Zone (42 page)

“I came to bring you this.”

He throws a piece of white cloth in her face, which she doesn’t immediately recognize.

“You left it on purpose, didn’t you?”

The bra she abandoned in a corner of the post. Ahmad is looking at her legs and her underwear beneath the raised nightdress.

“You’re mine now. Marwan isn’t here anymore.”

Everything has its price. Everything has a cost. If only he could get up. God, make Marwan get up, make Ahmad disappear. She feels exhausted, overwhelmed, aching, powerless. She won’t have the strength to fight. She won’t resist. Ahmad’s real face dances in the orange light.

He bends over her, catches her by the hair and pulls her violently into the apartment, she slides over the tile, half raises herself, shouts with surprise and pain, falls silent, he throws her onto the unmade bed, she buries her head into the pillow. Her gun is still at the front. Her strength, her willpower are there too. She wants to disappear. She hears Ahmad’s belt and pants fall onto the floor next the bed. She doesn’t want to look. She doesn’t want to see him. She stiffens when a feverish hand searches between her legs to undress her. She struggles instinctively, Ahmad takes her by the hair and crushes a knee into her kidneys, Ahmad is talking but she doesn’t hear him. She doesn’t want to hear him, she feels a moist contact, Ahmad spat on her closed thighs, she doesn’t want to hear him she doesn’t want to feel him she doesn’t want to feel those two clumsy fingers penetrating her sex she doesn’t even want to groan. Marwan, please. Marwan help me. Ahmad crushes her he is lying on top of her his breath against her neck she doesn’t hear him he doesn’t succeed he pushes her roughly shakes her he tries to turn her over she clings to the edge of the bed she doesn’t want to see him she doesn’t want to see him he hits her pulls at one of her legs she resists he spits again hits her again Ahmad presses with all his weight on her he doesn’t succeed he gets annoyed she feels sick she feels sick and suddenly there’s a terrible noise in her ears, a huge detonation, very close, deafening, followed by a warm liquid pouring onto her left shoulder, into her hair, against her cheek, a smell of powder, a smell of blood, Ahmad collapsed on top of her, she pushes him away and rolls to the bottom of the bed, she is on the ground, she crawls in the dark to the bathroom, she touches Marwan’s cold body, she stretches out, she faints next to him.

•

Abu Nasser wakes her gently in the Beirut dawn. The pale light dazzles her. Abu Nasser supports her, helps her get up, pours water over her face, she drinks, sees herself in the mirror, covered with blackened blood. Marwan is lying on a white sheet. Abu Nasser almost carries her to the bedroom. On the bed, Ahmad is stretched out, half his head gone. The wall is splattered with flesh and blood. Abu Nasser has tears in his eyes. His handsome uniform is stained now. He was dressed for the burial of his son, she thinks. Abu Nasser helps her put on a bathrobe. Two soldiers carry Marwan’s body on a stretcher.

“I’m taking you home, Intissar, it’s over.”

He gently takes her arm. She hears him shout orders to the fighters accompanying him, throw this bastard into the first ditch you see. Abu Nasser will have Intissar move to his house in Raouche. He will go alone to bury his son. Marwan will disappear into the ground.

Intissar will not be there to hear the din of the city falling behind her, exile will open up like a precipice in the middle of the empty sea, an immense shadow into which useless rifles and abandoned tanks will sink, caresses of the dead and the living, far from the enemy and from the fight that gave its fragile and vertiginous meaning to the existence that defeat has just annihilated to send her into anxious wandering, a roaming where her feet, which felt the disaster first, listlessly strike the earth and, as if they were afraid now of wounding it, will never leave their mark on it again.

By dint of tenderness, Abu Nasser managed to make her let go of Marwan’s heavy 9-millimeter that she was still hugging with all her strength, like a part of herself.

XXI

what a story poor Intissar Marwan puts his gun in her hand, his ghost saves her, there are loves, promises that withstand death, especially in books, books and plays, the Palestinians will be scattered throughout the Mediterranean, some to Tunis, some to Algiers, some to Syria, Arafat the grey will try to return to Lebanon to Tripoli in 1984 with his fighters before the Syrians send him back to the sea with a nice kick in the rear, the way you’d kick a dog, poor Intissar, Ahmad poor guy victim of his desire and his violence, victim who makes victims, like us in Bosnia, like the fair-greaved Achaeans, the ones that will sack Troy kill children and carry off women into slavery, me I haven’t saved anyone, either by letting my gun lie by the bedside or by being resurrected from the dead, no one, neither Andi nor Vlaho, and no one has saved me, not Marianne not Stéphanie not Sashka the blonde, I wonder if Rafael Kahla is like me, why does he write these terrifying stories, did he try to strangle his wife like Lowry, or did he kill her like Burroughs, did he incite people to hatred and murder like Brasillach or Pound, maybe he’s a victim like Choukri the wretched, or a man three times vanquished like Cervantes—who will wash my body once I’m dead, it’s very sad this story, very sad, a city falling, collapsing, a city breaking like glass in the hands of those who think they’re defending it, Barcelona in 1939 Beirut in 1982 Algiers in 1992 Sarajevo in 1993 and so many others, so many others with the masses of fighters doomed to death or exile, like Intissar, alone with Abu Nasser, Intissar the innocent who thinks she’s paying for a sin she did not commit, I still have two stories left to read by this Rafael Kahla, other war stories, sometimes you come across books that resemble you, they open up your chest from chin to navel, stun you, I’d like to have Marwan’s nobility, is that still possible, let’s think about it Yvan what are we going to do in Rome aside from getting properly plastered taking a bath and treating ourselves to a new suit, dark and luxurious, how to become Marwan, tomorrow morning, once the money is acquired and the dead in the suitcase are buried in the Vatican archives, what am I going to do with the piece of gold of Charon the ferryman, how to set death’s obol on each eye of all my corpses, Cocteau said about Ezra Pound the old madman that he was “the rower on the river of dead,” now I’m in the same situation or very nearly, Ezra Pound has a beautiful grave in San Michele the cemetery by the sea in Venice, the foggy little island off the Fondamente Nuove where the celebrities are crammed in, a green plot with a tiny plaque in the shade of the cypress trees for the fascist preacher of Radio Roma, obsessed with money and Jews, to the point of madness, of course in Venice I had no inkling of the magical
Cantos
, of Apollo’s oracle in 110 chapters, closed, esoteric, strange, which cover the past century in ten languages 800 pages and end in Rome, poem with these lines,
Le chapeau melon de saint Pierre / you in the dinghy (piccioletta) astern there
, if I had the volume of the
Cantos
I’d use it now to read my cards, open it haphazardly and see where it sends me, to Gethsemani Kyoto Pisa New Orleans to the City of London to Paris no definitely not to Paris, Ezra Pound the godless prophet shouted anti-Semitic diatribes and insults at the United States his homeland over the waves of the fascist radio, I wonder what the Americans in the café car would think of him, maybe they’ve visited San Michele, Venice the surprising is probably the only city in the world where lovers and couples on their honeymoon go to the cemetery, Venice eats away at your soul as surely as nitre on a cave wall, it was Stéphanie who gave me an anthology of Ezra Pound, with a tender little inscription,
to my favorite fascist
and the date, I had told her about my youthful passions for raised-arm salutes and shaved skulls, bad acquaintances, the weight of heredity who knows, my devotion to Brasillach the martyr by whom I hadn’t read a single line aside from his prison poems and a few texts on cinema, in our very Parisian high school Yvan was the real fascist, the violent ideologue, in combat boots bomber jackets the whole end-of-century bad-boy uniform, he came from a real family of historic Nazis firm believers who scorned the rank populism of the Front National, Yvan detested the Catholic Church which had to be brought to heel, he hated with a fine fury anything that wasn’t him, Jews communists Arabs British fairies the swarming Orientals the perverted capitalists corrupt politicians an endless list of hatreds and disgusts motivated by the reading of paranoid screwball pamphlets decorated with swastikas, crosses paty, rosy crosses, every possible kind of cross imaginable except the Gaullist Cross of Lorraine, fasces battleaxes sheaves of wheat crossed spears brandished swords glaives dark helmets, photocopied on bad paper or venerable newspapers from the good old days that he had to cover in plastic to keep them from crumbling to pieces so much had they been handled, Yvan had a real passion, ardent and contagious, I let myself be convinced by his admirable rage, probably I was predisposed to it, despite my grandfather’s escapades in the Resistance: my father was worried about my new acquaintances, my politicization and my black shirts, my mother of course said to him youth will have its fling, it was Yvan who had me meet Bardèche the historic, it was a pilgrimage, a little journey of initiation to the land of the master, who what’s more was charming, he offered us tea and a lecture just a tiny bit confused about collaboration Jewish manipulations and the importance of
The Charterhouse of Parma
, I remember the old man had an upper lip that trembled, an uncontrollable tic, physical expression of resentment, from time to time a drop of shining mucus beaded on his nostril to end up falling on his dressing gown without seeming to bother him in the least, the great Maurice liked me, he asked me what I wanted to study, I replied “political science” and he smiled, I couldn’t really tell if this smile was ironic scorn for that noble subject or an encouragement, then the worthy Mussolinian writer gave us little gifts, a brochure denouncing “the farce” of the Nuremberg trial for Yvan and
The History of the Spanish War
which had just been reprinted for me, with a dedication,
to Francis, wishing you the best for the future
, with a slightly hesitant pen, the brother-in-law of Brasillach the Catalan added a commentary, it’s something, he said, this book is constantly being reprinted in Spain, we had immediately seen and understood the whole interest of this war, Bardèche and Brasillach inseparable Laurel and Hardy went many times to the Iberian peninsula between 1936 and 1939, to witness the democratic anarchy and the importance of Franco the savior, they saw Europe on the march in it, thanks to Mussolini’s troops, Hitler’s planes, the Reds destroyed by law and order, they demonstrated that the massacres attributed to the nationalists were inventions of Republican propaganda, that the real bloodthirsty ones were the
rojos
the Reds the great eaters of clergymen, they defended the greatness of General Yagüe the fine strategist, from Millán-Astray’s Legion, the Italians with the handsome black feathers, and thus began a long battle of numbers that Bardèche would continue alone after Brasillach’s execution, all the corpses are communist or Jewish propaganda, all the dead served the USSR or Israel, so they didn’t exist, or hardly mattered, Bardèche is the champion of the avenging scrawls on gravestones, you’re not so dead as all that in Badajoz, there aren’t as many dead as they say in Auschwitz, that’s all lies to hide the crimes of the Republicans or the Resistance, those are the real criminals, the ones who raped nuns with pleasure before sending them to the firing squad, the ones who tortured the middle class in the prisons of Madrid and Barcelona, today his blindness seems so obvious to me that he could only be guided by hatred, a fierce secret hatred for those who had taken away from him the man he loved, Brasillach the martyr, a hatred of the Jews so strong so powerful that he couldn’t even manage to convince himself of their extermination, pursued by Jewish ghosts into his grave, the old Bardèche, senile, convinced of the universal conspiracy against the Good and the Right, Yvan my friend also firmly believed in these theories as old as the world that declared international Jewry the enemy to be killed, despite all my efforts I had difficulty convincing myself of the danger a few philosophers journalists or psychoanalysts could represent for the nation, I was a feeble anti-Semite, a bad racist, Yvan said to me it’s because you don’t deal with Jews or Arabs, if you knew them you’d hate them immediately, I trusted him, even though my beloved history books on the twentieth century proved precisely the contrary, according to Yvan that was because all of history had been written by the Jews, which no doubt explained his deplorable grades and his lack of interest in the subject, Mr. Moussempès our teacher in senior year was a nice man from the Landes a native of Dax with a strong southwestern accent difficult to suspect of crypto-Semitism however, his Gascon fluency made him an extraordinary orator when it came to telling about battles diplomacy political intrigues it’s probably thanks to him that I miraculously passed the prestigious entrance exam for the Sciences-Po later, Yvan respected me mostly because of my Ustashi background and my family photos full of dark uniforms, adolescence is in love with images, images and strong friendships for life and beyond the grave secret oaths arms raised above a patriotic altar, Yvan’s madness showed through at times but only rarely as I remember it, sometimes he became fixated on a subject and spun in circles like a record on a gramophone, for days and days locked up in his room reading the same minuscule paragraph over and over without saying anything but
that’s it, that’s it, that’s it
ad infinitum, a fragment of a speech on the economy by Hitler involving currency and inflation, for example, could set off one of his attacks, he’d stop going out, couldn’t even manage to drag himself to the bathroom and urinated into plastic bottles reading the text in question over and over, that’s it, that’s it, that’s it, as if he had discovered the Holy Grail, he was writing a biography of the Brothers of Christ, a treatise on their importance in the occult struggle against communism, where he traced the origins of all the secret societies defending the West to the forgotten children of Joseph and the Virgin Mary, the ones who remained in the shadow even though they’re mentioned in the Gospels, also baptized by John the Baptist the Beheaded and I forget what else, his anxious parents wanted him to go to the doctor but that was obviously impossible, because psychiatry and all of psychology were in the hands of the Jews who were trying to corrupt him, to rot his brain, and so on until the dawn of a day like any other, in the springtime, a little while before graduation, on the way to high school Yvan came nose to nose with people putting up posters from I don’t know what party for I forget which election, peaceful-seeming guys in their forties who were decking out a municipal billboard for the purpose, I don’t know why but Yvan saw red, he savagely attacked them, furiously, with the bike chain he always carried in the pocket of his orange-and-black jacket, he lashed one man’s face threw himself onto the second like a baboon tore off one of his ears with his teeth showering him with kicks in the groin, possessed, enraged, relentless, the third man didn’t think twice faced with the surprise of the attack with its extraordinary violence with his companions’ screams of pain with Yvan’s roars he brought the glue-brush down on his skull, a good straight strong blow that split his occiput and got him a huge number of stitches, even today no one can say if that fracture of his skull played a determining role or if his madness was already well advanced but Yvan went to the emergency room at the psychiatric hospital and then to a rest home for uncontrollable lunatics, Yvan schizophrenic paranoic catatonic and violent, incurable despite the tons of medications, electroshocks and various therapies his doctors have tried, Yvan plunged into the dark, when he speaks it’s to recite a paragraph from
Mein Kampf
or anti-Semitic insults,
the yids the yids are trying to assassinate me
, during his few minutes of consciousness a week Yvan is terrified, terrified or utterly violent, depending on the treatment that never managed to “stabilize” him, lost in the limbo of resentment and fright—for me the shock was terrible, Yvan had fallen in combat, brought down by a blow of that campaign bludgeon on his skull, I immediately went to see him at the hospital, I talked for a long time with his parents, and soon faced facts, he had a real fracture, a fine furious madness worthy of Ares, which brought tears of sadness to my eyes, I thought I’ll avenge you, I’ll avenge you, I’ll avenge Yvan with the staring eyes and the lolling tongue, Yvan the pale chained to a chair and shouting to the death: I saw his mother quietly crying afraid to approach him, afraid to approach her own son whose failing brain was oozing violence hatred and pain, now I’ll avenge you old pal I’ll give you a new life, you’ve gotten a little bit out of the asylum, your name at least, even if it’s with my face on your passport, Francis has slipped into the useless body of Yvan the Terrible for his reincarnation—after Yvan was committed I passed my baccalauréat to go get bored in a private preparatory class where I was supposed to be taught the subtleties of scholarly essays and general knowledge, I was bored stiff, I wanted violence and revenge so much that I went slogging in the army for sixteen months, Yvan would have liked that a lot, the virile songs and the nocturnal sagas, the maneuvers, the training in weapons, tactics, and orientation, until that trip to Egypt on my own to celebrate my discharge and meet Marianne the prudish—my Nazi stories made Stéphanie laugh a lot, especially the episode of Yvan the poor guy felled by a glue brush, still she was a little sorry for me, for having lost all that time, she said, all that ideological time she meant, before yielding to democratic reason, I replied