Zone (20 page)

for Turkey’s own good
, to bring it, they said,
to look its past in the face
or something like that, which made the ex-Ottomans in the wings laugh out loud, France would do better to set its own corpses in order, the France that in 1939 evacuated the last Armenians during the Alexandretta affair, with the cynicism proper to the Republic, after having put down the Syrian revolts it sold part of the Syrian territory to the enemy, France enraged and violent bombed the civilians of Damascus furiously in 1945 as it was leaving, a farewell gift, policy of scorched earth, I’ll withdraw my guns but I’ll use them one last time, leaving a few hundred unknown dead on the ground, nothing really serious, some Arabs, some treacherous and incomprehensible Orientals for General Oliva-Roget the one responsible for the gunfire, convinced that British agent-provocateurs were behind the riots that he suppressed before heading off with weapons and baggage for Paris to report to De Gaulle the great shepherd of warriors, France embarrassed Turkey in 1998 by throwing thousands of Armenian bones in its face, to which the Turks retorted with thousands of Algerian corpses, and this same Parliament of the Fifth Republic which had voted for the law of amnesty for war crimes in Algeria officially recognized the Armenian genocide, moved to tears, in 2001—the massacres of others are always less awkward, memory is always selective and history always official, I remember with Marianne in the Dardanelles the Turkish guide sang the praises of Atatürk father of the nation great organizer of the resistance on the peninsula, destined for a noble fate: that destroyer of the Empire had rehabilitated the Young Turks as soon as he came to power in 1923, after they had been tried in Istanbul in 1919 and condemned for the massacres of 1915-1916, to recognize the genocide today would be to betray the Sacred Memory of the mustachioed Father of the Turks, just as repealing the 1968 law of amnesty for Algeria is impossible and pointless, a betrayal of the Memory of the victorious General: Memory, that mortuary of texts and monuments, of miscellaneous engraved tombs, of textbooks, laws, cemeteries, handfuls of ex-soldiers, or dead soldiers rotting beneath rich gravestones, no paltry almost anonymous crosses in a cemetery of multitudes, but a marble vault, solitary like that of Charles Montagu Doughty-Wylie in Kilitbahir in the Dardanelles: the British officer fallen in April 1915 was probably the only one of his contingent who could speak Turkish fluently, who knew the Empire he was fighting against intimately, where he had resided as consul between 1906 and 1911, in Konya and Cilicia, Charles Doughty also mustached had then been a military attaché to the Ottoman troops during the Balkan war, in charge of organizing aid for the wounded, he even won a decoration for his bravery and his selflessness, the sultan pinned a crystal rose onto his jacket lapel, ironic medal, Charles Doughty would get a Turkish bullet full in the face on top of a remote hill in the Mediterranean, without being able to enjoy the sublime view over the Aegean, the Trojan hills he knew so well, torn apart by naval cannons—and he certainly did not know, at the moment of death, that the Armenians that he had saved in 1909 in Cilicia were in the process of being massacred yet again, this time without anyone being able to intervene, neither the American consul nor the few witnesses to the massacres, in 1909 in Konya Charles Doughty-Wylie and his wife receive a visit from a British traveling archeologist, Gertrude Bell, who photographs them in their garden, in the company of their servant and their huge black poodle, Mrs. Doughty-Wylie in a white dress, wearing a hat, with an unattractive face, hard features, jealous, perhaps, of the adventuress’ success with her husband, with reason—Gertrude is in love with the handsome Charles, the first female “intelligence officer” in Her Majesty’s government is taken with the elegant soldier diplomat, she will go pay her respects in secret to his grave, in the Dardanelles, a few years later, when she is plotting the formation of modern Iraq and offers the throne to Faysal King of the Arabs, Gertrude Bell the archeologist spy is surely responsible for many of the woes of the region, I thought of her in Baghdad in front of the museum she founded that had just been pillaged, they would find Mesopotamian cylinder seals as far away as America, everyone offered you ancient relics, the people from the UN left with their pockets full of ancient coins, statuettes and medieval manuscripts, the disemboweled country was losing its riches from its bowels and Gertrude Bell’s grave, green and silent, was still there in Baghdad where no one remembered her anymore or her role in the birth of the country, her intrigues or her friendship with T. E. Lawrence of Arabia, or her mysterious death, suicide or accident, of an overdose of sleeping pills on July 12, 1926: I slept in Gertrude Bell’s room at the Baron Hotel in Aleppo, thinking about Charles Doughty-Wylie and the Armenians, before going on with my tour, as a good carnival tourist, I went to Latakiyah, by train, from the Aleppo station where the Istanbul Express used to arrive after having made the tour of the Taurus Mountains—the Syrian train that crossed the mountains had no windows, I was absolutely frozen in the compartment, now I’m suffocating, I have a terrible hangover, I’m all shaky, blurry, sticky, in Latakiyah the sky was purple after the rain, the immense sea an unsettling grey I booked a room in a hotel with the absurd name of “The Gondola,” I had dinner in a restaurant run by Greeks, the fish was quite good as I remember it with a sesame sauce, there was nothing to do in Latakiayah aside from drinking in a pretty sordid bar where Russian pilots were on a binge, drunk as only Slavs can be, two giants from the Urals with uniforms and caps were dancing a grotesque, monstrous waltz, tenderly clasping each other their huge paws placed on their shoulders, they swayed from one foot to the other as they sang some Russian song, they were drinking undiluted arak straight from the bottle to the great disgust of the owner, a tanned slightly overwhelmed Syrian, the two ex-Soviet bears tumbled over a table provoking the hilarity of their comrades who offered me a drink, the boss wanted very much to throw them out but didn’t dare—I went back drunk to my not very cheerful hotel room, on the wall photos of Venice plunged me into depression I felt more alone than ever Marianne had left me Stéphanie was about to leave me my shadowy profession was one of the most sordid there is I looked at the ceiling or the reproductions of gondolas as I thought about Harout Bedrossian’s dead Armenians, about the Kurds and Arabs duped by Gertrude Bell, about the Dardanelles about Troy the well-guarded about the secret lagoon in the winter fog about death everywhere around me I thought about the Syrian prisons the hanged men the tortured Islamists about all those wasted existences thrown into the sea like the rain that was pelting hard on the window and now a fine Italian drizzle streaks the night horizontally in the outskirts of Bologna, and despite the suitcase the decision the new life before me I am in no better shape than in that hotel room in Latakiyah on the Syrian coast the profession of solitude despite the contact of bodies despite Sashka’s caresses I feel as if I’m unreachable as if I’m already gone already far away locked up in the bottom of my briefcase full of torturers and the dead with no hope of ever emerging into the light of day, my skin insensitive to the sun will remain forever white, smooth as the marble gravestones in Vukovar

X

the papal nuncio ambassador from the Holy See to Syria was a charming cultivated man from a good Italian family, it was Harout Bedrossian the Armenian Catholic who introduced me to him—curious the detours Fate often uses to land on its feet, once the suitcase was full I had to sell it, empty those thousands of documents of names and stories patiently gathered all around my Zone starting with Harmen Gerbens the Dutch torturer, documents collected over five years of endless investigations, of thefts of secret archival papers of cross-checking of testimonies, why those thousands of hours patiently creating this list, to fill the terribly empty life of the Boulevard Mortier and Paris, to give a sense to my existence perhaps, who knows, to end with a flourish, to win forgiveness for my dead, but from whom, to obtain the Holy Father’s blessing, or simply the money that’s worth any number of pardons, to settle down somewhere under the name Yvan Deroy my double shut up in his madness and violence, my papers are legal, real, like the ones I used to use to move around in the Zone, the Pierre Martins, the Bertrand Dupuis so simple that they immediately became real, I think little by little I left my identity behind in those pseudonyms, I split myself up, little by little Francis Servain Mirković dissolved into the real false papers to reconstitute himself like an atom in the thousands of names in the suitcase, regrouped into a single one, Yvan Deroy poor lunatic who has probably never seen the sea or caressed a woman, locked up forever, it’s so easy to appropriate an identity, to put your face in place of another’s, to take his life, born the same year as me, he had the same adolescence fascinated by violent ideologies, oscillating between the extreme right and the extreme left with a disconcerting ease, without any opinions, in fact, aside from his friends’, Yvan Deroy if he had gotten out of his hospital would have put up neo-Nazi posters, seduced by martial order and hatred, piling military training on top of military training and enlisting before being called up finally to become a man, a real man, as they say, eliciting admiration from his parents and fated for a splendid destiny, military service training in weapons, humbling oneself to the esprit de corps, the same esprit de corps that so fascinated Millán-Astray the founder of the Spanish Legion during his visit to the French in Sidi Bel Abbès in Algeria, the fortified village on the Oran plain deeply inspired the one-eyed general, the legionaries from all over Europe remade themselves in the barracks, they found a family a country in the Legion and more than France they served the Legion itself, my military service was instructive, slogging along while singing, my kit, my rifle and my comrades, camps, night marches, I liked that rhythm, that full life, the illusion of importance and responsibility a rank gives you, a Velcro patch on your chest, a command, a power, in the Joffre camp in Rivesaltes we bivouacked in pretty sordid barracks, having come down from the Larzac plateau in Corbières or somewhere with weapons and gear—target exercises, maneuvers, I of course didn’t know where we were camping, what these run-down buildings were, and who had been harbored in February 1939, then in 1942, then in 1963, in short all the possible uses of a well-situated military camp, close to the road, to the railroad and to the sea, a camp whose archival images I saw much later, I slept in a khaki sleeping bag where Spanish Republican refugees had slept, soldiers or civilians, Red or Black, who so frightened Daladier’s France that the French deemed it preferable to intern them then exploit their labor in weapons factories and hilltop fortifications until the Germans deported them to Mauthausen, most of them, among them Francesc Boix the photographer, born in Barcelona in the neighborhood of Poble Sec on August 31, 1920, interned in Rivesaltes then in Septfonds, enrolled in the Foreign Workers’ Companies and captured by the Germans he arrived in Mauthausen on January 27, 1941, stayed there four years, the blue triangle fastened onto his chest: his photos, stolen from the SS, document camp life, death everywhere, Francesc Boix testified at Nuremberg and at Dachau, he died in Paris on July 4, 1951, two months before his thirty-first birthday Francesc Boix dies of illness at the Rothschild Hospital without having seen Barcelona again, in Paris he lived in an attic room on Rue Duc on the corner of the Rue du Mont-Cenis, five minutes by foot from my place, we passed each other at the Rivesaltes camp, we passed each other on the slopes of Montmartre, he worked as a photographer at the paper
L’Humanité
, of course, why anything but humanity, I went to see the house where he was born in Barcelona, a quiet neighborhood on the side of a hill, with trees, a building from the beginning of the century number 19 on Calle Margarit, his tailor father owned a shop in the corner of his building, today there’s a bar, I drank a glass to the health of the young Spanish socialist who enlisted in the Republican army at the end of 1938, when the collapse was certain, when the Battle of the Ebro was lost and when Franco, Millán-Astray, Yaguë, and the others were hurtling towards Barcelona the invincible, propelling 500,000 soldiers and civilians onto the roads to exile, they crossed the border in Cerbère, in Le Perthus, in Bourg-Madame, many would end up going back to Spain or would choose exile in Mexico: Francesc “Franz” or “Paco” didn’t have that luck, he left Barcelona once and for all with his companions in arms, the Republic is defeated, Paco doesn’t lose his smile, he’s seventeen, he has hope, humor, joy, a passion for photography, and a little camera given to him by the son of a Soviet diplomat, a 1930 Leitz, thanks to which he published his first reports in the journal
Juliol
, when the Front was still holding up and the revolution was on the march, Francesc Boix will be the reporter of Mauthausen, I picture him in a striped uniform, in the terrible cold of Austria, for four winters, four long winters of suffering sickness and death that he fills by hiding photos, organizing the resistance, until the liberation—the Spanish liberated the camp themselves and hung a banner to welcome the Americans, Mauthausen and Gusen were overflowing with corpses, but so few compared to the 150,000 or 200,000 deaths in the camp complex, among them the massacred of the granite quarry, the gassed of Hartheim, those dead from hypothermia, immersed in freezing water for hours, the victims of medical experiments, the electrocuted, the hanged, the shot, the sick, the starving, the ones worn out by work, the ones asphyxiated in the gas vans, the ones beaten to death, according to the long list of the Nazi modus operandi, I was eighteen I didn’t know about Francesc Boix’s fate when I played at war in the Rivesaltes camp, I don’t remember dreaming of the deportations there, that of the Spaniards or that of the foreign Jews who passed through there, on their way to death, or that of the Harkis that France put there in 1963 some of whom stayed there for over seven years before permanent housing was found for them—in those rotting barracks that were falling to pieces one after the other, no plaque, no monument, no memorial, Francesc Boix the photographer of the
Erkennungsdienst
of Mauthausen, the very young man from Margarit Street in Barcelona, the witness at the Nuremberg trial, what was he thinking about, after he testified, back at the Grand Hotel, he saw Speer, Göring, or Kaltenbrunner in the accused box, he commented on the photos stolen from the SS, taken by the strange artist officer Paul Ricken, creator, besides the official camp photos, of almost a hundred self-portraits, full-face, in profile, in uniform, wearing civilian clothes, armed, on horseback—maybe it’s him Boix is thinking about, that January 27, 1946, lying on his bed in Room 408 of the Grand Hotel in Nuremberg, he’s thinking about one of Ricken’s photos, one of the most disturbing, where the Nazi snapped himself lying in the grass, arms alongside his body, in a suit, with a nice tie and shoes, in the same pose as the poor guys shot by the guards when, according to the Germans, they were trying to escape: Ricken has offered himself as an imitation of violent death, he arranged himself as the corpse he had photographed the day before, what could be the reason, Boix has copies with him, he looks at them, lying on his bed, he is preparing the second part of his testimony, what will the lawyer for the defense ask him? bah, wait and see, he thinks of Marie-Claude Vaillant-Couturier, so beautiful, he took her portrait for page one of
Regards
, they met in the wings, did they talk about Spain, who knows, Vaillant-Couturier wrote an article on the International Brigades, she too testifies about the camps, they say she went through the monumental entrance to Birkenau singing the Marseillaise, she is truly magnificent, I wonder if Boix was in love with her, if he desired her, his head was probably elsewhere, did he still remember his barracks in Rivesaltes, maybe the same one I slept in, almost fifty years later, I too in uniform, almost as young as he but destined for another fate: the idea of the documents in the briefcase came maybe from Boix the photographer from Barcelona, in any case the 296 images by Paul Ricken are carefully filed, digitized, in my suitcase, not the Mauthausen ones, but the ones from Graz, a sub-camp to which Ricken was transferred at the end of 1944, the report on the death march of the evacuation towards Ebensee, hundreds of dying people finished off with a bullet the minute they dropped from exhaustion, the photos of Ricken the austere are clean and artistic, he took his time, never a shaky blurred badly composed snapshot, just the opposite, a morbid body of work, self-conscious and precise, maybe he was trying to pierce a secret, Ricken the mad SS artist was condemned to life in prison at the Dachau trial in 1946, the 296 photos remained secret—296 close-ups, almost always framed the same way, where you see the killer’s face the instant he shoots, sometimes tense, sometimes relaxed, usually impassive, and the effect of the shot, at the same instant, a black cloud rising from the head of a man stretched out, a collection of executions documenting the massacre, how was Ricken able to convince the SS to let itself be photographed, I have no idea, Paul Ricken was a strange man, professor of art history member of the National Socialist Party from the very beginning, Boix and his Spanish comrades describe him as a pretty nice guy, not a brute, he never denounced his detainee “employees,” never manifested any violence, he was just a wee bit deranged, I think he was documenting his own moral collapse in his hundreds of self-portraits, he saw himself falling along with the world around him, falling into the bottomless night and it’s that night he photographed for a week during the death march, it’s a journey, an itinerary, like my own from the Rivesaltes camp all the way to the train to Rome, the disappearance of a man into a fascination with violence, his own disappearance and others—Francis Servain Mirković disintegrated in the same way Paul Ricken did, maybe I too wanted to document the journey, disappear and be reborn with the features of Yvan Deroy, if that’s possible, the train is moving forward, soon Bologna, then Florence and finally Rome, I suddenly have the strange sensation that something is going to happen in this car, something tragic like during the march of Paul Ricken the Nazi artist in eyeglasses, my neighbor is sleeping, his head back his mouth open the crossword-couple is conversing in low voices nothing new beneath the railroad sun temperature constant speed more or less constant so far as you can judge it on the black screen of the window where, from time to time, a sinister hamlet comes to life, we went to Rivesaltes by truck, old canvas-covered trucks that squealed whined rocked on their ancient shock absorbers, the drivers were also conscripts trained on-the-job in a barracks yard, their notions of driving couldn’t have been more military or abrupt, stand on the brakes on the descents, we were jostled like sacks on every turn, I felt these same sensations in other trucks in Slavonia or Bosnia except usually it was Vlaho driving, just as badly but with a smile, more than once the guy almost tossed us into the Neretva with our weapons and gear, stubborn as a mule it was as impossible to make him let go of the wheel as to teach him to use the engine for braking, for him shifting down would have meant demeaning himself, a kind of cowardliness, and even today, disabled, he descends Dalmatian hills at full tilt in a vehicle specially modified for his handicap, Vlaho the reckless Catholic wine-growing driver it’s been a long time since I saw him last, I confess that’s entirely my fault, too many memories, the shadow of Andrija, of our violent acts as conscripts, we’d talk about war, that’s for sure, I wonder if Francesc Boix liked to see his companions in deportation again, he probably didn’t want to be reminded of certain times, of the little daily base things of the concentration-camp world, you don’t survive for four years in Mauthausen without some low actions, without entering the grey zone of the privileged, of the
Prominenten
fed better, beaten less than their comrades, docile subordinates, accountants, administrators or photographers at the service of the camp, who can blame them for having escaped the 186 steps of the stone quarry, the freezing baths or the pickaxe handles, for having come through and survived, the luxury prisoners were authorized to move freely throughout the camp, is there guilt in surviving, probably, in Venice by the edge of the black water when I was thinking about Andrija I was overcome with shame and pain, Andrija’s sad death, I am carrying his absent corpse wherever I go, it’s heavy, I move forward with his body on my shoulders suitcase in hand, all this is very heavy—in the beginning Lebihan my pimply boss thought my passion for archives and secrets was completely natural, he said to me you’ll see, it will pass, beginners are always enthusiastic, it’s normal, after all it’s one of the advantages of the job, this kind of knowledge, he helped me get information I would normally not have had access to, old records that no longer interested anyone but were still classified “military-top secret,” archive reports often microfilm, personal files, Lebihan said that this way of working was the best way to teach me the Service’s real way of functioning, to know how to get some piece of information or other, etc., his motto was “archives are the compost that grows information,” he was an old hand at the “human” touch, as they say, with him I was in good hands, when he retired he invited me out to lunch, oysters at the Brasserie Wepler, if you please, he was pretty happy, even though he told me he was going to miss it, all this, I picture him clipping newspapers in the countryside around Évreux or Vannes, checking the sources, filling binders with scissors and glue, unless he’s given himself over solely to his passion for biking, Lebihan told me as he gobbled up his plump