Zone (46 page)

XXIII

the icy water of the canal, I had a fever when I reached my place trembling like anything it was light out I took two aspirin a scalding shower and I went to shiver right up against Marianne still wondering who could have dragged me out of the water, my clothes stank of old fishing nets, Marianne asked me jokingly if I had fallen in a canal, without meaning it, I didn’t say anything, she was afraid when she saw my face, sick exhausted and frightened, it was one straw too many for her personal camel’s back, I wasn’t going to tell her on top of that that I was practicing swimming with the rats in the waterways of La Serenissima, in the middle of the night, I had pity, I kept this story to myself, I coughed for two weeks, I was surprised at having wanted to die, at having stopped struggling, so it was that easy then, you just had to stop floundering, let yourself slip to the bottom, the way you entrust your body to a train, more tunnels,
Sette Bagni
says the signpost, Seven Baths station, funny coincidence, we’re a few kilometers away from Rome, not far to go now, I’m a little afraid of arriving, I’m afraid that Sashka the blonde won’t be able to do anything for me, it’s too late, she is far away, far away in the midst of her saints, in the whiteness of the
levkas
you soak the wood of icons in, she thinks that Francis Servain is a respectable entomologist who wouldn’t hurt a fly, I’m going to have to confront the world alone, alone, having gotten rid of the weight of the dead, Yvan old pal I have a strong feeling that we’ve made something of a mess of it all, drinking like fish slapping our thighs avenging each other for centuries, the gods have toyed with us, they’ve tricked us, and now we’re going to die alone with no hope of resurrection, in Jerusalem the Holy Sepulcher is bathed in incense, Golgotha and the tomb gleam, among the priests’ squabbles and all the liturgical languages, men patiently filed down the mountain and rock to build their house around the tomb, John the Eagle of Patmos writes that Joseph of Arimathea, a secret disciple of Christ, asked Pilate for permission to take down the remains from the crucifix, and Pilate, surprised that the Nazarene was already dead, gave his assent, so Joseph of Arimathea came, removed the heavy body in the company of Nicodemus who brought a mixture of myrrh and aloes, about twenty pounds, they took the emaciated Christ and wrapped him in strips of cloth with the aromatics, according to the way the Jews are buried: in the place where he had been crucified there was a garden, and in the garden a new sepulcher, where no one had been placed, and that’s where they put Jesus, wrapped up prepared his body protected from putrefaction by the aromatic resins, like Sarpedon valiant son of Zeus washed in the Scamander and anointed with ambrosia, fathers can do nothing to save their sons, neither the One God nor thundering Zeus, all they can do is prevent corruption, rot and flies, just as Thetis fills the nostrils of the divine Patroclus with red nectar to protect his body from the myriad worms, Jesus son of God carried away by Sleep and Death far from mortals, embalmed like the animals in the Cairo museum, wrapped in strips of cloth in a rock tomb, which Nathan Strasberg regarded as one of the treasures of Jerusalem, one of the tourist attractions, among the gleaming mosques, the Western Wall and the Damascus Gate, Jerusalem was an accumulation of histories, dead people, destructions and reconstructions, ever since the cannibalistic Crusades the Knights Hospitaller with the fine tunics Saladin and his ponies, all great killers of infidels, Jerusalem thrice holy shone like a beacon in the depths of the Mediterranean, waiting for the Second Coming and the Apocalypse, about which the three religions present were pretty much in agreement, the whole thing was to know when, and how, and who would preside over the Last Judgment, when they all return, Matthew of Ethiopia, Mark of Alexandria, Luke of Antioch, John of Ephesus, they will all come, the saints the madmen the angels the bellringers the corpses hacked by swords scimitars arrows will rise up in a perfume of spices, Mohammed the bearded mounted on Buraq the eternal mare will travel across the heavens, Bilal the Abyssinian voice of Islam will sing, Omar the Wise, Ali with the his two-bladed sword, all will rise in a fine commotion, the severe prophets, Abraham the sacrificer, beautiful Hagar the humiliated, Ishmael the predestined, Isaac the blind, Jacob the fighter, Esau in love with lentils, the gods will feast on the smoke of rams and ewes that all these lovely people will offer them, on the Temple Mount three times promised, there where the heads of Palestinian suicide bombers take off for the skies, corks of divine champagne, during the celebration of the end of days, the last fireworks, prefigured by the explosions of war, and it’s no doubt only a question of patience before the universe decides to become infinitesimal again and sucks all these burning memories into nothingness: in Jerusalem you met lots of messianic lunatics, fanatics of the ineffable God, of Christ or Allah the transcendent, with bells in their hands homespun robes or immense beards, ready to preach to you and announce the Last Judgment, in the world capital of eschatology, land too of hatred of the other of resentment and mystical illusion, where Nathan the son of survivors from Łódź looked at this whole circus with amusement, it’s folklore, he said, you know, it’s the folklore of Jerusalem, Megève has skiing, here we have religions, Jerusalem has lived on this income for millennia it’s not going to change overnight, the tomb of the Crucified One seemed very small in the end in the midst of this huge debauch of Faith, I brought back to my mother some holy oil blessed by some patriarch or other, a little icon and slides of the Sepulcher, the glass flask began oozing in my suitcase and I had a pair of socks that could have cured quite a few plague victims or convert the most perverted of atheists they smelled so strongly of the balm, which didn’t at all amuse Marija Mirković the serious,
one day you’ll pay for your impiety
she had said to me,
you who had the luck to visit Jerusalem
, and a great fear came over me, an infantile fear that she was right and that I’d end up stricken down by the wrath of the All-Powerful, before I came to my senses, pouring a little oil even holy onto some cotton was not the worst thing I’d done, far from it, does everything you do get paid for some day, maybe, Nathan Strasberg spoke to me of his parents survivors from Łódź city of Jews, now living by the blue sea, his father great fighter in the Resistance and his mother a
Volksdeutsche
from the city of three cultures, renamed Litzmannstadt by the Nazis, named for an obscure general who had won fame there in 1914, Łódź was a city of red brick, industrious, where Jews comprised over half of the population, Nathan’s mother a German whose family of Prussian stock had settled there in the 1880s, during the textile explosion, a militant communist who fought too for women’s rights, afterwards converted to Judaism and living in Palestine, land of the gods, in Łódź they spoke Yiddish, German, and Polish, in the spring of 1941 the ghetto is formed, 160,000 Jewish inhabitants under the orders of King Chaim Rumkowski the ambiguous, the first convoys of useless people are sent to Chełmno to die in the gas trucks—as in Belgrade that same year they use specially equipped vans to rid the Wartheland of Jews, SS drivers carry the naked corpses into the countryside to mass graves dug in the middle of the woods, revenge, revenge, that’s what Nathan Strasberg’s father has been shouting since 1942, miraculously escaped from imprisonment thanks to his German wife he joins the Polish Resistance and fights against the Nazis in the forests next to Lublin, without knowing that hundreds of thousands of his co-religionists are exterminated nearby between Sobibór and Majdanek, without knowing that the children of Łódź are gassed all together, thousands of kids emaciated and crying given to the Germans by Rumkowski the tragic,
give me your children
, he said,
I need 20,000 children under ten
, Rumkowski shouted into his microphone
I am sacrificing the limbs to save the rest of the body
, all the toddlers went that way, the German ogre knew how to twist the arms of the Jewish leaders convinced that work would save them, that
productivity
would save them, they hadn’t understood, they hadn’t understood that the monster was not rational, that its head was in other spheres, in the black clouds of destruction, and the Jews were destroyed, Strasberg the courageous wounded at the end of 1943 returns to Łódź in 1945 to realize the extent of the disaster, revenge, Nathan didn’t know exactly when his father joined the avengers of the Nakam group, after having settled his wife and sister in a safe place, the night was long, in 1946 the day has scarcely dawned, the Jewish Brigade of Palestine is billeted to Northern Italy, on the border with Austria, and secretly murders all the Nazis and fascists that fall into its clutches, with a bullet in the back of the head, Abba Kovner the partisan poet who organizes the secret emigration to Palestine wants more, he wants
six million dead Germans
, revenge, real revenge, with the craziest plans, he imagines poisoning the water supply of Nuremberg, he imagines killing the prisoners of war in the Langwasser camp: in the end they will manage to kill a few hundred German prisoners with arsenic, impossible to know how many, the Americans in charge of these captives being little inclined to acknowledge the massacre, before they went to Palestine for good to devote themselves to winning the independence of the State of Israel by fighting, this time, the British—revenge is sweet at the time, my fury after Andi’s death, the cataclysm I set off, we set off, in the villages around Vitez, the houses that burned, the screams, the unhappiness, and that group of civilians opposite me, no great warriors with weapons in hand but rather men in their forties in work clothes terrified by the rifle butts raining down on them their homes in flames humiliated tearful we threw them shovels to dig trenches in the middle of mines and bombardments I thought of Andi dead in his own shit his body lost taken away without our being able to fight to save it I thought of Vlaho with his arm cut off of Sergeant Mile killed with a bullet in the middle of his forehead, revenge, one of the prisoners was smiling, he was smiling the bastard, he thought we were funny, we were making him laugh with our rage, why was he smiling, why, he doesn’t have the right to smile I gave him a huge clout, he laughed, his face was dirty, his eyes half shut by bruises he kept laughing and stuck out his big black tongue at me, the other guys were looking at him, terrified, this madman was going to draw divine vengeance onto them, he was making fun of me, the retard was making fun of me, making fun of me of Andi of Vlaho of Mile of all our dead and even his own Athena breathed an immense strength into me, all the gods were behind my right arm when I took Andi’s bayonet out of its sheath, found behind his pallet, behind me as they had been behind Seyit Havranli the Turkish artilleryman and his 400-pound shell, behind Diomedes son of Tydeus when he wounds Ares himself, I let out a shout worthy of Andrija the furious I brought the long blade down on the laughing Muslim, with divine power, the power that comes from the belly, from your feet in the earth, a wave of pure wrath a perfect movement from right to left that doesn’t stop at obstacles of flesh a gesture that continues into the sky where my cry of rage rises along with the victim’s blood an inexplicable red column, his body gives a jump his shoulders stiffen his monstrous head is still laughing on the ground his eyes blinking before his torso collapses, accompanied by the incredulous murmuring of the spattered witnesses, I still have the strength to send the vile head rolling with a huge kick, not even surprised by my own power, beside myself, outside myself outside the world already in Hades paradise of warriors, for you Andi this bloody head rolling down the hill, this atrocious slicing through the soft flesh before brandishing my weapon at the sky, everyone moves away from the butchery, everyone moves away from the miracle, one of the prisoners faints and falls into the black blood of the village idiot, of the saint maybe whom I’ve just decapitated so cleanly that it’s a wonder, a medieval fresco, the martyr beheaded lies on the Bosnian soil without anyone hurrying over to recover his head on a golden platter, we go on to something else, another fire other rapes other pillages other carnages until dawn, until dawn we go back to our barracks exhausted despite the drugs our fingers a little numb because of the alcohol sitting on my pallet I bend over to take off my boots the laces are sticky with blood, the laces and the tongue, it’s disgusting, it’s disgusting my stomach contracts, that’s it, the gods have left me alone, alone in the blood and bile, to choke with disgust fatigue and remorse—I didn’t decapitate Medusa the terrifying like Caravaggio, just a poor madman, a simpleton, his thick blackish tongue pursues me, his surprised eyes, his laugh, the madman at the Milan train station had something of the same gaze, he held out his hand to me, I refused it, too bad for me,
erbarme dich, mein Gott, Herz und Auge weint vor dir, bitterlich
, I think of Leon Saltiel the man from Salonika, he took revenge too, he tortured the man who betrayed him to death and strangled the woman he loved, crying, he abandoned their bodies and went to a crowded cabaret to listen to Roza Eskenazi sing
To Kanarini
, Leon Saltiel ordered ouzo, to the sound of the
rebetikas
, the violin the lute the exciting voice of Roza the irreverent with her Constantinople accent, there were no more Greeks in Smyrna, almost none in Istanbul, there were no more Jews in Salonika, almost none, Agatha was dead, her eyes wide open were slowly clouding over in Stavros’s café, next to the corpse of her lover, farewell, the cabaret customers think stupidly that Leon is crying because of the music,
bitterlich