They proved as much at Cannae. Nothing can make them retreat. Then will come the Carthaginians. He has been thinking about it for days already. And he knows that Scipio is doing the same on his side. He saw it in his gaze when they greeted each other. They spoke, and acted as if they were conversing, but each of them was already thinking about tomorrow’s battle.

  In a faraway hotel room in the past, Sullivan Sicoh watches as the girl gets up. She walks around the bed and goes into the bathroom, offering her buttocks and the light skin of her back to his gaze. How old is she? Twenty? He watches as she disappears, with her long blond hair. Silence fills the room. He lies there for a moment then slowly opens the drawer of the night table with one hand and takes out the bible. A faint smile passes over his lips. He leafs through the pages at random. Suddenly he freezes. There, before his eyes, he has just found the name that was waiting for him. He knows it will be his. It is so obvious. He mutters the words he has just read. He wants to hear them echo in the air of the little room that still smells of fixed-price love: “Death rather than my life.” He smiles again but his expression has changed, as if those lines had been written for him, and then he says out loud: “Job.” He pauses for a while, seems to be thinking, then gets up, takes his wallet, and goes over to the door to the bathroom. The girl inside is having a wash. It takes her a moment to hear his voice. When eventually she turns off the water, he explains that he will slide the money under the door, she mustn’t open it. She asks him if everything is all right, she sounds worried. She is probably not used to clients paying extra. He doesn’t answer and he slides the first twenty dollar bill, as he continues to explain: he wants her to stay there, in the bathroom, and call out to him, that’s all, call out several times. She asks him to repeat what he has said, she’s not sure she has really understood. He slides two more bills under the door and says again, call him by his name, that’s all, nothing else, but do it for a long time . . . Then he lies back down, folding his arms beneath his neck, in the bed that still smells of the effort of their bodies. Then the girl’s voice rings out and he closes his eyes to fill himself with it: “Sullivan . . . ? Sulli . . . ?”

  Assem pauses on the third floor, catches his breath, tries to make the most of the ambient calm one last time. He takes the little piece of paper from his pocket and reads again: “Last door end of the corridor to the left.” He walks ahead, down the corridor. The sounds from the street have faded. When he passes by one of the first doors, he thinks he can hear the sound of a television, or a radio. He goes on, until he is outside the door at the end. He knocks, and waits. Nothing.

  Again she says, “Sulli . . . ?” changing her tone, her voice more fearful, shrill.

  Assem listens out, knocks again. Still nothing. So he puts his hand on the door handle and the door opens slightly. He can hear the street sounds again, traffic. He goes through the door and sees a vast room overlooking the avenue he took to come here. One of the two big windows is open. There is no one. He walks into the room. Not a single piece of furniture, either. He goes further in, to see the other rooms. Everything is the same. An empty apartment. There is just an old wall-to-wall carpet on the floor, and this open window—a sign, at least, that someone came here not long ago. He breathes calmly, allows himself to be overcome by the silence of the place.

  “Sulli . . . ?” On she goes, conscientiously doing what she has been paid to do, calling again and again, changing her tone even when she must be in the process of getting dressed. “Sulli . . . ?” This is what he wanted to hear, in this soulless room to which he will never return: his absence. “Sulli . . . ?” He hears the void he will leave when he has left his life.

  The apartment is empty. Assem goes over everything he will not have to do: the false dialogue with Job, the moment he should have used the pretext of making a phone call or smoking a cigarette out on the balcony in order to alert the men waiting downstairs. All of that has just been scrubbed. Job is not here; perhaps he never even came to Addis Ababa. He is thumbing his nose at them. At him. At the men from the intelligence services who are trailing him. He will continue along his path of folly, and Assem is glad that it has turned out this way. And so he smiles, wipes his hand across his face to remove the sweat, leans out the open window, and gazes at the lion of Judah across the way, reigning with the immobility of a pharaoh over a nation of automobiles. He makes a sign with his hand for the men to come, and they come. He can already hear them climbing the steps four at a time, still believing there is a mission, when in fact there is nothing more than an empty apartment.

  “Sulli . . . ?” There is nothing left of Sullivan Sicoh, nothing but the name still uttered by the girl out of nowhere who will soon fall silent, the name echoing once, twice more, then nothing. And he knows in that instant that everything has truly been erased, that he has managed to escape from who he was.

  He leaves. No one is waiting for him anymore, and the Americans won’t need his feedback for their meeting this evening at the embassy. When he steps back out into the street, the heat outside seems to grab him by the cheeks. The air is so thick that it is almost hard to swallow. He heads toward his hotel when suddenly, behind his back, a voice calls to him: “Sir . . . Hey, sir . . . ” Initially he pays no attention. “Sir . . . ” Eventually he turns around: it is a handicapped man in a wheelchair that must be a hundred years old, with rusted armrests and creaking wheels. The man’s feet are atrophied, thin and twisted like a sickly wood. “Sir!” He is about to turn back and walk away, to leave the crippled man to follow him a few more steps then give up, but something in the man’s eyes stops him. Something like complicity, an initiated look. He walks up to him, takes out a banknote and hands it to him. The crowd pays no attention, sees no more in the scene than a white man giving mone
y to a beggar. The man gives a broad smile. He doesn’t say thank you. He stares him right in the eye and says, in English, “Tripoli. Hotel Radisson. June 27 at nine P.M.” And he adds, as a sort of strange signature, these words that he even finds hard to say: “So lamely and unfashionable/That dogs bark at me as I halt by them . . . Why I . . . Have no delight to pass away the time/Unless to see my shadow in the sun,” then he smiles at his truncated quotation, because he managed to say it in spite of everything. He senses that Assem has just understood, and that he will be entitled to claim the money he was promised for this errand. Time stands still. Assem can no longer hear the street around him. He is rooted to the spot, gripped by the words. Job is there between them, invisible, speaking through the mouth of the crippled man. Job is there, playing with Richard III and an Ethiopian paralytic, mocking the men from the US intelligence services. He recognizes his voice, even if it is coming from the lips of the disabled man, who does not know in whose name he is speaking, who probably never even met Sullivan Sicoh in his entire life, has done this simply for the cash they’ve promised him, but Assem knows these words come from Job and that the appointment is genuine. They will meet again. He will be able to ask him the questions that have been haunting him since their last meeting: What have we achieved? What are we obeying? He smiles, and suddenly feels good, in this stifling city amid this chaotic traffic. He will go to Tripoli. Did Job deliberately set this meeting in Libya? Does he want to test him, see if he has the nerve to go back there? Not because the country is at war, but because of the memories of an angry crowd and a dictator with a swollen face. It’s no mere coincidence. Is he taking him to Libya so that he, Assem, will be in a place where he is fragile? Perhaps he wants to see him naked, out of this world, confronted with the memory of his limits, the way he was out of this world in the helicopter taking him back from Abbottabad with his comrades screaming for joy as they looked at bin Laden’s body there at their feet, in that moment when he felt the irreconcilable split from the other men, perhaps that is what he wants . . . Wants him to agree to meet him in the place where something snapped inside him. Only then will they speak. And perhaps only then will Assem understand what it is that gives Job that fascinating gaze that is both feverish and cheerful, as if he thought the blazing world was ever so amusing, because he had penetrated its secrets.

  X

  ZAMA

  They will do to Palmyra what they did to Nimrud. The troop movements have confirmed that Islamic State is continuing to advance toward the oasis of Tadmur and the ancient city. She has to fight, do whatever she can. All morning she has been trying to reach Khaled al-Asaad on the telephone but with no luck. She is going around in circles in her office, fuming about the elderly gentleman, eighty-three years of age, who cannot be reached. She met him during a course in Syria. “Monsieur Palmyre,” everyone called him. She remembers his handsome, noble face, with his white hair and his big glasses that made him look like an Egyptian writer. She remembers his speeches, at the end of the dinner, which he sometimes delivered in Aramaic, to everyone’s amazement. He likes to do this. Not to impress the young students, but to allow the sounds of the old, old language to resonate one more time. That is his way of giving voice to the antiquity in humankind. Again she tries to phone him. Someone eventually answers. A young voice says hello. She introduces herself, says she is calling from UNESCO in Paris. She is speaking to his son, Walid. He explains that his father is at the site. That he will tell his father to call her as soon as he gets back. She takes the opportunity to ask about the situation. Walid is tense. His answers are brief. “We’re very worried. My father is working very hard, to take every precaution.” She voices a few encouraging words, thanks him, and hangs up. Men are working, hurrying about, thinking about how to protect the ruins while the country is burning. There is a world that is straining in its efforts to preserve Palmyra for future generations, and in its midst, men are fighting. And the venerable Khaled is still striding through the site he knows like the back of his hand, speaking Aramaic to the old stones.

  Zama will be the name of his victory, or of his defeat. It is time to find out. He gives the order to attack, and the eighty elephants charge, goaded by their drivers. They are headed straight for Scipio’s trap, but Hannibal doesn’t see it. For the time being he is doing his utmost to make sure his orders are properly transmitted. The collision between the two armies is brutal, like two bears towering over each other. The Romans want to erase the defeats at Cannae and Trasimene. Scipio is fighting to avenge his father and all the consuls before him who lived through the debacle. As for Hannibal, he is on his own territory and he knows that if he loses now even the trees will bleed. The thud and clamor of combat rises from the plain. All of Carthage holds its breath. At a five-hour march from Zama, the entire city is waiting to hear whether it will be plundered or will eclipse the Roman empire. Hannibal does not see that the elephants are penetrating into the lines. Or perhaps he sees it and is glad? He doesn’t see that they are penetrating too easily. The Roman velites withdraw, allow the mastodons to advance. Scipio smiles. Everything is going just as he hoped. By reenacting the battle of Cannae he will defeat Hannibal. He has been careful to leave spaces between the different units of his legion. The elephants move into the spaces. And before long, the same thing happens in Zama as in Gaugamela: Hannibal turns pale, just as Darius turned pale. Both of them, a century apart, see that the elephants are overexcited, panicking. The sound of clarions, the press and shove of bodies around them are terrifying. They go into a rage, wheel around, lash out at random, return, and, without realizing, charge their own line. They can no longer retreat, they have moved too far into the enemy lines. Then the legions close around them, and in Zama, as in Gaugamela a century earlier, the great elephants of war become useless, massive beasts, and all of a sudden their trumpeting is the precise anthem of disaster.

  “I absolutely will not move from here.”

  She tries one more time to persuade him. She tells him about the risk he is taking. The violence of these men who have death in their fingertips. She says he will be more useful out of harm’s way, that UNESCO needs his knowledge about the site. She says that they can arrange everything to bring him to Europe. She personally will see to it, but Khaled al-Asaad says again, “I will not move.”

  There is a long silence.

  And again she tries, with a soft voice, like a little girl pleading with her father: “Please, Monsieur Asaad . . . please.”

  Still he says nothing. Perhaps at this moment he is trying to gauge the consequences of his decision for himself and his family? Perhaps he can sense the future? When he starts to speak again, his voice is softer, too. He asks her not to be angry with him. “I’m an old man,” he says. “My life is over. If I leave, everything will have been in vain. I can’t, don’t you see? I am taking precautions. My son Walid and I are trying to hide as many pieces as we can. I will keep watch over the site for as long as I live. Imagine Priam leaving Troy before the Achaeans get there . . . it’s just not possible.”

  The conversation comes to an end. She knows she won’t manage to persuade him to leave. With his son he will stay on, they will be the guardians of an empty temple, waiting for death. He will stay because to go anywhere else is to admit defeat. Does his age protect him from fear? Is it because his life is almost over that events can no longer affect him? She prepares to hang up, asking him to send her news, not to hesitate if he needs anything. He says yes, of course, thanks her. She knows he will do no such thing. Old Priam has closed the gate to the city of Ilion and he is waiting for the barbarians. He is doomed to watch as the world crumbles around him—there, from the place that is his: Tadmur, the pearl of the desert, the city of Queen Zenobia, whose sole guardian is an old man, eighty-three years of age, pacing to and fro between the columns and the ruins, keeping watch over the funerary towers and entrusting his fear to the evening wind.

  In Zama as in Cannae, the first line holds. It ret
reats gradually, allowing the enemy to move in, and all Scipio has to do is what Hannibal himself did, as if in a sort of homage to the master, a vast circling movement that ensnares the Carthaginians. The Roman commander lowers his arm. This is the order to charge that Masinissa and his Numidan cavalry have been waiting for. They spur the flanks of their horses to make the enemy scream. Masinissa knows he has won, that henceforth he will reign over Numidia, from Siga to Cirta, that his rival, Syphax, will be swept aside. He knows he has just won his wager, and that he was right to change sides and betray Carthage, for very soon it will be nothing. The cavalry of the Massylii charge, and Hannibal knows that there is nothing left to do but leave Zama. He goes away, just as Darius went away, leaving the men behind him to finish dying. Some may yet fight, courageously. In the anonymity of the mêlée, there are surely still some warriors who will put their rage into the fight to repel the enemy, but to no avail. It will take time, a few hours or more, until the combatants’ strength is depleted, until everyone sees that defeat is certain, until their bodies tremble with fatigue, and the most valiant among them resign themselves to placing one knee on the ground, and let their throats be cut.