Zone

by Mathias Enard

  It’s unfair and no one can do anything about it. The Russian clodhoppers are so heavy that Intissar feels as if she’s glued to the ground.

  She plays at loading and unloading her rifle as she thinks about Marwan. The well-oiled mechanism is reassuring, it’s still working perfectly. A little after noon. At dawn Beirut smelled not of thyme but of burning trash. Yesterday too. She slept in a stairway. Abu Nasser woke her gently around six in the morning. He said: Marwan has fallen.

  Now he’s the martyr Marwan. They’ll print posters with his photo and paste them onto the walls of the city. If there’s still a city left. If there’s still anything left to print posters with. If they still have time. If time still exists.

  The sea is everywhere. Beirut is an island. Where could they go? Intissar has never left Beirut. She has never slept anywhere but in Beirut. No, that’s wrong, once she slept in Tripoli and, when she was little, a few days in the mountains. Beirut is her island.

  Defeat is all the more obvious when no one wants to acknowledge it. Their possible exile is proclaimed as a victory. The Palestinians have gloriously resisted the Israeli army. The resistance continues. The glorious fight for the liberation of Palestine continues. In the stench spread by the bombardments, Intissar wonders whether Palestine really exists. Whether something besides the Palestinians themselves (a piece of land, a homeland) exists, Palestinians who scatter their dead throughout the Middle East like wheat. There are Palestinian graves all over the world, now. And Marwan lying dead somewhere. Intissar closes her eyes to keep back tears of impotent rage. Despite herself she sees again the most horrible corpse of the siege—in Khalde, a combatant crushed by a tank on the road, as easily as a rat or a bird. His faceless head was a flat puddle of reddened hair. The first-aid people from the Red Crescent had had to peel him off of the asphalt with a shovel. Around the body, a circular pool of viscera and blood, as if someone had stepped on a tomato. Palestinians cling to the land.

  She goes on playing mechanically with the rifle. Marwan is dead. When she asked Abu Nasser how he had died, he didn’t know what to say. He said: I wasn’t there, Intissar. Abu Nasser has four sons. He was born in Jerusalem. He has a fine greying beard and lives in a big apartment in Raouche.

  She’d like to know how he fell. Ya Intissar, ya Intissar, istashhad Marwan. That’s all she knows. She hears the bombings, it’s like everyday music, a drumbeat or heartbeat. The planes are tearing the sky apart. She wishes Marwan a fine death. Without pain, without anxiety, a sudden flight, a disappearance into the sea or into the sun. She sees again Marwan’s hands, Marwan’s smile, feels the absence of Marwan’s mouth, his chest.

  She goes out to go to the main command post. Fighters are running, shouting, calling to each other, the battle is still raging, she discovers. At the southern entrance to the city. In the mountain. Everywhere. The Israelis are making statements on the radio, on television. In the South the Shiites welcomed them as liberators. Villages tired of supporting Palestinian fighters. Tired of being poor, bombed, and despised. Cowards. Traitors. Abu Nasser hesitates to send Intissar to the front. She insists. I want to know what happened to Marwan, she says. Did . . . Did they bring back his body? Abu Nasser doesn’t know. His voice catches in his throat. Everything’s going badly, my little one, everything’s going badly. Look for Habib Barghouti and the others, they were with him yesterday. Take care of yourself. I’ll come soon.

  Without Marwan she’d never have taken up arms. Defeat would have another taste. She’d be looking desperately for water in the midst of rubble. Or dead at home in Borj Barajne, in unbearable heat, in the burning wind from the bombs. How much time now? Soon nothing of the city will be left. The sea, that’s all. The indestructible sea.

  She sees a Jeep full of comrades leaving for the front. The front. That’s a funny word. You defend yourself. You’re besieged. Finally being as close as possible to the Israeli tanks is an enviable position, you don’t risk a napalm bomb or a phosphorus shell. Near the southern part of the city the streets are strewn with debris, charred cars, the heat from explosions drew waves in the asphalt, like a rippling black rug. The civilians are hiding. To the east Israelis are in the museum, where they’ve been fighting for weeks, she thinks. Or maybe just a few days. By the airport too. Yesterday she drank half a bottle of water for the entire day. Bread is rationed. Just thinking about the smell of canned tuna or sardines makes her nauseous.

  The only Israeli she ever saw was the corpse of a soldier, fallen in a skirmish. Brown-haired, young, not many things distinguished him from the Palestinian fighters, once he was dead. Only once he was dead. On the other side they have things to drink and eat, weapons, ammunition, tanks, planes. Here there’s nothing but a city stuck between the sky and the sea, dry and burning. They already have Palestine. Beirut is the last star in Palestine’s sky, flickering. And about to go out, to become a meteor and sink into the Mediterranean.

  •

  “Intissar? Marwan is . . .”

  “I know. Abu Nasser told me.”

  On the ground floor of a half-destroyed building, fortified by the rubble and fallen rocks from the upper storeys, in the midst of anti-tank rockets and two 30-caliber machine guns, the four Fatah fighters smoke joints, bare-chested. The smoke makes you thirsty. The smell of hashish softens the smell of sweat a little. From time to time one of them looks out onto the street through an opening in the wall. Intissar sits down on the floor. Habib makes as if to pass her the joint, but she shakes her head.

  “We’re waiting. No one knows what’s going to happen.”

  “How . . . how did he . . . ?”

  Habib is a giant of great gentleness, with a childlike face.

  “Last night. A little further away, there, at the front. With Ahmad. On reconnaissance just before dawn. Ahmad is in the hospital, lightly wounded. He told us he saw Marwan fall, hit by many machine-gun bullets in the back. He couldn’t bring him back.”

  The possibility that Marwan might still be alive makes her heart skip a beat.

  “But then how can you be sure?”

  “You know how it is, Intissar. He’s dead, that’s for sure.”

  “We could call the Red Crescent maybe, so they could go look for him?”

  “They won’t come this far, Intissar, not right away in any case. They’ll wait to be sure, to have authorization from the Israelis. There’s nothing to do.”

  Habib breathes in his smoke, looking sad but convinced. She knows he’s right. Now the front is calm. Defeat. She imagines Marwan’s body decomposing in the sun between the lines. A burning tear trickles out of her left eye. She goes to sit down a little farther away, her back to the wall. Here the smell of urine has replaced that of hashish. The comrades leave her to her pain. The silence is terrifying. Not one plane, not one explosion, not one tank engine, not one word. The crushing sun of midday. Marwan a hundred meters away. Maybe the Israelis have picked him up. No one likes having bodies decomposing in his camp. Ahmad. He had to have fallen in the company of Ahmad the coward. Treacherous, cunning, vicious. He might have been lying to cover himself. Maybe he shot himself in the foot. Maybe he killed Marwan. She mechanically loads her Kalashnikov, all the combatants turn around, surprised. The metallic click of the breech resounded like a knife on cement. She wishes the fighting would begin again immediately. She wants to shoot. To fight. To avenge Marwan stretched out over there. At this moment Arafat and the others are with American envoys negotiating their departure. To go where? 10,000 Fedayeen. How many civilians? 500,000 maybe. To go to Cyprus? Algiers? To fight whom? And who is going to protect the ones that stay? The Lebanese? This silence is unbearable, maybe just as unbearable as the heat.

  Habib and the others have begun playing cards, without much enthusiasm. The weight of defeat.

  Most of the fighters are nomads. Some are escapees from Jordan, who settled in Beirut in the late 1970s; others took part in operations in the South; still others joined the PLO after 1975. All of them nomads, whether they’
re children from the camps or refugees from 1948, or from 1967, whom war surprised far from their homes and who were never able to go back. Abu Nasser crossed the Lebanese border on foot. He never returned to Galilee. Marwan neither. Intissar was born in Lebanon, in 1951; her parents, from Haifa, had already settled in Beirut before the creation of Israel. Often, watching the old railroad tracks in Mar Mikhail, she thinks that the trains used to come slowly down the coast to Palestine, passing through Saida, Tyre, and Acre; today the space has grown so much smaller around her that it’s impossible for her to even go to Forn El Chebbak or Jounieh. The only ones that can travel through the region without difficulty are the Israeli planes. Even the sea is forbidden to us. The Israeli navy is patrolling and firing missiles. Habib and the shabab are children of the camps, sons of refugees of 1948. Palestinians from the outside. Palestinians. Who resuscitated this biblical term, and when? The English probably. Under the Ottomans there was no Palestine. There was the vilâyet of Jerusalem, the department of Haifa or Safed. Palestinians had existed for barely thirty years before they lost their territory and sent a million refugees on the roads. Marwan was a militant as soon as he was old enough to speak. Marwan sincerely thought that only war could return Palestine to the Palestinians. Or at least something to the Palestinians. The injustice was intolerable. Marwan was an admirer of Leila Khaled and the members of the PFLP who hijacked airplanes and kidnapped diplomats. Intissar thought you had to defend yourself. That you couldn’t let yourself be massacred by fascists, then by F16s and tanks without reacting.

  Now Marwan is dead, his body is turning black under the Beirut sun near the airport, a scant hundred kilometers from his birthplace.

  Ahmad. Ahmad’s presence next to Marwan disturbs Intissar. Ahmad the cruel. Ahmad the coward. What were they doing together? Ever since the incident they were joined solely by a common cause and a cold hatred. But the first time she saw Ahmad something in her trembled. It was on the front line, a year earlier, when some combatants were returning from the South. Ahmad was almost carried in triumph. He was handsome, crowned with victory. A group of Fedayeen had gotten into the security zone, had confronted a unit of the Israeli army and destroyed a vehicle. Even Marwan admired their courage. Intissar had shaken Ahmad’s hand and congratulated him. Men change. Weapons transform them. Weapons and the illusion that they produce. The false power they give. What you think you can obtain by using them.

  What earthly purpose can the Kalashnikov, which is lying across her thighs like a newborn child, serve now? What can she get with her rifle, three olive trees and four stones? A kilo of Jaffa oranges? Vengeance. She will get peace for her soul. Avenge the man she loves. Then defeat will be consummate, the city will sink into the sea, and everything will disappear.

  V

  half-starved wretch sublime those Palestinians with the heavy shoes what a story I wonder if it’s true Intissar pretty name I imagine her beautiful and strong, I am luckier than she is, I went to Palestine, to Israel, to Jerusalem I saw paralyzed pilgrims one-armed people one-legged people people with no legs weird people bigots tourists mystics visionaries one-eyed people blind people priests Catholic and Orthodox pastors monks nuns every kind of habit all the rites Greeks Armenians Latins Irish Melchites Syriacs Ethiopians Germans Russians and when they weren’t too busy “fighting over cherry stems while ignoring the cherries” as the French saying goes all these lovely folk mourned the death of Christ on the cross the Jews lamented their temple the Muslims their martyrs fallen the day before and all these lamentations rose up in the Jerusalem sky sparkling with gold at sunset, the bells accompanied the muezzins at top volume the ambulance sirens drowned out the bells the haughty soldiers shouted bo, bo at suspects and loaded their assault rifles one finger on the trigger ready to fire at ten-year-old kids if they had to, fear strangely was in their camp, the Israeli soldiers sweated from fear, at the checkpoints there was always a sniper ready to fire a bullet into the heads of terrorists, staked out behind bags of sand a twenty-year-old conscript spent his day keeping Palestinians in his sights, their faces in his cross-hairs: the Israelis know that something will happen sooner or later, the whole point is to guess where, who, and when, the Israelis wait for catastrophe and it always ends up coming, a bus, a restaurant, a café, Nathan said that was the most discouraging aspect of their work, Nathan Strasberg the one in charge of “foreign relations” for the Mossad took me around Jerusalem and stuffed me with falafel, don’t believe the Lebanese or the Syrians, he said, the best falafel is Israeli, Nathan was born in Tel Aviv in the 1950s his parents, survivors from Łódź, were still alive, that’s all I knew about him, he was a good officer the Mossad is an excellent agency, never losing sight of its objectives, cooperation with them was always cordial, sometimes effective—out of dozens of Palestinian, Lebanese, American sources they were the best on international Islamic terrorism, on Syrian, Iraqi, or Iranian activities, they kept watch over the traffic in arms and drugs, anything that could finance Arab agencies or parties at close range or from a distance, all the way to American and European politics, that was the game, they readily collaborated with us on some cases while trying to block us on others—Lebanon especially, where they thought that any political support for Hezbollah was a danger for Israel, Hezbollah was for them hard to penetrate, nothing at all like the divided, greedy Palestinians: the sources on Hezbollah were fragile not very reliable very expensive and always liable to be manipulated from above, of course with Nathan we never spoke about that, he showed me thrice-holy Jerusalem with a real pleasure, in the old city you heard dozens of languages being spoken from Yiddish to Arabic not counting the liturgical languages and the contemporary dialects of tourists or pilgrims from all over the world, the Holy City could duplicate all joys and all conflicts, as well as all the various cuisines smells tastes from the borscht and kreplach of Eastern Europe to the Ottoman basturma and soujouk in a mélange of religious fervor commercial buzz sumptuous lights chants shouts and hatred where the history of Europe and the Muslim world seemed to wind up despite itself, Herod Rome the caliphs the Crusaders Saladin Suleiman the Magnificent the British Israel the Palestinians confronted each other there argued over the place in the narrow walls that we watched grow blanketed with purple at sunset, over a drink with Nathan at the King David Hotel, the sumptuous luxury hotel that also seemed to be at the heart of the world: famous for the attack of the Irgun Zionist terrorists who had killed a hundred people in 1946, the hotel had also welcomed exiles, unfortunate monarchs dislodged from their thrones by one conflict or another, Haile Selassie pious emperor of Ethiopia driven away by the Italians in 1936 or the disastrous Alfonso XIII of Spain put to flight by the Republic in 1931 who ended his days in the Grand Hotel on the Piazza Esedra in Rome, for a few weeks Alfonso XIII occupied a suite on the fifth floor of the King David in Jerusalem where he had a view over the gardens and the old city, I wonder what the Iberian sovereign thought about when he contemplated the landscape, about Christ probably, about the Spanish monarchy that he saw go out in one last golden reflection on the Dome of the Rock and that he hoped to see come to life again: they say that Alfonso XIII collected slippers, he had dozens of them, plain, embroidered, or luxurious and all those wools those furs those felts around his feet were his real home in exile, in Jerusalem Alfonso XIII bought sandals which he was still wearing when he expired in his Roman luxury hotel without having seen Madrid again, condemned to international hotels those chateaux of the poor—at the King David bar that British jewel I sip my bourbon in the company of Nathan without knowing that Jerusalem would soon catch fire, we spoke about the end of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict not knowing that violence would very soon resume on the Temple Mount, you could make it out in the distance, that’s where my collection begins, in Jerusalem talking with Nathan in the golden-brown twilight, the man of the Mossad an accomplice despite himself gives me some pieces of information, the first, about Harmen Gerbens the alcoholic Cairo Batavian, out of kindness, without questioning me abo
ut my interest in this forty-year-old affair, wanting to please me, just as he offered me falafel in the old city and whiskies at the King David he told me that Harmen Gerbens had of course never worked for Israel, but his name appeared in an old file on the Suez expedition that Nathan had gotten from the Shin Bet, cleared of ever-embarrassing military considerations four decades later—why this interest in the old Dutchman, in the “foreigners” rounded up in Egypt in 1956 and 1967, in the Qanatar Prison, maybe it was the effect of Jerusalem, a yearning for penance or a way of the cross, do we always know what the gods are reserving for us what we are reserving for ourselves, the plan we form, from Jerusalem to Rome, from one eternal city to the other, the apostle who three times denied his friend in the pale dawn after a stormy night perhaps guided my hand, who knows, there are so many coincidences, paths that cross in the great fractal seacoast where I’ve been floundering for ages without knowing it, ever since my ancestors my forefathers my parents me my dead and my guilt, Alfonso XIII driven out of his country by history and collectivity, the individual against the crowd, the monarch’s slippers for his crown, his body versus the function of his body: to be both an individual in a train crossing Italy and the bearer of a sad piece of the past in an entirely ordinary plastic suitcase wherein is written the fate of hundreds of men who are dead or on the point of disappearing, to work as pen-pusher man of the shadows informer after having been a child then a student then a soldier for a cause that seemed just to me and that probably was, to be a string on the bobbin that the goddess spins as she proceeds on a straight path among passengers each one in his body pushed towards the same terminus if they don’t get off along the way, in Bologna or Florence, to meet one of those madmen who haunt the station platforms announcing the end of the world: my neighbor has turned on his Walkman, I hear sounds but can’t really tell what he’s listening to, I can make out a high-pitched rhythm superimposed over that of the train tracks, Sashka can’t live without music either, CDs galore Russian or Hebrew airs melodies ancient or modern when I met her the night was very dark, a glance is stronger than a ship’s mooring says a Dalmatian proverb one look and you’re pulled out to sea—in the little Roman streets painted with ivy, perfumed by rain, stricken too with the sickness of history and death like Jerusalem Alexandria Algiers or Venice, I cling to lies and to Sashka’s arm, I pretend to forget Paris the Boulevard Mortier violence and wars the way, when I was a child, a ray of light would always slip beneath the door to reassure me, the distant conversations of the adults lulled me with indistinct murmurs pushing me little by little into the world of dreams, Sashka is the nearby body of a distant being, surrounded as we are by all these ghosts my dead and hers whom we resist by putting our arms round each other’s shoulders near the sad Tiber great carrier of refuse, it’s over, I left Paris my civil servant’s studio apartment my books my souvenirs my habits my lunches with my parents I filled lots of trash bags threw it all out or almost all got loaded one last time by accident in my old neighborhood slipped into the skin of Yvan Deroy and farewell, on the road to the end of the world and a new life, they all float past the window in the darkened plain, Nathan Strasberg, Harmen Gerbens, and the ghosts of the suitcase, the torturers of Algeria, the executioners of Trieste, all that foam on the sea, a white slightly sickening froth made from the putrescence of a load of corpses, I needed patience to collect them, patience, time, intrigues, leads, not losing the thread, consulting thousands of archives, buying my sources, convincing them by following the rules of information-gathering I’d learned haphazardly through the years, sorting through the information, compiling it, organizing it into a file that can be consulted easily, by name, date, place, and so on, personal stories life stories worthy of the best Communist paranoid administrations, archives such as there are by the millions records traces—maybe it was in The Hague that I began, in 1998 before Jerusalem I take a few days’ leave to go to the International Court of Justice where the trial of General Blaškić was taking place, the commander in Vitez of the HVO the army of the Bosnian Croats, in his box at the beginning of the hearing Tihomir Blaškić recognizes me and nods to me, after becoming brigadier-general he is facing twenty major charges, among them six infractions of the Geneva conventions, eleven violations of the laws and customs of war, and three crimes against humanity, committed in the context of “grave violations of humanitarian international law against Bosnian Muslims” between May 1992 and January 1994, I left Bosnia on February 25, 1993, I had gotten there from Croatia in April 1992, and after a few months’ stay on the front near Mostar I joined Tihomir Blaškić in central Bosnia, his headquarters had since November 1992 been located in the Vitez Hotel, he was an efficient, respected officer, I felt bad when I saw him in the midst of that multilingual administrative circus of the ICJ where a large chunk of time was lost in arguments over procedure, in misunderstandings of the American prosecutor’s quibbles, in countless witnesses and hours and atrocities while I knew perfectly well who had committed them, I could see again the places, the flames, the battles, the punitive expeditions until my departure after Andrija’s death: at bottom I hadn’t been attached to anything, theoretically I was answerable to the Croatian army but we were supposed to have resigned and left for Bosnia so as not officially to embarrass Croatia, I went to see the captain then the major I said I’m leaving I can’t stand it any more they replied but we need you I said think of me as having fallen in battle Blaškić gave me a funny look and asked me are you OK? I answered can’t complain, then he gave the order to sign my travel papers and I left, I crossed the lines to go back through Mostar then Split whence I reached Zagreb, I moved into a shabby boarding house I bought sneakers that were too small for me I remember I had only combat boots, I didn’t know where to go, I remember calling Marianne crying like a baby I don’t even know anymore if I was drunk, I felt guilty for abandoning my comrades, guilty for my share of the destroying, the killing, I dreamed for hours and hours on end without really sleeping, I dreamed of funeral ceremonies where Andrija blamed me for having abandoned his body I walked for kilometers in the mountains to find him to put him on a tall wooden pyre and burn him, his face was outlined then in the smoke that rose to the heart of the spring sky—all that came back to me all of a sudden as I saw Blaškić in his box at The Hague among the lawyers the interpreters the prosecutors the witnesses the journalists the onlookers the soldiers of the UNPROFOR who analyzed the maps for the judges commented on the possible provenance of bombs according to the size of the crater determined the range of the weaponry based on the caliber which gave rise to so many counter-arguments all of it translated into three languages recorded automatically transcribed 4,000 kilometers away from the Vitez Hotel and from the Lašva with the blue-tinted water, everything had to be explained from the beginning, historians testified to the past of Bosnia, Croatia, and Serbia since the Neolithic era by showing how Yugoslavia was formed, then geographers commented on demographic statistics, censuses, land surveys, political scientists explained the different political forces present in the 1990s, it was magnificent, so much knowledge wisdom information at the service of justice, “international observers” took on full meaning then, they testified to the horrors of slaughter with a real professionalism, the debates were courteous, for a time I would have volunteered as a witness, but neither the prosecution nor the defense had any interest in having me appear and my new occupations imposed discretion on me, for a long time I thought about what I would have said if they had questioned me, how would I have explained the inexplicable, probably I too would have had to go back to the dawn of time, to the frightened prehistoric man painting in his cave to reassure himself, to Paris making off with Helen, to the death of Hector, the sack of Troy, to Aeneas reaching the shores of Latium, to the Romans carrying off the Sabine women, to the military situation of the Croats of central Bosnia in early 1993, to the weapons factory in Vitez, to the trials at Nuremberg and Tokyo that are the father and mother of the one in The Hague—Blaškić in his box is one
single man and has to answer for all our crimes, according to that principle of individual criminal responsibility which links him to history, he’s a body in a chair wearing a headset, he is on trial in place of all those who held a weapon, he will be condemned to forty-five years in prison then to nine years on appeal and today he must be taking advantage of his early release near Kiseljak, not very far from the villages where the burnt bodies of civilians for whose deaths he was blamed lie, those people who are still waiting for a justice that will never come, in the very Dutch Hague there was such a procession of ex-Yugoslavs that it was a headache to arrange their court appearances without all those people meeting each other in the planes, trains, or cars before finding themselves all together in the luxurious cells of the detention building or the antechambers of the hearing rooms, the vanished country was reconstituted one last time by international law, Serbs Croats Bosnians of all kinds Montenegrins fell into each others’ arms or pretended they didn’t recognize each other, they were there to speak about their war to air their dirty linen in front of judges who of course could be neither Serbs nor Croats nor Bosnians nor Montenegrins nor even Macedonian or Albanian or Slovenian, only their defenders were, and this international community that judged them indirectly watched with a remote air all these barbarians with unpronounceable names, hundreds of thousands of pages of trials became a distressing ocean, a tidal wave of justice in which the victims who had come to testify floundered, the displaced the tortured the beaten the raped the plundered the widows usually cried behind closed doors in a room with lowered blinds and their stories didn’t leave the glassed-in cages of the interpreters, consigned to court reports in English or French for posterity, without the judges hearing the accents the dialects the expressions of their voices that traced a real map of pain—they all took the plane home afterwards with a taste of bile in their mouths for having returned seen their enemies their torturers or their memories without their hatred or their love or their loyalty or their suffering serving any purpose at all, characters in the Great Trial organized by international lawyers immersed in precedents and the jurisprudence of horror, charged with putting some order into the law of murder, with knowing at what instant a bullet in the head was legitimate de jure and at what instant it constituted a grave breach of the law and customs of war, referring endlessly to the rulings of Nuremberg, Jerusalem, Rwanda, historical precedents recognized as such by the status of the court, retracing customary international law in the interpretation of the Geneva conventions, peppering their verdicts with flowery, apposite Latin expressions, devoted, yes, all these people were very devoted to distinguishing the different modes of crimes against humanity before saying gentlemen I think we’ll adjourn for lunch or because of repairs in Hall 2 the Chamber requests the parties to postpone the hearings planned for this afternoon until a later date, let’s say in two months, the time of the law is like that of the Church, you work for eternity, at least all this palaver offered a distraction to the defendants, they listened for months on end to the story of their country and their war, interested as you’d be by a good film, or maybe bored by its repetitiveness, I stayed for three days in The Hague I wondered if someone was going to recognize me and shout police! police! when they saw me but no—my name must have appeared somewhere in an investigative report though, buried there with the others, lying black on white among the dead and the survivors of our brigade, maybe with the list of our civilian victims on the facing page, intentional or accidental, as accidental as a mortar shell can be when it buries a family under rubble, I feel as if I’m floating all of a sudden, the train is passing over a series of switches and is dancing, the lights of the countryside pirouette around us in a random ballet that makes me nauseous or is it the memory of the war, I took advantage of the trip to The Hague to go as far as Groningen, to see the multicolored houses lining the canal that surrounds the city center, the main square had a magnificent tower, the sea and the islands quite close, Germany a few kilometers to the east, an average quiet city with a glorious past, I strolled at random in the streets downtown before finding a very handsome hotel near the canal in a seventeenth-century building with the evocative name Auberge du Corps de Garde, Inn of the Guard Corps, just like that, in French, which led me to think that they spoke that language, the first thing I did after settling in was to rush to the phone book, there were two Gerbens, initials A.J. and T., one living a little outside the city and the other near the venerable university south of the center, according to the map, if Harmen Gerbens the old Cairo-dweller had had two daughters they had probably gotten married and taken the name of their husbands, the receptionist at the Guard Corps was nice but suspicious, what did I want with these Gerbens, I asked her if the name was common she replied no, not really, I decided to explain the story to her, in Cairo I had met an old man from Groningen named Harmen Gerbens who had asked me to say hello to his family for him, a white lie the old drunkard would rather have spat on the ground, she suddenly looked moved and decided to help me, to pick up the telephone and ask for me if the first Gerbens in the phone book knew a Harmen residing in Cairo, I couldn’t understand a scrap of the conversation but the young woman was smiling at me and nodding her head as she spoke, before putting her hand over the receiver and explaining to me—it was his nephew, he in fact did have an uncle named Harmen who left for Egypt after the war, she was all excited about it, ask him if I can meet him, please, she took up the telephone again and her Dutch conversation—this first Gerbens in the phone book was a doctor and received visits in the afternoon, I made an appointment for four o’clock and went to eat herring in a passable restaurant by the water, fortunately the weather was nice, a pale autumn light and a sea breeze perfumed the landscape, what questions was I going to ask this doctor, what attracted me in Harmen’s story, in the shadiness I thought I discerned in it, my head full of war memories rekindled by The Hague, pursued by the impenetrable face of Blaškić on the accused bench, heroes, fighters, the dead, feats of arms, it’s time I kill as I walk along the canal, a few moored canalboats remind me that from here you can reach the Rhine then the Rhone leading to the Mediterranean and thus reach Alexandria, the Venetian tradesmen brought back furs from Holland that they exchanged for spices and brocades, according to my illustrated guide Groningen was a prosperous trading city where they imported tobacco from the colonies, it’s almost time, the pleasant receptionist showed me how to reach the nephew’s office: as four o’clock strikes I’m facing a man in his fifties in a white lab coat, he knows English, he is polite, somewhat surprised to hear about a relative he’s never met, I thought he was dead, he says, if I remember right my aunt said he was dead, she died a few years ago, my cousins are married and they live in Amsterdam—my father is no longer in this world, carried off by tobacco and alcohol, so far as I know after the war he was never very close to his brother, they weren’t on the same side, you see, my father was a resistant and my uncle, hmm, not so much, I think they fell out with each other, at the Liberation my uncle was forced to flee to avoid the death penalty, he escaped from the military prison not long before his execution, what had he done to deserve such a sentence? I asked, I don’t know, the doctor stammers, I don’t know anything about it, he’d been a Nazi I guess, I confess I never tried much to find out, you understand, my parents never spoke about it, it’s strange to think he’s still alive, over there in Egypt, it’s just as strange that the British didn’t arrest him when he arrived in 1947, I thanked the doctor and left imagining Gerbens’s two daughters, they the daughters of a traitor and he the son of a hero, maybe they’re both murderers but for different causes, the two children of Harmen the Cairo Nazi probably bore the mark of the absence of a father despised by his homeland whom they had never tried to see again, just as they had never seen their father’s family again, they had changed cities, changed their name by marriage and left this gap in their genealogy to their descendants, when she returned to Holland Gerbens’s wife must have declared her husband in Egypt dead, and
had condemned him to keel over alone and far away in the exile of Garden City and alcohol which was one of his many prisons, probably the strongest one, along with his past, Harmen Gerbens the old Nazi locked up so many times, in Holland, in Qanater, at his place in Garden City, in Metaxa, and in Egyptian brandy, condemned to watch himself die as he remembered perhaps the death’s head on his SS collar, which had not stopped accompanying him all throughout his existence like an invisible tattoo—did he remember the people he had loaded into trains headed east, the women he had raped in the Westerbork camp, how far back did memory go, Harmen Gerbens took his place in the list in the suitcase—I went back to the Guard Corps hotel, it started to rain, I thanked the receptionist warmly, I told her mission accomplished and she smiled at me as she handed me the key to my room, and tonight in the Plaza when the unknown man comes to take possession of the briefcase and hand over my cash I’ll toast the health of the receptionist and the doctor in Groningen, of Gerbens’s daughters, of Nathan Strasberg the Jew from Łódź who in Jerusalem translated the appendix to the Shin Bet report for me, he thought it rather ironic that Israeli intervention had the effect of sending a former Nazi to prison in Cairo, it was a kind of relief for him, Nathan was also compiling lists, endless lists of targets, of men to kill, of Palestinian personnel hostile to the Oslo agreements, PFLP, DFLP, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, the new “refusal movement” constituted a major risk for the Mossad, and Nathan was gathering information on their schemes, not knowing that very soon after the beginning of the second Intifada he was going to have to murder most of these people, according to the nice doctrine of preventative murder, with air-to-ground missiles over Gaza or Merkava tanks in the West Bank camps, Nathan was a little chubby smiled a lot and was full of good humor I wonder where he is today, a little closer to the end of the world, as the train is crossing the Po almost without slowing down, a factory slips by in white neon lights behind brick walls, a tall structure, metal girders lit here and there by red lamps like a boat—in Venice Ghassan Antoun worked in Porto Marghera in a similar petrochemical establishment, an immense jumble of tubes and storage tanks also lit at night by red lamps that appeared out of the fog, he went home in the early dawn by bus, over the bridge called the “Freedom Bridge” that joins Venice to terra firma and commemorates the end of Austrian domination, Ghassan always gave off a strange smell, like peanuts or grilled corn, washing didn’t do any good this strange chemical smell never left him, it only diminished a little according to his distance from the factory, without ever completely disappearing: the night shift stole his body from him without ever entirely returning it to him, contaminated by familiar and unsettling effluvia, the way a soldier on campaign smells of sweat and grease, I met him at dawn in a bar where daybreak freed me from my walking insomnia, we were both going home like exhausted frozen vampires, he with an anorak over his blue overalls I with my eternal hat shoved down to my eyebrows, he reminded me immediately of Andrija the Slavonic, go figure, there was nothing similar in their features, aside maybe from an unsuitability of the body for its clothes, Andrija always badly dressed the uniform never fit him, either too big or too small, his outfits were stained and his kit dangled oddly he always looked awkward, weighed down by the bag, the ammunition, the weapons and Ghassan in his blue worksuit crammed into the anorak had the same ungainly walk that went with his eternal smile and the little mustache he was so proud of, Andrija killed in central Bosnia near Vitez was reincarnated in the damp cold dawn of a café in Venice, a proletarian café by the lagoon not far from the romantic island cemetery of San Michele—Stravinsky, Diaghilev, Ezra Pound the old madman—which I hadn’t deemed it wise yet to visit, Andrija’s absence, I was probably looking for a replacement for him, a substitute in the great solitary boredom of La Serenissima: Ghassan lived a stone’s throw away in a damp dark apartment that he shared with his cousin head waiter at a luxury hotel Riva degli Schiavoni, that morning we had coffee side by side without exchanging a word, at least that’s what I remember, maybe our countless breakfasts at dawn in the course of the months that followed are superimposed over that first meeting, I forget at what instant exactly I spoke to Ghassan for the first time, I don’t think our friendship was immediate, as they say, in the yellowish lighting of the Piacenza station and the air-conditioning of the train that keeps me from smelling his factory odor, friendship or camaraderie needs time, experience, and if in love the union of bodies gives each the illusion of profound knowledge of the other, so the effluvia of fighters, their sweat and their blood, gives the illusion of intimacy, Ghassan and I observed each other for a long time without sharing anything, despite (or maybe because of) the similarity of our personal stories, the strange points in common that were immediately guessed, the empathy and the resemblance, real or imagined, with Andrija and his mustache, just as in this overheated train I don’t speak to my neighbor, despite the points of contact that could link our existences together, of which this motionless journey is an example, what is he going to discover, where will he get out, Bologna, Florence, or Rome, he looks like he’s bored stiff, his Pronto in his hand, he too is looking out the window Piacenza is fading away and the industrial zone is starting up its intermittent lights, which the night of this flat fertile countryside hides from us at the border of Emilia, crossed by the train—soon Ghassan will be forty, if he’s still alive despite the recent avalanche of corpses in Beirut: did he become one of the bodyguards for Elie Hobeika or some obscure Christian second-in-command, did he take up the weapons he had abandoned in 1991, fleeing the arrival of the Syrian Great Brother in his corner of the mountains, who knows, I left Ghassan when I left Venice, and afterwards, in Trieste or during one of my trips to Beirut on business as they say, I didn’t seek him out, he had told me though where his family lived, right in the middle of the hill of Achrafieh that overlooks the eastern side of the city, he had said that from the roof of his building you could see the sea, much bluer than in Venice, much more sea-like than that interminably flat lagoon: the eastern Mediterranean its colors marked by the seasons like a tree, from grey to turquoise, beneath the immense sky of Lebanon that the mountains make even vaster by limiting it, in the reflections of the summits, Ghassan vanished like Andrija, finally disappeared in his turn and maybe helped by age didn’t I try to replace him too, to fill the void left by the end of that cold friendship that began in a bar at dawn facing the island of San Michele the floating cemetery of Venice with its corner for foreigners, we saw each other every morning or almost at daybreak, Ghassan was emerging from his factory of fertilizers or God knows what putrid residue and I from my nocturnal wanderings, a way to escape the woman who had joined me in Venice whom I no longer wanted to see, I think, unless the opposite was true, she obstinately refused to go to bed with me arguing that Venice made her depressed, which was probably true, she was always cold, she didn’t eat much, but today I realize that she was my reflection, that I was the depressed one, most likely, motionless in Venice as I am now in this train, on my way to recovery, to oblivion, to two years of war I lost roaming through Croatia and Bosnia, I had wanted Marianne to join me but I preferred solitude and the company of Ghassan, Nayef, and the others, we didn’t meet often, she slept at night, whereas I slept during the day, exhausted by insomnia—maybe that was the consequence of two years of amphetamines, two years of cultivating the body, two years of fear of dying in the mud, huge hangovers two years of bullets bombs alcohol and drugs it was a miracle I thought that Marianne waited for me, that she came to join me in Venice which was not a romantic choice but a way of disappearing, an island outside of time and outside of space, a tomb for me and for Andrija who was rotting in my memories as he was decomposing in the earth, on weekends Ghassan and I got drunk—often he told me stories about the civil war in Lebanon, his own war, he was on the side of the Lebanese Forces, of course, on the side of the flag and the crucifix that was so similar to us Croats, he was sixteen at the fall of West Beirut, in 1982, when Intissar and the Palestinian fighters left Leba
non, Ghassan had thought the war was over, he had enlisted a few months later when the massacre had started up again, inspired by his elders who told him about the glorious years in the 1970s, when the other side was leftist, long-haired, and wore an upside-down Mercedes symbol for a badge, later the enemy was Druze, then Syrian, then Christian during the last great confrontation that put the mountain to fire and sword for nothing, the city was burning, he said, the bombings were more intense than ever, Geagea’s Lebanese Forces were fighting against General Aoun, in that mixture of pride, power and money that summarized his country so well: he might have fought against Marwan, Ahmad and Intissar, maybe even against Rafael Kahla the author of the story, who knows, every time I went to Beirut I thought about Ghassan’s stories, and the new contacts in my new profession told me more stories of war and espionage, Lebanon is a market stall by the sea, said Kamal Jumblatt, and everything’s for sale, everything’s for sale, especially information and the lives of the undesirable, Kamal the father of Walid Jumblatt prince of the Druzes the funniest the cleverest the cruelest of the lords of the Lebanese war, secluded in his palace in Mukhtara to escape the Syrian bombs and the car bombs, Walid the killer of Christians from the Shouf is a witty, cultivated and very wealthy man, his warriors were the toughest, the boldest, the craziest, the bloodiest, they infuriated their leader because they were incapable of marching in step, but they had no equals in leaving 200 dead on a village square in less time than it takes to say so, and in that tiny country where everything is known or everything happens among family they tell the most unlikely stories about the warlord Walid, they make you smile and tremble at the same time, like all of Lebanon, country of laughs and shudders: one night he invited a cousin and his wife Nora to dinner, up there in his mountain, and at the end of the meal, as the couple was about to leave, Walid, without even getting up from the table they say, told his relative that he could leave but that his wife was staying, and so there were two possible solutions, either she got an immediate divorce, or she became a widow, this Helen of Phoenicia, always the passion for the wives of others, just as frequent among the kings of Lebanon as those elsewhere, witness Ghazi Kanaan the Syrian colonel who used all the terror of power in Damascus not only to get rich, but also to sleep with well-placed ladies in high Lebanese society, and they say—of Kings, of Warriors—that he was capable of summoning a minister in the middle of the night and telling him to send his mistress straightaway, so she could come give him head, him the leader of the Syrian forces, his revolver at his minister’s temple: ogres want everything, take everything, eat everything, power, money, weapons, and females, in that order, and these stories of monsters reminded me of my own ogres, Serbian, Croatian, who could unleash all their rage and quench all their thirst for mythic humanity, violence and desire, these stories were the delights of the man in the street, the children, the meek, happy to see the powerful get humiliated in turn in front of someone more powerful, lose their honor their wives as the poor had lost their houses their children or their legs in a bombardment, which after all seemed less serious than dishonor and humiliation, the defeat of the powerful is tremendous, beautiful and loud, a hero always makes noise when he collapses, a hundred kilos of muscle strike the ground in one huge dull thud, the public is on its feet to see Hector tied to the chariot, see his head wobble and his blood spurt, the ogre conquered by an even bigger ogre: Ghassan couldn’t help but be fascinated by these heroes, the Jumblatts, Kanaans, or Geageas, admire their feats of arms and their escapades that he recounted like good jokes, slapping his thighs, smiling from ear to ear, over a spritz or a Campari and soda on one of those Venetian squares that themselves seemed the opposite of all violence, on the other side of the world, a piece of history floating on the motionless lagoon, one of the centers of the political and economic Mediterranean cut off from reality and eaten away by tourists as well as by vermin and moss, slowly but surely, the army of underlings has taken the city, they stroll among the dead palaces, invade the sumptuous churches, happy to contemplate the corpse of the giant up close, the empty shell of the dried-out snail—with Ghassan we were absolutely insensitive to all the beauties of Venice, he the emigrant, the worker, I the depressive who in La Serenissima probably appreciated only the silence of the deserted streets invaded by night and fog, disoriented, incapable of making a step towards firm land, Marianne had to leave me one fine morning on the Ponte delle Guglie for me to wake up, we were coming back drunk from a night of endless talk, Ghassan and I, it must be six or seven in the morning, I almost haven’t seen Marianne at all the two or three preceding days, she in light and I in darkness and there she was on the bridge, in the grey dawn, pajamas on under her coat, her hair loose, pale, rings under her eyes, and when I go up to her worried she lands me a furious kick right in the balls which doubles me over cuts off my breath and she disappears, she leaves right in front of the dumbfounded eyes of Ghassan who doesn’t even dare laugh for a few minutes, astonished as I clutch my abdomen my head against the parapet not understanding what’s just happened not realizing that my aching testicles are sounding the alarm, that this unexpected shot from Marianne is propelling me out of Venice, I’ll never see her again, she took the first train, she left, and I did too, shaken all of a sudden by her despair the pain makes me come to my senses, at daybreak, Ghassan stunned watches Marianne walk away without believing it, what was she doing outside at that hour half dressed I guess she was looking for me, she was looking for me to tell me she was leaving, it was over, she couldn’t say anything she aimed her shoe at my privates I hurt all the way up to my ears, my eyes full of tears, I took note: I took note, I woke up, shaken, pulled out of waiting and drunkenness, I packed my bags in the shadow of Marianne’s vanished perfume, Achilles the proud warrior gathers his spoils, his shining greaves, and his bronze weapons into hollow vessels, I said goodbye to Ghassan knowing full well I probably would never see him again and three days later, more than six months after my arrival, I took a train almost like this one headed north passing through Milan: there are geographical points about which you realize, once the route has been traveled, that they were crossroads, cruxes perhaps, detours, required passages without your being able to guess—trains and their blind progress always lead you there—that they harbor an important part of the journey, that they define it as well as contain it, modest, those train stations you travel through without ever going outside them, for me it’s the Milan station, a city actually unknown but where, at every change of my existence, I passed through to get into a new train, from Paris to Zagreb, from Venice to Paris, and today from Paris to Rome to go deliver—like any merchandise, pizza, flowers—fifty-year-old secrets and other more recent ones to trembling prelates, in return for hard cash, I set the amount at $300,000, thinking that the irony wouldn’t escape men of the Church, thirty pieces of silver, they didn’t breathe a word, agreed without a murmur, without daring to bargain with the sinner over the price of treason, Rome is still Rome, whoever its master is, I turn round in my seat and close my eyes, Milan, at every bend in life, without ever really pausing there: I’ve never seen the Duomo, or da Vinci’s Last Supper, or the Victor Emmanuel Gallery, or the gallows where they exposed the dead Mussolini, hanging by the ankles like a common pig, giving his porcine face the homage due to it, that face with the immense forehead that today adorns so many weird objects in all the markets in Italy, T-shirts aprons playing cards penknives with engraved handles collectible matchboxes alcohol flasks or soccer balls, the economy of fascism seems to be doing well and just recently I saw, after a meeting at the Vatican, on the other side of the river, on People’s Square, a Mussolini ceremony in proper form, for some kind of general election maybe, the new fascists were there with the old fascists, brown shirts, black, songs flags arms raised eagles unfurled Latin inscriptions shouts into microphones authoritarian loudspeakers violence cars swerving tires screeching around the square and immediately I thought of Croatia of course but especially of the end of Salò, the Italian Social Repub
lic, worn away little by little by the partisans who themselves were exterminated en masse from Bolzano to Mauthausen, sent by train beyond the Brenner Pass to die in Teutonic land, whenever the SS didn’t bother finishing them off themselves by clubbing them to death in cells from La Risiera to Trieste—trains carry soldiers and the deported, murderers and victims, weapons and ammunition and for now in the darkness of the countryside that I guess at by dint of the movements of the car behind my closed eyes, the desert of factories sky of fireflies of apocalypse in the dust of the immense industrial zone that hides, to the west, the foothills of Piedmont, rocked by memories as well as by the rails, I left Venice as Marianne left me and I fell asleep, I fell asleep in an Intercity train that was going to Milan to bring me to Paris, everything’s mixed up everything’s muddled I get younger in my sleep disturbed by the memory of Marianne I see again her underwear always white sometimes lacy her curves heavy at the hips and breasts the simplicity of her smile her slightly naïve generosity or the naïvety that we attribute today to generosity, the abyss between us dug with the soldier’s shovel of my departure for Croatia, the first night in Alexandria that always returns with the vividness of a beacon, in that room facing the Mediterranean, it was raining, a yellow lamp illumined the streaks of rain that was the only light she got undressed in the dark, she was on vacation with her parents at the Cairo Club Mediterranean and had treated herself to an excursion to Alexandria on her own, treated herself to adventure, I met her by chance in the train that goes from Cairo to Alexandria, in a luxurious first-class and extraordinarily slow car, a real cliché of Oriental laziness, and along the Nile delta, so green, I ogled the sheer white of her cotton blouse, already, more moved by lust than by any real interest in her soul, drawn by her prehistoric Venus curves, seeking a refuge in tender shapes, the way a child sucks his thumb, a maternal baby bottle in those breasts of hers I couldn’t manage to tear my eyes away from, we lived in the same neighborhood in Paris, bought our bread at the same bakery, and although we had never seen each other there this coincidence seemed, in an Egyptian train jolting along 4,000 kilometers away from the Rue de la Convention, like a divine sign and triggered our complicity, the immediate friendship of people foreign countries push towards each other, corralling them in closeness thanks to the circle of otherness and the unknown that surrounds them: she was on vacation, and so was I, I was seeking in adolescent flight a sense to my life that I thought I could find in Marianne’s imposing breasts, in her white lingerie that illusion, that gift of Aphrodite the dissembler, it hides from desire itself the identity of the flesh it covers, its banality, a false transparency a game of hide-and-seek and asleep daydreaming outside of what I imagine to be Piacenza I see her again once more undressing in the pool of humid half-light, I leave her she leaves me with a resounding kick in the balls, in those organs the cause of our meeting, the circle was closed, my testicles source of my passion ended up getting their comeuppance, crushed under Marianne’s shoe until they shot up and hid at the bottom of my throat, she had punished the ones responsible for the initial mistake and we each took a different train a much faster train than the one that gamboled through the Egyptian countryside between those thin downy cows called gamous, in the midst of dovecotes and farmers whose swing-ploughs and hoes haven’t changed since Ramses, one more train, in Venice I had begun reading, reading passionately, withdrawing from the world and burying myself in the pages, whereas in two years of war I hadn’t held one book in my hand not even a Bible in Venetian apathy I stuffed myself with adventure novels, maritime novels, stories about corsairs pirates naval battles whatever the Francophone tourists abandoned in hotels on the lagoon and ended up at the little bookseller’s behind the Campo Santa Margarita, thrillers, spy novels, historical novels and aside from my nocturnal expeditions and my conversations with Ghassan I spent the best part of my time lying on the sofa reading, Marianne was obsessed with the war, more than me maybe, she wanted to know, questioned me endlessly, read treatises about the former Yugoslavia, she had even started learning Croatian which infuriated me, I don’t know why, her accent, her pronunciation irritated me, I needed silence, I needed her body and silence, the only person I managed to talk about the war with was Ghassan: indirectly, little by little, by commenting on the qualities of some rifle, a certain brand of rocket-launcher we began, the way lovers create intimacy little by little, exchanging anecdotes, war stories, and comparing our lives as soldiers, they were nothing alike—Ghassan the handsome warrior, sunglasses, new outfit, M16 in hand, sat in state at a roadblock or hung out at the beach in Jounieh with his comrades, the confrontations were violent and quick, the war lasted for ten years and was well-run, as he said, the only real battle in which he took part was against the Lebanese army in February 1990 in the Metn and at the Nahr al-Kalb, bloody final butchery, from one hill to the other the artillery massacred the fleeing civilians, the fighters threw themselves at each other in a furious melee: Ghassan told me how he had killed his own cousin, a private in the army, with a grenade thrown at his Jeep that was transporting ammunition, the three occupants were blown away in a spray of flesh, metal and fire, over there no one knows that I’m the one that threw that grenade, said Ghassan, how am I supposed to talk normally to my aunt after that, he remembered hurtling down hills shouting to give himself courage, pissing on the barrel of a machine gun to cool it down, without success, putting an armored vehicle out of commission with a LAW 200 meters away and seeing the commander of the tank manage to extricate himself from the carcass but burn like an old blackened shoe bent double over the barrel, crying for hours on end (he said laughing) after a horse died, accidentally knocked down by a volley of fire, and above all, above all he told how he had been wounded, how he had thought himself dead, cut up all of a sudden by dozens of pieces of shrapnel after a bomb exploded, he had seen the jacket of his uniform burst open with machine gun fire, he was suddenly covered in blood pierced from ankle to shoulder by countless bites, a foul viscous substance covered his entire right side, Ghassan had collapsed in spasms of pain and panic, convinced it was the end, the shell had fallen just a few meters away, the doctors removed eight foreign teeth and seventeen bone fragments from his body, debris of the poor guy in front of him volatilized by the explosion and transformed into a human grenade, pieces of smoking skull propelled in a plume of blood, the only metallic shard of which was a gold premolar, Ghassan did come out of it, he still got shivers up his spine and bouts of nausea from disgust, he said, just thinking about it gives me the creeps, I didn’t know if I should laugh or cry at this story, Ghassan transformed into a living tomb the martyr’s relics enshrined directly in his skin, the union of warriors married by the magic of explosives, Ghassan’s story wasn’t a unique case, strange as it may seem, in Syria Larrey surgeon of the Great Army tells of having removed from the stomach of a soldier a piece of bone stuck straight in like a knife, sharp as a bayonet, horrified we thought for a moment, he says, that the cannons of the place had been loaded with bones, before learning from the very mouth of the wounded man that this fragment came from the dried corpse of a camel, scattered by a cannonball—Marcel Maréchal the cellist also relates, in his Memoirs of the War of ’14, that a pocket watch from Besançon, a baptism medal, and two fingers (forefinger and middle finger, still attached to each other) landed on his knees after the explosion of a torpedo in the embankment, and that he didn’t know what saddened him more, the flesh or the two objects, infinitely more human, in the midst of the butchery, than the simple bloody knuckles—Ghassan still had under his skin, in his neck mainly, minuscule fragments of bone that were invisible or practically invisible to X-rays which, no one knows why, years later, manifested from time to time in the form of cysts and boils that he then had to have lanced, what annoyed him most was having to explain to the doctor why his body was vomiting ossicles the way others do shards of glass from a windshield: poor warriors’ bodies, I had been lucky, aside from a few scrapes, superficial burns, and a sprain I had gotten out of
it pretty well, my flesh didn’t remind me of the war all the time, I have two little scars but they’re in my back and behind my shoulder, I never see them, I’d need two mirrors to examine them at leisure—Sashka caresses them with her finger, I know, when I’m lying on my stomach, she never asked me where they came from, unlike Marianne and Stéphanie who questioned me so often, the story of Ghassan’s wounds reminded me of my seafaring novels, on the ships the wounded were crammed with wood shards, from the gunwale, the pulleys, the tackle, the masts, the cannonballs, or grapeshot chopped up the deck hurling thousands of splinters, so many savage needles that stabbed the crew, like the ones that landed in the left hand and thorax of the arquebusier Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra at Lepanto on October 7, 1571, on board the vessel Marquesa, held in reserve in the rearguard of the Christian fleet and engaged in combat around noon to counter the bold attack of Uluj Pasha the brave, he was trying to turn the center held by Don John of Austria the commander of the Holy League who had gotten up in a good mood that day they say, at dawn around six in the morning, one fine fall morning, and this even though the season was already advanced, in the revolting stench of the galley where over 300 people lived piled on top of each other, Don John of Austria had put on his breastplate and his armor when, around seven in the morning, the first Turkish vessels were sighted, within range in two hours more or less, which left the young twenty-five-year-old bastard time to organize his fleet, the day will be long, the opening of the Gulf of Patras sparkles due east in the rising sun, it has become a deadly trap where 208 Turkish galleys and the 120 light vessels that accompany them are enclosed, carrying 50,000 sailors and 27,000 soldiers, janissaries, spahis, volunteers, in twelve hours 30,000 corpses or over 1,800 tons of flesh and blood will have joined the fish in the peaceful blue water, I told Ghassan about the Battle of Lepanto when we visited the arsenal of Venice the tranquil warrior, which without a qualm would negotiate a separate peace with the Ottomans a few years later, thus putting an end to that famous Holy League commanded by Don John of Austria the first bastard of Charles V, hard to imagine the foul smell spread by 500 galleys and their slaves, the illnesses, the parasites, the vermin they transported, the first cannon thunder around nine in the morning, average speed five knots, let’s not rush ourselves, let’s try to preserve marching orders, in the rearguard on board the Marquesa Cervantes is feverish, in bed, he insists on taking part in the battle, on deck—better to die standing up in the open air than be drowned or burned alive in a fetid forehold, Cervantes goes back to his arquebus, the enemy galleys are a few miles in front of him, behind the center of the Christian camp where the Austrian’s flagship sits in state, it fires a cannon and raises its flag to identify itself, the Turkish standard-bearing vessel the Sultana with Ali Pasha on board does the same, customs are chivalrous, men less so, before long they’ll massacre each other forgetting all the courtesies of war, already the Venetian galleys, veritable battleships of the time, loftier and better armed, break the Turkish central lines and cause terrible damage, it is 11:15 in the morning, the Christian left wing is under fire and seems on the point of being turned round, Barbarigo its commander is hit with an arrow in his eye, his nephew and officer Contarini is already dead, sunk with the Santa Maria Maddalena—on the right, facing Andrea Doria the clever condottiere, Uluj Pasha moves to the south, so as not to be outmaneuvered Doria follows him, leaving a void in the line of defense, the galleys of the rearguard advance to fill it, from his arquebus Cervantes sees Don Álvaro de Bazán give the orders: the oarsmen strike the flat sea, the speed increases to ten knots, in a few minutes there will be a confrontation with the Turkish galleys that have detached from Uluj Pasha’s squadron, already the arrows are flying, grapeshot too, at the very instant Cervantes fires his arquebus at the Turkish soldiers fallen into the sea I empty my glass of wine, like Captain Haddock right in the middle of the adventures of the knight François his ancestor, and Ghassan begs me to continue, how was Cervantes wounded, what was the outcome of the battle, despite being Christian he can’t help but be on the side of the Ottomans, which after all is understandable but soon the Turkish center will collapse, the head of Ali Pasha will adorn the galley of Don John, that of Murat Dragut will follow, already their right flank is nothing but a memory, the galleys are captured one by one by the Venetian fleet, boarded in a wild melee, driven against the coast and bombarded from the shore, the Turkish archers confront the muskets and cannons of La Serenissima and Don John of Austria, from the height of his twenty-five years and all his nobility, sees with pleasure the fire and battle on the Sultana whose escort his galleys destroy vessel by vessel, the Christian slaves suddenly freed gather together the scuttling axes and massacre their former masters with fury, Uluj Pasha the infidel has seized the standard-bearing vessel of the Knights of Malta, Don Álvaro de Bazán’s squadron launches forward to free it, on the Marquesa Cervantes the artilleryman loads his weapon in the company of five soldiers, he aims it at the galley of Saïd Ali Raïs the pirate from Algiers, without knowing that a few years later their fates would cross again, conversely, that Cervantes would be imprisoned and at the mercy of the corsair noble, already near the center of the battle cries of victory resound, the surviving Turkish galleys are trying to escape, one of the vessels opens fire on the Marquesa to free Saïd Ali, a volley of grapeshot sweeps the top of the deck where the weapons are in battery, and a shard of wood penetrates Cervantes’s wrist, slices a nerve and deprives him forever of the use of his left hand, for the greater glory of the right—what would have happened if the Muslim gunner hadn’t had the noon sun in his eyes, if Cervantes had passed away, anonymous on a forgotten galley, erased by the Glory of Don John of Austria, he would no doubt have been replaced, if there is always someone to take over a cannon there will also be someone to take up a pen and a knight of mournful countenance, his brother Rodrigo who knows, his brother whom the subsequent good fortune of the author of Don Quixote has crossed out of history, I imagine he would have related his elder brother’s death with panache, and today, on the ferries that go to Patras from Italy, Bari, or Brindisi, loudspeakers would point out to passengers the monument to the older brother of the one who imagined the old sailor crazy with pirate tales, on board a galley whose name I prefer to forget, and so on, soldiers are for the most part unknown, where are the names of the 30,000 drowned, burned, decapitated men of Lepanto, where is the name of the one whose teeth and skull almost killed Ghassan, who knows the name of the Turkish soldier who was on the verge, without realizing it, of changing the course of Western literature and who died in Smyrna or Constantinople, still trembling with rage about the memory of the disaster of Lepanto, mustache in his gruel—at 7:00 P.M. on that October 7, 1571 the Turkish spoils and the Christian armada are sheltered in the cove of Porta Petala, Don John of Austria has an immense Te Deum chanted in the starry night, the Muslim is defeated, the Turk conquered, the allies of the Holy League sing of the glory of God and their captain, that young twenty-five-year-old imperial bastard who has just won the most important naval battle since Actium in 31 BC: a few miles north of Lepanto, in those same waters ruled by Poseidon, the fate of the world has already been played out once before, the divine Antony and Cleopatra the Egyptian confronted Octavian the landowner, the two former triumvirs threw their fleets and their gods into battle, Isis and Anubis against Venus and Neptune, another battle between East and West, between North and South, without anyone knowing very clearly who the barbarians were: all these stories fascinated Ghassan, he swallowed Christian propaganda and was pleased to believe that the Lebanese were Phoenicians, descendants of worshipers of Astarte and Baal, originally from Byblos he imagined his ancestors like himself, cultivated, cosmopolitan, tradesmen, great founders of cities, Carthage and Leptis Magna, Larnaka and Malaga, great navigators and formidable fighters, whose elephants crossed the Alps: Hannibal son of Hamilcar the tamer of warriors first conquered the Romans in Ticino and wounded Scipio the horseman his enemy—out the window, as the Po plain stretche
s out to the outskirts of Piacenza, a hundred kilometers from Milan, I wonder if I’ll see one of Hannibal’s elephants, who died of cold and of their wounds after having crushed the Roman legions a few kilometers away from here, in Trebbia, in the course of that Battle of Trebbia where 20,000 legionaries and foreign auxiliaries of the Roman army perished, 20,000 corpses looted by the locals—beneath the sediments of the river, beneath the dead of one of Bonaparte’s first battles in Italy, beneath the tons of dust borne by time are the skeletons of pachyderms who were victorious over the Romans but conquered by snow, abundant this year too, I want to ask my neighbor if he knows that there are elephant bones buried right next to us, he never looks out the window, he is content to drowse over his magazine, one December day similar perhaps to this one in 218 BC, the day of the winter solstice says Livy the scholar, 80,000 men 20,000 horses and thirty elephants clashed: Livy the precise counts the legions, centuries, cohorts of horsemen, names the leaders of each troop, the ones who won glory for themselves and the ones who deserved shame, he describes Hannibal the stubborn who, after over fifteen years of war on Roman soil, didn’t manage to wrest surrender from the senate or the people of Rome, despite a series of massacres that are unique in ancient history: in Tunis near Carthage sitting in the Porte de France I order an espresso that they call here a direct as I read the paper, in 1996 I paused for a few days in Tunisia to meet Algerians in exile there, within the framework as they say of my new functions, I visit residential and seaside Carthage, cluttered with luxury villas, in Megara, Hamilcar’s gardens are still planted with sycamores, vines, eucalyptus, and especially jasmine, with my source, a friendly reformed bearded man, we stroll along the beach, I think about the Carthaginian vessels come from Sicily, Spain, or the Levant that landed there, acceding to the war orders of the senate inflamed by the memory of the Roman dead at the Battle of Cannae, then they decided to reduce it to ashes, Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam, and nothing more, Cato the Elder the gravedigger of Carthage certainly wore a beard, like my repentant Algerian Islamist who rounded out his monthly paycheck by snitching, in the name of the Good, on his former comrades who had strayed from the path of God, on the wrong path, Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam, there are always Carthages to destroy, on the other side of the sea, from Ilion the well-guarded, in that to-and-fro motion, like a tide that gives victory by turns to Constantinople, Carthage, or Rome: on the beach of Megara you still find, washed up by the waves, tiles of mosaics torn from Punic palaces sleeping on the bottom of the sea, like the wrecks of the galleys of Lepanto, the breastplates sunk in the Dardanelles, the ashes thrown in bags of cement by the SS of La Risiera along Dock No. 7 in the port of Trieste, I collect these square multicolored stones, I put them in my pocket just as later on I will collect names and dates to file away in my suitcase, before reconstructing the entire mosaic, the full picture, the inventory of violent death begun by chance with Harmen Gerbens the SS-man from Cairo, locked up in the Qanatar Prison along with Egyptian Jews suspected of collaborating with Israel, which gave Nathan a good laugh at the bar of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, I wonder what those Egyptians could have been thinking, he said, how long did you say they held him? Eight years? They realized what he was, I guess, they didn’t know what to do with him, finally they freed him just before the war of ’67, the enemies of my enemies are my friends, and they granted him Egyptian citizenship, still under his real name, without anyone worrying if he’d be found one day, hidden under the dusty mango trees of Garden City, alcoholic prisoner of eternal Egypt, like the defeated Antony of Actium if he hadn’t preferred death to prison and said farewell with one thrust of the sword to Alexandria, Alexandria that was leaving him forever, in 1956 and 1967 the Jewish community in Egypt had been forced into exile, today it counts fewer than fifty members—the great synagogue on Nebi Daniel Street in Alexandria is nothing but an empty shell now, the old custodian you have to bribe to visit it apes the prayers and ceremonies, he pretends to get out the scrolls, to read them, chant them, making the absence even realer by his sham, no one prays anymore in the synagogues of Egypt, except for a few, come from France from Israel or from the United States, they organize ceremonies for the celebrations, in 1931 however Elia Mosseri director of the Bank of Egypt, one of the wealthiest bankers in Cairo, owner of a magnificent Art Deco palace in Garden City, invested with his brother and friends in Jerusalem on a site located on the ancient Julian Way and built an immense luxury hotel there that would become the King David: strange to think that Harmen Gerbens’s apartment is a few meters away from the former villa of the founder of the hotel where Nathan and I spoke about the Batavian SS-man relocated by the Egyptians at his release from prison to an apartment abandoned by a Jewish family, just as Nathan’s parents, who landed in 1949 in Haifa after many sufferings, would occupy the house of a Palestinian family driven away to Jordan or Lebanon, in a strange Wheel of Fortune where the gods give and take away what they gave—Isabella of Castile promulgated the Alhambra Decree in 1492 and expelled the Jews from Spain, a decree abolished by Manuel Fraga with the pale-faced Minister of Tourism under Franco the Iberian Duce in 1967 when he offered passports to the stateless Jews of Egypt citing the fact that they were Sephardic and thus of Spanish origin, allowing by a fanatical stroke of nationalism the resumption of diplomatic relations with Israel: in the fall of 1967 the Egyptian Jews who had no ties with the Powers, France, Great Britain, or Italy, got off the boat in Valencia in the orange-freighted port where their ancestors might have cast off 500 years before, leaving behind them houses, gold, jewels, and above all the myth of that Andalusian culture of the three religions of the book, to be scattered from Morocco to Istanbul, on the shores of that sea that I walk along with my Algerian Islamist gathering Carthaginian tesserae in 1996, Lebihan my superior at the time often sent me to meet the “sources,” you inspire confidence, he said, they’d hand over the good Lord to you without a confession, with that honest look you have, you’d better go yourself, also because he couldn’t stand Arab food, lover as he is of blanquette of veal oysters Muscadet and celery rémoulade, what’s more he couldn’t bear chili pepper, for him Tunisia was a digestive and circulatory disaster, the fire of Baal—food considerations aside, with information of human origin contact is essential, confidence, especially when the “source” doesn’t present himself first to collaborate, when you have to go to him circle round him stroke him the right way a game of fox and Little Prince, the animal knows it wants to be tamed, it lets itself be, it always steps back once or twice like a frightened virgin, you have to determine its motivations, whether they’re ideological familial venal crooked or vengeful and always keep something up your sleeve for the master stroke, “serving the homeland” still works with some Frenchmen, especially in the sciences or economics, where the risks are all in all negligible, “fighting against the Reds” doesn’t work anymore, people are suspicious of it, replaced by “fighting the rise of Islam,” which comes down to pretty much the same thing, but in my experience the motivations of informers are most of the time pecuniary, money sex power that’s the Holy Trinity of the case officer, it’s better to carry a money clip than a weapon, even if, for obvious psychological reasons, the sources prefer to believe they’re working “for the good cause,” more rewarding than “I sold out”: the nice bearded Islamic fundamentalist was serving the cause of God now by non-violence, as he said, I’ve seen too many massacres, too many horrors, it has to stop, he was a former member of the armed branch of the ISF, close to the Rome negotiators under the guidance of the Sant’ Egidio community, St. Giles of Trastevere a stone’s throw away from Sashka’s place—in the winter of 1995-1996, when I was still a novice spy, thanks to this Catholic intervention the different political parties of Algeria had signed an agreement in principle, a platform of demands supposed to put an end to civil war, they were all there, except the army of course, from the historic Ben Bella to the Islamists, including the Kabylians, the liberal democrats, and even Louisa Hano
une the Red from the Workers’ Party, the only woman in the meeting, they called for democracy for respect of the Constitution for the end of torture and of military machinations, all of that of course was doomed to failure but it offered a fine basis to negotiate a peace to come, at the same time in Algeria the ISA and the GIA were massacring infidels while soldiers were torturing and executing anything that fell into their hands, my source confided concrete information to me, my first source abroad, my first voyage into my Zone, names, organization rules, factions, internal tensions, which I tallied afterwards in my office with other files, other sources, to draw up a memo from it, a piece of paper included in a weekly report sent to the ministers concerned, to the office of the Prime Minister and the President of the Republic, weather forecasts of trouble, this week showers likely over North Africa, fair weather in the Balkans, threatening in the Middle East, storms in Russia, etc., a special service was in charge of compiling the information from the different sections for this secret regular publication, not counting the special memos or the precise requests from X or Y, economic, geopolitical, societal, or scientific anxieties are finished at last for me, the shadowy times are over, one last suitcase and I’ll join Sashka with the transparent gaze, lie down in silence next to her and bury my lips in her short hair, no more lists no more torturers’ victims investigations whether official or not I’m changing my life my body my memories my future my past I’m going to throw everything out of my sight out of the hermetically sealed window into the great black mass of landscape, purify myself, plunge, in Venice La Serenissima one December night I had been drinking, I was staggering home from the end of the Quay of Oblivion, north of Cannaregio I had 300 meters to cover to get back to my Old Ghetto, might as well be a hundred kilometers, or a thousand, I swayed from right to left, pitched forward, headed in the wrong direction, I turned onto the Square of Two Moors, I sprawled into the sculpted well in the middle of the little esplanade, then lifted my painful knees the way you extricate yourself from a trench in wartime, I saw myself again rifle in hand bent double I took three more steps towards the Madonna dell’Orto bridge, two to the left, one to the right, carried forward by my own weight, by the weight of my black cap or my memories in the frozen-mud smell of the Venetian fog, breathing hard as hard as possible to get my spirits up, my mouth wide open my lungs frozen, go forward, go straight ahead if you fall you won’t get up you’ll end up dead killed by the Chetniks behind you by the Turks by the Trojans with the swift mares I breathe I breathe I go forward I cling to the rail of the bridge it’s a tree in the Bosnian mountains I climb, I climb in the night I climb down I see the tall façade of bricks on the church what the hell am I doing here I live on the other side on the other side I make a U-turn stumble miss the bridge and plunge into the dark canal head first, a hand grips me, I’m drowning, it’s the conductor waking me up, he shakes me, asks me for my ticket I hand it to him mechanically, he smiles at me, he looks pleasant, outside it’s still just as dark, I glue my eyes to the window, open countryside, it’s stopped raining