Zone (19 page)

coffee, coffee, café, please,
I placed my scarf on the chair in front of me, and I waited as I contemplated the glacis of the impregnable fortress, a masterpiece of Arabic military architecture said the
Lonely Planet
open on the table to give me the look of a solitary adventurer, I had finished my coffee when a man about sixty, quite tall, with white hair, came up to me and asked if I spoke French, I replied yes, of course, and he said in French
it’s a pleasure to meet you
, he added
come, we’ll go visit the Citadel
, he paid for my coffee before I could even react and took me by the arm as if I were a lady, he didn’t let it go for the entire visit, and I confess that this unaccustomed tenderness gave our strange couple an entirely natural look, he insisted on paying the entrance fee, he pointed out the machicolations, the hallways that twisted to foil invaders’ attacks, the iron grates on the ceiling to bombard assailants, and it wasn’t until we emerged from the central donjon onto the immense mound in the middle of the ramparts that he began to speak in earnest, I didn’t say anything, I wanted to listen first, feel, try to make out if it was to my advantage to do business with him or not, as Lebihan the chief said
you have a gift for human relations
, the contact had spoken of a
source of exceptional interest
, which justified my presence, I grew doubtful when I realized that it was impossible to settle this business through the mail, a real exceptional source doesn’t take risks, normally we never meet, it’s a Syrian network that forwards the information but here the nice source held my arm as if he were my father, at the windswept summit of the Citadel of Aleppo the grey, from which we could see the whole city, the big mosque below, the countless pigeons whirling around the minaret, the black rooftops of the souk, the little cupolas of the caravanserai, the modern buildings in the suburbs all the way out to the countryside where the earth looked red in the winter sun,
my name is
. . .
um
. . .
my name is Harout
, his hesitation was not very professional, I began to sense a base trick, my contact’s mistake, I sighed internally, sheesh, all that for this, I said Harout, fine, whatever you like, on my passport at the time my name was Jérôme Gontrand, with a
d
, I just said “Jérôme,” I was patient you have to know how to wait to be calm I had my butterfly net in hand I waited for Harout to relax a little before I caught him and added him to my collection of Lepidoptera, he was the one who was going to capture me I didn’t know that of course, it was he who would hurtle me into this train five years later, look a city already, probably Modena, just forty kilometers or so until Bologna, the Pendolino slows down, at night all Italian suburbs look alike, during the day too probably, it is Modena, I just caught a glimpse of the sign announcing the station, Modena, pretty little city, sister of Reggio with two specialties, charcuterie and luxury cars, pork and Maseratis that’s a very Italian way of putting it just like my neighbor the
Pronto
reader he probably wouldn’t turn up his nose at either one, with his Ferrari cap, he should wave it out the window, we just passed close by the Scuderia factories, I remember the historical center of Modena, magnificent, squares, churches, Duomo, just a year ago on Thursday, December 11
^th
Mohammad el-Khatib blew himself up at 5:00 in the morning at the corner of the Piazza Mazzini a few meters away from the synagogue, one of the most beautiful in Italy, the Palestinian born in Kuwait had a Jordanian passport he set fire to his white 205 Peugeot he parked it in front of the synagogue, the policemen on duty tried to intervene with a fire extinguisher but without success, Mohammad waited at the steering wheel in the burning vehicle its doors and windows closed, he waited until the LPG gas exploded and ripped the car apart scattering his body to the four winds, he was possibly already dead carbonized when everything blew up, the synagogue was very slightly damaged, there were no victims, aside from Mohammad and a very old Yorkshire terrier with a heart condition which died from fear in its urine on the second floor of the building across the way, a few broken windows, nothing more, the dog was named “Pace,” peace, strange coincidence that no newspaper revealed—without knowing it Mohammad el-Khatib set off all the anti-terrorist alarms in the world, we all tried to find out if the poor fool was connected to a known cell, if his name was already listed somewhere, in a file, in a report, until the Italian services confirmed the police version, a suicide, not a suicide bomber, just a suicide: Mohammad el-Khatib, unknown, depressive, psychotic, violent, on tranquilizers had set fire to himself maybe without even thinking about the explosion that would follow, he wanted to die in front of the synagogue, maybe die like the Palestinian martyrs in Jerusalem or Tel Aviv, in glory and flames, or maybe sacrifice his life to protest against the occupation, peacefully, or else maybe simply to die, in the heart of a grey December night, when Hades is calling—still the fact is that there were no more Jews to kill in Modena, the synagogue is open only for the high holidays, and at 5:00 in the morning not many people are to be found in the city streets, the carabinieri and the assistant public prosecutor patiently collected the crimson ruins of Mohammad’s body, they gathered them into black plastic bags, the municipal services hurried to make every trace of the death disappear, they cleaned the asphalt, repaired the streetlights, replaced the broken windows and then burned, in a dump, the remains of the old dead pooch whose mistress didn’t know what to do with it, I thought about Attila József, the Hungarian poet who stretched out on the railroad tracks near Lake Balaton to get himself cut into three pieces by the first train, or into two lengthwise by the sharp wheels, Attila József had a twofold influence in Hungary, poetic and deadly, if I can put it that way, dozens of
poètes maudits
or over-lucid teenagers came down to die on the tracks at the same place he did, or, when the railroad administration, alarmed, decided to fence off the place, a little further up on the same line—in the same way Mohammad was following the example of the Palestinian martyrs those little solar Christs who cut their bodies in half at the waist with a belt of explosives, Nathan Strasberg told me that their heads were propelled dozens of meters high into the air, like a plastic bottle by a firecracker, I imagine their final moments, they contemplate Jerusalem one last time, from so high up, in a final blink of their eyes they see the Dome of the Rock shining, at the top of their final ascension, at the point of equilibrium, as when you throw a ball into the air, their bleeding heads freeze for a split second in the sky before falling back down—there are traditions in suicide, groups, fraternities: hanging, somewhat rustic, firearms and knives, more warlike and manly means of transport, resolutely modern, that of poison or bleeding into your bath in the old style, of gas with or without explosion, of being burned alive, for my part I belong to the category of the drowned, water signs tempted by the total disappearance of their bodies in the dark stream, Mohammad el-Khatib demonstrated as he died, he made one final gesture, maybe the only one that counted for him, that December morning a few hundred meters from the train station that we’re hurtling through, he was taking his place with the most famous deaths of his people, joining them despite his Italian exile, his suicide didn’t stop Luciano Pavarotti from getting married two days later at the Teatro di Modena (
the theater is the artists’ church
, he would say) a few hundred meters away, with 700 guests, among them Bono the U2 singer and Zucchero who sang “Stand By Me” in the midst of Armani dresses, policemen on horseback, jewels, male and female socialites, the tenors Placido Domingo and José Carreras, a gospel choir, and a string ensemble surely to help Mohammad el-Khatib and the dead dog climb to paradise, there are so many ways to react to suffering and injustice, Pavarotti put a list of humanitarian organizations on his wedding register, the Palestinian of Modena set fire to himself in front of an empty synagogue and Harout in Aleppo held me by the arm as he tried to explain something to me that I did not understand, on top of the citadel, on the big windswept terreplein, something to do with eighty-year-old massacres, with death marches in the middle of the desert, and I couldn’t see what this had to do with our negotiations, after half an hour I finally interrupted him, I was freezing and wanted to get straight to the point, he replied
don’t worry
, don’t worry you’ll get your information, you’ll know everything you want to know, and even more, at the highest level, you can find out the color of Hafez al-Assad’s boxer shorts if that strikes your fancy, you’ll get special channels to negotiate with the Syrians if necessary and an attentive ear at the presidential palace, everything you want finally in Syria and Lebanon, but on one condition: that France officially recognize the genocide of the Armenians—I was stunned, I couldn’t believe my ears, this guy was definitely off his rocker, what could I do about recognition of the Armenian genocide, he smiled at me very calmly, I said to him listen, you should really speak with someone at the embassy, it’s diplomats you need I think, in any case I’ll see what I can do, Harout interrupted me and said don’t worry, there’s no hurry you know, it was already so long ago that it can wait a few more years, Harout was in fact only the representative of “honorable correspondents” whose services and information would possibly turn out to be so useful to France that despite the damages produced in Franco-Turkish relations the National Assembly on January 18, 2001 finally adopted the bill recognizing the Armenian genocide whereas in 1998 a similar initiative had not fared so well, the text having been “lost” in the Senate, where it was never placed on the agenda, and I don’t know to this day if the man or rather men that Harout represented had something to do with that business or not, in Aleppo in 1997 in any case official recognition of the genocide by France seemed entirely unlikely, and one year later the Assembly voted unanimously for the act the first time, what’s more a big historic conference was organized at the Sorbonne, the Turks were seething with rage and burned the tricolor in Ankara, the French presented themselves once again as the Just and France as the homeland of human rights, the deputies all embraced each other as they left the chamber, some had difficulty holding back their tears as if they themselves had just saved thousands of men from the massacre, forgetting that the bodies had been sleeping for almost a hundred years already in Deir ez-Zor in the Syrian desert, around Aleppo or in Eastern Anatolia, that little historic Armenia where the best proof of the destruction is the absence of Armenians today, where have they all gone, they disappeared, disappeared from Van, from Diyarbakir, from Erzurum—in May 1915 the prefect of Jezireh complained about the corpses carried along by the Euphrates, linked two by two, killed with a bullet in the back or by the long knives of the Circassians or the Chechens whom the Ottomans recruited as stalwart executioners, Harout told me all this in Aleppo, at the bar of the Baron Hotel where the Young Turks had slept, come from Stamboul to supervise the butchery, the caravans of deportees coming from the north spent some time in the concentration camp of Bab a few kilometers away from the city,
everyone has forgotten
, said Harout,
everyone has forgotten that the death camps were here, around Aleppo, in Rakka on the Euphrates, in Deir ez-Zor, in Hama, in Homs, as far as the Djebel Druze
, almost a million Armenians passed through here on their long march to death and those who survived in the camps were always sent further away, on foot or by wagon, until their numbers were so reduced that it became feasible to kill them by hand, to burn them alive, to blow them up with dynamite or drown them in the river, the witnesses talk about cannibalism caused by famine, children feeding on animal excrement, Arab Bedouins who raided the columns of deportees, kidnapping the nubile young women, a brief apocalypse, a few months, between 1915 and 1916, at a time when the British and French soldiers were falling like flies on the hills of the well-guarded Dardanelles facing the soldiers commanded by Mustafa Kemal who wasn’t called Atatürk yet, Harout told me, over a glass of arak in the shiny old leather armchairs in the Baron Hotel, about the killing of the Armenians and how the community of Aleppo, present in the city since the Crusades, had been ransomed but more or less spared, he told me about the end of the most brilliant Ottoman Empire, the most beautiful empire in the Mediterranean and the Balkans as far as Libya, which still had protected its Christian minorities for centuries, in exchange for a tribute—Harout Bedrossian born in 1931 showed me photos of his family around 1900, the men in tarbooshes and the women in black dresses, he took me to taste
the best soujouk and basturma in Aleppo
, his French was impeccable and distinguished, colonial, with a beautiful strange accent, we did not speak about work, of course, he was just an intermediary, like me, we were two suitcase-carriers, shady businessmen, on good terms and nothing more, the man or men he represented were businessmen close to government ministers whose palms they greased to get the right to deal with foreign countries, clients of Alaouite bigwig apparatchiks ruling over a country of countless varieties of police and information services in the country of cages and prisons with no exit, its desert littered with Armenian bones that the government glorified mostly to annoy the Turks their hereditary enemies, the Turks spearhead in the fight against the Axis of Evil, with whom military cooperation was in full swing, France was training Turkish officers in military schools, French officers left to train in Turkey, materiel was exchanged for expertise as well as information mainly about Iran and the Russian Caucasus, despite appearances our bilateral relations were entirely cordial and a few hundred thousand dead and forgotten Armenians were not going to jeopardize the geo-strategic equilibrium of the post-Cold War, we would go on working together, nothing stops, even when the deputies legislated