Zone (17 page)

she was a virgin, she was a virgin, maiden! maiden!
the basement smelled nicely of rancid alcohol sweat fear blood gun lubricants used to lubricate anuses forced open with a bottle of anisette, a training grenade, or to conduct electricity and prevent the flesh from burning too quickly, when the electric-shock torture is no longer manual, of course, but a transformer of the same kind (coils and elements) as the one that delighted me when I was little, to vary the speed of the trains just as my father, in his day, varied the intensity of the shouts and contractions of the muscles strained to breaking point—I remember in high school I had related a biology experiment to my parents, we applied a continuous current to the nerve endings of a dissected frog and it moved, its feet contracted obedient to the experimenter and his 4.5 volt battery, I had explained this experiment in detail and my mother had said “what cruelty, poor animal,” I remember my father hadn’t added anything, he had taken refuge in silence, he had looked away without commenting at all on the fate of the frog or on electric barbarity, he was silent, once again, just as he was silent once and for all that day in his grave, victim perhaps of cancer remorse or guilt, and I arrive at his funeral after having spent hours sifting through files and papers about him, after having learned that for a year he had been assigned to “special interrogations” for military information described in the secret reports of the Intelligence Service, after having retraced his glorious escapades in remote douars and hamlets, the son followed the shadow of the father, the grandfather and many others without realizing it, as I bury my progenitor I think of the dead who are accompanying him into the grave, tortured, raped, killed unarmed or fallen in combat, they flit about in the Ivry cemetery, around us, can my mother see them, does she know, of course,
he did what he had to do
, that’s her phrase, like mine
I did what had to be done
, for the homeland, for
Bog
our God for the cemeteries who call out—I see again the monumental cemetery in Vukovar, its white crosses on one side and its black gravestones on the other, a cemetery stuck in time, frozen, fixed in November 1991, in Vukovar death seems to have gone on vacation on November 21
^st
exactly, after three months of hard labor, tired and sated: I went back there not long after my father’s Ivry funeral, to see eastern Slavonia again Osijek, Vinkovci and especially to see Vukovar restored to the fatherland, Vukovar where I had never gone, which I hoped to free on my arrival in October 1991 and which fell a month later to the hands of the Yugoslav army and Serb paramilitaries, the taste of bile at the fall of Vukovar, Hector and Aeneas inside our lines, the camp invaded, the hollow vessels threatened, and fear, the fear of losing, of being conquered, of disappearing of going back to the vacuity of things our useless arms broken against the bronze of T55 tanks, I put my black hat on again and once my father was in the ground I left to travel around Croatia, alone, I wanted Vlaho to go with me but he was too busy bottling or casking or something, and also he didn’t much want to go back there into the humidity of the Pannonian autumn, to see Vukovar, the place of wolves, well-named—the draftees from Vojvodina and central Serbia tucked into it wholeheartedly, those mustached wolves who looked as if they’d come straight out of a poem by Njegoš, they genially massacred everything they could, at the fall of Vukovar we had gone mad, Andrija had gone mad, rigid, crazy with pain, furious, dangerous, in a rage, full of hate and brave, indomitable, for if the city was a sad symbol for us for him it was much more, perch, pike, friends from bars from familiar houses a first kiss by the Danube and everything that attaches you to a city, I passed through his village I had never seen before either, his parents who had been relocated to Zagreb suburbs had never gone back there—their house was still in ruins, with its little garden, its gate and a big shell hole in the front wall, obscene eye, I then headed for Vinkovci before turning left towards Vukovar, on my way between Osijek and Vinkovci I didn’t recognize anything, none of my battlefields, no wolves in sight despite the late hour, Vinkovci looked placid and sleepy, the suburbs were dotted with wrecked or razed houses, abandoned, burned, bombed factories: I was driving through what had been Serbian lines at the steering wheel of my brand-new Golf from Avis, in the rotten evening under a freezing drizzle, and I saw the cemetery, a few kilometers away from Vukovar, what was left of the sun went away quickly and I stopped, a big flat field a parking lot roomy enough for thirty tour buses, flags, a monolithic monument, it didn’t take long for memory to settle here I thought, the nation had reasserted its rights to its martyrs, the brand-new cemetery on a territory that had just recently been reconquered where death held sway ten years earlier, all the tombstones bore witness to this, died October 20, 1991, died October 21, 1991, died November 2, 1991, and this family, husband wife and son surprised probably by a shell all died together on November 5, 1991, and so on, up to November 19, the apogee, massacre, crosses—a little further on the cemetery for those who hadn’t fallen during the war looked disordered, alive, almost, but here, in the field of black marble, I felt as if I were wandering round in a confused military necropolis, where all the soldiers were civilians, hastily dressed in the uniform of sacrifice, the Croatian flag flew to embrace the souls of its new children just as at the time it kept us warm on our fighting biceps, the shield Checquy Argent and Gules caressed 938 white crosses, night was falling gently, I was alone in the middle of all these dead bodies, filled with a dull and tenacious sadness I got back into the Golf, I drove to Vukovar, to the Hotel Danube a decrepit red tower by the river’s edge, I walked along the bank, caught sight of another monument, a huge cross by the water’s edge, the center of town stank of ghosts death and mud, I passed the door of a bar in the famous street of baroque arcades completely rebuilt, young people with shaved heads gave me strange looks, I downed two, three
rakija
almost all at one go which won me the bartender’s respect, I felt very empty, I had just lost the battle of Vukovar a second time, the battle against sadness and despair, I passed near the old covered market burned bombarded abandoned, I bought a bottle of local plum brandy in a grocery store a package of peanuts I went back to the Hotel Danube to collapse on the bed my eyes turned towards Novi Sad and Belgrade on the surface of the majestic river and I drank, I drank as I thought of Andrija’s anger of his tears after the city fell, Andi a toast for you, for your rage that day or the next I forget when Fate sent us two prisoners after an ambush, one was wounded, the other unhurt was trembling with fear he said
my father has money, my father has money, if you let me go he’ll give you a lot of money
, he was too afraid to lie, we had picked them up when they were trying to desert, I was tempted to let them run, I was about to hand them over to a grunt so he could take them to Osijek, but Andrija arrived,
are you out of your mind? You forgot Vukovar already? Not one of them should escape
, and he machinegunned them at length, right away, without hesitating, looking them in the eyes, fifteen cartridges each in the chest, on my bed in the Hotel Danube a toast for Andi great shepherd of warriors, a toast for the stupefied gaze of the two little Serbs when the brass pierced them, a toast for the Vukovar cemetery in the falling night, for the Ivry cemetery one spring morning, for the soldiers of ’14, the Resistants the ones condemned to death and a toast for my pater probably a murderer neither a Resistant nor a man condemned to death who is keeping them company today, as the train slows down to enter Reggio in gentle and beautiful Emilia, luminous for those coming from the darkness, an Italian city where the churches the squares and the arcades have not been demolished with mortar fire, the train station is small, all length and no width, streaked with white neon lights, a few travelers are waiting on the platform muffled in coats, scarves, on the opposite track a train is passing, a freight train, headed for Modena, loaded with tanks of milk—there was probably no need for a train for the ten Jews rounded up in Reggio at the end of 1943, they must have transported them by truck, right nearby, twenty kilometers away, to the Fossoli camp antechamber of Poland, but there is a plaque, in town, near the big synagogue in the heart of the former ghetto, which lists the names of these ten people who were eliminated 2,000 kilometers away from their home, whereas just ten Carabinieri bullets would have sufficed to spare them the torments of the journey, and would have earned them a burial, secret no doubt, but a place in the earth where, like the massacred ones in Vukovar, they would wait for someone to find them again, they didn’t have that luck, they were offered a piece of cloud in the heavy sky of Galicia—Fossoli transit camp through which passed, from autumn 1943 to August 1944, most of the Jews deported from Italy, before the camp was moved to Bolzano near the Austrian border, strange perseverance, the war was mostly lost, Mussolini’s Italian Social Republic in Salò was taking on water everywhere and yet the German administration went to the trouble of organizing convoys, transports for the partisans and the last Jews from Bologna or Milan, to Fossoli then Bolzano and finally to Birkenau, one final effort to make Italy
Judenrein
or
Judenfrei
, according to the nuances of the time, the ten Jews from Reggio who hadn’t gone into exile were perhaps caught at home, near the synagogue on the Via dell’Aquila, maybe denounced, maybe not, and went to join the Resistants behind the barbed wire, before being shoved into one more train, towards the Polish terminus, where there arrived, that year of 1944, the Jews from Hungary and the 60,000 last inhabitants of the Łódź ghetto, among them the relatives and grandparents of Nathan Strasberg the Mossad officer, at least the ones that hadn’t already been gassed in Chełmno in 1942—Birkenau, where all the tracks join, from Thessalonica to Marseille, including Milan, Reggio, and Rome, before going up in smoke, my train has windows, some were deported in passenger cars, the Jews from Prague, the Greek Jews who even paid for their ticket to Poland, they sold them a ticket for death, and the community leaders negotiated bitterly over the price of the journey with the German authorities, strange cynicism of the Nazi bureaucrats, Eichmann, Höss, Stangl, calm men, quiet family men, whose tranquility contrasted with the virile belligerent hysteria of Himmler or Heydrich, Franz Stangl loved flowers and well-ordered gardens, animals, during his trip to Italy in Udine and Trieste he loved the gentle landscapes of the Veneto, and the sea, then he loved the old city of Damascus and its odors of cardamom, and his wife, and his children, the little Austrian cop who wasn’t very smart the murderer of several hundred thousand Jews denied having beaten a single one, he even convinced himself that their death was easy, piled up between four concrete walls asphyxiated with the exhaust gas of a diesel engine it took twenty minutes to die,
when everything goes right
, when everything went right he said in twenty minutes it was in the bag, but of course Bełzec, Sobibór, or Treblinka were amateurish compared to Auschwitz, his colleague Höss had set up his business well, his compartmentalized factories of pain functioned to perfection, until the end they worked on bettering the machine, they were even planning to make it bigger, big enough to welcome all of Europe if necessary, all the Slavic vermin and all the subversives, without hatred, without anger, just solutions to problems, for a problem requires solutions just as a question calls for a response—my father son of a Resistant participated actively in the resolution to the Algerian problem, submachine gun in hand, and lies today in the Ivry cemetery, beside the gunned-down men of Mont Valérien, a torturer despite himself, a rapist too probably despite himself, executioner despite himself, of course nothing to do with Höss, Stangl, and the others, my father born in 1934 near Marseille believed in God in technology in progress in mankind in education in morality, the train gets underway again, slowly leaves Reggio Emilia with a grinding noise, how slow it is, how ominously slow, I suddenly feel as if the names in the briefcase are dripping onto me like the putrefying fluids of a corpse forgotten in a train car, I’m tempted to open it but it contains nothing visible, digitalized documents on shiny disks, five years of voracious obsession ever since Harmen Gerbens the Dutch camp guard, five years playing a historian of shadows or a spy of memory, now it’s over, in a manner of speaking, I could just as well have gone on for ten more years, but there’s Rome that’s waiting for me and the new life, the money from the Vatican, beginning again, beginning everything again under the name Yvan Deroy, goodbye Francis ex-warrior Defense Delegate, after my father’s death my mother shut herself up in widowhood, she’s a very dignified widow, she’s a professional at mourning, accompanied by her friends and my sister at Mass twice a week and at the cemetery Sunday morning after service, she lives for her dead husband in the same way she lived for him when he was alive, and when she isn’t at the church or at Ivry she plays Beethoven and Schumann on her piano until she has cramps in her fingers,
how well you play, Mama
, Leda spends her days at home listening to her, she goes back to her place just in time to prepare dinner for her husband, she lives 200 meters away, she badgers my mother from dawn to dusk so she’ll take on students again,
at my age
, she replies,
at my age
, my mother however is barely sixty years old, I forget when exactly she stopped teaching, when those well-mannered teenagers stopped coming to the house who, for me, were an unattainable dream, I remember one more precisely, she must have been three years older than me and came twice a week at around five or six o’clock, I was just getting back from school—she always wore a skirt, she was a little plump, with a round face, long blond hair tied back, she greeted me nicely when I hurried to open the door to her, I took her duffel coat as I observed her breasts, they seemed giant to me, I breathed in the smell of her coat as I hung it up, and I watched her walk into the study, the piano room which we called the study, her music scores and notebooks in hand, I spied, with the door ajar, on the girl approaching my mother to see how she settled down by the piano and lifted her skirt sometimes to position herself on the stool, a mechanical gesture, a terribly erotic second for me, I thought I could glimpse her underwear through her wool stockings, I felt the friction of her buttocks against the burgundy felt, the movement of her thigh when she leaned on the pedal, and I got a terrible erection, an immense desire that drove me to the bathroom as a Liszt etude or a Chopin Polonaise (she was gifted) resounded, the rhythm of her fingers on the keyboard must have been, I imagine, my own on my personal instrument, in desire and in music, while I hated Liszt, Chopin and all those horrible maternal notes I came terribly, too quickly, the desired student was made to start again because of her tempo and it was my mother’s voice more than once that interrupted my pleasure, with her