Hear Our Defeats

by Laurent Gaudé

  Did he believe the blood would stop flowing with Lee’s surrender? Did he believe he would luxuriate in peace one day, revert to his former innocence? There are too many corpses, and the dead are demanding their due. Grant saw the president this morning. He sat in on a cabinet meeting. Sat there listening to this man he admires, this man who has led them to victory, confident he is taking the right steps. Then he declined the invitation to the theater the president gave him, he took his leave and went back to Philadelphia. This evening they will bring him news. Initially he cannot understand why everyone is shouting, why people are weeping in the street, when it is already so late. The news travels by word of mouth, in the street, through the houses, throughout the country: Lincoln has just been shot, at Ford’ Theatre, during the very performance to which Grant had been invited. Five days after the South surrendered, Lincoln is dead. The men killed in battle are here, ever more numerous, pressing with all their weight upon the world of the living.

  His valet has come to warn him: the men from the Derg are waiting outside the door. He goes down from his room. The corridors seem so big, now that they are empty. He walks without haste. He goes through salons where pedestals have been overturned, smashed plates are on the floor. Why has no one picked them up? Disaster has been gnawing away at the palace. He goes slowly down the staircase. When at last he comes face-to-face with the military men—young men, with rough manners, speaking loudly to hide the fact that they are impressed, or not to show too much scorn—he hears the repeated order to go with them at once. He consents but demands that his valet be allowed to accompany him. He also asks to ride in one of his Rolls and not that horrible gray Volkswagen that is waiting for him at the entrance, between two military jeeps. The men in fatigues don’t seem to understand. They categorically refuse, and drive him to the barracks. He says nothing more, does not protest. Now he knows the name of the leader of the insurrection: Mengistu Haile Mariam. He was right: perhaps it is, in a way, the spirit of the other Mengistu who has returned. It is all so confusing . . . It is said that this man’s mother had been a servant at the royal palace. The common folk have rushed to the entrance to the palace to watch as he climbs into the Volkswagen: there is no cheering. In the old days, the people would shout with joy, wherever he went. Is this the irrefutable sign that everything is about to end, that the world he once knew, the world he reigned over, has been submerged?

  Everyone around him is worried. It’s not old age. It’s not calumny, it’s poverty. He is ruined. Julia is distraught. His friend Mark Twain has begged him to write his memoirs, and promises he’ll get a good price for them. A life undone. He has been president. But will anyone remember? Two terms in office. Both tainted by corruption. Then he went around the world, slept in the finest hotels in Paris, London, New Delhi. He was greeted as a hero wherever he went and now he’s ended up here, exhausted, with a blanket on his lap, with nothing to comfort him save the motion of the rocking chair, and his memories.

  He gazes around his cell. This is where it all ends, in these four walls, in a soulless room, not really uncomfortable, but ugly. He won’t move again, he’ll stay here, in these barracks of the fourth division, the one that fomented the coup, the one that came and knocked on the door of the palace every day with a list of names, and that very evening led the dignitaries before the firing squad, within earshot of the palace. He is already familiar with exile, and flight, too; he has hidden in caves, walked through the night to escape his enemies in pursuit, but a tiny cell, never. He is learning. He has everything he needs. They feed him. They even took him to the Imperial Guard hospital to operate on his prostate. He does not think about anything, does not hope for any liberation. Oddly, he does not miss them, all those things he thought he could not do without—his valet, the grandeur of the court, his cook. He has been stripped of everything, does not own a single thing. There is no purpose to his days, not really. He talks to no one. He is just a body that goes on living, useless, isolated, invisible. And everything goes on, outside. The country is alive. Men go to work. He has departed from the world, he is undone, tiny, and no one is weeping for him.

  Everyone is worried, but he is not. He’ll write his memoirs. To leave something behind for his children, but deep down it hardly matters to him. Who can understand what his life was? He is naked and tired. He thinks endlessly about Lincoln, Lee, and Sherman. The only individuals he would willingly allow to pass judgment over him. They too have seen man in his nakedness. They too have ordered murder and been congratulated for it. They too have always known they had an army of the dead walking behind them.

  Are they poisoning him? Yes, surely. But he goes on eating. What else can he do? He is convinced they are poisoning him because that is what he would do if he were in their shoes. A gradual death, one that can be passed off as a defeat of the body. Not a crime. Not an execution. That is what he did with Iyasu, Menelik’s son and heir. He’s not sorry he did. Iyasu was mad. Truly demented. The Italians wanted him to be king of kings and make him their puppet. He ordered him arrested and held prisoner in a hidden place deep in Harar. Then he poisoned him. Slowly. So that may well be what they are doing to him. But he couldn’t care less.

  One day—does the date have the slightest importance—death comes for him. It has the face of the son of one of the Libyssa fishermen. The young man comes in at a run, breathless, his face contorted by fear, and in an instant he knows that this is the last day of his life. “They’ve come . . . !” The boy says the words over and over, until he is gasping for breath. Hannibal tries to get him to speak. How many of them? Where are they? But the young man merely points behind him. And already he can hear the pounding on the door.

  This is the time of disaster. Very often he feels cold. He can’t smoke anymore. He is no longer allowed his beloved cigars, with their taste of encampments and horses. He lets his mind wander, constantly reenacting the battle. So many faces inhabit his mind, so many men who passed before him to the rhythm of armies or in long columns of prisoners, with the limping distress of the wounded or at a panicked run, so many men, at Lincoln’s funeral, at the commemorations, a huge crowd filling his mind.

  He senses instinctively that he won’t have time to run away. And yet he has imagined this day. There are seven ways out of the house. He knew that sooner or later he would be sold to the Romans. But it all happens so quickly, he has no time to do anything. The door has been broken down. The assassins are coming. He has only a few moments left. In his ring there is poison: he opens it and greedily swallows the contents.

  He is learning to live in a room he cannot leave, preserving his old man’s impassivity, as if everything had abandoned him long ago—fear, joy, feelings of ambition or desires for revenge, as if there were nothing left but a dried-up husk of a man who has agreed to be rolled between the hands of History. Nothing matters to him. He is just that man, there, in a cell, a stone’s throw from the palace where he used to reign. History has decided it will end like this, and he is empty, has been drained of all the tumult that followed him everywhere during his lifetime, as if the only gift History could give him would be silence, the great, appeasing silence that comes before death.

  It is the time of disaster now and that is fine. He would blush if he died in glory. The fact that he is ruined and suffering from the cold doesn’t matter. He lost the words with which to complain long ago, and he is slowly getting used to the idea of ending up on his patio, in those gentle hours when the light fades, before the damp takes hold of him. Men always end their lives in defeat. He takes with him his memories of fever, his nights of drink, his exhaustion from the war, he takes with him everything he has been and dies without regret because the rest is nothing.

  He reaches for a sword, because he would like to die with his weapon in his hand and keep his enemies at bay long enough for the poison to take effect, but the weapon seems incredibly heavy and he cannot stop it from falling to the floor with a dull metallic clang. His he
ad is spinning. The Roman soldiers enter the room, their faces heavy, their hands thick. How many are there? He’s not sure he’ll manage to count them. His vision blurs. A white foam oozes from his lips. He can just make out the surprise on his assailants’ faces before he falls to the floor: that surprise is a victory he holds close in his mind.

  And then one day Mengistu Haile Mariam comes in to see him in his cell. He has come to kill him. He can no longer wait for old age or poison to finish him off, it’s too slow. Do they speak? What could they say to each other? Haile Selassie knows what his executioner has come for. He doesn’t want to plead. He doesn’t move. He remains impassive, the way he always has. He is nothing but a dried-up little man who will not take long to die. Mengistu comes closer, he will suffocate him between two mattresses. It will take only a few seconds, a few minutes at the most . . . He will squeeze hard, using all his weight, and a world will disappear. They do not speak. There is nothing to say. One man has come to kill the other. That’s all. The day outside is vast, but Haile Selassie will not see it. Mengistu comes even closer, leans over the bed, and already there is not enough air.

  How long does he lie there on the floor, dying, yet conscious? How long before one of the killers, perhaps, annoyed that he has not been able to fulfill his mission as planned, stabs him with his own sword or cuts off his head? How long before he slips away? He reflects on his life—a long warrior’s gallop across a blazing land—and thinks again of the victory he is taking with him, in spite of death, the victory of having become a name his enemies cannot capture: “Hannibal,” and he smiles.

  It’s all over.

  Sheridan. Grant. Sherman. Lee. A generation of heroes, of butchers. Who might grieve when they are gone? There can be no sadness. More like relief. Too much blood. The blood spilled, which they walked in, and the blood that spread into the earth, nourishing the trees on the battlefield.

  They have buried each other. The day of Sherman’s funeral the Confederate general Johnston, his enemy, carried his coffin. It was raining and they told him to put on his hat. He refused, saying that would be unworthy, and that if Sherman were carrying his coffin, he would certainly not put his hat on . . . Johnston was obstinate. He ended up catching pneumonia and died of it several weeks later. They are bound by blood, and die together.

  There are the remains. The ones that are hidden, and the ones that are glorified. The nation built a huge mausoleum for Grant, and it must seem quite empty to his poor skeleton. Perhaps he would have preferred a tree on the battlefield at Shiloh, but heroes are doomed to marble . . .

  For the bodies of the defeated, there is still hatred.

  The secretary of war, Edwin Stanton, asked the quartermaster general to deal with it: find a place for all the bodies left by this huge fratricidal butchery. And Montgomery Meigs decided on Arlington, General Lee’s former estate. They built the nation’s military cemetery in the defeated man’s garden.

  Hannibal’s body is hidden, buried in secret. It is hurriedly spirited away because, even lifeless, he still causes Rome to tremble.

  One day at the bottom of a hole in the barracks basement in Addis Ababa they will find the Negus’s remains. A ceremony will be held at Saint George’s cathedral so that his bones, tarnished by thirty years of obscurity, can become relics, and so that the king of kings, the lion of the tribe of Judah, may rest in peace.

  But can they, all these men, really rest in peace?

  XIII

  ALEXANDRIA

  She is in Alexandria, in the Mediterranean night, on that shore where the air is humid and at sunset the swallows make a deafening racket. She is there while he is in Tripoli, almost next door, but they don’t know it. She cannot sleep. Her room has a little balcony overlooking the sea and she has gone to sit out there. Her legs on the parapet, her skirt pulled up to catch a bit of cool breeze, she thinks about Marwan. The gentle night air enfolds her. She remembers the last time they met. She saw him again after they split up. Just once. He was the one who called her, when he knew she would be passing through Cairo. His voice over the telephone had changed, grown older. He asked her if they could meet at the Café Riche at six in the evening. She said yes. In the hours leading up to their appointment she wondered what he might possibly want from her. There had been an urgency in his tone. She got to the café early. She sat down at a little table that faced the entrance and ordered a tea. Oddly, the café was rather empty. And then he appeared in the doorway, and she almost put her hand up to her lips. He had lost weight, and he walked like an old man. It was obvious that this was the first time he had been out in a long time. He was wearing a good suit but it hung loose on his body and he looked like a tired marionette. What sort of pretext had he used to leave the house to come and meet her? He smiled when he saw her. She didn’t know whether she should stand up and kiss him on the cheek. He swept away her hesitation with a wave of his hand that meant she shouldn’t get up, then he collapsed on his chair like an exhausted swimmer who has finally made it to shore. He was short of breath. His face was emaciated. The waiter told him it was a pleasure to see him again, bowing and scraping and calling him sir, before he went off to prepare a second cup of tea. They didn’t talk about themselves, about their affair or the breakup. They didn’t talk about the illness that had depleted him and would soon ensure there was nothing left of him in his huge baggy suit but bones. That was not why he was here, she had sensed that instantly. Once the second cup of tea was brought and they would no longer be disturbed he reached in his bag for an object wrapped in tissue paper which he placed on the table. “I’m going to tell you a story,” he said. “Don’t ask me anything, don’t say anything. And in the end, you can take this package, or leave it.” And so, in the rather sleepy setting of the Café Riche, he began telling his story. Nothing could make him lose focus, neither the shuffling steps of the waiters nor the occasional group of students bursting in, giddy and excited, as if they had arrived at a place where the future of tomorrow’s world would be decided; with Mariam they seemed to be cut off from the rest of the world. He talked about Mariette Pasha. He invoked the feverish hours of the excavation of the Serapeum, when modern archeology was in its infancy. He spoke about the fierce competition among the various European nations in Egypt in those days. Both Lepsius, the great German archeologist, and Mariette knew that supremacy would fall to whoever managed to acquire the most, and fastest. And then there was Salomon Fernandez, the so-called antique dealer who pillaged the sites. Ever since the Napoleonic campaign Egypt had been an open air antiques market. “Just imagine,” said Marwan with a sort of rediscovered jubilation, “what they went through, those men. Between plunderers and archeologists . . . ” And he explained how you had to be clever in order to obtain a firman. That sometimes the right to dig was granted in the most random of ways. That Mariette, while waiting for his firman, had had to interrupt his excavation. “And so,” said Marwan, “do you know what he did? An archeologist. Like you or me, who knows he’s in the right place, that everything he has been looking for for months, or years, is there beneath his feet, but he can’t dig because he hasn’t got the official paper with the stamp, because he hasn’t knocked at the right doors or hasn’t oiled the right palms, so what does he do?” He went on to list the ways Mariette Pasha got around the absence of a firman: he would dig at night, once the supervisors sent by the powers that be had gone home for the night, by torchlight, and with a smaller team. Then smuggling the artifacts out with the help of foreign visitors. To avoid detection by the authorities, every French visitor would leave with a statue or a jewel hidden underneath the ladies’ shawls or in their handbags. Wasn’t that plundering, too? The sort of tricks pirates got up to? And yet Mariette created archeology and chose Egypt; he settled in Bulaq, founded a museum there. He is still buried there, outside the museum he gave to Egypt and which was one way to stop the artifacts being sent to the Louvre. She listened, wondering why Marwan was telling her all this, but takin
g the time to gaze at his eyes, which had lost none of their sparkle. “And then one day Mariette went to see Paul-Émile Botta in Paris. I don’t know where they met. Maybe at Botta’s house. Mariette was young and probably nervous and intimidated. There before him was the consul of Mosul, of Jerusalem, of Tripoli. And above all there before him was the man who had discovered the giants of Khorsabad. I don’t know when he set his artifact down in front of Botta, or what he said. I imagine he talked about how important it was not to forget that we are tomb robbers. That the pharaohs shut themselves away in their tombs for all eternity, and that for us to open those tombs, to break and enter, even in the name of History, is still nothing more than some pirate incursion. We mustn’t forget this. We create a science, we are rigorous, we study at libraries, we talk about heritage, and History, and the memory of civilizations, but we shouldn’t keep silent about this thing: the pleasure we get from breaking and entering. The skeletons and mummies, the funerary objects—we’re stealing them from the void. We open rooms that ought to stay closed. Yesterday it was with dynamite, today it is with infinite precaution, but woe to anyone who forgets that the basic gesture remains the same. That is what Mariette must have said to Botta, then he handed him the object he had brought for him. Not as booty. Not like the empress who a few years later would ask him for Queen Ahhotep’s jewels—which he refused to give her, as it happens, he was incensed by such an obscene demand—no, he handed the artifact to Botta as a pact. They were both men who had been on digs, mounted expeditions, headed teams, and they needed to share a stolen object that would be handed down from generation to generation so that no one would ever forget that archeology is only a step away from pillaging. But Botta looked at him, dumbfounded, his cheeks red. He frowned, stammered, protested. How dare you, young man . . . or something like that. Do you take me for a pillager? I have worked for France. For humanity. He tossed all these grandiose words in Mariette’s face like so many slaps on the cheeks of a fifteen-year-old shoplifter. It was a disgrace. And all this . . . because he didn’t get it, didn’t know that the man there before him didn’t need any lessons in ethics. That he would go on to give far more to Egypt than anyone else in that era. And Mariette went away again, crestfallen, wondering what had come over him, even worried that the consul might denounce him. Time went by, but the idea remained: a stolen artifact so that we may never forget that archeologists are tomb robbers. And when the young Maspero came into his life, just before his wife and daughter died and he buried them in the cemetery in Old Cairo, he identified him as his worthy successor. Maspero was brilliant, elegant, cultured. Mariette had the feeling that Maspero’s generation would be more methodical than his own, more scientific, and then he thought again about the artifact, because it would perhaps be even more crucial for these men of the scientific era not to forget the notion of breaking and entering. So he handed his artifact to the young man, who must initially have been surprised, even stunned, and a little bit ashamed because he had probably never stolen a thing in his life, but Maspero was smart, so he accepted it.”