VII
everything is harder once you reach man’s estate, living shut up inside yourself harried destitute full of memories I’m not taking this trip for nothing, I’m not curling up like a dog on this seat for nothing, I’m going to save something I’m going to save myself despite the world that persists in going forward laboriously at the speed of a handcar operated by a man with one arm, blindly a train at night in a tunnel the dark even denser I had to sleep for a bit, if only I had a watch, I just have a telephone, it’s in my jacket hanging on the hook, but if I take it out I’ll be tempted to see if I have any messages and to send one, always this passion for writing into the distance, sending signs into the ether like smoke signals gestures with no object arms hands stretching out to nothingness, to whom could I send a message, from this prepaid phone that I took care to get a tramp to purchase for me in return for a big tip, as luck would have it he had an identity card and wasn’t too wasted, the seller didn’t cause any trouble, I left my apartment dropped off a few things at my mother’s sold my books in bulk to a bookseller at the Porte de Clignancourt took three or four things, as I was sorting through things I of course came across some photos, I saw Andrija again in his over-sized uniform, Marianne in Venice, Sashka at twenty in Leningrad, La Risiera camp in Trieste, the square chin of Globocnik, Gerbens’s mustache, I took everything, and I can say that everything I own is above me in a slightly scaled-down bag, next to the little briefcase that’s going to the Vatican and that I plan to hand over as soon as I reach Rome, then tonight in my room at the Plaza on the Via del Corso I’ll go drink at the hotel bar until it closes and tomorrow morning I’ll take a bath buy myself a new suit I’ll be another man I’ll call Sashka or I’ll go straight to her place I’ll ring at her door and God knows what will happen, Zeus will decide the fate that’s suitable to allot me the Moirae will bustle about for me in their cave and what will happen will happen we’ll see if war will catch up with me again or if I’ll live to be old watching my children grow up the children of my children hidden away somewhere on an island or a suburban condo what could I possibly be living on, what, like Eduardo Rózsa I could tell the story of my life write books and screenplays for autobiographical films—Rózsa born in Santa Cruz de la Sierra in Bolivia of a communist Jewish father a resistant in Budapest was the special correspondent for a Spanish paper in Zagreb before he became a commander in the Croatian army, I met him once or twice on the front and later in Iraq, an admirer of Che Guevara and war who founded our international brigade, a group of volunteers who spoke English among themselves Warriors of the Great Free and Independent Croatia who all arrived like me after the first images of the Yugoslav madness, Eduardo was already there, he landed in Croatia in August 1991 one month before me during Osijek and the first clashes, he came from Albania and before that from Budapest and Russia where he trained for espionage for guerilla warfare for comparative literature and philosophy, a poet—today he writes books collections of poems and plays himself in films, maybe Che Guevara would have ended up the same if he hadn’t made Achilles’s choice, if he had been given life he too might have become—weapons put away, life over—an actor, he was so good-looking: like Hemingway Eduardo Rózsa wrote fast, I picture him on an August night on the terrace of the Hotel Intercontinental in Zagreb where all the foreign press stayed, the Vanguardia from Barcelona reproached him for describing the fighting too much and for not talking enough about politics, he downed shots as he described the first battles, the Yugoslav tanks against the shabby Croats, his hotel room was transformed into a real War Museum, pieces of shrapnel ammunition the tail-ends of rockets maps relics of all kinds, Eduardo a funny character idealist warrior converted to Islam after having fought for the Catholic crucifix, vice president of the Muslim community of Hungary, formerly press secretary for the first free Iraqi government, men want causes, gods that inspire them, and in that scorching August of 1991 in front of the Intercontinental’s pool his R5 riddled with bullets in the garage his pen in hand he thought about the Bolivian sierra about socialism about Che and his old hole-filled uniform, he had just been shot at by Serbs on the highway from Belgrade, he writes his article, it was the first time he was under fire, the half-open window shattered to pieces, the passenger seat opened up suddenly spitting out its stuffing with hisses and metal clangor, with the speed and distance he probably didn’t hear the explosions, he swerved turned off the headlights instinctively and kept going straight ahead his hands damp clutching the steering wheel sweat in his eyes up to the suburbs of Zagreb, up to the hotel, up to the foreign colleagues the two French photographers who were sharing his room, they see Eduardo arriving dripping with sweat beside himself those two twenty-five-year-old journalists also came to Croatia to get shot at and to run around the countryside with Yugoslav tanks on their tail, to them Eduardo is a master, a man of experience and now he’s arriving trembling and sweating, he says nothing, he takes out his notebook and quietly goes to get drunk on plum brandy by the pool watching the American reporters laughing in the water at their cameraman’s jokes, that’s where it happens, touched by Zeus Eduardo Che Rózsa chose his camp, the next day in Osijek he’ll go see the Croatian officers, he’ll enlist, join the Achaean ranks in a fine rage, a rage against the Serbs: the journalists saw him one fine day in a khaki uniform, a rifle on his shoulder and when I arrived at the end of September he had abandoned the pen to devote himself to war, he would come back decorated medaled honorary citizen of the new Croatia, a hero, godfather of I don’t know how many children, and he would write his exploits himself, play his own role in the film—the first time I saw him it wasn’t on the screen, he was sitting in the middle of the trench in which I was crawling in Osijek, I was scared stiff, absolutely clueless, the shells were raining down in front of us there was the Yugoslav army its tanks and its elite troops, I didn’t know where I was going I climbed up the trench my nose in the autumn smell, in the humus, to escape, to go home, to find again the attic room and Marianne’s caresses, I couldn’t hear anything and I couldn’t see much I had glimpsed my first wounded man fired my first cartridges at a hedge, the uniform of the national guard was just a hunting jacket that didn’t protect much I was shivering trembling like a tree under the explosions Rózsa was sitting there I crawled right onto him he looked at me and smiled, he gently moved the muzzle of my gun away with his foot, had me sit down, he must have said something to me of which I have no memory and when our people began firing he’s the one who propped me up against the parapet with a pat on the back so I’d start shooting too, before he disappeared, Athena comes to breathe courage and ardor into mortals in battle, and I fired calmly, I fired well before jumping out of the trench with the others, fear evaporated, flew away with the shells towards the enemy and the farm we were supposed to take, far from Zagreb, far from the Hotel Intercontinental from its covered pool its terrace and its sauna that I had never seen, far from Paris, Che Rózsa would continue his career, I heard his name many times during the war, heroic and other more mysterious deeds, like the murder of a Swiss journalist accused of espionage for I don’t know whom, some people thought he had come to infiltrate the brigade: he was found dead by strangulation during a patrol, a dozen days before the British photographer Paul Jenks was shot in the back of the head as he was investigating the previous man’s death, heroes are often wreathed in shadows, marked by Hades great eater of warriors, Eduardo as well as others, even though in those days journalists were falling like flies, in Croatia at least, or later on around besieged Sarajevo—in central Bosnia, between Vitez and Travnik, they made themselves much scarcer, aside from a few reporters from the television channel owned by the HDZ, the Croatian party in Bosnia, who had the strange habit of emerging from nowhere, like a jack-in-the-box, of appearing at the unlikeliest times and some British reporters clinging to the white tanks of the nuisances from BRITFOR—those photographers and journalists were plying a strange trade indeed, public spies in a way, professional informers for public opinion, for
the majority, we saw them that way, high-end informers who hated us as much as Her Majesty’s soldiers scorned us, frustrated by inaction their hands on the triggers of their 30-millimeter guns, perched on top of their Warriors painted white, ice-cream trucks they were called in Croatia, what possible use could they serve, they collected the corpses and negotiated cease-fires so they could go on leave to Split, where they swam, danced, drank whisky before returning to count the shots in Travnik, through binoculars at their windows, or to jog around the stadium—Eduardo Che Rózsa ex-secret agent ex-journalist ex-commander of one of the best-organized brigades in eastern Slavonia writer poet screenwriter turned Muslim and activist for Iraq and Palestine, in Budapest in his suburban house, is he thinking about the Chetniks he killed, about his first two dead, torn to pieces by a grenade in a barn by the Drava River, about his comrades fallen like mine, is he still thinking about the war, about Croatia, he a Catholic by his mother a communist by his father, a murderer by the grace of God, does he remember the freezing rain of the winter of 1991 in the outskirts of Osijek, Eduardo who grew up in Chile until the coup against Allende, deported to Budapest on a chartered flight of foreign “Reds” who couldn’t be sent to the firing squad or tortured, Eduardo going in the opposite direction from me began in intelligence before he became a journalist, then a volunteer to fight with the Croats, by our side, and returned, enriched with wisdom’s store, to live in Hungary through his remaining years, in poetry screenplays books strange missions, plus everything I don’t know about him probably, Eduardo Che Rózsa who didn’t recognize me when we met in Baghdad by the Tigris not long after the invasion, between a cheap restaurant and a peanut-vendor, during the fleeting euphoria of victory, of dictatorship overthrown, justice restored—the treasures of Troy were still burning, manuscripts, works of art, old men, children, while already the coalition forces were congratulating each other on the river’s shores, not worrying about the first attacks, the signs of a catastrophe of the same caliber as the one in the 1920s, or even worse, Eduardo Rózsa was strolling in the company of a few officials by the eternal Tigris, I was eating a corncob from a street vendor with a guy from the embassy, I had just met Sashka and I didn’t want war or peace or the Zone or to remember Croatia or Bosnia I wanted to go back to Rome even for just twenty-four hours to be with her, and then Commander Rózsa walks by without seeing me, a ghost, was I the ghost or him, I had already begun to disappear I was burying myself little by little in the contents of the suitcase, in Sashka whom I thought I’d seen for the first time in Jerusalem years before, in Iraq the heat was incredible, a damp vapor rising from the slow Tigris bordered with reeds where from time to time corpses and decaying carcasses ran aground like the Sava River in 1942 without perturbing the American patrols who were still strolling about like Thomson and Thompson in Tintin a blissful look on their faces as they observed around them the country they had just conquered which they didn’t know what to do with, Baghdad was drifting, ungovernable like Jerusalem or Algiers, it was decomposing, an atom bombarded by neutrons, hunger, sickness, ignorance, mourning, pain, despair without really understanding why the gods were persecuting it so, destroyed, sent back into limbo, into prehistory the way the Mongols did in 1258, libraries, museums, universities, ministries, hospitals ravaged, Rózsa and I the ex-warriors come to share the spoils or inhale its remains, as specialists of defeat, of victory, of the New World Order, of the peace of the brave, of weapons of mass destruction that gave the soldiers a good laugh, they slapped each other on the back as they drank their Budweisers like after a good joke, in Basra the British were the same as in Bosnia, very sportsmanlike, professional and indifferent, they unloaded humanitarian aid trucks as I’d seen them do in Travnik, as Rózsa had seen them in Osijek, except this time they were authorized to use their weapons, which they weren’t shy about using: they hunted former Ba’athists the way others hunt deer or rather wild boar in the Ardennes, the English soldiers were returning to Basra, to the same place where their grandfathers had been stationed in 1919, after the Dardanelles, after the Hejaz and Syria, the exhausted Tommies rested their legs in the country of palm trees and dried lemons, by the edge of the swamps and meanderings of the Shatt al-Arab, they stuffed their faces with dates and lambs stolen from native shepherds, wondering how much longer the war would last, it lasts forever, almost a century after Gavrilo Princip’s Balkan gunshot, the referee’s pistol shot in a long-distance race, all the participants are already at the starting line, ready to dash forward into the world of Ares great eater of warriors, hoping to return loaded with treasure and glory: Che Rózsa commander covered in medals from the great patriotic Croatian war, Vlaho or me decorated with the order of the grateful nation, Andrija with a fine black marble tombstone with no corpse, To our brother the Hero, he no longer has a body, Andrija, no bones beneath his slab, no gold pin on his jacket he’s a name a phrase a brother and a hero, I was thinking of him in Baghdad conquered humiliated subjected and pillaged as I passed Rózsa the Hungarian from Bolivia a convert to Islam and to international aid, president of the Muslim community of Budapest, or something like that, after having been a fervent defender of Opus Dei, was he informing for the Hungarians, or the Russians, or the English, were we still colleagues, colleagues of the shadows—in the night of war, of the Zone, of memories of the dead, we were living together, without seeing each other, we were sharing the same life, passing each other by the edge of the Tigris, that Styx like the Tiber like the Jordan the Nile or the Danube like all those deadly rivers running into the sea, river of urine along a wall, fluvial ways intersect each other like railroads and weave a spiderweb around the void, in the center the hollow sea abstract and moving, ink-black at night water-green during the day and steel-blue at dawn, I always wondered why Eduardo Rózsa had joined the Croats, why those volunteers, that international brigade of which I could have been a member, he says in his books that he was fighting for Justice, to help the weak against the strong, the Serbs though also felt their rights were being threatened, they were defending their land, which was their land because their houses and their dead were there, and volunteers came to their aid too, just as Rózsa and his people came to the Croats or the mujahideen came to the Bosnians, they all saw an international affair in it, a fight of right against wrong, aside from Rózsa’s more or less apolitical comrades there was in Croatia a group of foreign fighters in the ranks of the HOS, the Croatian extreme right, neo-fascists who knew the Ustashi songs by heart, Frenchmen mostly, I knew a few of them by sight, glimpsed at a rally in Paris, it’s a small world when it comes to that community, I saw them again in arms outside of Okučani then later in Zagreb, they were cheerful coarse soldiers, they were happy to be there—as Le Pen said the one-eyed nationalist ocular emulator of Millán-Astray military experience is always good for the little ones, he had had his own in Algeria, and the networks of international solidarity sent recruits to paint their faces green and learn the language in old songs from the 1940s, I could have been one of them, I could have been one of them that’s for sure if I hadn’t set out on a completely different tangent, at bottom we were all volunteers, even Vlaho who had deserted the Yugoslav army in the middle of his military service almost 700 kilometers away from home to join the ranks of the national guard right where he was, near Osijek, he had stayed with us, Vlaho the Dalmatian, despite the cold and the rain that froze his bones, and yet God knows he was fat when he arrived, fat, gentle, and funny, with a completely round, angelic face, Vlaho was a volunteer like Andrija like me like the French of the HOS like Eduardo Rózsa, like Orwell during the Spanish War, like Blaise Cendrars in Champagne in ’14, just as Sashka’s half-brother, Kolia, had fought at the side of the Serbs, Slavic Orthodox solidarity against Catholic Slavs, ex-communists against ex-fascists, she hadn’t seen him for years she told me, Kolia the skinny mystic back from Afghanistan had wandered round aimlessly in too-confining Russia at the end of the 1980s before launching into a military adventure with the Chetniks, sajkaca on his head, pr
obably whistling Tchaikovsky’s Marche Slave, I can see Sashka lying on her blue sofa in Trastevere when she finds out I was a soldier in Croatia she says what a coincidence, my brother was at war with the Serbs, was at war, those are her words, moj brat pobyval na vojne, the paths of Slavitude meet in the lines of fire, where was he, I ask her, gdje, I might have seen him, maybe we sized each other up through our Kalashnikovs, maybe he killed one of my comrades, maybe one of his shells hurled us head over heels into the soft mud of the corn fields, she replies in Serbia, konjechno, the clear eyes of Sashka on her sofa don’t understand the question, she doesn’t see the war, she can’t understand, I should be clearer, I know it’s pointless—in the Slavic-Latin pidgin we speak there’s no room for the nuances of war, we had so few words in common, old Slavic words and Italian terms that were transparent in French, too few to shed light on the motivations of international volunteers Russian French or Arab and that’s all the better, imprecision the impossibility of going into detail, everything stays outside when I’m with her, the war, the Zone, the suitcase I’m filling, meaning passes through hands through hair through Sashka’s immense gaze the coincidences that link us to each other the railroad tracks of the past that intersect, in Jerusalem, in Rome, like with Eduardo Rózsa my Hungarian double converted to poetry and international politics, what could I explain about my involvement—leaving for a noble cause, the cause of my Habsburg ancestors who had defended Vienna against the Turks, the cause of my maternal family, the bourgeoisie of Zagreb linked to Austria and Italy, Mama cried from sadness and joy when I left, I know she went to church every day to pray for me, and my father without admitting to praying as such thought again about his own war, his two years in Algeria, quite happy that my own had some meaning, as he said, even if that meaning escaped him a little, he knew almost nothing of Croatia, aside from a few of his wife’s cousins, but respected passion for one’s Country, himself a discreet French Catholic nationalist, an engineer without much curiosity about the world, a little self-effacing, but tender and attentive—I remember the huge electric train he had laid out for us, a whole network on giant wooden planks, patiently, dozens of trees, tracks, switches, signal lights, stations, and villages, all controlled by transformers, complex potentiometers that regulated the speed of the engines passing each other, waiting for each other, turning on their red headlights in the Christmas dusk, getting lost in tunnels beneath plastic mountains covered with a too-green, rough grass smelling of glue mixed with the ozone smell of all those electric motors functioning at once, from the switchyard to the level crossing, meters and meters of little red and blue cables ran alongside the tracks nailed to the board, for the street lights, the gates, the houses, I remember there was a freight train with a steam engine, a grey German military transport, French passenger cars, for years in the basement of our house in Orléans we added tracks trees scenery trains to this fantastic assemblage built on the HO scale, I can imagine the fortune swallowed up little by little by this set that’s sleeping in boxes today, since our move to Paris and the painstaking dismantling of the installation that put a precise end to childhood, farewell small-scale models make way for real trains like this one, somewhere between Parma and Reggio Emilia—Eduardo Rózsa writes in one of his books about the anger of his communist father when he learned that his son was fighting beside the Croats, fascists, he thought, descendants of the Ustashis of the NDH, Nezavisna Država Hrvatska, the Independent State of Croatia of 1941: the truth is there were loads of neo-Nazis, hooked on the mythology of victory over the Serbs, on the mythology of the single “independent” Croatian State scoured clean by the partisans, we all had Faith, we were all taking part in history rifle in hand feet in questionable socks with a fresh lungful of air our eyes full of pride for God and the homeland for vengeance for our dead for our children yet to come for the land for our ancestors buried in the land, against Serbian injustice, then for our comrades maybe also for the pleasure of it a taste for steel the pleasure of war the glory of honor fear danger laughter power our honed bodies our scars, and in the tiny apartment in Trastevere it was impossible for me to explain all that to Sashka, just as she couldn’t explain the feelings of her half-brother, they didn’t interest her, she hadn’t seen him since she left Petersburg in 1993, just when Kolia came back from the war, she had left fled to Jerusalem City of Peace, of light and eternal violence, where I like to think I saw her, when she was painting fake Russian icons for American tourists near the Damascus Gate, an angel on her shoulder, I came across her there that’s for sure just as I exchanged bullets with her half-brother around Vukovar, just as trains passed each other on two separate tracks on my father’s plank table, just as I met Eduardo Rózsa ten years later in Baghdad without his seeing me, by the edge of the river—and the thousands of documents in the briefcase that the train is conveying across the Italian countryside are nothing but that, intersections, men glimpsed in Cairo in Trieste or Rome, it was simple, you just had to uncoil the lines follow the tracks wait to meet them at night in my own night gaining on the landscape and the food-processing plants in the region of Parmesan and pasta: the crossword enthusiast has gotten up to go to the bathroom, my neighbor is quietly snoozing, the car is silent, he is snoring or whistling, I don’t know, according to the movement of the tracks, I close my eyes, where would I like to go now, to Beirut the blue to find the Palestinians again and Intissar in the little cream-colored book, not yet, or to Iraq country of hunger and death and Babel, to Troy maybe with Marianne, to the Homeric Dardanelles, to Mycenae city of Agamemnon shepherd of warriors, it overlooks the plain of beautiful mares, far from the mounds and hills near Hisarlik, far from the trenches and ravines where the dehydrated bodies of English and Australian soldiers piled up in 1915, water had to be conveyed there by boat in immense metal vats, I’m thirsty all of a sudden, maybe the crossword enthusiast went to the bar not the toilet, from the Dardanelles to Iraq, from Troy to Babylon, from Achilles to Alexander, thinking again about Heinrich Schliemann the discoverer of Ilion the well-guarded, from Mycenae adorned with gold, to Arthur Evans knight of Her Majesty’s Empire who until his ninetieth year pursued adventure in Crete at Knossos, pipe in his mouth, convinced he had discovered the labyrinth and sanctuary of the potent bulls, and I too, in a way I am an archeologist, brush in hand I search through and probe vanished, buried things, to make them rise up from corpses, from skeletons, from fragments, debris stories copied out on coded tablets, my own Scripta Minoa, begun by the excavation of Harmen Gerbens the brutal alcoholic rapist in Garden City, and followed by thousands of names of killers and victims, painstakingly annotated, delineated like the charred pottery of Troy VII the mysterious burned city, indexed, classified, without my understanding the reason for my passion, like Schliemann or Evans, pushed always further into endless research, standing over the huge charnel pit of history, feet in the void: when I arrived at the Boulevard Mortier, after having been recruited against all expectation despite my war-filled past and my foreign ancestry, plunged into my solitary Zone peopled with ghosts shadows living or dead in the middle of endless secret archives in those soundproof hallways, those tunnels under the boulevard, every night I walked across Paris up to the 18th arrondissement and my new civil servant’s two-room-with-kitchen apartment, thirty square meters of disorder on the sixth floor with no elevator, as it must be, my head beneath the zinc of the Parisian ceiling, my elbow on the zinc of the bar down below, morning and evening, before and after the metro, coffee to go, draft beer on my return, little by little the regulars become the anonymous family of the café-owner patriarch, soldiers of the brewer officer, Jojo Momo Pierre Gilles and the others, madmen and not-so-mad men, alcoholic and sober, loners and family men, some were like cockroaches, impossible to get rid of, others disappeared from one day to the next, and Momo Pierre Gilles and their brothers in bottle speculated then about Jojo’s disappearance, cancer, cirrhosis, or that second wound of the drunkard after his disease, the wife, the spouse who forbids you bar games and
after-dinner drinks, it went without saying for all these barflies that you never willingly left a good bar once you’d found one, it was as unlikely in their eyes as leaving a comfortable inexpensive apartment to go live in the Salvation Army, Michael the owner reassured his flock about the fate of so-and-so, I met him in the neighborhood, he’s fine—he was lying that’s for sure so as not to frighten his parishioners, out of generosity, Saint Michael the owner had a great tenderness for his inveterate drinkers, and he regarded it as more than a business, an enterprise for public salvation rather, the fashioning of the social bond he willingly took part in by pouring himself a small whisky from time to time, cheerfully paying for a round when he lost at dice, he lavished affection and advice on matters of love, work, or finance, at the level of a small neighborhood bar, where those who managed to run up a tab were rare (credit is dead, bad debtors killed it) more out of a sense of education and morality, really, more than out of mistrust or greed, the bar in the 18th, might as well say a bar without a name, without anything special in the décor or the brown leatherette banquettes was a part of my life, every night a beer or two standing at the bar before climbing the well-polished steps to my woman-less and television-less home, during the ascent of my Parisian Olympus I slowly rid myself of the filth of the world of the Boulevard, of the Zone, to enter another—my photos of La Risiera di San Sabba on the wall, next to the picture of Globocnik in Trieste, the one of Stangl in Udine, now the snapshot of Sashka in Petersburg, and in its place, before, nicely framed, the image of Stéphanie on the Bosporus, which I found in a closet and threw into a trashcan yesterday morning, the glass broke immediately with a loud noise, for years every night the same ritual climb the steps get out the long bronze-colored key insert it in the old keyhole open the door smell the odor of cold tobacco sometimes of trash or alcohol go over to the window open the shutters watch the cars pass by in the street for a few seconds put away the empty bottles lying around the clothes scattered about then pick up a book sit down in my armchair with, according to my humor and my resources, a glass of wine or a beer in hand—curious this passion for reading, a remnant from Venice, from Marianne great devourer of books, a way to forget to disappear wholly into paper, little by little I replaced adventure novels with simply novels, Conrad’s fault, Nostromo and Heart of Darkness, one title calls for another, and maybe without really understanding, who knows, I let myself be carried away, page after page, and although I’ve already spent a large part of my day as an ambiguous functionary reading—notes, reports, forms, on my well-guarded screen—there is nothing I desire more then than a novel, where the people are characters, a play of masks and desires, and little by little to forget myself, forget my body at rest in this chair, forget my apartment building, Paris, life itself as the paragraphs, dialogues, adventures, strange worlds flow by, that’s what I should be doing now, going on with Rafael Kahla’s story, finding Intissar the Palestinian again and Marwan dead on a corner in Beirut, a journey within the journey, to ward off fatigue, thoughts, the shaky train, and memories—warrior, spy, archeologist of madness, lost now with an assumed name between Milan and Rome, in the company of living ghosts like Eduardo Rózsa the Hungarian righter of wrongs dressed in black who went to Mass willingly, everything I was trying to forget as I read in my armchair in Paris, sinking into the Zone into Algeria of the beheading and the beheaded, the Zone land of the wrathful savage gods who have been clashing with each other endlessly since the Bronze Age at least and maybe even before, since the caves the stone hatchets and the flints that caused spectacular jagged wounds, not counting the maces, clubs, cudgels, bludgeons, ancestors of the hammer of the Stara Gradiška camp with which my Ustashi cousins smashed in Jewish and gypsy Serbian skulls as a boredom-dispelling switch from the knife, at the same time in Trieste at La Risiera the Ukrainian guards were finishing off the Croatian and Slovenian partisans with a fine weapon almost a medieval sledgehammer a cube of sharp metal attached to a thick steel cable with a comfortable wooden handle, who had invented this device, an engineer or a mechanic who knows, maybe his name is somewhere in my suitcase, somewhere, in the Trieste file, city of high winds and nightsticks, with the magnificent synagogue and two Orthodox churches, Serbian and Greek, Trieste port of the Habsburgs since the thirteenth century, through it the bodies of Franz Ferdinand and the beautiful Sophie passed on their way from Sarajevo, the city paid them one last homage, its farewell to the Empire, before sending them by train to Vienna via Klagenfurt, soon the Adriatic port would change hands and nations, would go over to Italy before rediscovering Germanness at the end of 1943, then being stormed by the new Slavs of the South for a few months in 1945: four countries in thirty years, an Austro-Hungarian Italian city annexed to the Reich then to the Yugoslav Republic of Slovenia finally governed by the Anglo-Americans before finding Italy again and falling asleep for a long time in the confines of democratic Europe, tired, deserted by the Jews the Greeks the Germans the Hungarians the Slovenians, cut off at the tip of the Julian Veneto, at the border of red Slavitude, at the edge of deadly Karst, near the gulf well-guarded by the ramshackle castle of Duino where Rilke took advantage in 1912 of the same hospitalities as, thirty years later, the officers of the German navy who set themselves up there, hiersein ist immer herrlich, Rilke received by Princess Marie von Thurn und Taxis mocked from afar the somber James Joyce, who at the time was being welcomed by the stiff professors of the Berlitz School and rebuked by his young wife every time he came home drunk, the little uncouth Irishman staggering in the wind, one of many visitors, many train cars that met there, on the endless jetties of a harbor that today is almost deserted, I went there for the first time on leave between two fronts with Andrija and Vlaho, I dragged them to Trieste then Zagreb going through Rijeka the grey and through Opatija the most respectable of Austro-Hungarian seaside resorts where we stayed for about an hour, just long enough to realize that the average age of those taking the curative waters was close to that in Vichy, Evian, or rather Karlovy Vary, it was the end of the winter of 1992, spring hadn’t yet arrived, Vlaho, ill, was treating himself with rakija, he was vexed because a prostitute had refused to go to bed with him with the excuse that he was sick to death with a cold, he had caused a scandal in the sordid bar in Novi Zagreb, provoking general hilarity, c’mon, it’s just my nose dripping, not the rest, I don’t have clap in my schnozzle—since then he was grumpy, we mischievously suggested he take advantage of the sulfurous waters of Opatija and of the old ladies, surely less demanding than the professionals so careful of their health, what’s more all these aged respectable German ladies were certainly there to take care of themselves too, they’d be understanding, Vlaho shrugged his shoulders saying oh, very funny, very funny, so, where are we going? and what with one thing leading to another we arrived in Italy, before leaving again for Herzegovina passing through Dalmatia, a two days’ rest at the home of the more or less cured Vlaho, insulted all day long by his grandfather the Partisan who raised every glass shouting smrt fašizmu, Vlaho answered heil Hitler as he emptied his own to enrage him, in the middle of the vines a few kilometers away from Split where the UNPROFOR soldiers were dancing, their helicopters flew over us and we, we had to hitchhike soldier-style to reach Mostar—today these memories are a kind of old Yugoslav movie, the images seem to have aged, grown out-of-date, they’re no longer mine, only the sensations remain: shame, fear, pleasure, danger remain, the smells too, the contacts, Andrija’s face, Vlaho’s hand, clutching his glass or his rifle, he was our dismantling and oiling champion, even the most exotic weapons, the most unlikely ones he could strip them bare almost with his eyes closed, arm a mine or a wire trap as easily as he scratched his ass or blew his nose, without ever realizing, we thought, what he was manipulating, with a dexterity of a rodent with a nut, rapid, precise, he ate in the same way, quickly, his fore-paws joined, his chummy face opened in an immense smile at the sight of drink or food or a new weapon: Vlaho is a field mouse, a dormouse or a rat, and above all a male child, war was h
is element, for it was simple, funny, and virile, in a world where becoming a man didn’t mean growing up but sharpening yourself, reducing yourself, pruning yourself like a vine or a tree from which you take away the branches little by little, the female part, or the human part, who knows, a classic garden hedge sculpted into the shape of a warrior, you could just as easily say into the shape of a phallus, a rifle, the male archetype we were all trying to resemble, strong, skillful, prehistoric hunter free of a brain, capable of all kinds of boasts, swaggering, proud but submissive to anyone stronger and to his hierarchical superior, scorning the weak, women and homos, anything that doesn’t look like him, in fact, Vlaho, Andrija, the others, and I little by little we were transformed into soldiers, into professionals, of course we squeezed out a tear from time to time, but it was soon hidden and erased disguised as sweat or smoke in the eye, an embrace and there you are, or at least that’s what we’d have liked, sometimes everything collapsed, Achilles’s shield pierced, the beautiful greaves torn off, the spear broken, and then he was just a naked child curled up calling for his mother or his brothers moaning crying in his sleeping bag or on his stretcher, I remember the day Andrija the invincible collapsed for the first time, the warrior of warriors whom we’d never seen without his shell: around Vitez, one morning like all the others in a village like all the others, when tensions were at their height with the Muslims, a warm morning, a little misty, a munitions transport going north, a few kilometers from Travnik the deadly beauty one fine morning with a smell of spring, with Sergeant Mile and Vlaho the crazy driver at the steering wheel, I don’t remember why we stopped near that building, probably because there was a corpse on the threshold, an old man, an entire cartridge clip in his head and chest, machine-gunned from quite close up and his dog too, a Croatian house, the door was open, a smell of incense wafted out as from a church, a dark interior and wood furniture, shutters closed they must have been shot at night, the guy and his mutt, why had he opened his door, why had he gone out, Mile signed to us, a trembling orangey light was coming from a room in the back, a tiny fire, something’s burning, all three of us move towards it, Vlaho remains behind to watch the entrance, a big bedroom with candles everywhere, dozens of candles still lit and on the double bed an old lady stretched out her hands on her chest a black or dark-grey dress her eyes closed and I don’t understand, Andrija takes off his helmet as a sign of respect, he takes off his helmet sighs and mumbles something, Mile and I imitate him without understanding, all three of us are in the process of watching over an old woman who doesn’t know she’s a widow, that her husband who lit all these candles for her was shot with his dog on his doorstep by unknown men or neighbors, she has heard nothing, on her deathbed, not the machine-gun volleys outside, not the footsteps in her house, not the laughter of those who jammed that large crucifix straight upright into the middle of her stomach, its absurd shadow is dancing on the wall next to the lowered faces of Andrija and Mile, bare-headed, and it’s Vlaho’s voice that wakes us up, u kurac, he has just entered the room, fuck, what the hell are you doing here, are we going yes or no, he glances crazily at the grandmother at her desecrated body, I put my helmet back on, Mile puts his helmet on, and we leave like robots not saying a word we climb into the Jeep Andrija sits down next to me he remains silent his eyes gazing into space the tears are beginning to flow onto his cheeks he gently wipes them away with his sleeve, he doesn’t sob he looks at the countryside the houses the trees I watch him he cries like a silent fountain without hiding it, why, he’s seen lots of corpses, young, old, male, female, burnt black, cut into pieces, machine-gunned, naked, dressed or even undressed by an explosion, why this one, Andrija will die a few weeks later, he’ll have time to avenge his own tears, to cauterize his tears in the flames, to ravage enemy bodies in turn, houses, families, exulting with Ajax son of Telamon, with Ulysses in the ruins of Troy, Andrija the furious was avenging that unknown grandmother he never mentioned again, I still have in my mind’s eye the shadow of Christ on the flowered wallpaper, in the gleam of the candles, nothing had been disturbed, no vengeful inscription on the walls, nothing, it was a strange miracle this crucifix stuck God knows how into the flesh of this old woman, Andrija upset without showing it by this sign, Sergeant Mile didn’t say anything either, Eduardo Rózsa cracked too one day, and Millán-Astray, and Achilles son of Peleus, one day one fine day when nothing prepared you for it, and I too, I cracked, fissured like a clay wall slowly drying, in Venice it was a collapse followed by ghostly wandering through the hallways of the Zone, you die many times and today in this train all the names in this secret suitcase draw me to the bottom like the cinderblock attached to the legs of a prisoner thrown into the Tiber or the Danube, in the middle of middle-class Emilia, a train where the travelers are all sitting nicely, a car of passengers ignoring each other, pretending not to see the fate they share, these shared kilometers entrusted to the Great Conductor friend of model railways of halberds and of the end of the world, some facing forward and others with their back to their destination, like me, their gaze turned to the rear, to black night, to Milan the departure station: Millán-Astray Franco’s friend, the thin one-eyed one-armed general the Legionary responsible for splendid massacres in Morocco had a guilty passion for decapitation, he liked to slit the darkie’s throat with a bayonet, that was his weakness, not to say his hobby, in 1920 he founded the Spanish Foreign Legion, after a stay in Sidi Bel Abbès with the French who are always proud of their military cunning, a natural colonial mutual aid, the French Legionnaires made a great impression on Millán who was neither one-eyed nor one-armed at the time, just obsessed, fascinated with death, Millán formed his Legion in Morocco for Spain to which the poor, the hoodlums, the banished from all over Europe rushed, and he welcomed them singing them hymns—the Spanish Legionaries whom I came across in Iraq looked like young newlyweds dressed for their weddings, they sang while they marched quickly, soy el novio de la muerte, to their nuptials like those of their ancestors in Africa, to whom Millán said you are dead, full of lice, vulgar, you are dead and you owe this new life to death, you will live again by giving death, as good fiancés you will serve, pay court to the Reaper with passion, hand Lady Death the scythe, sharpen it buff it polish it brandish it in her place in Morocco first then after the beginning of Franco’s anti-Red crusade on the very soil of the homeland, in Andalusia, in Madrid then on the Ebro in the last great offensive, in Morocco against the bloody Berbers tamers of mares, in the military disasters of the Spanish protectorate that allowed the ephemeral creation of the first independent republic in Africa, the natives’ Republic of the Rif, the republic of Abd el-Krim el-Khattabi whose creased, yellowed bank bills you can still find at the second-hand stores in Tétouan, Abd el-Krim the hero, the gravedigger of Spaniards was on the point of losing Melilla after the disaster of the Battle of Annual in July 1921 where 10,000 poorly armed, malnourished Spanish soldiers perished, without leaders and without discipline, one of the most resounding military blunders after the Somme and the Chemin des Dames, which would make the liberal monarchy of Alfonso XIII the Roman exile tremble: did he know, in his room in the Grand Hotel on the Piazza Esedra, with his collection of slippers and his princely visits, that his enemy of the time, the Berber cadi with the ponies, had found asylum in Cairo, at the court of King Farouk the anglophile: I picture him smoking a hookah by the Nile, for years, until, one day in 1956, the new king of independent Morocco suggested he return home—he refuses, maybe because he likes Nasser and Tahia Kezem too much, or maybe because he prefers to have his blood sucked by Cairo mosquitoes rather than by a Sharifian king, he dies without ever seeing his country again or holding a weapon, aside from a 9-millimeter Campo Giro picked up from the mutilated corpse of General Silvestre, commander of the Rif Army, the buffalo-horn-plated butt of which, smooth and scratchless, bears the arms of Alfonso XIII sent into exile by the defeat of his general and his brand-new pistol, Silvestre the murdered with the undiscoverable scattered body, replaced by the brothers
Franco Bahamonde and Juan Yagüe, eagles with poetic names, and their elder brother Millán-Astray with the absent eye, to whom his legionaries offered pretty wicker baskets garnished with decapitated Berber heads, to his great delight, just as before him, around 1840, Lucien de Montagnac, a colonel who was also one-armed, the pacifier of Algeria, staved off colonial boredom by decapitating Arabs like artichokes—I suddenly see Henryk Ross’s photo of the Łódź ghetto, a crate full of men’s heads next to another larger one where the headless bodies are piled up, that would have delighted Astray the one-eyed or Montagnac the ill-tempered, admirers of the samurais with the slender swords and of those saints who carried their own decapitated heads: long after his wars, Millán-Astray the bird of prey translated the Japanese Bushidō into Spanish, code of honor and of honorable death, of decapitation of the conquered soldier, law of the friend who slices your neck and thus saves you from suffering, just as the French revolutionaries adopted the guillotine for its democratic painless aspect, a king’s death for everyone, the leader’s rolling in a basket, whereas before the Revolution decapitation was reserved for nobles, with commoners dying in spectacular torments, drawn and quartered or burnt for the most part, if they survived questioning—in Damascus not long ago they hanged opponents from immense streetlights on the Square of the Abbasids, from the raised basket used in Paris to trim trees, I remember one day a hanged man who had stayed up too long ended up being decapitated from his body and fell his head rolled between the cars provoking an accident which caused one more death, an innocent little girl, probably just as innocent as the guy whose shoulderless face had frightened the driver, also innocent, just as there are lots of innocent men among the killers in the suitcase, as many as there are among the victims, murderers rapists throat-slitters ritual decapitators who learned to handle their knives on lambs or sheep, then Zeus did the rest, in Algeria my Islamists were the world champions of decapitation, in Bosnia the mujahideen killed their prisoners in the same way, the way you bleed an animal, and my own entrance to the Boulevard Mortier bore the sign of seven monks’ heads abandoned in a ditch, I can’t escape decapitation, these faces pursue me, up to Rome and Caravaggio with his head of Goliath David’s fist closed in the bloody hair or in the so-refined Palazzo Barberini Judith with her sword in Holofernes’s throat, the blood gushes so nicely, the beautiful widow looks both disgusted and resigned as she severs the carotid artery, the servant holds the bag that will surround the damp relic its eyes wide open, its hair sticky, a somber image among the religious scenes, the Saints Jerome, the portraits of bishops become popes, the innocent girls wild Judith neatly beheads the Babylonian general, to save her people in the same way Salome obtained the head of the Baptist, beheaded in his cell by a brutal guard, with a thick knife, as shown by Caravaggio, again, on the immense canvas in the cathedral of the Order of the Knights of St. John in Malta, summer of 1608, when the order was incorporated, a year after arriving in the impregnable island, forty years after the Ottoman siege when Jean de Valette shot Turkish heads out of his cannons like cannonballs, to frighten the enemy, Michelangelo Merisi di Caravaggio the Milanese would have liked to die beheaded, he died ill on a beach in Argentario, facing the grey sea that he had never painted, or that he had always painted, in the dark immensities where the bodies of beautiful boys and saints are born, of murderers prostitutes soldiers disguised as saints, Caravaggio great master of darkness and decapitation
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