Zone (21 page)

fines de claires
oysters on the Place de Clichy that when he started out,
for another agency
, he liked investigating the cycling world, we all have our hobbies, he added referring to my own, mine was biking, the leftists and anarchists in bicycling—there’s no such thing as a profession not worth examining, I thought, and many facets to national security—of course we didn’t find many, pinkos on bikes, that’s OK, but I dug up a few each time, especially sports journalists, heh heh, my bosses at the time would always say to me come on, Lebihan, go to the Sorbonne or Nanterre instead, that’s where they’re recruiting, so then I wandered around the university for a while to put up a front, but as soon as there was a chance to follow the Tour de France or a Paris-Roubaix race, I was there—today he must be caught up in the scandals and finances of his favorite sport, explaining the ins and outs of things to a wife with her mind on something else or to his buddies at the bar, of course I haven’t heard any news about Lebihan since our last handshake after brandy at the Wepler, he was moved, the old cyclist, think of it, he had trained me, and trained me well, he had made the style of my notes and reports drier, had taught me all the secrets of the shadowy trades, records and archives, enough to fill the suitcase, he suspected something, of course, but he was too close to retirement really to bother about anything, no need to saddle himself with possible annoyances, the affair with Stéphanie would make the rounds of the Service, or almost, “intimate relations” between functionaries were not encouraged, even if, at bottom, they resolved a certain number of security problems, at worst the possible leaks would remain internal and pillow-talk wouldn’t pass the Boulevard door: it was the end of the affair that got me a strategic “removal” into the distant reaches of the Zone for a while, so as not to see her every day, and this thanks to Lebihan’s scheming with the personnel department, thanks to the paternalist bicycle-loving boss—Francesc Boix the photographer of Mauthausen loved bikes too, he covered the Tour de France from 1947 to 1950 for
L’Humanité
and
Regards
, on the back of a motorcycle, as required, Lebihan might have classified him as a “Red” at the end of the 1960s if he hadn’t died in 1951, poor Francesc dead of a strange illness of poverty or remorse he had contracted in the camp, one of those inexplicable illnesses of which death is the only outcome, I can imagine where it can come from, one winter night in 1943 who knows Francesc Boix might have gotten a few bogus reichsmarks from the Mauthausen camp in exchange for his work, Paul Ricken has him for good, he got him to walk around the first barracks near the entrance, the brothel for prisoners, opened after Himmler’s visit six months earlier, a pass costs two marks, a few deportees from Ravensbrück worked there they were chosen by the SS they are beautiful they say, Boix crosses the main yard at night, the first time he went to a brothel it was in Barcelona, near the Parallel, in a murky neighborhood of stinking alleyways, an old-fashioned cathouse, red, full of velvet, the tiny bedroom smelled of lust and Doctor Cáspar’s prophylactic ointment, he lay down with a pudgy Aragonese, much older than him, the business was finished off very quickly, he put his pants back on in a hurry to finish getting drunk with his friends, he should have taken a picture of the young woman, a souvenir of her milky thighs and abundant pubic hair, which grew up almost to her belly-button, he will remember her, but maybe not really the orgasm, at least not as much as he’d like to remember it, pleasure is a lightning-bolt that leaves no trace, he crosses the Mauthausen yard the death-place to go find his friend Garcia at the brothel, final recompense of Nazi power for those who serve it well: Germany holds us by the balls, he thinks, Germany holds us by the balls and he laughs all alone, that morning fifteen Czechs and Yugoslavs were shot by the Gestapo right next to the identification office where he works, he was developing film when he heard the gunshots, he went out of his darkroom looked out the window saw the corpses sprawled against the wall there were four women among them, and now that night has fallen he’s going to the brothel where there’s a record-player with German songs, the “guards” of the cathouse are common-law criminals, sent here after the most terrible crimes, killers, rapists, these degenerates are the kings of the camp, their subjects the Jews, Poles, and homosexuals, the nobility are the German opposition parties, the Spanish Republicans, the typical Nazi hierarchy—Francesc Boix passes a few scrawny prisoners returning from a Kommando outside, he greets them with respect, he knows he’s lucky, that the few Spaniards employed in the camp administration services are privileged, that the prisoners are succumbing one after the other, exhausted, broken down by slavery and the guards’ sadism, he also greets Johannes Kurt the SS officer who’s accompanying them, not one of the cruelest, not one of the best either, among the detainees there are also former SS officers deserters from the Eastern Front, they never escaped any chores any heavy labor, they won’t last much longer, they have failed, they don’t deserve to live, they have betrayed the homeland and its aggressive Führer, Francesc arrives at the door to the brothel, he goes in, takes off his beret, in the antechamber an ex-warder converted into a pimp is slumped in an armchair, his eyes are gleaming, the room stinks of potato-peel alcohol, there’s music,
guten Abend, Spanier
says the man, he makes the sign to pass, in the women’s room there are women in civilian clothes and men in striped uniforms, voices amiable conversations laughter in the midst of the noise of wooden clogs on the hard floor, a dozen whores, double the number of inmates, Boix catches sight of Garcia deep in conversation with one of the ladies, he goes over, cap in hand like a shy child, the women are speaking German, Garcia introduces him, he hastily tries
ich heisse Franz. Wir gehen?
in his contraband German, they make for one of the adjoining rooms, Francesc holds out his two reichsmarks, the girl takes them, lets her dress fall to the ground, her skin is covered in bruises and scars, she signs to him to go over to the washbasin, she lowers his striped trousers washes his private parts examining them carefully to make sure there are no lice, the water is freezing he feels as if his tool is retracting into the base of his pelvis, he’s a little ashamed, he remembers Barcelona here he is silent, he catches hold of one of the woman’s drooping breasts she gives him a frightened look he closes his eyes thinks about his Aragonese whore about the photograph he did not take the German woman pulls him by his member to the bed she lies down spreads her legs Francesc stretches out over her she stinks of sweat and barracks her name could be Lola or maybe Gudrun he moves as much as he can with no result she emits carnival cries he pretends to come gets up smiles at her she is ugly neither of them has fooled the other—Francesc Boix goes back to the main room a smile on his lips Garcia gives him a tap on the shoulder, that’s better, isn’t it, he says, and Boix replies without lying yes, that’s better, that’s better already and soon it will be even better, at what instant does he know he’ll get out, he’ll survive, at what instant does he make the decision to survive? they say that the prisoners knew, saw the ones that had a chance and the ones that were going to die, Manos Hadjivassilis one of the Greek resistants from ELAS who ended up in Mauthausen after quite a tour, escaped twice, recaptured almost a thousand kilometers from Salonika, in the neighborhood of Gorizia in the company of Yugoslav partisans, scarcely had he returned to the camp, while he was still waiting in the identification line, already destroyed by what he saw around him, seized with the certainty that it was the end, Manos suddenly broke out of rank began running towards the electric barbed wire fence to throw himself onto it, the electricity contracted all his muscles made him bleed from his nose and mouth in a smell of ozone and burnt flesh he was still alive when a guard finished him off with a reverent volley of gunfire,
exit
Manos Hadjivassilis the Greek communist from Macedonia who had traveled the Epirus and crossed the Balkans on foot rifle in hand, the image of his corpse photographed by Paul Ricken will appear in Francesc Boix’s developing bath, then it will be hung on a clothesline to dry, in the meantime Manos’s body will already have disappeared into the crematorium, to end up in the heart of Austria’s filthy sky, let’s hope that Zeus the patient made that grey cloud rain down on Olympus, Boix will get out of the camp, and will even go to Greece to cover the civil war for communist publications, a respite, a brief reprieve before the Rothschild Hospital and the Thiais cemetery, Francesc was already dead, he was already dead in Mauthausen which you don’t leave, he was dead in the arms of the German prostitute, one night at the brothel of Barracks No. 1, in impossible contact with that Gudrun or Lola, his soul fallen between their two bodies, that’s where he contracted the illness, there, in the impossibility of finding anything but more or less putrid flesh, no other contact possible, no consolation, an eternal solitude caught hold of him, he would float over the world without touching anything, like Paul Ricken documentarist of deterioration, stricken with the same affliction—if I think about it, my attempts at escaping the Zone and memory are part of the same syndrome perhaps, what happened, in Venice with Marianne, in Paris with Stéphanie the brunette, in the harlot bars in Zagreb or the sordid cabarets in Aleppo, what happened in Bosnia, what is waiting for me at the end of this trip, in Rome, in the distant tenderness of Sashka and her apartment, what’s waiting for me under the name Yvan Deroy the mad, will I be able to rid myself of myself the way you take off a sweater in an overheated train, in the black despair of the Bolognese night, suburbs without end, I tremble at the memory of Stéphanie’s face, I see her portrait thrown out yesterday with the rest of the apartment’s useless objects, maybe a homeless man will recover it for its frame or for the shoulder-length dark-brown hair, the few spots of red on the nose and cheeks, the very calm half-smile, sure of herself, the black polo-neck, a three-quarter-length portrait with the Hagia Sophia and the Bosporus behind her, from the window of our last hotel room, a portrait of a dazzling beauty, maybe the tramp going through the trash is also falling in love with her, he sees her and immediately he swoons, he’ll keep the photo to keep himself company, he’ll talk to it, invent a name for it a life a passionate love story, if he only knew, if he knew Stéphanie Muller the brilliant strong dangerous Alsatian, I saw her before she left on a job, before she went under the drainpipe, as we say in our jargon, to be under the drainpipe means to leave on a job abroad and hence to get a rain of cold hard currency on your head corresponding to three or four times a Parisian salary, Stéphanie destined for a great future is probably in Moscow at present, I’m supposed not to know where she is, I shouldn’t have thought about her again, it must be very cold in Moscow, a little like in Alsace, not at all like here in gentle Mediterranean Italy, I shift in the seat, I want to get up, take a few steps to chase away the image of Stéphanie with the perfect body, the perfect voice, the keen intelligence, Stéphanie to whom I told the story of Francesc Boix the photographer of Mauthausen during our trip to Barcelona, how can you care so much about such stories, she said, she was reading Proust and Céline, nothing but Proust and Céline, which gave her, I think, the cynicism and irony necessary for her profession, she was rereading the
Journey
and the
Recherche
she called them by those abbreviated names, the
Journey
and the
Recherche
, both in the Pléiade editions, of course, and she filled me with jealous admiration, I hadn’t managed to finish the
Recherche
, the stories of Parisian aristocrats and bourgeois bored me almost as much as their narrator’s complaining, and the
Journey
depressed me terribly, even though the wanderings of those poor guys had something touching about them all the same, when we left on vacation or for the weekend Stéphanie put in her bag either one of the volumes of Proust or the first volume of Céline, you don’t change perfume brands, she didn’t change her book, her Chanel and her Marcel, and voilà, ready to go, her only concessions to novelty were books
about
Proust and Céline, separately or together, which she skimmed, critically, and these essays comforted her in her monogamy, encouraged her to return to the Text after the commentary: listen, she said, notes and reports land on me all day long, I write analyses, I have a right to a little relaxation, the right to read well-written things, it’s a change for me, Stéphanie is a specialist in what we call the
risk-countries
, she worked for a while in the Strategic Affairs Department before passing the test for our magnificent barracks of shadows, before it was suggested to her that she pass the discreet administrative test instead—in Barcelona city of banks and palm trees I looked for the traces of Boix, republicans, anarchists, militants in the POUM, Stalinists from the PSUC, she talked about tapas, the Picasso Museum, Miró, she said it’s
sweet
, this restaurant is very
sweet
, the neighborhood is really
sweet
, Gaudí is
sweet,
she was so beautiful, with her sunglasses by the harbor, watching the ferries leaving for Majorca and Minorca, her hair down to her shoulders, her hand in mine, I forgot my Zone, my suitcase, I became a tourist, which is the pleasantest of conditions when there are two of you, when you have money and you want to make love all the time, she told me again stop thinking about those war stories, why don’t we go back to the hotel? we’d go back to the hotel and wouldn’t emerge until nightfall, to plunge into the carnival of little streets in the center of Barcelona that looked as if they were made by the tourists themselves to make them