Zone

by Mathias Enard

  XVI

  a tunnel is blocking my eardrums, I’ll go back to the café car, that’s the best thing to do, I leave Rafael Kahla’s book on my tray-table and head for Antonio the bartender, the swaying makes me stagger in the middle of the car I almost sprawl onto an offended nun, she must have gotten on in Florence I hadn’t noticed her before, there always has to be a nun in an Italian train, a nun some Boy Scouts some bohemian musicians a Pronto reader a spy a pretty blonde and an illegal immigrant, all the characters needed for a play or a genre film, or even a canvas by Caravaggio, there are more people in the bar now, the passengers are beginning to get hungry and thirsty, it must be close to eight o’clock: Antonio recognizes me, he says ironically a gin? no, not a gin, a beer, the bubbles will do me good, the Holy Spirit of fermentation, the large bay windows of the restaurant car are bathed in moonlight, between Arezzo and Montepulciano, everywhere hills and vines, the beer is cold, the label is pretty, blue and white, with a picture of a big sailboat with the nice name Sans Souci, Carefree, that’s a good omen—in Thessalonica the Byzantine there was a similar boat moored outside the harbor, by Aristotle Square, a magnificent three-master with a black-and-white striped hull, elegant, low on the water, it wasn’t the Sans Souci but the Amerigo Vespucci a boat-school belonging to the Italian navy, in 1997 Salonika was the cultural capital of Europe, this exceptional event had to be celebrated with dignity, I passed through there by chance back from my first Greek vacation as a new spy, farewell Algerian cutthroats, make room for sun ouzo and shish kebab, I had brought Drifting Cities by Tsirkas, which talked about everything except Greece, Jerusalem Alexandria Cairo instead I had bought this novel as a good tourist to read native literature, as Marianne would have done who devoured Yasar Kemal by the shores of well-guarded Troy, I was wasting my time there, the Greek islands were disappointing, what was I looking for there, I have no idea, the Dodecanese were just a traffic jam of cars disembarking from rusty ferries, windswept treeless islands, the sea was turbulent and terribly blue, the clusters of vacationers come from all over Europe went round and round in circles from inlet to inlet from beach to beach from tavern to tavern, and of course solitude was just a pure illusion, given the size of the citadel and the number of French tourists who frequented the area—in Patmos, at the foot of the grotto of Saint John the Evangelist, all the traditional houses were repainted white so often that the white didn’t have time to dry, pilgrims and devotees were added to the tourists come for the scuba diving and the windsurfing, on an island of a disturbing beauty, mountainous, rocky, dry, perfect if it had been deserted, which was not the case, far from it, people were climbing over each other, by day the ferries discharged day-trippers like a cargo of wheat, thousands of round grains invaded the little streets headed for St. John’s monastery, in a giant humming noise, a murmur of muffled voices and flashes snapping despite the blinding summer light, for an hour or two at the very most, then the flood surged back to the boat immediately followed by another load, and so on from 9:00 in the morning to 7:00 at night, impossible to imagine that there were so many cruise boats in the Aegean Sea, an incalculable number, and only when darkness came, when the stars replaced the people and scattered the sea with equally countless glimmers could one, by an effort of the imagination, in the noise of the waves lapping against the rocks, in the shadow of the dark mountain, imagine the visionary presence of the herald of the Apocalypse and the end of the world, the Eagle of Patmos deported by the Romans to this inhospitable rock, coming from Ephesus the golden, I picture him at night, haunted by the cold and visions of the end of days, his eyes wide open onto the nothingness of the sea plain, certain that this cave would be his last home, peopled with animal cries with the neighing of horses with the sighs of the dying with body-less heads with sick people with terrifying abscesses with fallen angels with fornicating demons, in the pale rays from the kingdom of heaven that the friendly moon casts on the sea, John the Evangelist will survive the ordeal of the island, a magnanimous Caesar would send him back to Ephesus, he would die his fine death, after himself digging a ditch to lie down in, in the circular choir of his primitive chapel—in Patmos in my very rustic inn I had nightmares in which a stranger gave me cylindrical boxes like hatboxes and recommended I carry them with me to Paris as contraband, they were heavy, I ended up opening one, it contained a desiccated muddy human head with its eyes hanging out of its sockets, the head of one of the Tibhirine monks and I woke up with a start, impossible to rid myself of the images from glutinous Algeria, so I went to submerge myself in the icy water at the base of the rocks, I stayed until dawn rolled up in my towel on a flat rock, until daybreak transformed Poseidon’s realm with the azure plume into phosphorus, then I climbed back up to the village to have a coffee and eat a dense heavy roll stuffed with olives or an almond cake watching the landing of the first invaders of the day, and then I got tired of nightmares the evangelist had no miracle for me, I set off in turn on a ferry for Rhodes, island of the colossus, of knights and forgotten mosques, which was Ottoman from the beginning of the sixteenth century until 1912, when the Italians decided they wanted the crumbs of the dying Empire, they had conquered a piece of desert in North Africa and a string of stones in the Aegean, of which Rhodes was the mountainous steep-sloped pearl, the landscapes looked like Troy, pine groves rising high above the sea, twenty or so villages were dotted all around the tear-shaped island, whose shore was eaten away by hotels and seaside resorts—I soon abandoned my car to take refuge in the old city of the main town, in little streets behind the thick walls of the knights of Jerusalem, in the shade, in the Juderia, the old Jewish neighborhood, in a medieval building called the Hotel Cava-d’Oro: the Juderia smelled of absence, there was just a handful of Jews left in Rhodes, a dozen miles from the Turkish coast, there was nothing left of a community of 2,000, the only believers in the synagogue of Kahal Shalom were Israeli tourists, and in the pretty inner courtyard of the hotel, at breakfast-time, I heard them speaking Hebrew while the Jews of Rhodes spoke Ladino, Judeo-Spanish memory of the kingdom of Spain that had expelled them, the island had been a refuge for them, for a few centuries, before European punishment caught up with them and sent them to live in the clouds in the sky over Auschwitz, of all the Jews deported mid-1944 only a hundred or so would return, they’d settle elsewhere, Rome, France, the United States, deserting their native island touched by absence and nothingness, in the Jewish Museum in Rhodes I watched Nazi persistence charter three old rusty barges to transport the Juden from the Dodecanese to the transit camp of Haydari near Athens, then make them cross the Balkans by train, through Salonika Skopje Belgrade and Budapest, to hook the cars up to the endless freight cars that sent the Hungarian Jews to their death, the Teutonic functionaries knew their job, despite the allied bombings, the partisan attacks, the movements of troops that had to be brought back from the East, the reinforcements and supplies to be conveyed to the front they found a way, when the Red Army was already in Poland, to set up convoys going from Asia Minor to Galicia, to send a few thousand Jews to their deaths all the more docile since they knew nothing about the anti-Semitism, the ghettos, the extermination in progress, far, very far away, on an island with such imposing ramparts that it seems impregnable, protected, they thought, by the memory of the Knights Hospitaller of Jerusalem and of Suleiman the Magnificent, Rhodes looked more like the Middle East or Cyprus than like Patmos, there were mosques, fountains, Latin churches dating back to the Crusades, and the imposing palace of the Grand Master that looked vaguely like the Crusaders’ citadels in Syria and Palestine—so many dead things plunged me irremediably into nostalgia, my nightmares had ceased, replaced by insomnia, which I treated with huge swigs of undiluted ouzo until I was sunk in a dreamless blackness, at the price of deafening snores that earned me the unsympathetic reproofs of my Israeli neighbors, despite the medieval walls separating us, the Jews of Rhodes so far as I know were the ones who came from furthest away to be caught in the spiderweb of Auschwitz, the only ones along wi
th the Jews from Corfu to begin their final journey on a boat, the solitude so pleasant at first was weighing on me, the Juderia of Rhodes stank of absence of deportation and sunscreen, I put the car back on a ferry headed for the Piraeus, I said to myself that vacations were extremely annoying things, and even though I thought the knights of Jerusalem were more or less agreeable, future masters of Arab Malta and employers of Caravaggio, I wanted to find a big city again, a capital, activity and not just idle tourists like me moving around in the midst of the ghosts of Crusaders and dead Jews: the bar on the train is full of Americans, they’re going to Rome, a group of tourists, a bunch of friends in their early sixties, blonde women, tall men, their teeth redone, nice people, Sans Souci beer in hand I listen to them commenting on their hotel in Florence, it wasn’t bad, they say, by European standards, I don’t know if this remark is supposed to be positive or negative, maybe we’ll see each other again at the Plaza, the most American, most decadent of the luxury hotels in Rome, why didn’t Yvan Deroy choose the Minerva Hotel in front of the Bernini elephant, the elephant with the long trunk, or the Grand Hotel on the Piazza Repubblica, the one belonging to Alfonso XIII of Spain the collector of slippers, so close to the train station, or another of the 100,000 luxury hotels in Rome, each one haunted by its famous visitors its corpses its ghosts, Yvan Deroy will be a phantom among others, the last beer of Francis Servain the secret agent, the last beer of Francis Servain offshoot of Hades, it had to be called Sans Souci and be a boat—after two days sweating in Athens in a dusty deserted city, after gathering my thoughts in the Temple of Zeus, after having revered the green-eyed goddess and her peerless beauty I had sweated so much and was so covered in dust that I dreamt of the Great North and the glacial cold, I thought of Lebihan and his scorn for anything south of Clermont-Ferrand, the old man was right, Athens was disemboweled, they were building a subway line the gods were not very happy to have their cellar drilled into like that and took revenge by sinking newspaper kiosks underground parking lots and inattentive foreigners into the abyss, Hephaestus the lame and Poseidon the earth-shaker caused quite a bit of trouble for the harried engineers, not counting the pompous archeologists from the Antiquities department who wanted to analyze each pebble taken out of the excavations, which made Athenians say that their subway wouldn’t be ready till the end of days, the Hellenes were a proud people but not without irony, in August obviously they were all on vacation, and around Omonia Square only somber Albanians and broke travelers walked, in the dust and the apocalyptic noise of pneumatic drills, under the maternal gaze of the goddess on top of her Acropolis, I thought of Albert Speer the Führer’s architect inventor of the theory of rubble, conceiver of buildings destined to become beautiful ruins a thousand years in the future, ruins like the Greeks and Romans had, which Germany was sadly lacking, Adolf the Determined didn’t back away from anything for the good of his people, so Speer sketched Doric temples with unheard-of proportions that once eaten away by time would have constituted a magnificent Forum, a sublime Parthenon in the middle of Nuremberg and Berlin, Speer was a strange architect, the planner of vestiges of the future, great builder of arms factories—at the Nuremberg trial Francesc Boix formally recognized him, he pointed him out, he saw him in photographs during his visit to Mauthausen, accompanied by Kaltenbrunner, head of security for the Reich, in the stairways of the death quarry, what is Speer the artist thinking at that instant, in the dock with the accused, singled out by a Spanish communist photographer, Speer who denied ever knowing anything, ever seeing anything, ever hearing anything, the Führer’s friend sitting in the midst of the rubble, where the American bombs had accelerated the work of time: in Athens slaves built the Acropolis, slaves would build the monuments of the Reich, many would die, true, but many had died building the pyramids and no one today thought of demolishing them or of damning their architect, that’s what Speer must have been thinking the little rich man in the dock between an SS officer and a Wehrmacht officer, he got out of Spandau Prison in 1966 and I imagine him a few months later, at the age of sixty-one, traveling through Greece in the company of his son Albert Jr., who at that time was planning the urban development of Tripoli in Libya, and who would go on to build in Iran and Saudi Arabia, does Albert Speer Sr. remember the stairway in Mauthausen as he climbs the steps to the Acropolis, or the young Spaniard who pointed him out in Nuremberg, not very likely—in 1947 Boix also goes to Greece, at the beginning of the civil war, on assignment for L’Humanité and Regards, he photographs Zachariadis the general secretary of the communist party and spends some time in the mountains with the DSE partisans, before returning to Paris and dying there, in the meantime he had also gone to Algeria, where the same Speer Jr. would much later design a suburb that would, without him knowing it, house my GIA cutthroats, and Boix would follow the Tour de France, which delighted him, I haven’t seen his photos of Greece but I suppose he knew how to talk with the communist fighters, after all he had been one too: I left for the north, instead of taking the ferry to Igoumenitsa I still had time to kill so I went back up to Thessaly, maybe it was cooler there, I was pouring with sweat in the car with all the windows open, in Bosnia in 1993 there was a brigade of Greek volunteers who fought alongside the Serbs, a handful of fanatics who distinguished themselves around Sarajevo especially, I hadn’t met any of them, fortunately, the Arab mujahideen and the Russian auxiliaries were quite enough, even if they’d been in skirts and clogs with pompoms like Thomson and Thompson, great Orthodox solidarity on one side, Muslim fraternity and Catholic harmony on the other, in the train’s bar the Americans are talking loudly, they’re laughing, they’re happy, they seem to have been playing golf all their lives around Seattle, so pale are they, they’re drinking mineral water and Chianti, maybe their parents were soldiers in this region, in the company of Moroccan goumiers and Algerian infantry of the French Expeditionary Corps, in June 1944, around Lake Trasimeno, between Montepulciano and Perugia, after the victory of Monte Cassino, that famous victory that the Moroccans and Algerians had celebrated by robbing killing pillaging and raping anything that fell into their hands, including livestock according to the complaints lodged at the allied police station, great soldiers were also excellent bandits, they had gotten a fine reputation for themselves ever since they’d landed, their officers closed their eyes or preferred to take the law into their own hands, after all it was wartime, in Sicily things hadn’t been so easy, the civilians hid in the mountains and they say that more than one soldier “who had behaved badly” had been found cut into pieces by an offended father or husband, around Naples the French soldiers of the colonial troops had set off an avalanche of complaints about theft, theft and murder, not counting the various perversions related by the Neapolitan prostitutes, no matter the Moroccan mountain troops and the Algerian infantry corps were great soldiers, they had proven it many times, and they would prove it once again in Monte Cassino, their heroism was equaled only by their perfect savagery, they climbed the rocky slopes under fire of the Germans entrenched at the top, they died bravely, sent to the front with their mules, their donkeys, and when they were victorious had bled freely were quite dead chopped up cut up crushed by bombs and stones the survivors scattered into the countryside to take their share of honor, beautiful dark-haired virgin girls tanned from laboring in the fields, sheep, goats from which they made smoking hecatombs, the gods licked their lips, the soldiers in the colonial troops carried everything off on their mules, even mattresses, and when the farmer tried to resist, refused to hand over his wife his daughter his mother his sister his sheep and his wall clock they slit his neck with pleasure, weren’t they conquerors, they were applying the law of war, they could take everything down to the last stone if they wanted, magnanimous they usually consumed the women on site and only rarely carried them away, they weren’t any worse than the bombs that had razed the abbey of Saint Benedict at Monte Cassino, when there wasn’t a single German inside, tons of explosives dropped in vain from beautiful B-17s those angels of de
struction, the same angels that wiped German cities off the map, the original Benedictine abbey lay in fragments, Pope Pius XII in Rome was furious and silent, he knew how things stood, humped peasants and a few atrociously violated goats were nothing compared to a building of that value, Italian civilians and the walls of Saint Benedict the ascetic gardener were chalked up to profit and loss, Rome fell, Pius XII rushed into the arms of his liberators mit brennender Sorge, with a keen anxiety, the Pope spoke German better than English, after ten years spent in Bavaria, Pius XII the clever had managed to keep the Vatican intact in the tempest, facing Mussolini then the Reich, with immense cowardliness and great courage, according to which version you heard, it is to be feared that Pius XII was neither exceptionally spineless nor particularly brave, that he feared the Reds more than all the others, he negotiated the Lateran Accords with Mussolini, congratulated General Franco for having delivered Spain so nicely to the Church, dared to chide the Führer for his attacks against Catholicism, asked the martyred Polish faithful to be patient for a while, hid a few Jews in his gardens, the Pope preferred to lower his Papal tiara over his eyes for a while so as not to be blinded by what he could have seen, there would always be time to forgive the killers and beatify the martyrs, and the list was long, the list was terribly long, like the Americans who were burying bodies with backhoes during the liberation of the camps, Dachau, Bergen-Belsen, Mauthausen, hundreds of women and men went into the ground, millions had already gone there, in flames and into the air, like the 60,000 Jews who were missing from Salonika when I went there, certainly in 1945 no one recognized the city anymore, almost half the inhabitants had disappeared, I found a hotel very close to the sea a stone’s throw away from Aristotle Square and the White Tower, in the new city that is so reminiscent of Alexandria in Egypt, the elegant whitewashed buildings burned in the evening sun setting from Mount Hortiatis to bring a little coolness to the avenues crushed by summer, people strolled along the seafront, their mouths open like asphyxiated fish, cooler air rose little by little from the sparkling gulf, the rigging of the Amerigo Vespucci began clinking in the warm breeze, the light faded and projected bluish shadows onto the glasses on the café terraces in the square, it was logical for Salonika to remind me of Alexandria founded by Alexander the conqueror of Asia, the one who had profited from the lessons of Aristotle quite close to this place, before spreading the fury of his armies to the ends of the earth, I felt immediately rested in Salonika, the last chapter in Drifting Cities, a story about survivors of the communist saga took place there, by a strange chance the book had caught up with me on my trip, the heroes drank Macedonian wine in a tavern on top of the ramparts, remembering their dead, a libation, the handsome Manos killed by a grenade his corpse attached to a mule’s tail and dragged over the rocks, Pandelis and Thanassis shot, the bony rheumatic women would take care of their memorials, was it the wind coming from the north, from the nearby Balkans, from Serbia possibly, was it the novel by Tsirkas or the Macedonian wine but once the last page was finished I was trembling as if I were about to collapse, where were they, Andrija the Slavonic, Vlaho the Dalmatian, lost in death or in their mountains, sing, goddess, their memorable names, the names of the ones who left me, whom I left, for the first time I felt as if I were locked up in the Zone, in a hazy shifting blue interspace where a long threnody rose up chanted by an ancient choir, and everything was spinning around me because I was a ghost locked up in the realm of the Dead, condemned to wander without ever making an image on photographic film or being reflected in a mirror until I shattered my fate, but how, how could I extricate myself from this empty shell that was my body, I paced Salonika top to bottom and bottom to top, the icons the saints the churches the ramparts over to the prison of Heptapyrghion on top of the Acropolis, Constantine the Philosopher, Cyril the apostle of the Slavs who left from Salonika for a long journey ended his life in Rome, you can see his tomb, beneath the narthex of the San Clemente Basilica, on the Lateran slopes, maybe when I get to Rome I’ll go lie down too in a humid basement, in a cave, a catacomb, and I’ll let Yvan Deroy the fortunate take his leave, let him walk to his fate and abandon me to decay, I’ve almost finished my beer, my Sans Souci with the proud ship, the tourists from the New World don’t seem in a hurry to go back to their car, me neither, above my seat is the little suitcase chained to the luggage rack, what does it really contain, why did I want to document the Zone from Harmen Gerbens the Cairo drunk, all those images, those names, down to my own, down to the terrible photos of Bosnia, including the souvenirs of Jasenovac, the throngs of massacred in Mauthausen, the documents from Globocnik and Stangl in Trieste, my father’s torture photos, the Ottoman telegrams in code addressed to Talaat Pasha, the Spanish lists of the mass graves in Valencia, the massacred of Shatila, the laughter of Alois Brunner the senile in Damascus, may they rest in peace, may I rest in peace, since everything’s going to be over soon, may the apocalypse come and the warming or the freezing the desert or the deluge I’ll entrust my personal ark to the eternity specialists and farewell, the madman on the platform in the Milan train station was right, one last handshake before the end of the world, one last contact one last exchange of information and goodbye