Zone (27 page)

three drummer boys on the way back from war, three drummer boys, and rat and tat ratatatat, on the way back from waaar
, I have that tune in my head now, the suitcase is very heavy, and the gin does nothing for it—I splash more water on my face, the window in the toilet is opaque, I can only feel the pressure of endless tunnels on my eardrums, between Bologna and Florence, which must not be far now, are we already in Tuscany, what time is it, 7:15, another half-hour before Florence then 300 kilometers till Rome and the new life, if I don’t get out on the way, if I don’t take advantage of an unexpected stop to try to escape Fate, but the choices were already made a long time ago, I’ll hand over the suitcase, I’ll follow it through to the end, in the fall of 1990 I began the journey in a train from the Gare de Lyon, I was crossing Italy for the first time, determined, a little anxious still, strong from my military knowledge ready to place my sword at the service of my country, now it will go back in its sheath, farewell Francis Mirković the butcher from Bosnia, farewell, farewell Andrija the fierce, rest in peace, in the train to Zagreb we sang
three drummer boys
as we drank, now I’ve drunk alone
and rat and tat, ratatatat
, now I’m alone in the night locked up in this cubbyhole, I’ll have to find the courage to leave it, the strength, just as sometimes in war you’re afraid to go out, one night on the front in Bosnia two guys had to go reconnoiter the enemy lines, as close as possible to see where the Chetniks had set themselves up, Andi immediately volunteered and he chose me to go with him, in theory I had a higher rank than he but who cares, I agreed, we armed ourselves, weapons and ammunition, I remember I broke a shoelace as I tied my boots too forcefully which made Andrija laugh out loud but which seemed a bad omen to me, maybe Athena wouldn’t accompany us this time, the daughter of Zeus was looking elsewhere, we left in the darkest part of night around 2:00
A.M.
, we began to go down the hill between the trees, slipping on the wet earth, I was scared stiff, because of the darkness or the shoelace, I don’t know, my rifle clanked against the buttons on my jacket I was obsessed by this sound I was sure it was going to get us spotted Andrija skidded sideways sprawled onto his back swore like a trucker in a low voice, we should go back, I thought, we should go back right away before the real catastrophe, it seemed imminent,
shit it’s like looking through an African’s asshole
Andrija whispered that didn’t make me laugh but he was right we could be passing an entire regiment without realizing it, the lower down we got the steeper the slope became, we’d have to cling to the tree trunks to get back up, the Serbs must have been right below us—we stopped to listen we heard nothing, aside from an owl in the distance, maybe the goddess didn’t abandon us in the end, the night smelled of earth of grass and of the cold damp the calm was far from the racket of war Andrija looked at me as if to say should we climb back up? the valley was plunged in darkness there was no enemy around here that’s for sure just an irregular rustle of leaves like hesitant footsteps down below I grasped Andi’s shoulder put a finger to my mouth someone was approaching, the owl suddenly falls silent, someone was trying to climb the hill and panting, on our right—Andrija smiled, happy finally not to have schlepped all this way for nothing, my fear came back, what rotten luck, kilometers of hills and we come almost nose to nose with the Chetniks, how many of them were there, I strained my ears in vain I could hear just one of them, one single guy wheezing and breaking branches, this must be what deer and bucks feel when the hunter approaches, pieces of branches and a tightening of the chest Andrija signs to us to move to the right to intercept this noisy oaf, maybe a civilian, but what the hell would a civilian be doing in the middle of the night in the middle of the front, maybe one of our own, lost, was climbing back to our lines, Andi the brave moved away as quietly as possible veered off to the right the unknown man would find himself between the two of us in a few seconds I could hear him distinctly now the fat quarry was advancing slowly towards Andrija I hid behind a tree my mouth was dry I held my breath the Chetnik passed me I caught him by the legs he fell into the mud Andi jumped onto his back gagged him with his hand to stifle his cry of fear, I took his weapon, held him by the ear, aside from the panicked breathing of the Serb the hill was silent, Andi put his dagger under the petrified soldier’s neck and made him sit down opposite me he was in his forties with bulging eyes I whispered
if you shout we slit your throat, ok?
he nodded Andrija removed his hand but not his blade,
what are you doing here?
I asked, he stammered
they sent me on reconnaissance
he was so afraid he had difficulty speaking, his breath stank of onions, I asked
where are the others?
he replied
I’m all alone,
with an air of despair,
liar are you jerking us around or what?
the knife pressed a little harder on his Adam’s apple he blanched
I swear to you, I swear, I’m all alone, I was supposed to go look at your lines, I got lost
, I believed him, the front had shifted the previous day after their offensive, they wanted to know where we had withdrawn to, just as we wanted to know where they had stopped, I asked him the question,
down below, on the other side of the river
, that was logical, probably true, we’d be able to take our catch with us, this fish with the bulging eyes gone to spy on us alone in the night, Andi asked me in a low voice
should we go?
as I got up I noticed that our Serb had a game bag at his side, a canvas bag, I felt the weight of it the soldier rolled his frightened eyes, I opened it, it was full of bloody billfolds, gold chains, bracelets and wedding rings, a highwayman of corpses, he came back at night to strip the dead that we hadn’t had time to bury during the day, scattered around in no man’s land, maybe a spy but definitely a vulture with a panicked look, I heard the owl hoot in the distance, the Serb suddenly tried to free himself, to run away, Andrija the furious fell down swearing I pulled the trigger on my rifle by instinct two explosions ripped through the night followed by groans of pain I went over to the soldier he was writhing in the freezing mud I took his haversack his rifle Andi slit his throat in one enraged motion wiped his knife on the dead man’s jacket
come on we’re going back up
, we went back up, with difficulty, Andrija griping cursing the Chetniks I listened to the owl singing carrying the dead man’s soul to Hades,
three drummer boys on the way back from war
, the third was sleeping up above like a baby, he didn’t even wake up when we went to bed, after handing our somber booty over to an officer, the mortal remains, papers and jewelry of the abandoned dead—a few months before Andrija himself joined the underworld, Andrija shot down shitting behind a bush by a Muslim squadron that came out of nowhere died as he lived, ironically, fallen in his own shit like Robert Walser in the snow, three bullets in the chest thrown backwards into the smoking shit, pants around his knees, immobilized by the runs weapon in hand, no doubt he was laughing all alone and saying
Za dom spremni
as he heaved, Andi I miss you, in the early morning the fog the taste of the bronze of combat I said to you in a low voice “you’re not going to go shit now,
nećeš valjda sad da kenjaš
do it here if you want,” that gave you a good laugh, poor stubborn proud Croatian fool, you had already thrown up on me one winter night I could have put up with your shit, I would have preferred it to your death, fallen in irony Andrija I press the black plastic button and the water that flows down the steel sides of the ultra-modern train toilet is a torrent, a thin river that carries everything away flushes my urine onto the tracks and crossties going by at 150 kmh to soil eternal Tuscany with an immense pleasure

XII

back to my seat, my moving cage, eyelids closed: there’s nothing to be done, it doesn’t matter that I’m exhausted pathetic half-drunk bladder emptied I still can’t manage to persuade Morpheus to carry me far away from this train for a while, to find Andrija in a heroic dream, Stéphanie in an erotic dream, or even a nightmare inspired by the thousands of dead in my suitcase with the horror photos, I open my eyes, the little crossword-puzzle couple is quiet, calm, she’s sleeping with her head on her companion’s shoulder, he’s reading, that’s what I should do, go back to my book, find Intissar and the heavenly Palestinians, I remember as a child with my sister in order to pass the time during long car trips we’d play at guessing the starting point and final destination of the cars we passed, where does the little crossword-loving couple on the other side of the aisle come from, where are they going, it’s too simple in a train I know they got on in Milan and are going to Florence or Rome, but to do what, I have the feeling he’s a professor, a teacher of something, of the violin why not—yes, that’s it, he’s a violin teacher, he looks like a fiddler he reminds me of a friend of my mother’s she played chamber music with, his companion had been his student, that’s for sure, although she looks more like a harpist or a flautist: corduroy slacks, flowered blouse, long hair not too clean, or at least not as clean as it would be if this woman had been, let’s say, a pianist or a violist, being a spy makes you observant—plunged into the Boulevard Mortier in the headquarters of darkness and secrecy, of strategic or trivial information, often you forget where you are, the job becomes routine, the investigations, the crosschecking, the files, the summaries, the reports, the correspondents, the secret agents, the middlemen, the friends, the enemies, the propaganda, the sources, the manipulation, the human or technological information, all that blends in with normality, with the everyday, the way a civil servant makes entries in the big register of births, marriages and deaths, without them affecting him in the slightest, their births, deaths, marriages, divorces, adoptions, marginalia: the passion that was there in the beginning evaporated quickly, Lebihan the man of oysters and pelada was right, he said to me scratching himself
you’ll see, it’ll pass
, like an itch, I guess, the curiosity the joy of learning evaporate in time—the first two years I was convinced my recruitment had been an error, that the administration would realize very quickly it had made a mistake, that my past and my family’s past disqualified me as a spy in the service of the Republic, surely the director of the preliminary security clearance had done his job poorly, despite the three months or so of various investigations after the result of the recruitment exam, I wondered how the Agency could have decided to include such a politically and militarily dubious element, susceptible to slightly pro-fascist and foreign sympathies, it was one more mystery among the mysteries of that Temple of Isis that is our quarters where only the initiates meet, priests, demiurges, and oracles of the shadows, how naïve I was—of course the gods of the Boulevard had planned a fate for me, they hadn’t overlooked a thing about me, quite the contrary, when the time came they would make use of these defects or these qualities, with time and numbed by habit and state-employment preoccupied with myself I had forgotten that I was a pawn like any other in the quarrels of Zeus, Hera, Apollo and Pallas Athena, a pawn used for carrying out an aim as obscure as the clouds amassed over inaccessible Olympus, that’s one way to console yourself, I could also say OK I was fooled deceived manipulated used, nothing else, and even this suitcase of hidden documents, of my endless investigations hadn’t escaped them, they probably wanted it, facilitated my task, just in case, all that might be useful one day, one day all this will have its usefulness, you don’t escape, probably despite my precautions they’ll learn the identity of Yvan Deroy soon enough and will add it to my file, you never know, they might have need of the good Francis some time or other, they might need his information, his knife, his naïvety, maybe someday Stéphanie having reached the top of the information hierarchy will try to get her revenge, beloved of the gods she’ll only have to ask them for my head and the Kraken will appear on a private Italian beach, at Porto Ercole, Hercules Port, on the Argentario for example they’ll put an unknown substance in my
spaghetti alle vongole
and I’ll die of drowning an hour later when I dive into the Mediterranean, the blue cemetery, at the very spot where Caravaggio, another lord of decapitation, dropped dead: an impeccable and very Italian death,
a French tourist passed away from a heart attack after drinking copiously at a meal. Rapidly approaching his fiftieth year, the Frenchman Yvan Deroy, on vacation on Mount Argentario, joined the sad list of the imprudent who don’t wait for three hours after lunch before swimming
, the local paper will say, between two society gossip columns, and my death will not shake the cosmos, far from it, at most they’ll find a little place to put my body on the White Island at the mouth of the Danube where they buried Achilles, if I haven’t been eaten by the morays and congers, next to Andrija great tamer of mares, and basta—I want to open the suitcase, to reassure myself, my life insurance, they’d say in spy movies, life insurance that I’ll sell to feverish cardinals and Franciscans, agents of the Great Archivist, I get up, the little suitcase is still discreetly handcuffed to the steel bar of the luggage rack, I can’t be bothered to get the key out, I could pick up Rafael Kahla’s book again, find Intissar and her Lebanese adventures again, in Cairo during the informal meeting of honest traffickers half the participants came from Lebanon, and I myself was coming from Beirut where I had met the secretary of the richest of them, Rafiq Hariri the good-natured, fond of grilled quail and lamb tartare who had assured us of his participation, both personal and financial, by no means negligible, in our work, an offering to the gods of the Zone, so they would be merciful to him: of the Lebanese present in Cairo at the time the great majority died prematurely, Elie Hobeika the butcher of Shatila blown up in his car on January 24, 2002, Mike Nassar a major gun-runner on March 7 of that same year, and so on, Ghazi Kanaan the vigorous ogre welcomed all these future corpses to his home for dinner, on January 22 Elie Hobeika is invited over to the home of the Syrian with the prominent features, what does he say to him, they certainly don’t talk about the Palestinians massacred in the camps in 1982 in front of the eyes of the Israeli army, nor of the Islamists reduced to ashes by the government of Damascus that same year, maybe they talk about the proceedings that Belgium is instituting against Ariel Sharon for crimes against humanity, in which Hobeika is summoned to testify, they smile, maybe they even laugh at the good joke the Belgians have just played on Sharon, it’s highly unlikely but you never know—the Syrians wanted above all not to lose in the post-9/11 storm, the invasion of Iraq, the Oriental New Deal of Bush the simple, the ardent, Damascus was afraid, poor Hobeika, everyone had wanted his death, the Palestinians, the Israelis, the Lebanese, that’s maybe why Ghazi Kanaan invited him to dinner, he caresses him one last time like a sick old dog before it’s euthanized, he knows he’s going to sacrifice Hobeika before he talks too much, urged on by the necessity of the noose that’s tightening, and basta, in novels they call it sacrificing a pawn, or in trade jargon “clarifying the situation,”
we’re going to clarify the situation
meant that in all probability someone was going to disappear, in the great clarity of a car bomb, Hobeika the dashing commander of special forces of the Phalangists during the civil war had in his trunk two bottles of compressed air, a mask, and a pair of flippers, he liked scuba diving, he had bad luck, he liked scuba diving and one morning he was going down Hazmieh to Beirut when an insignificant car exploded as he went by the two diving bottles also blew up, ripping open the back seat he was sitting in, piercing Elie Hobeika’s body with shards of steel and chair springs, farewell nice diplomatic butcher, he had no time to think about anything before the dark veil covered his eyes, farewell, he didn’t see the flares of the Israeli army guiding its soldiers through the little streets of Shatila, those nights in September 1982, three nights and three days of knives of submachine guns for how many Palestinians massacred, no one knows, between 700 and 3,000, according to sources, they buried the corpses with bulldozers, in secret, the Israeli army had asked Hobeika’s militia to rid the camp of the terrorists that were still there, rid the camp of terrorists yet to be born, of terrorists in the making, of retired terrorists and of possible engenderers of terrorists, that’s what the Lebanese with the long blades must have understood, those conscripts of the Phalangist Party founded by Pierre Gemayel the athlete, admirer of that fascistic Hitlerian order he discovered at the Olympic Games of Berlin in 1936, he would take the name of his movement from Spain, Mediterranean symmetry once again, Beirut and Barcelona touch by folding over on the Rome/Berlin axis, surely Pierre Gemayel with the Brylcreem in his hair pictured a Spanish fate for his country, a victory of the nationals after a sad but necessary civil war, I want to go back to Intissar and the Palestinian fighters but I’m too sleepy to go on reading, I make myself more comfortable, my legs stretched out onto the opposite seat, I’d almost take off my shoes after all why wouldn’t Yvan Deroy take them off, in a first-class car, for me though my upbringing is such a heavy burden that I wonder if my socks are clean, if they’re free of holes and in my doubt I refrain, the humiliation would be too great if upon waking the flautist or harpist on the other side of the aisle saw my big toe sticking out of a misshapen knee-sock, the hypocrisy of the well-polished shoe hiding the foot’s wretchedness, just as my pants are hiding faded underwear with a sagging waistband—the world of appearances is like that, who can claim to know his neighbor, I had been very surprised to find a photo of a child in Andi’s bag, carefully put away between the pages of the little Bible that he never opened because, he said, he knew it by heart, the photograph of a young girl of about eleven or twelve, with pigtails, Vlaho and I had immediately started in on him, it’s your fiancée, she’s not bad, we passed the photo back and forth like a ball without him being able to get it back,
come on guys, that’s enough, give it back
, we had begun teasing him about the obvious advantages of such youth, virginity assured, the absence of cellulite, all the macho lewd remarks that came into our heads and Andrija exploded he looked at us as he shouted with all the rage he was capable of, one hand on his knife, if he had been armed he would have gunned us down on the spot, Vlaho the magnanimous immediately handed him the snapshot as if he had received a divine order and then we had seen two tears stream down the cheeks of Andi the furious, he caressed the young girl’s face before pressing it to his heart and putting it carefully away, in his pocket this time and when he raised his head he smiled, he smiled and said
that’s my sister you pair of assholes
, we had been stunned and ashamed, ashamed of having forced Andrija’s tears and of having discovered his weakness, as ashamed as if we had brought to light a terrible infirmity, as ashamed as if we had discovered, despite ourselves, that he had a tiny penis or a single ball, the warrior had feelings, tears, Andi’s tenderness was all the more inconceivable to us because he never spoke about this little sister, out of shyness, because he himself was ashamed of his affection as I am of my holey sock or my tramp’s underwear or my informer past my cop’s life as I’m ashamed of having been afraid of having been cowardly of having dumped Stéphanie, Marianne, my mother, all the weight of the endless shame of Francis the coward, who is trying today to redeem himself with a suitcase and a borrowed name, in Rome the city of great forgiveness and of indulgences, or rather in the outskirts of Prato, we’re almost in Florence, Prato birthplace of Curzio Malaparte the restless—the ex-fascist disillusioned journalist owner of one of the most beautiful houses in the world in Capri is buried in his birthplace a stone’s throw from here, like a good Tuscan, nowhere near his villa on the Neapolitan island, that immense stone staircase between the sea and the rocks, sublime parallelepiped where God knows how Godard managed to film
Contempt
—Brigitte Bardot skinny-dipping in the inlet at the base of the steps, Fritz Lang spinning around, Michel Piccoli smoking and I imagine Georges Delerue on the rooftop terrace with the magnificent view, playing the cello: in that dark house, the Piccoli-Bardot couple comes apart in the midst of filming
Ulysses
, a film by Fritz Lang, and when the shrewd warrior sees faraway Ithaca from his hollow vessel it’s the villa of Curzio Malaparte in Capri, lost in the midst of the waves like a boat, Curzio Malaparte’s real name was Kurt Suckert, his father was German, at the age of sixteen the young Kurt signs up and takes part in the First World War, back home he develops a passion for the “social revolution” promised by the
squadre d’azione
, those eccentric militiamen who tortured leftist men by making them drink castor oil until their intestines were completely liquid: Malaparte became one of the first theoreticians of fascism before being disappointed by Mussolini in 1928, Malaparte the disillusioned was a prolific journalist, he was the special correspondent for the
Corriere della Sera
with the Axis forces, in Croatia, in Poland, and then on the Russian front, in 1943 he interviews Ante Pavelić the Croatian Poglavnik, in
Kaputt
he tells how the Slavic Führer with the big eyes was a friendly man, somewhat reserved, a fervent Catholic, in his office he had a basket full of shellfish without shells that Malaparte thought were Dalmatian oysters, to hell with oysters, Pavelić said to him, it’s a gift from my Ustashis, a hundred Serbian eyes offered to the head of the triumphant homeland, Curzio Malaparte tells this story in a novel, is it true, what do I know, in any case it’s true for a number of Serbs and no less a consequential number of Westerners, apparently Malaparte denied this on his deathbed, which seems to me even more unlikely, why would he care, on the verge of the great plunge, about the dictator’s reputation, it was just one more stain on his name, didn’t matter, what did a hundred victims matter a few enucleations it could just have well have been fingers ears noses balls or birth certificates it didn’t matter Malaparte’s portrayal is no doubt quite realistic, Pavelić the discreet smiling friendly cultivated man was at the head of a band of assassins, like it or not, he ordered the detention and violent death of enemies of the Croatian people, he was neither fundamentally anti-Semitic nor profoundly anti-Serb, he was just pragmatic, in that great Céline-ian pragmatism of the 1930s– 1940s according to which every problem calls for a solution, every question an answer, to each his own devil, the Jews the Serbs the communists the fascists the Freemasons the saboteurs and everyone sought to resolve his problem in a definitive way with the help of some group or other—the subordinates sought above all to get richer, Globocnik the man of Trieste, Ljubo Runjas the Valencian exile, they sought above all to fill their pockets with goods taken from the dead, they were no ideologues, just nice little corpse robbers on a large scale, on the scale of millions of men and women gassed or shot, and Malaparte’s eyes are only the sticky gaze of all those dead men their bodies humiliated and robbed, Curzio Malaparte the equivocal the fickle who goes from fascism to cynicism to resistance to communism before joining the lukewarm bosom of the Holy Roman and Apostolic Catholic Church in a grave in Prato pretty town in Tuscany that the train is thundering through, I had given his novel