Zone (14 page)

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, probably 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 18
^th
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 18
^th
, 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,