Zone (7 page)

Without Marwan she’d never have taken up arms. Defeat would have another taste. She’d be looking desperately for water in the midst of rubble. Or dead at home in Borj Barajne, in unbearable heat, in the burning wind from the bombs. How much time now? Soon nothing of the city will be left. The sea, that’s all. The indestructible sea.

She sees a Jeep full of comrades leaving for the front. The front. That’s a funny word. You defend yourself. You’re besieged. Finally being as close as possible to the Israeli tanks is an enviable position, you don’t risk a napalm bomb or a phosphorus shell. Near the southern part of the city the streets are strewn with debris, charred cars, the heat from explosions drew waves in the asphalt, like a rippling black rug. The civilians are hiding. To the east Israelis are in the museum, where they’ve been fighting for weeks, she thinks. Or maybe just a few days. By the airport too. Yesterday she drank half a bottle of water for the entire day. Bread is rationed. Just thinking about the smell of canned tuna or sardines makes her nauseous.

The only Israeli she ever saw was the corpse of a soldier, fallen in a skirmish. Brown-haired, young, not many things distinguished him from the Palestinian fighters, once he was dead. Only once he was dead. On the other side they have things to drink and eat, weapons, ammunition, tanks, planes. Here there’s nothing but a city stuck between the sky and the sea, dry and burning. They already have Palestine. Beirut is the last star in Palestine’s sky, flickering. And about to go out, to become a meteor and sink into the Mediterranean.

•

“Intissar? Marwan is . . .”

“I know. Abu Nasser told me.”

On the ground floor of a half-destroyed building, fortified by the rubble and fallen rocks from the upper storeys, in the midst of anti-tank rockets and two 30-caliber machine guns, the four Fatah fighters smoke joints, bare-chested. The smoke makes you thirsty. The smell of hashish softens the smell of sweat a little. From time to time one of them looks out onto the street through an opening in the wall. Intissar sits down on the floor. Habib makes as if to pass her the joint, but she shakes her head.

“We’re waiting. No one knows what’s going to happen.”

“How . . . how did he . . . ?”

Habib is a giant of great gentleness, with a childlike face.

“Last night. A little further away, there, at the front. With Ahmad. On reconnaissance just before dawn. Ahmad is in the hospital, lightly wounded. He told us he saw Marwan fall, hit by many machine-gun bullets in the back. He couldn’t bring him back.”

The possibility that Marwan might still be alive makes her heart skip a beat.

“But then how can you be sure?”

“You know how it is, Intissar. He’s dead, that’s for sure.”

“We could call the Red Crescent maybe, so they could go look for him?”

“They won’t come this far, Intissar, not right away in any case. They’ll wait to be sure, to have authorization from the Israelis. There’s nothing to do.”

Habib breathes in his smoke, looking sad but convinced. She knows he’s right. Now the front is calm. Defeat. She imagines Marwan’s body decomposing in the sun between the lines. A burning tear trickles out of her left eye. She goes to sit down a little farther away, her back to the wall. Here the smell of urine has replaced that of hashish. The comrades leave her to her pain. The silence is terrifying. Not one plane, not one explosion, not one tank engine, not one word. The crushing sun of midday. Marwan a hundred meters away. Maybe the Israelis have picked him up. No one likes having bodies decomposing in his camp. Ahmad. He had to have fallen in the company of Ahmad the coward. Treacherous, cunning, vicious. He might have been lying to cover himself. Maybe he shot himself in the foot. Maybe he killed Marwan. She mechanically loads her Kalashnikov, all the combatants turn around, surprised. The metallic click of the breech resounded like a knife on cement. She wishes the fighting would begin again immediately. She wants to shoot. To fight. To avenge Marwan stretched out over there. At this moment Arafat and the others are with American envoys negotiating their departure. To go where? 10,000 Fedayeen. How many civilians? 500,000 maybe. To go to Cyprus? Algiers? To fight whom? And who is going to protect the ones that stay? The Lebanese? This silence is unbearable, maybe just as unbearable as the heat.

Habib and the others have begun playing cards, without much enthusiasm. The weight of defeat.

Most of the fighters are nomads. Some are escapees from Jordan, who settled in Beirut in the late 1970s; others took part in operations in the South; still others joined the PLO after 1975. All of them nomads, whether they’re children from the camps or refugees from 1948, or from 1967, whom war surprised far from their homes and who were never able to go back. Abu Nasser crossed the Lebanese border on foot. He never returned to Galilee. Marwan neither. Intissar was born in Lebanon, in 1951; her parents, from Haifa, had already settled in Beirut before the creation of Israel. Often, watching the old railroad tracks in Mar Mikhail, she thinks that the trains used to come slowly down the coast to Palestine, passing through Saida, Tyre, and Acre; today the space has grown so much smaller around her that it’s impossible for her to even go to Forn El Chebbak or Jounieh. The only ones that can travel through the region without difficulty are the Israeli planes. Even the sea is forbidden to us. The Israeli navy is patrolling and firing missiles. Habib and the
shabab
are children of the camps, sons of refugees of 1948. Palestinians from the outside. Palestinians. Who resuscitated this biblical term, and when? The English probably. Under the Ottomans there was no Palestine. There was the
vilâyet
of Jerusalem, the department of Haifa or Safed. Palestinians had existed for barely thirty years before they lost their territory and sent a million refugees on the roads. Marwan was a militant as soon as he was old enough to speak. Marwan sincerely thought that only war could return Palestine to the Palestinians. Or at least something to the Palestinians. The injustice was intolerable. Marwan was an admirer of Leila Khaled and the members of the PFLP who hijacked airplanes and kidnapped diplomats. Intissar thought you had to defend yourself. That you couldn’t let yourself be massacred by fascists, then by F16s and tanks without reacting.

Now Marwan is dead, his body is turning black under the Beirut sun near the airport, a scant hundred kilometers from his birthplace.

Ahmad. Ahmad’s presence next to Marwan disturbs Intissar. Ahmad the cruel. Ahmad the coward. What were they doing together? Ever since the incident they were joined solely by a common cause and a cold hatred. But the first time she saw Ahmad something in her trembled. It was on the front line, a year earlier, when some combatants were returning from the South. Ahmad was almost carried in triumph. He was handsome, crowned with victory. A group of Fedayeen had gotten into the security zone, had confronted a unit of the Israeli army and destroyed a vehicle. Even Marwan admired their courage. Intissar had shaken Ahmad’s hand and congratulated him. Men change. Weapons transform them. Weapons and the illusion that they produce. The false power they give. What you think you can obtain by using them.

What earthly purpose can the Kalashnikov, which is lying across her thighs like a newborn child, serve now? What can she get with her rifle, three olive trees and four stones? A kilo of Jaffa oranges? Vengeance. She will get peace for her soul. Avenge the man she loves. Then defeat will be consummate, the city will sink into the sea, and everything will disappear.

V

half-starved wretch sublime those Palestinians with the heavy shoes what a story I wonder if it’s true Intissar pretty name I imagine her beautiful and strong, I am luckier than she is, I went to Palestine, to Israel, to Jerusalem I saw paralyzed pilgrims one-armed people one-legged people people with no legs weird people bigots tourists mystics visionaries one-eyed people blind people priests Catholic and Orthodox pastors monks nuns every kind of habit all the rites Greeks Armenians Latins Irish Melchites Syriacs Ethiopians Germans Russians and when they weren’t too busy “fighting over cherry stems while ignoring the cherries” as the French saying goes all these lovely folk mourned the death of Christ on the cross the Jews lamented their temple the Muslims their martyrs fallen the day before and all these lamentations rose up in the Jerusalem sky sparkling with gold at sunset, the bells accompanied the muezzins at top volume the ambulance sirens drowned out the bells the haughty soldiers shouted
bo, bo
at suspects and loaded their assault rifles one finger on the trigger ready to fire at ten-year-old kids if they had to, fear strangely was in their camp, the Israeli soldiers sweated from fear, at the checkpoints there was always a sniper ready to fire a bullet into the heads of terrorists, staked out behind bags of sand a twenty-year-old conscript spent his day keeping Palestinians in his sights, their faces in his cross-hairs: the Israelis know that something will happen sooner or later, the whole point is to guess where, who, and when, the Israelis wait for catastrophe and it always ends up coming, a bus, a restaurant, a café, Nathan said that was the most discouraging aspect of their work, Nathan Strasberg the one in charge of “foreign relations” for the Mossad took me around Jerusalem and stuffed me with falafel, don’t believe the Lebanese or the Syrians, he said, the best falafel is Israeli, Nathan was born in Tel Aviv in the 1950s his parents, survivors from Łódź, were still alive, that’s all I knew about him, he was a good officer the Mossad is an excellent agency, never losing sight of its objectives, cooperation with them was always cordial, sometimes effective—out of dozens of Palestinian, Lebanese, American sources they were the best on international Islamic terrorism, on Syrian, Iraqi, or Iranian activities, they kept watch over the traffic in arms and drugs, anything that could finance Arab agencies or parties at close range or from a distance, all the way to American and European politics, that was the game, they readily collaborated with us on some cases while trying to block us on others—Lebanon especially, where they thought that any political support for Hezbollah was a danger for Israel, Hezbollah was for them hard to penetrate, nothing at all like the divided, greedy Palestinians: the sources on Hezbollah were fragile not very reliable very expensive and always liable to be manipulated from above, of course with Nathan we never spoke about that, he showed me thrice-holy Jerusalem with a real pleasure, in the old city you heard dozens of languages being spoken from Yiddish to Arabic not counting the liturgical languages and the contemporary dialects of tourists or pilgrims from all over the world, the Holy City could duplicate all joys and all conflicts, as well as all the various cuisines smells tastes from the borscht and
kreplach
of Eastern Europe to the Ottoman
basturma
and
soujouk
in a mélange of religious fervor commercial buzz sumptuous lights chants shouts and hatred where the history of Europe and the Muslim world seemed to wind up despite itself, Herod Rome the caliphs the Crusaders Saladin Suleiman the Magnificent the British Israel the Palestinians confronted each other there argued over the place in the narrow walls that we watched grow blanketed with purple at sunset, over a drink with Nathan at the King David Hotel, the sumptuous luxury hotel that also seemed to be at the heart of the world: famous for the attack of the Irgun Zionist terrorists who had killed a hundred people in 1946, the hotel had also welcomed exiles, unfortunate monarchs dislodged from their thrones by one conflict or another, Haile Selassie pious emperor of Ethiopia driven away by the Italians in 1936 or the disastrous Alfonso XIII of Spain put to flight by the Republic in 1931 who ended his days in the Grand Hotel on the Piazza Esedra in Rome, for a few weeks Alfonso XIII occupied a suite on the fifth floor of the King David in Jerusalem where he had a view over the gardens and the old city, I wonder what the Iberian sovereign thought about when he contemplated the landscape, about Christ probably, about the Spanish monarchy that he saw go out in one last golden reflection on the Dome of the Rock and that he hoped to see come to life again: they say that Alfonso XIII collected slippers, he had dozens of them, plain, embroidered, or luxurious and all those wools those furs those felts around his feet were his real home in exile, in Jerusalem Alfonso XIII bought sandals which he was still wearing when he expired in his Roman luxury hotel without having seen Madrid again, condemned to international hotels those chateaux of the poor—at the King David bar that British jewel I sip my bourbon in the company of Nathan without knowing that Jerusalem would soon catch fire, we spoke about the end of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict not knowing that violence would very soon resume on the Temple Mount, you could make it out in the distance, that’s where my collection begins, in Jerusalem talking with Nathan in the golden-brown twilight, the man of the Mossad an accomplice despite himself gives me some pieces of information, the first, about Harmen Gerbens the alcoholic Cairo Batavian, out of kindness, without questioning me about my interest in this forty-year-old affair, wanting to please me, just as he offered me falafel in the old city and whiskies at the King David he told me that Harmen Gerbens had of course never worked for Israel, but his name appeared in an old file on the Suez expedition that Nathan had gotten from the Shin Bet, cleared of ever-embarrassing military considerations four decades later—why this interest in the old Dutchman, in the “foreigners” rounded up in Egypt in 1956 and 1967, in the Qanatar Prison, maybe it was the effect of Jerusalem, a yearning for penance or a way of the cross, do we always know what the gods are reserving for us what we are reserving for ourselves, the plan we form, from Jerusalem to Rome, from one eternal city to the other, the apostle who three times denied his friend in the pale dawn after a stormy night perhaps guided my hand, who knows, there are so many coincidences, paths that cross in the great fractal seacoast where I’ve been floundering for ages without knowing it, ever since my ancestors my forefathers my parents me my dead and my guilt, Alfonso XIII driven out of his country by history and collectivity, the individual against the crowd, the monarch’s slippers for his crown, his body versus the function of his body: to be both an individual in a train crossing Italy and the bearer of a sad piece of the past in an entirely ordinary plastic suitcase wherein is written the fate of hundreds of men who are dead or on the point of disappearing, to work as pen-pusher man of the shadows informer after having been a child then a student then a soldier for a cause that seemed just to me and that probably was, to be a string on the bobbin that the goddess spins as she proceeds on a straight path among passengers each one in his body pushed towards the same terminus if they don’t get off along the way, in Bologna or Florence, to meet one of those madmen who haunt the station platforms announcing the end of the world: my neighbor has turned on his Walkman, I hear sounds but can’t really tell what he’s listening to, I can make out a high-pitched rhythm superimposed over that of the train tracks, Sashka can’t live without music either, CDs galore Russian or Hebrew airs melodies ancient or modern when I met her the night was very dark, a glance is stronger than a ship’s mooring says a Dalmatian proverb one look and you’re pulled out to sea—in the little Roman streets painted with ivy, perfumed by rain, stricken too with the sickness of history and death like Jerusalem Alexandria Algiers or Venice, I cling to lies and to Sashka’s arm, I pretend to forget Paris the Boulevard Mortier violence and wars the way, when I was a child, a ray of light would always slip beneath the door to reassure me, the distant conversations of the adults lulled me with indistinct murmurs pushing me little by little into the world of dreams, Sashka is the nearby body of a distant being, surrounded as we are by all these ghosts my dead and hers whom we resist by putting our arms round each other’s shoulders near the sad Tiber great carrier of refuse, it’s over, I left Paris my civil servant’s studio apartment my books my souvenirs my habits my lunches with my parents I filled lots of trash bags threw it all out or almost all got loaded one last time by accident in my old neighborhood slipped into the skin of Yvan Deroy and farewell, on the road to the end of the world and a new life, they all float past the window in the darkened plain, Nathan Strasberg, Harmen Gerbens, and the ghosts of the suitcase, the torturers of Algeria, the executioners of Trieste, all that foam on the sea, a white slightly sickening froth made from the putrescence of a load of corpses, I needed patience to collect them, patience, time, intrigues, leads, not losing the thread, consulting thousands of archives, buying my sources, convincing them by following the rules of information-gathering I’d learned haphazardly through the years, sorting through the information, compiling it, organizing it into a file that can be consulted easily, by name, date, place, and so on, personal stories life stories worthy of the best Communist paranoid administrations, archives such as there are by the millions records traces—maybe it was in The Hague that I began, in 1998 before Jerusalem I take a few days’ leave to go to the International Court of Justice where the trial of General Blaškić was taking place, the commander in Vitez of the HVO the army of the Bosnian Croats, in his box at the beginning of the hearing Tihomir Blaškić recognizes me and nods to me, after becoming brigadier-general he is facing twenty major charges, among them six infractions of the Geneva conventions, eleven violations of the laws and customs of war, and three crimes against humanity, committed in the context of “grave violations of humanitarian international law against Bosnian Muslims” between May 1992 and January 1994, I left Bosnia on February 25, 1993, I had gotten there from Croatia in April 1992, and after a few months’ stay on the front near Mostar I joined Tihomir Blaškić in central Bosnia, his headquarters had since November 1992 been located in the Vitez Hotel, he was an efficient, respected officer, I felt bad when I saw him in the midst of that multilingual administrative circus of the ICJ where a large chunk of time was lost in arguments over procedure, in misunderstandings of the American prosecutor’s quibbles, in countless witnesses and hours and atrocities while I knew perfectly well who had committed them, I could see again the places, the flames, the battles, the punitive expeditions until my departure after Andrija’s death: at bottom I hadn’t been attached to anything, theoretically I was answerable to the Croatian army but we were supposed to have resigned and left for Bosnia so as not officially to embarrass Croatia, I went to see the captain then the major I said
I’m leaving I can’t stand it any more
they replied
but we need you
I said
think of me as having fallen in battle
Blaškić gave me a funny look and asked me
are you OK?
I answered
can’t complain
, then he gave the order to sign my travel papers and I left, I crossed the lines to go back through Mostar then Split whence I reached Zagreb, I moved into a shabby boarding house I bought sneakers that were too small for me I remember I had only combat boots, I didn’t know where to go, I remember calling Marianne crying like a baby I don’t even know anymore if I was drunk, I felt guilty for abandoning my comrades, guilty for my share of the destroying, the killing, I dreamed for hours and hours on end without really sleeping, I dreamed of funeral ceremonies where Andrija blamed me for having abandoned his body I walked for kilometers in the mountains to find him to put him on a tall wooden pyre and burn him, his face was outlined then in the smoke that rose to the heart of the spring sky—all that came back to me all of a sudden as I saw Blaškić in his box at The Hague among the lawyers the interpreters the prosecutors the witnesses the journalists the onlookers the soldiers of the UNPROFOR who analyzed the maps for the judges commented on the possible provenance of bombs according to the size of the crater determined the range of the weaponry based on the caliber which gave rise to so many counter-arguments all of it translated into three languages recorded automatically transcribed 4,000 kilometers away from the Vitez Hotel and from the Lašva with the blue-tinted water, everything had to be explained from the beginning, historians testified to the past of Bosnia, Croatia, and Serbia since the Neolithic era by showing how Yugoslavia was formed, then geographers commented on demographic statistics, censuses, land surveys, political scientists explained the different political forces present in the 1990s, it was magnificent, so much knowledge wisdom information at the service of justice, “international observers” took on full meaning then, they testified to the horrors of slaughter with a real professionalism, the debates were courteous, for a time I would have volunteered as a witness, but neither the prosecution nor the defense had any interest in having me appear and my new occupations imposed discretion on me, for a long time I thought about what I would have said if they had questioned me, how would I have explained the inexplicable, probably I too would have had to go back to the dawn of time, to the frightened prehistoric man painting in his cave to reassure himself, to Paris making off with Helen, to the death of Hector, the sack of Troy, to Aeneas reaching the shores of Latium, to the Romans carrying off the Sabine women, to the military situation of the Croats of central Bosnia in early 1993, to the weapons factory in Vitez, to the trials at Nuremberg and Tokyo that are the father and mother of the one in The Hague—Blaškić in his box is one single man and has to answer for all our crimes, according to that principle of individual criminal responsibility which links him to history, he’s a body in a chair wearing a headset, he is on trial in place of all those who held a weapon, he will be condemned to forty-five years in prison then to nine years on appeal and today he must be taking advantage of his early release near Kiseljak, not very far from the villages where the burnt bodies of civilians for whose deaths he was blamed lie, those people who are still waiting for a justice that will never come, in the very Dutch Hague there was such a procession of ex-Yugoslavs that it was a headache to arrange their court appearances without all those people meeting each other in the planes, trains, or cars before finding themselves all together in the luxurious cells of the detention building or the antechambers of the hearing rooms, the vanished country was reconstituted one last time by international law, Serbs Croats Bosnians of all kinds Montenegrins fell into each others’ arms or pretended they didn’t recognize each other, they were there to speak about their war to air their dirty linen in front of judges who of course could be neither Serbs nor Croats nor Bosnians nor Montenegrins nor even Macedonian or Albanian or Slovenian, only their defenders were, and this international community that judged them indirectly watched with a remote air all these barbarians with unpronounceable names, hundreds of thousands of pages of trials became a distressing ocean, a tidal wave of justice in which the victims who had come to testify floundered, the displaced the tortured the beaten the raped the plundered the widows usually cried behind closed doors in a room with lowered blinds and their stories didn’t leave the glassed-in cages of the interpreters, consigned to court reports in English or French for posterity, without the judges hearing the accents the dialects the expressions of their voices that traced a real map of pain—they all took the plane home afterwards with a taste of bile in their mouths for having returned seen their enemies their torturers or their memories without their hatred or their love or their loyalty or their suffering serving any purpose at all, characters in the Great Trial organized by international lawyers immersed in precedents and the jurisprudence of horror, charged with putting some order into the law of murder, with knowing at what instant a bullet in the head was legitimate