Zone (11 page)

VI

the route is predictable, despite the failing light there will be Reggio Emilia then Modena Bologna Florence and so on until Rome, its sweetness like overripe fruit, Rome, rotting flamboyant corpse of a city you understand too well the fascination it can exercise over certain people, Rome and the suitcase I’m going to hand over there the time I’ll spend there maybe the choice has been made the choice has been made ever since the goddess sang of the wrath of Achilles son of Peleus, his warlike choice his honor the love that Thetis his mother bore him and Briseis his desire whom Agamemnon took just as Paris possessed Helen, the one waiting for me in Rome in her most beautiful
peplos
, maybe, the train is slowing down now approaching a station, boredom is holding me in its grip, on the other side of the aisle a man in his fifties is doing crosswords with his wife in a paper called
La Settimana Enigmistica
, the puzzle week or something like that, his wife looks much younger than he, in man’s estate everything is harder, in the nothingness of indecision that is the world of rails and shuntings, she is waiting for me, I like to think Sashka is waiting for me, that her body is waiting for me, I think about the life we abandon and about the one we suddenly choose for ourselves, about the clothes we take off, the beautiful greaves, the breastplate, the leather sustaining the breastplate, the beechwood spear cast into the fire, the shield, all those times when you get undressed, when you show yourself, naked with nothing else but the shivering of skin—those naked men taken by the hundreds out of trains blind their clothes piled up in a corner of the yard the air suddenly frozen the arms that cross the hands that cover the elbows to clothe with flesh the naked flesh marked in its center by the birthmark of the pubis: the enemy always rushes at the conquered to strip them, and we ourselves we strip our enemies for money for a souvenir for a rare weapon and our prisoners too before finishing them off, on principle, in the cold, we order them to get undressed sometimes so as not to stain or make a hole in the uniform, the jacket that could always be useful of course, but also to enjoy the power of man over naked animal, the man standing up against the shorn and trembling animal, laughable it was easier to take despicable life away from them, the gentleman with the
Settimana Enigmistica
seems very paternal, he explains the words, the letters that fit, his companion is looking through a little pocket dictionary, she’s a brunette, her hair long and tied back, in man’s estate you leave your suitcases, you cling to the youth of others, you strip your women, you undress them, it’s been almost ten years since I left Venice since Marianne left and the other life that was beginning without my knowing it in the train from Milan by a dull pain in the testicles is coming to an end today, the resignation handed in, treason consummated, dread of the world now, I am entrusting my entire self to another train, one more, I’m no longer a kind of snitching pen-pushing nosey civil servant but a free man, and this cumbersome freedom fruit of my treachery I’ll spend it in the company of Sashka who is waiting for me maybe, Marianne is so present now, close down one existence open up the one before, ten years later, livelier than ever, what could have become of her, I picture her a teacher in a Parisian high school, a mother, of course, she whose body and education were pushing her towards teaching and maternity, just like mine towards the war that for it was entirely natural, for a boy brought up in violence, used to the idea of weapons since childhood, primary school and cartoons, raised in the idea of God and the nation oppressed by his mother’s wailing, finding himself one day with an assault rifle in his hand, near Osijek, propelled by his parent’s tears and drawn by the summons of Franjo Tuđman the Savior, it’s the bland but pleasant face of the crossword enthusiast that makes me think of him, dazed by the fruitless drowsiness of the train’s rhythm, Tuđman whose photograph soon joined that of Ante Pavelić in uniform on my mother’s patriotic altar, along with Christ and a weeping Virgin, Tuđman arrived in Zagreb as King of Kings, to transform my existence radically, save me or ruin me, who knows, and in front of our television in the 15
^th
arrondissement, in the dark, religiously, we listened to his elegiac speeches only half of which I understood, which my mother translated for me with devotion,
on the day Christ arrived in Jerusalem, he was welcomed as a prophet
, shouted the newscaster,
today the Croatian capital is the new Jerusalem: Franjo Tuđman has come for his own
, Croatia was born again, it emerged completely armed from Tuđman’s helmet, finally dragged itself out of its Titoist sleep, found in war wounds a strength a courage a youth and in the clash with its enemies a will a power a beautiful pain whose names were inscribed in letters of fire on television screens, Knin, Osijek, Vukovar, the hairy drunken Serbs were marching against innocence and beauty, they were massacring us, taunting us as they massacred us, in my entire Parisian quiet student’s existence, those trips on the metro, those for me abstruse classes in public law, history, and politics, those daily meetings with Marianne all slipped into the void that I was discovering within myself the silent void of the summons of a homeland in danger, hunger desire appetite for a sense of struggle of combat of another life that seemed to me terribly true, real, you had to fight the injustice that was being unleashed on the young State all the bolts of the archer Apollo protector of the East, and the more images and speeches reached me, the more my mother cried both from joy and from pain, the more I slipped towards Croatia, the more I disappeared from Paris from the university I was escaping Marianne and the present, I was burying myself in news reports in Krajinas in surrounded Dubrovnik in the provocations of the Yugoslav army in patriotic songs that I was discovering and even the language even the language that I had half-forgotten never really learned scorned in fact for years even the language came back to me realer and stronger than ever to the great displeasure of my father I began speaking Croatian at home he who hardly understood a word felt excluded from this nationalistic madness as he called it probably rightly, you look like your grandfather said my mother,
podsjećaš me na djeda
, you look like your grandfather, it was a trap, I fell into it just as a train plunges into the night I followed in my grandfather’s footsteps without knowing who he was, two years of war, two full years aside from three getaways, one to Trieste with Andrija and Vlaho and two in Paris, mostly to see Marianne again, to feel again what the
poilus
of 1914 told about, the incomprehension of people not at the front, the impossibility of telling about it, of speaking, like those children leaving school who don’t know how to say what they did all day: when Marianne questioned me about the war, both of us lying in the dark in her tiny attic room I replied “nothing,” I did nothing, saw nothing learned nothing I didn’t know how to say it, it was impossible, I told my mother that we were fighting for the glorious homeland, that’s all, I saw nothing in war and then I left, I took the night train from Italy or Austria and the next night I was in Zagreb, I thought about the
poilus
who left Paris, I imagined, in that civilized, comfortable train, that I was a Hapsburg soldier on leave who was returning to the front, who was returning to fight the Italians over there on the Isonzo in the foothills of the Alps in 1917 while on the other side of the aisle the crosswords are in full swing, the man older than his companion is talking to her like a professor, Hemingway and his nurse, Hemingway who came this way before going to play at being ambulance driver in the mountains, did he too feel the discrepancy, the impossible gulf hollowed out by the war, between those not at war and the soldiers, the ones who saw, who know, who suffer, the ones who have become dead or death-dealing flesh, and in that immense flat countryside extended by night I think of those who went up to the front on the Somme after seventy-two hours in Paris, after downing their little drinks after being very sad after having sadly and thoroughly fornicated they are like us silent in their car they don’t exchange a word in the distance a few bright flashes announce the zone of the armies the zone we’re coming close even if you don’t hear the cannon you see it you’re coming close, your throat contracts, you get out of the train, you walk through a group of wounded men who are waiting to be evacuated and they’re moaning, you get into a truck driven by a slightly bad-tempered guy, just a bit abrupt, jealous of a man on leave, then you end up on foot, you greet the artillerymen whom you envy for being so cozily entrenched at the side of their howitzers, even if they all end up half-deaf that’s not serious, you advance through the lines, through the half-buried networks following the directions written on wooden signs or on German helmets stuck in the clay, you hope that the first night will be calm, for now it’s the English taking it on the chin over there towards Ypres, you forbid yourself from thinking about the girl you’ve just left, about the last load you shot in a furnished apartment, the last shot you drank alone in the Place de Clichy because all your friends are at the front or at work, the waiter at the café still too young to leave felt envy and respect for you the
poilu
, but his turn will come, when will he die, will he fall in a few months on the Chemin des Dames, cut in half by a machine gun, decapitated by barbed wire or disintegrated by a mine in his trench, will he cry as he holds his warm smelly guts in his hands, will he call for his mother, will he look like a ghost for his arm sticking up somewhere in the mud, you’re in the ground, in the first lines that are made of dirt churned up by bombs, barely shored up, you reach the 329
^th
infantry commanded by an officer you’ve never seen before, there’s X, there’s Y, they all know it’s best to leave the man on leave to his silence, they’re all muddy covered in lice starving it’s been seventy-two hours since you saw them unconsciously you look for the missing ones you
see
the missing ones then you say nothing, the lieutenant makes a curt sign with his head you set down your kit you look for a position you clutch your Lebel sitting as if in a train you’re back and a part of you most of you has remained behind, back there where you savor the end of the world, the pistol shot of Gavrilo Princip in Sarajevo marks the beginning of the race to horror, on June 28, 1914, Gavrilo nineteen years of age thin and tubercular weapon in hand cyanide in his pocket pieces together the destroyed world three empires and rushes me without knowing it into this train ninety years later, near Parma judging from the suburban lights, Gavrilo the Bosnian Serb believed in the Great Serbia that I did my share to undo, the little activist was lucky, like Jaurès’s assassin on the Rue Montmartre he was in a café, the plans failed, the bomb that was supposed to make an end to Franz Ferdinand didn’t explode beneath the right car, the archduke is still alive, for his misfortune Gavrilo Princip is beloved of Hera, the clever goddess will blind the Austrian chauffeur and the motorcade will come up to Princip, up to his café, Moritz Schiller’s café at the corner of the street facing the tiny bridge it’s a fine day he just has to go out leave his cup half empty take the capsule of poison in his left hand the weapon in his right and shoot, did he have time to observe the Habsburg’s surprised mustaches, the quivering lips of the beautiful Sophie his wife killed instantly, did he glimpse the millions of dead who gushed forth along with the Austro-Hungarian blood, was he happy with his shot, did the son of Leto guide his shots, was he proud of his four cartridges, did he hesitate, did he think it’s nice out today I’m in a café I’ll set off the massacre some other day, probably he didn’t have time to reflect, he went out, and according to the police reports he fired from five feet away, eye to eye—Gavrilo Princip would die in turn in Theresienstadt, in the prison of the Czech city where the Reich would install a model ghetto in 1941, thus paying absurd homage to the man who indirectly allowed its advent, piling death on death, a ghetto for artists, for intellectuals, one of the worst concentration camps, it superimposed farce on horror, Gavrilo in his cell in the Theresienstadt castle died in 1918 without having seen the birth of the Kingdom of the Southern Slavs for which he had indirectly fought, and the cyanide capsule served no purpose, he died slowly from tuberculosis, which is why he had been recruited to begin with: a band of tubercular terrorists, condemned men doomed to die soon, that’s the ideal thing, you feel much less remorse sending them to the slaughterhouse—the first time I went to Sarajevo I passed by the former Moritz Schiller café on the corner by the bridge, on the side of the embankment there’s a proud plaque, what does it mean today, what did it mean then, at the height of the siege, along the river where every now and then Serbian or Bosnian mortar shells landed, to remind the international community that times were hard they didn’t hesitate for long to shoot at each other, like the recruits of 1917, just as the waiter on the Place de Clichy gone to the Chemin des Dames would shoot himself in the foot to escape the slaughter, the Muslim army probably shot itself in the foot once or twice, in the agony of the city where Gavrilo Princip, coughing, spitting blood, had killed the brother of the emperor, a bomb looks like a bomb, it has no owners once it’s thrown, the self-mutilations were countless during the war of 1914, some in the hand, others in the fat of the belly, and I understand those Bosnian artillerymen, exasperated by international indifference, who probably used the tactics of the exhausted
poilu
, hoping that the American planes circling around them would end up putting the Serbian batteries out of commission and I imagine, just as the young soldier points his Lebel at his shoe and pulls the trigger, that they must have hesitated for a long time before shooting at their own men, or not, maybe like Gavrilo Princip at nineteen they were determined, hardened by the certainty of death that was the ambiance of Sarajevo during the last war—the battalion of tubercular Serbs of the Black Hand presaged the number of desperate, suicidal, sacrificed ones that are the army of shades of the century, or of all of history, maybe there was something foundational in Princip’s 32-caliber, was it really him who pulled the trigger, he was already dying, condemned, a ghost, a plaything in the hands of the wrathful gods, one instant of glory is given to Diomedes son of Tydeus, to the Ajaxes, to