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XVIII

in Rome in 1598 Michelangelo Merisi called Caravaggio organizes his first decapitation: he has the head of an old horse cut off by an athletic brigand recruited in front of one of the many houses of ill repute around the mausoleum of Augustus, in his studio he attentively observes the naked killer’s muscles bulge under the weight of the sword, the curve of shoulder when he brings the blade down onto the animal’s throat, the nostrils smoking from fever, prostrate with illness the animal is condemned Caravaggio has no time to draw it of course, he studies the reflection on the metal when it penetrates the neck the spurt of black blood that soaks the warrior’s thigh and turns purple, the horse’s legs convulse, the metal returns to the charge, the savage mercenary again lifts the weapon and strikes higher up opening a new wound the horse has stopped moving the man has reached the vertebrae, the executioner is red and soaked to his waist, he bends forward to finish his work, Michelangelo Merisi watches him grasp the mane cut off the last pieces of flesh and with his left hand brandish the heavy head, effortlessly, it is dripping and its eyes are staring, Caravaggio feels nauseous, his two domestics throw buckets of water over the shuddering executioner, one can almost see his heart beating in his hairless chest, Caravaggio starts drawing, muscles, swords, gushes of blood, while the hired killer washes himself, before Merisi the invert pays him for something entirely different, a ritual that was much more reprehensible at the time than the death of a sick horse, Rome is a somber dangerous city full of daggers disfigured prostitutes cutthroats dark alleyways, Caravaggio loves this city, after his flight he won’t rest until he returns to it, even though Naples has its charm, its distress, even though you can find lovers and heads to cut off as far as Malta the prim, it’s always Rome the plebes of Rome the pomp of Rome that will attract Caravaggio the sacrificer, the man in love with bodies night and decapitation, Rome that’s coming quickly closer in the Tuscan night, tomorrow the Americans to whom Antonio the bartender is serving another Chianti might stop at Saint Louis of the French, San Luigi dei Francesi, on their way to the Piazza Navona, to see the three canvases in the Contarelli Chapel, the calling, the inspiration, and the martyrdom of St. Matthew, among the most famous works by Caravaggio, the sword of the naked man standing over the saint lying on the ground, the beauty of the angel, a few meters away in the first chapel to the left are the commemorative plaques for the French soldiers who died in Italy, the officers of free France who commanded Moroccans Tunisians Algerians Senegalese West Indians, no one looks at them, poor forgotten guys, the Moroccan troops and the Algerian goumiers, sacrificed so easily by the allied generals—withdrawn from the Italian front in July 1944 after having left 10,000 dead and missing there, they take part in the landing in Provence, will travel across all of France before crossing the Rhine in April 1945, it seems to me I’ve seen their mule trains from the window, in Italy the fear of “Moroccaning” becomes a real panic, blown out of all proportion given the facts, a few hundred violent acts by the colonial troops, they had to eat, to cheer themselves up, to earn something from war that otherwise gave nothing but pain, the French officers had the authority to send their soldiers to the firing squad at the slightest misdemeanor, without any further ado than a note sent to headquarters, there were about a hundred of these, a hundred guys shot for one reason or another, among the thousands of members of the French Expeditionary Corps that would not see the Atlas again, the Rif, Constantine, Kabylia, many of the survivors would put their military experience to the service of the FLN a few years later, some would be tortured, killed without warning or caught in ambushes facing the colonial officers who had led them to victory or to a plaque, a little marble plaque a few feet away from Caravaggio’s
Saint Matthew
, a plaque to summarize the thousands of names in French cemeteries scattered throughout Italian soil between Naples and Lake Trasimeno: in Salonika, once
Drifting Cities
was shut, between taverns and bottles of Macedonian wine, thanks to a travel guide bought by chance in a newspaper kiosk I went to see the Zeitenlick necropolis, the cemetery for the Balkan campaign, where there are 9,000 French graves and the bones of 8,000 Serbs from the years 1915–1917, forgotten next to a large avenue, in the middle of town, the survivors of the Dardanelles, landed in 1915 to support the retreating Serbs, in the necropolis there is a well-kept British plot, a Russian section, an Italian monument, a giant Serb ossuary, a corner for the Algerian Muslims, for the Jewish French, for the Buddhists from Indochina, the Madagascans and Senegalese the whole world had come to get murdered by the savage Bulgarians the Germans and their Austrian allies, and the whole world was resting now between the cypresses on the Avenue Langada two kilometers away from the sea, in the August sun, I thought back to my visit to the Dardanelles with Marianne six years earlier, hundreds of pages earlier, now by chance on my own I saw the next episode, the names of those who were still alive when we were discovering the tormented landscapes along the peninsula, the forts of Kilitbahir, Cape Helles, now I could follow their journey, 9,000 more had keeled over a little further away, in the meantime I had waged war myself, I had stopped over in Venice, Marianne had left, I had become a civil servant of the shadows and I found myself alone by chance in Thessalonica before all these graves that so to speak belonged to me, the way Atatürk’s native house belonged to me climbing the little streets of the high city, a restored Ottoman residence, ocher-pink, Mustafa Kemal whose museum I had visited in the Dardanelles, his path was opposite, eastwards, to glorious Anatolia, when he was born in 1881 Salonika was the second-largest city in the Ottoman Empire, peopled half with Sephardic Jews and half with Turks, Greeks, Slavs, and Europeans, Pabst’s
Spies from Salonika
, that film fascinated me when I was little, why in 1912 after the Balkan Wars did Mustafa Kemal continue his military career, until he sent the British and the French back to the sea in Gallipoli, then sent the Greeks from Asia Minor in 1923, as for the Jews they pursued their studies, until the Germans caught them in 1941, so that by mid-1943 only a handful remained, scattered among the mountains with the Resistance—the transit camp in Salonika was next to the train station, the trains began leaving in March 1943, for Treblinka, Sobibór, and Birkenau, by August 50,000 people had been deported, and almost 40,000 gassed, I learned all that in the Jewish Museum, before the communities of Athens and Rhodes the community of Thessalonica was destroyed by Alois Brunner the furious specialist, who had arrived in Greece in February 1943, until then anti-Jewish measures had been limited to prohibiting bicycles and radios, Brunner took things in hand, the bull by the horns, he organized a Jewish police of hoodlums to help him in his task, and six months later not a single Jew was officially left in Salonika, the last
Prominenten
including Grand Rabbi Zevi Koretz were put onto a train headed for one of the camps of Bergen-Belsen, not a question of extermination for him, the Germans feel they owe him something, as well as the 300 Jews of Spanish nationality whom Franco’s consul is calling for, the surprising Spaniards insist on recovering their Jews, so a convoy leaves for Bergen-Belsen, whence a transport is organized for the south, and the Sephardim take the return route to the lands of Isabella of Castille that they left 400 years earlier, through Vichy France, do they meet one another in the stations of Narbonne or Bordeaux, the ones heading for destruction and the ones escaping it, I have no idea, after arriving in Spain they were confined in military buildings in Barcelona: in January 1944 those inhabitants of the Aegean coasts found themselves on the other side of the Mediterranean, after weeks of trains, transit camps, negotiations, privations, and illness, from Macedonia to Saxony from Saxony to France from France to Catalonia before finally being sent to Spanish Morocco, undesirable on the homeland’s soil, and undertaking, for themselves this time, a new exile that would lead some as far as Palestine, luckier in the end than Grand Rabbi Zevi Koretz: he died of typhus just after the liberation of the camps, Zevi Koretz the German-speaking Ashkenazi had understood Alois Brunner’s orders very well and had scrupulously carried them out, he thought he was acting for the best, maybe he was afraid of German violence, maybe he didn’t know what was awaiting his fellow-citizens around Krakow, we’ll never know—leaving the Museum of Jewish Presence my solitude is beginning to feel more and more weighty, I’m hot, I’m thirsty, the long summer afternoon still has time ahead of it so I’ll go eat and drink in an air-conditioned place, thinking about the journeys of the children of Israel, and trying to imagine Salonika speaking Judeo-Spanish, French, and Turkish, between a hammam, a mosque, and two Byzantine churches, that year the city is the cultural capital of Europe, sad recompense for the few survivors of the former Jerusalem of the Balkans, like Leon Saltiel, whose Memoirs I bought in the museum, Leon Saltiel is Jewish and a communist and after the first measures of the SS in the beginning of 1943, roundups, branding, he joins ELAS, the Greek partisans, in the mountains, where he takes part in some heroic actions, until civil war broke out between the Resistant factions in the beginning of 1944, then Leon Saltiel left the Resistance to return secretly to Salonika accompanied by a comrade from Ioannina, Agatha, with whom he is hopelessly in love, he realizes that his entire family has been deported and that the collaborators are selling off Jewish property, he conceals himself with his fellow fighter and lover at the house of a friend, Stavros, but he is denounced, arrested, tortured and sent to Mauthausen, he arrives after an atrocious journey, in the company of Yugoslav partisans and another Greek Resistant, Manos Hadjivassilis from Macedonia, he too crossed the Balkans on foot rifle in hand before being arrested in Slovenia, Manos kills himself as soon as they arrive in the camp, he throws himself onto the barbed wire, the SS guards finish him off, Leon Saltiel speaks many languages, he makes friends with the Spanish communists who organize resistance in the camp, did he meet Francesc Boix the photographer, it’s likely, Leon Saltiel is sick during the liberation, he stays for two months in an American infirmary, between life and death, he is up and about in June 1945, 3,000 kilometers away from his country, he learns that there has been a civil war, that there has been fighting in Athens, that the communists are opposing the British and the royalists, Leon wants to see Agatha and Salonika again, he gets a passport from the Red Cross and starts out on the long journey, on foot through Austria and Hungary, he reaches Belgrade where he is arrested for reasons he doesn’t understand, ends up being released and sent back to Italy by way of Zagreb with a contingent of prisoners of war, in Venice after two weeks of medical quarantine in a humid transit camp they put him on a train for Ancona, in Ancona he meets some Greeks, they find him a spot on a freighter that finally berths in Patras on December 1
^st
, 1945: on his thirtieth birthday Leon Saltiel is in Greece, he reaches Athens easily and from there gets to Salonika, he’s afraid of what’s waiting for him, in the meantime his hair has grown back, his poor civilian clothes provided by the Red Cross are in ruins, his clogs too, he has a wild beard, hollow eyes, he goes to the center of town, back up Egnatia Avenue, he’ll go back to where he started from, to Stavros’s café the place where he was arrested, he’ll drink a coffee with no sugar, calmly, watching the few post-war cars jolt by, he veers off to the left, to Santa Sophia Street, to the border of the upper town, it’s almost 6:00
P.M.
, he has a few drachmas in his pocket given to him by his coreligionists in Athens, they also suggested they let someone know of his arrival by phone, he refused, now he’s just a hundred meters away from Stavros’s place, Leon Saltiel hesitates, he could go back down and see the building where his mother lived, his brother-in-law’s shop, even though he knows there’s nothing left there, that they’re all dead, he knows it better than anyone for he has seen the piles of corpses, the summary executions, he has smelled the stench of burnt flesh, when the icy wind made the Danube ripple, he could go to the synagogue, the community has surely planned something for the returning ones, he must not be the only one to come back, he could also go to party headquarters, he doesn’t know if he wants to all that much, to talk, tell stories, explain, there were a few Greeks with him in Mauthausen, a dozen, no Jews, they all died, one of them hanged himself with the cord that was holding his pants up,
Adonai, Adonai,
Leon has never been religious, the last of his comrades died of pneumonia after the liberation, others had arrived after the evacuation of Auschwitz, some even from Salonika, but they had already left again when Leon got out of the infirmary, the Americans didn’t know how to repatriate him to Greece, he walked along the Danube as far as Vienna, the soldiers looked at him as if he were one of the walking dead and now at the corner of the street a hundred meters away from the café he hesitates, he is ashamed, Stavros is a good friend, was he captured by the Germans too, Leon Saltiel goes up to the café terrace, he glances inside, waits an instant, enters, walks up to the bar, Stavros is there, he hasn’t changed, he stands in front of him, without saying anything, Stavros glances at him absentmindedly without recognizing him, annoyed Leon sits down at a table, he waits, he doesn’t know what to say, he says Stavros a coffee with no sugar please, busy behind the counter the man repeats the order to the kitchen, one no sugar, Leon is at a loss he hesitates to shout Stavros it’s me he remains silent a woman emerges from the kitchen holding a little aluminum tray it’s Agatha, Leon lowers his head, she puts the coffee and the glass of cold water abruptly down on the table, Leon stares at the brown froth in the little cup, he has seen the wedding ring on her right hand, he suddenly thinks of Aris Andreanou who hanged himself in the showers with his belt, of his overlong twisted neck, his eyes looking up, his mouth open, he waits patiently for the coffee grounds to settle, he knows now that neither Agatha nor Stavros is going to recognize him, because he is a ghost, because for them he is dead, he suddenly understands why and how he was arrested, Leon Saltiel drinks his bitter coffee, then a little water, he throws down a coin that rattles on the metal tray, and goes out—I do the same, halfway through Saltiel’s Memoirs I pay for my drinks and I go out, I’ve been reading for a good two hours in English, something I haven’t done since the worthy Institute of Political Science in Paris, the afternoon is far advanced, I climb up to the old city sweating, I need air, I need to see the sea from high up, tomorrow I’ll leave I’m not really sure why but suddenly I want to take my car and go north, to go back to Paris by road, to go through Bulgaria and Serbia, after all I have a French passport, it’s August, there are tourists, I’ll go through the Iron Gates and follow the Danube to Budapest, to see the other side, what does the river look like in Voivodina, on the other shore, in 1997 the war had been over for two years, the region was catching its breath again, what a funny idea when I think about it, to go throw myself into the jaws of the mustachioed Chetnik wolf, without permission, I wasn’t supposed to go to that sort of country, in theory I was supposed to ask for special authorization for all movements abroad, which beats everything for a spy, but really, I didn’t think much could happen to me, aside from my car breaking down, I’d never seen either Belgrade the white, or Novi Sad the Austrian, maybe the Serb souls buried in the military cemetery in Salonika had put this idea in my head, they were trying to take revenge on my Austro-Hungarian ancestors who sent them to their graves, they wanted to lure me into a trap and drown me in the Danube, in October 1915 Kaiser William II backs up the Austrians in battle, on October 9
^th
Belgrade is taken, the Serbs withdraw on all fronts, all the more so since Ferdinand of Bulgaria, to whom Macedonia and Kosovo have been promised, has just stabbed proud Serbia in the back, retreat is necessary, the army is destroyed and its scattered remains will be added to the Allied Front of Salonika, where they will fight until 1917, in all almost 300,000 Serbian soldiers would meet their death during the First World War, they say, while the Austrians would put their occupied country to fire and sword—the report by Rudolph Archibald Reiss in 1915, used for years as propaganda, came back to me, those nice men disemboweled, civilians enucleated, vaginas opened up by bayonet to let the semen of dozens of troops ooze in, noses cut off, ears torn off, all described with the coldness of the forensic police specialist: whether it was used by one side or the other didn’t take away any of the veracity from the testimony, attested by the force of the revenge, the hatred of whoever espouses that revenge, hatred he will purge, dozens of years later, using it against his enemies, out of fear, fear stemming from tradition, from the legend that impels him too to go towards the other with his blade leading the way, the way the stories of Serbian atrocities drove us, in fear, to cut their corpses up into pieces, terrified no doubt that such warriors had the power to come back to life, the series of Serbo-Croatian massacres always proved the previous story right, without any one ever being wrong, since everyone, like the Austrians in Serbia, could cite an atrocity committed by the other camp, the Other per se, you had to erase his humanity by tearing off his face, prevent him from procreating by cutting off his balls, contaminate him by raping his women, annihilate his descendants by slicing off breasts and pubic hair, return to zero, annul fear and suffering, history is a tale of fierce animals, a book with wolves on every page,