Zone (31 page)

Che
Rózsa’s Welsh adjunct in the international brigade, not a bad guy, a soldier, he reminds me of Vlaho with his jagged teeth, I wonder if we would have bumped off a journalist if we had to, no doubt about it, after all a photographer is a kind of spy bought by the highest bidder, a parasite who lives off war without fighting it, all those freelance guys were like us, young and inexperienced at the beginning of the conflict, like us they trembled with fear beneath the shells from the Yugoslav tanks, for most of them it was their first assignment, their first contact with war, like us they saw their first corpses like us they shoved their gear in front of their comrades and exchanged bloated, exaggerated tales, everyone outdoing each other in the number of horrors they’d seen, or how close to death they’d come, I’m not watching the screen I’m plunged into my memories I’ve understood that they’ll never find out who killed Paul Jenks they’ll never know I keep drinking leaving Stéphanie to her disgust with mercenaries soldiers Slavonic hail at the end of the tape she stays silent a while she hesitates to ask me questions she doesn’t know where to begin suddenly she realizes something she says
so you killed people?
and I’m flabbergasted, this cultivated mind is incapable of admitting that she too is touched indirectly by violence, splattered by my actions, this civil servant who prepares strategic options for the French army doesn’t realize what there is at the other end of her work,
no, I spent a few months gathering mushrooms and singing dirty songs
, I feel a mute rage rising in me, what exactly does she want to know,
but
. . .
how many?
it reminds me of those teenage trysts, when you ask “so you’ve slept with how many guys?”
I have no idea
, Stéphanie is stubborn, she looks like a judge, she insists,
a lot?
I answer truthfully,
I have no idea, it’s impossible to know,
and she is so ignorant of what I’m talking about that she thinks she can see on my shoulders thousands of corpses, all of a sudden, she imagines I’m Franz Stangl or Odilo Globocnik, she has tears of anger in her eyes, she feels deceived, she is discovering that her lover is a murderer, I down my drink at one go and pour myself another,
you’re an alcoholic killer
, she says between sobs and she begins laughing, laughing and crying at the same time, then she calms down, she calms down dries her tears and says
oh my, oh my
, she gathers herself together, things follow their course in her mind, she’s pragmatic, she’s curious, she wants to know, she wants to understand, she wants to put herself in my place she insists
and what’s it like to kill someone?
with a small hesitant voice, almost beseeching, so I explode, I think of Lowry and Margerie in Sicily, I say to her you’ll see for yourself, I get up I find the Yugoslav 7.65 in the wardrobe Stéphanie is dumbfounded like a good conjuror I hand her the weapon I show her the cartridges in the clip I shove the breech lift the safety catch I say to her you see there’s a bullet in the chamber she is paralyzed with fear I go over to her I say you want to know what it’s like to kill someone? so I grab her by the wrist I put the gun in her hand she doesn’t react I place my finger next to hers in the trigger she doesn’t understand she is paralyzed with fear and surprise I stick the muzzle in my mouth Stéphanie shouts no no no she fights I put pressure on her finger she presses despite herself on the release shouting noooo instinctively she hits me with a terrific left jab worthy of Zeus in the mouth the pistol goes click and that’s it, it falls heavily onto the wood floor, Stéphanie collapses too, she’s hiccupping as she sobs, she looks as if she’s going to throw up, she is curled up on the ground her hair hides her face and I leave, I leave her there like that lying alongside the little black Zastava with no firing pin, to go running down the stairs running down the street running onto the bridge over the Montmartre cemetery and so on until the Place de Clichy without even noticing that it was raining I arrive soaked at a bar a burning pain in my jaw I order a brandy that I down in one gulp, I feel my spirits lifting—my spirits are lifting in the midst of drunks, as the jukebox is playing Claude François’s “As Usual,” the original version of “My Way,” what idiocy, what got hold of me, and it’s my turn to have a big sticky cry, standing at the bar, in the midst of a choir of lushes who are repeating in chorus
as uuuusual
, guilt is flooding through me again now, 1,500 kilometers away and months later, it all can’t be ascribed to the alcohol, what cunning god breathed that idea into me, that macabre, violent farce, Stéphanie convinced that my skull was going to shatter and stain the ceiling, Sandra Balsells her eye in the gunsight, Intissar washing Marwan’s body, Malcolm Lowry with his hands around his wife’s neck, what a trip, the train slows down, we’re in a suburb of Florence the sublime, capital of beauty and tourism—the museums even the Uffizi gallery always give off a funereal smell, artworks, artworks stuck in time and space hung on a nail or placed on the floor, artworks that are more or less macabre like Caravaggio’s decapitations or stuffed human beings, in the Cairo Museum Nasser forbids the crowd of tourists from seeing the mummies of pharaohs, those little men dried by time their inner organs carefully preserved in alabaster vases, ever since his adolescence Nasser has found it disgraceful that colonialist foreigners come to satisfy their curiosity in front of the embalmed remains of the glorious fathers of Egypt, imagine, he said, that a group of Arab archeologists wanted to unearth the kings of France in Saint-Denis to exhibit their coffins and their most intimate bones to the view of all, it seems to me that the French government would oppose that, it’s likely, after all the head of Louis XVI was brandished on the Place de la Concorde but we haven’t seen it since, so Egyptian mummies are locked up in a big room forbidden to the public, except that of Tut-Ankh-Amun and his wooden sarcophagus—on the other hand the Egyptians don’t have that same delicacy with the dozens of animals swaddled 3,000 years ago, ibis, dogs and jackals, cats, swallows, garter snakes and cobras, calves and bulls, falcons, baboons, perch and catfish, a whole zoo preserved in strips of linen and resin fills the Cairo Museum, dignified and dusty like an old Englishwoman, a museum of natural history, before in this kind of establishment they didn’t hesitate to exhibit stuffed men, I read somewhere that a little city in Spain by the sea still possessed, not long ago, a 150-year-old bushman warrior, in a glass cage, with spear and tackle, the plaster skin was regularly repainted ebony black which earned him the nickname
El Negro
, he sat in state between two human fetuses that were swimming in formaldehyde, in the company of a two-headed cow and a five-footed sheep, the Bushman had been bought in Paris at the taxidermists Verreaux Fils that provided half the museums in Europe with specimens of various species,
El Negro
disinterred secretly the day after his burial in Botswana was sent to Paris by boat accompanied by a number of skeletons from the same cemetery, after having been eviscerated his skin dried with salt his body smeared with a special preparation, stuffed in France he immediately interested a veterinarian who set him up in 1880 in his collection, I forget where near Barcelona, by the Mediterranean, and the nice black man with his spear and a borrowed loincloth was the delight of generations of Catalan schoolchildren, for he was four and a half feet tall, more or less their height, and I imagine the children playing at hunting lions in the playground after having seen it, for almost a hundred years: dusted, repaired, repainted
El Negro
was forgotten in the back of a provincial museum until one day they decided to give it a proper burial, out of decency, there had to be an international campaign for the museum of natural history in question to agree to part with the jewel of its collection, but the Bushman ended up finding its way back to Africa again, on a plane, the government of Botswana organized a national funeral for this unknown warrior whose remains now rest next to his own people—in Florence the Noble of course there’s no stuffed black man in the Uffizi gallery, no animal or human mummies, pictures statues gods goddesses saints all the nobility of representation, from the perfectly proportioned busts to the golden hair of Botticelli, one of the most popular museums in Italy, where Caravaggio’s aegis sits enthroned, the Gorgon’s blood-red face on a round shield, a corseless head with crazy eyes, the snakes are still moving in Medusa’s mane, did cultured Stéphanie admire Caravaggio so obsessed with decapitated heads and blood, maybe, always that curiosity about death, that desire to see her own death in that of others, to guess, to pierce the secret of the final instant just as Caravaggio depicts himself in the suffering face of the Gorgon with the cut neck, Stéphanie curious about my war exploits, my courage or my cowardliness, Stéphanie lying on the ground, broken with fear and tears, next to my useless 7.65 abandoned on the floor, did she get an answer to her question, was that really what she was asking me, I’m obscure even to myself, rattled by Fate like a convoy in this tunnel where traces of humidity gleam on the blackened concrete underneath Florence city of flowers

XV

airbrakes shrill cries obscure pain in my ears intense light the train stops Santa Maria Novella Saint Mary the New the Florentine train station the sign is blue the letters white I straighten up stretch, travelers bustle about the platform women men, men women it must be cold here too everyone’s bundled up in heavy coats some ladies have furs angora blue lynx chinchillas real or fake in Venice there were many furriers for the incredible quantity of stuck-up old cows the city contains the most freezing city in the Mediterranean caressed by Siberian winds coming in from the Pannonian Plain, as frigid as Constantinople and that’s cold, stores with their display windows overflowing with mink and golden fox, shops equipped with immense refrigerators to preserve all these pelts through the summer, let’s hope for the furriers’ sake that global warming is the prelude to an Ice Age, the diversion of the Gulf Stream will make the Rhone freeze in winter we’ll all have astrakhan shapkas on our heads we’ll be able to skate to Ajaccio long-distance Valencia Majorca in a sled the Moroccans will invade Spain on horseback and the apes on the Rock of Gibraltar will finally die of cold, dirty animals apes, thieving and aggressive, so human they won’t hesitate to bite the hand that feeds them noisy lewd exhibitionist masturbators, maybe they’ll adapt to the new climate conditions, the simians, orangutans with long white fur will make their appearance on the new ice floes they’ll be hunted for their skins it will be a real pleasure, a real end-of-the-world pleasure, the last man chasing the last monkey on an ice shelf floating in the middle of the Atlantic and so long, farewell, end of the hominid primates, on the platform the ladies in furs watch their husbands carry the luggage, the couple next to me hasn’t budged, so they’re going to Rome, four people enter our car, a woman in her sixties sits down opposite me on the seat vacated in Bologna by the
Pronto
reader, she doesn’t have a mink but a black wool coat that she has folded to store above her seat, a rather broad but harmonious face, hair almost white, eyes dark, a pearl necklace above a red cardigan upper-middle-class the statisticians or polling institutes would say, she searches through her handbag to get a book out, she hasn’t favored me with a look, the train will start up again soon, soon it will start up again for the great descent nonstop to the Termini, I remember a scene in
Amici Miei
, the film by Monicelli with Tognazzi and Noiret, on this same platform, the five friends with their virile noisy friendship play a hysterical game, they wait for a train to leave and give the passengers leaning out the windows a resounding smack in the face, the men and especially the women, and this sport makes them die laughing, so much that one of the characters says this magnificent phrase,
how happy we are with each other, how happy, it’s too bad we’re not gay
, with Vlaho and Andi we could have uttered the same phrase with the same conclusion we were happy together in Osijek on our jaunt to Trieste in Mostar in Vitez we were happy strangely happy war is a sport like any other in the end you have to choose a side be a victim or a killer there is no alternative you have to be on one end or the other of the rifle you have no choice ever or at least almost never, we’re leaving in the other direction, like Santa Lucia in Venice or Termini in Rome Santa Maria Novella is a dead-end, we start up again, now I’m facing my destination, Rome is in front of me, Florence streams past, noble Florence scattered with cupolas where they blithely tortured Savonarola and Machiavelli, torture for the pleasure of it
strappado
water the thumb-screw and flaying, the politician-monk was too virtuous, Savonarola the austere forbade whores books pleasures drink games which especially annoyed Pope Alexander VI Borgia the fornicator from Xàtiva with his countless descendants, ah those were the days, today the Polish pontiff trembling immortal and infallible has just finished his speech on the Piazza di Spagna, I doubt he has children, I doubt it, my neighbors the crossword-loving musicians are also talking about Florence, I hear
Firenze Firenze
one of the few Italian words I know, in my Venetian solitude I didn’t learn much of the language of Dante the hook-nosed eschatologist, Ghassan and I spoke French, Marianne too of course, in my long solitary wanderings as a depressed warrior I didn’t talk with anyone, aside from asking for a red or white wine according to my mood at the time,
ombra rossa
or
bianca
, a red or white shadow, the name the Venetians give the little glass of wine you drink from five o’clock onwards, I don’t know the explanation for this pretty poetic expression,
go have a shadow
, as opposed to going to take some sun I suppose at the time I abused the shadow and night in solitude, after burning my uniforms and trying to forget Andi Vlaho Croatia Bosnia bodies wounds the smell of death I was in a pointless airlock between two worlds, in a city without a city, without cars, without noise, veined with dark water traveled by tourists eaten away by the history of its greatness, the Republic of the Lion with a thousand bars, in Morea in Cyprus in Rhodes the Mediterranean East was Venetian, the galleys and galleasses of the doges ruled over the seas—when I visited the Arsenale with Ghassan, telling him about the Battle of Lepanto facing the immensity of the harbor basins, in front of the shapes of the docks and piers, I understood the infinite power of La Serenissima, a stone lion stolen from Rhodes good-naturedly guarded the port of the greatest arsenal in the Mediterranean,
pax tibi Marce evangelista meus
, peace be with you, Mark my Evangelist, that’s what an angel said to Saint Mark when he was sleeping in a boat on the lagoon, before crossing the Mediterranean and dying near Alexandria, in a place called Bucculi, the house of the bullock driver, where he had built a church, the angry pagans martyred him without delay, the white-bearded saint, they tied him up and dragged him to death behind a cart over broken cobblestones singing
let’s bring this steer back to his stable
, in Beirut during the civil war they liked this torture very much, a number of prisoners died attached with barbed wire to a Jeep crossing the city at top speed, torn to bits scraped bare burned by the asphalt asphyxiated their limbs dislocated like the Evangelist in Alexandria and Isadora Duncan the scandalous in Nice, in 828 the Venetians stole Mark’s relics from the Egyptians to offer him a final resting-place in their city, in that Byzantine basilica with the five domes, with the gold-encrusted nave the only church in the world where you can reply
et cum spiritu tuo
with your feet in the water, Saint Mark’s the floodable—the Zone is rainy, Zeus often drowns cities in terrifying downpours, Beirut Alexandria Venice Florence and Valencia are regularly submerged, and even once in Libya desert of deserts in Cyrene the sparkling I witnessed an apocalyptic storm, divine punishment rained down on the ruins and the few tourists who had dared to come to the land of Qaddafi the sublime madman, they had sent me to negotiate the purchase of highly important information on Arab Islamist activities, the Libyan agencies were unbeatable on this subject and Qaddafi sold his entire store of it in exchange for reintegration into the league of nations, he gave everything he knew about the activists he had more or less supported, closely or remotely, everyone in the shadows rejoiced at the Libyan information, the British, the Italians, the Spaniards, Lebihan the bald lover of mollusks also rubbed his hands, a good operation, he said “go to Libya, you like to travel, it’s probably interesting” he didn’t believe a word of it obviously, a country where there wasn’t even a bicycle race worthy of the name and where you had to eat atrociously spicy horrors, I agreed especially in order to see Cyrene and Ghebel Akhdar the Green Mountain country of Omar Al Mokhtar who had caused the Italians no end of trouble before dying at the end of a rope in 1931, the white-bearded sheikh fought against the soldiers of the new Rome almost barehanded, in that piece of desert Italy had taken from the Ottomans in 1911—Rodolfo Graziani in charge of organizing the repression copied the methods of the British in South Africa and the Spanish in Cuba, he emptied Cyrenaica of its inhabitants, sending 20,000 or 30,000 Libyans into camps, on foot across the desert without supplies, sure of decimating them, he was
draining the water to catch the fish
, before Mao Zedong had codified revolutionary guerilla warfare, in the same way that the French in Algeria fifty years later would “round up” Muslim civilians inside barbed wire in order the better to control them, always camps, more camps, Spanish camps for the people of the Rif Italian camps for the Libyans Turkish camps for the Armenians French camps for the Algerians British camps for the Greeks Croatian camps for the Serbs German camps for the Italians French camps for the Spanish it’s like a nursery rhyme or a marching song,
look, here’s some black pudding, here’s some black pudding, for the Armenians the Greeks and the Libyans, for the Belgians there’s none left, for the Belgians there’s none left
,
¹
etc., monument to the poetry of war, in Croatia we sang to the tune of “Lili Marleen” words from who knows where,
i znaj da čekam te, know that I’m waiting for you
, Andi had even composed a version of his own, which involved cutting off the balls of the Serbs and defending the homeland, poor Lili, by the barrack gate, she has to wait some more—it was in Libya that Rommel’s soldiers voted in the song written by Hans Leip during the First World War, the Afrikakorps soldiers in the Cyrenaic liked the melody of the woman waiting across from the barracks, in front of the big gate, beneath the lamp post, they wrote hundreds of letters to implore the radio to broadcast it more often, curiously the German station that transmitted to North Africa was in Belgrade, it was from Belgrade that every day at 21:55 precisely there rang out
wie einst Lili Marleen, wie einst Lili Marleen,
and the sweat-covered soldiers wept their last drops of water somewhere between Tobruk and Benghazi in front of their lamplit encampments, Rommel himself wept, Rommel telegraphed to Belgrade to ask for more, more, more Lili, always Lili, the British sang it in German until the propaganda provided them with an English version that the BBC also repeated several times a day, Tito and the partisans whistled it in Bosnia, the Greeks of ELAS in Gorgopotamos, the surviving Italians in El Alamein sighed
con te Lili Marleen
and even we, forty-five years later, sang it by the Drava,
i znaj da čekam te
, it will be impossible to get this tune out of my head now, it’s going to accompany me to Rome with Andi’s voice and his obscene words, in Cyrene in Libya visiting the Greek ruins a dozen kilometers from the sea I whistled “Lili Marleen” and thought of Rommel’s soldiers and of Montgomery, before the storm broke and almost drowned me in the middle of the immense temple of Zeus, I found refuge under the awning of a soda and souvenir stand run by a nice Lebanese a Phoenician lost in Libya who was bored stiff, he told me in flawless French, fortunately there are a few tourists, he added, I drank a local Coke, the racket of the rain on the sheet metal prevented us from continuing the conversation, the air smelled of wet dust and salt, lightning tried to knock down the cypress trees and the Greek columns the water transformed the whole site into a pool of mud that the beating rain struck with the rumbling thunder in a purplish-blue light streaked with thick lines of rain that ricocheted off the earth like bullets so hard that there was no shelter to be found, the Lebanese man laughed, he guffawed with a nervous laugh drowned out by the hammering of the storm, he tried as well as he could to protect his makeshift counter and the interior of his stall, I was sheltered but still soaked to the waist, Zeus finally took pity, he put the lightning back in its box, the sky opened suddenly in a great white light, I said goodbye to the Phoenician from Sidon lost among the cans of Pepsi and the Doric columns, and I resumed my journey to Benghazi—in a rented car, the exchange rate and standard of living let you buy all the seats in a shared taxi and escape suffocation or thrombosis, Lebihan wasn’t very happy I was going to sightsee in Cyrenaica, even though he loved the movie
A Taxi for Tobruk
, from which he had taken one of his favorite phrases,
an intellectual sitting down doesn’t go as far as a brute who walks
, that’s what he said to me when I spoke to him about Cyrene,
you remember Ventura in
“A Taxi for Tobruk”
?
of course, I remembered Lino Ventura and Charles Aznavour, I replied
as for me I prefer Ventura in
“The Army of Shadows,” that gave him a good laugh, and set him scratching his scalp with a grin,
The Army of Shadows, oh, that’s good
, Libya’s main disadvantage was the dryness, a dry dry dry country not a drop of alcohol from Egypt to Tunisia, tea, coffee gallons of fizzy drinks but not a beer not a drop of wine nothing nothing nothing aside from bootleg in Tripoli, if that, Tripoli the sinister Italian capital of the Immense Republic of the Masses and of its leader the sly dictator whose personal bodyguards made all the heads of state in the world pale with envy, a real company of guards made up of sublime and dangerous amazons, muscle-bound women armed to the teeth real fighters for the Guide of the Revolution champion of the cause of African Unity writer poet great protector of his people, builder of the artificial Great River that leads fossil water from the Sahara to the coast for irrigation, blue oil after black gold, the September Conqueror’s dream to govern a green country, green like Islam, a green Africa, he gave Libya the permanent river that it lacked to rival Egypt, now they grow lettuce in Tripolitana, lettuce and tomatoes, my storm must have been an unheard-of piece of luck for everyone maintains that it never rains in Libya and that the climate change isn’t going to make things any better, far from it, hard to picture the Sahara flowering, barely 3,000 years ago there were gazelles monkeys wild horses eucalyptus baobabs breadfruit trees everything was scorched in a giant heatwave, everything, all that remains are cave paintings by the inhabitants of that era and skeletons buried beneath tons of silica, they say that in 1944 the Bedouins of eastern Libya all became military archeologists, they dismantled burnt tanks and abandoned cannons, recovered empty ammunition crates, objects left behind in fortifications, the merchants of Benghazi sold tons of hole-filled blankets, pierced cans, rolls of barbed wire, and even a music box, the only souvenir I bought in Libya, a little varnished music box with a woman’s face painted in lacquer on the lid, the shopkeeper in the old city near the Al-Jarid souk told me its story, the little object, about four centimeters by two, had been made near Vienna and given to a soldier on leave, the looters had found it on his corpse buried by the collapse of a sand trench, along with letters, two photographs a broken watch and other personal effects that the nomads had no use for but which they sold at a good price in town, along with six antitank mines that the sands had vomited up a stone’s throw away from the body, nice fat yellow mines all round and new and heavy, the merchant who bought the lot didn’t know what use antitank mines could be in peacetime but, aware of the danger, he stashed them away in a corner in the back of his shop where no one could handle them by mistake and forgot them, he forgot them so completely that they didn’t explode until November 1977 during the People’s Revolution, when the Revolutionary Committee wanted to get hold of the hidden goods of this imperialist collaborator, the chief of the Equality Squad had never seen a German mine, he thought he’d discovered gold or precious metal, so yellow, so heavy, so well-hidden in a suitcase at the very back of a depot, the