Zone

by Mathias Enard

  VI

  the route is predictable, despite the failing light there will be Reggio Emilia then Modena Bologna Florence and so on until Rome, its sweetness like overripe fruit, Rome, rotting flamboyant corpse of a city you understand too well the fascination it can exercise over certain people, Rome and the suitcase I’m going to hand over there the time I’ll spend there maybe the choice has been made the choice has been made ever since the goddess sang of the wrath of Achilles son of Peleus, his warlike choice his honor the love that Thetis his mother bore him and Briseis his desire whom Agamemnon took just as Paris possessed Helen, the one waiting for me in Rome in her most beautiful peplos, maybe, the train is slowing down now approaching a station, boredom is holding me in its grip, on the other side of the aisle a man in his fifties is doing crosswords with his wife in a paper called La Settimana Enigmistica, the puzzle week or something like that, his wife looks much younger than he, in man’s estate everything is harder, in the nothingness of indecision that is the world of rails and shuntings, she is waiting for me, I like to think Sashka is waiting for me, that her body is waiting for me, I think about the life we abandon and about the one we suddenly choose for ourselves, about the clothes we take off, the beautiful greaves, the breastplate, the leather sustaining the breastplate, the beechwood spear cast into the fire, the shield, all those times when you get undressed, when you show yourself, naked with nothing else but the shivering of skin—those naked men taken by the hundreds out of trains blind their clothes piled up in a corner of the yard the air suddenly frozen the arms that cross the hands that cover the elbows to clothe with flesh the naked flesh marked in its center by the birthmark of the pubis: the enemy always rushes at the conquered to strip them, and we ourselves we strip our enemies for money for a souvenir for a rare weapon and our prisoners too before finishing them off, on principle, in the cold, we order them to get undressed sometimes so as not to stain or make a hole in the uniform, the jacket that could always be useful of course, but also to enjoy the power of man over naked animal, the man standing up against the shorn and trembling animal, laughable it was easier to take despicable life away from them, the gentleman with the Settimana Enigmistica seems very paternal, he explains the words, the letters that fit, his companion is looking through a little pocket dictionary, she’s a brunette, her hair long and tied back, in man’s estate you leave your suitcases, you cling to the youth of others, you strip your women, you undress them, it’s been almost ten years since I left Venice since Marianne left and the other life that was beginning without my knowing it in the train from Milan by a dull pain in the testicles is coming to an end today, the resignation handed in, treason consummated, dread of the world now, I am entrusting my entire self to another train, one more, I’m no longer a kind of snitching pen-pushing nosey civil servant but a free man, and this cumbersome freedom fruit of my treachery I’ll spend it in the company of Sashka who is waiting for me maybe, Marianne is so present now, close down one existence open up the one before, ten years later, livelier than ever, what could have become of her, I picture her a teacher in a Parisian high school, a mother, of course, she whose body and education were pushing her towards teaching and maternity, just like mine towards the war that for it was entirely natural, for a boy brought up in violence, used to the idea of weapons since childhood, primary school and cartoons, raised in the idea of God and the nation oppressed by his mother’s wailing, finding himself one day with an assault rifle in his hand, near Osijek, propelled by his parent’s tears and drawn by the summons of Franjo Tuđman the Savior, it’s the bland but pleasant face of the crossword enthusiast that makes me think of him, dazed by the fruitless drowsiness of the train’s rhythm, Tuđman whose photograph soon joined that of Ante Pavelić in uniform on my mother’s patriotic altar, along with Christ and a weeping Virgin, Tuđman arrived in Zagreb as King of Kings, to transform my existence radically, save me or ruin me, who knows, and in front of our television in the 15th arrondissement, in the dark, religiously, we listened to his elegiac speeches only half of which I understood, which my mother translated for me with devotion, on the day Christ arrived in Jerusalem, he was welcomed as a prophet, shouted the newscaster, today the Croatian capital is the new Jerusalem: Franjo Tuđman has come for his own, Croatia was born again, it emerged completely armed from Tuđman’s helmet, finally dragged itself out of its Titoist sleep, found in war wounds a strength a courage a youth and in the clash with its enemies a will a power a beautiful pain whose names were inscribed in letters of fire on television screens, Knin, Osijek, Vukovar, the hairy drunken Serbs were marching against innocence and beauty, they were massacring us, taunting us as they massacred us, in my entire Parisian quiet student’s existence, those trips on the metro, those for me abstruse classes in public law, history, and politics, those daily meetings with Marianne all slipped into the void that I was discovering within myself the silent void of the summons of a homeland in danger, hunger desire appetite for a sense of struggle of combat of another life that seemed to me terribly true, real, you had to fight the injustice that was being unleashed on the young State all the bolts of the archer Apollo protector of the East, and the more images and speeches reached me, the more my mother cried both from joy and from pain, the more I slipped towards Croatia, the more I disappeared from Paris from the university I was escaping Marianne and the present, I was burying myself in news reports in Krajinas in surrounded Dubrovnik in the provocations of the Yugoslav army in patriotic songs that I was discovering and even the language even the language that I had half-forgotten never really learned scorned in fact for years even the language came back to me realer and stronger than ever to the great displeasure of my father I began speaking Croatian at home he who hardly understood a word felt excluded from this nationalistic madness as he called it probably rightly, you look like your grandfather said my mother, podsjećaš me na djeda, you look like your grandfather, it was a trap, I fell into it just as a train plunges into the night I followed in my grandfather’s footsteps without knowing who he was, two years of war, two full years aside from three getaways, one to Trieste with Andrija and Vlaho and two in Paris, mostly to see Marianne again, to feel again what the poilus of 1914 told about, the incomprehension of people not at the front, the impossibility of telling about it, of speaking, like those children leaving school who don’t know how to say what they did all day: when Marianne questioned me about the war, both of us lying in the dark in her tiny attic room I replied “nothing,” I did nothing, saw nothing learned nothing I didn’t know how to say it, it was impossible, I told my mother that we were fighting for the glorious homeland, that’s all, I saw nothing in war and then I left, I took the night train from Italy or Austria and the next night I was in Zagreb, I thought about the poilus who left Paris, I imagined, in that civilized, comfortable train, that I was a Hapsburg soldier on leave who was returning to the front, who was returning to fight the Italians over there on the Isonzo in the foothills of the Alps in 1917 while on the other side of the aisle the crosswords are in full swing, the man older than his companion is talking to her like a professor, Hemingway and his nurse, Hemingway who came this way before going to play at being ambulance driver in the mountains, did he too feel the discrepancy, the impossible gulf hollowed out by the war, between those not at war and the soldiers, the ones who saw, who know, who suffer, the ones who have become dead or death-dealing flesh, and in that immense flat countryside extended by night I think of those who went up to the front on the Somme after seventy-two hours in Paris, after downing their little drinks after being very sad after having sadly and thoroughly fornicated they are like us silent in their car they don’t exchange a word in the distance a few bright flashes announce the zone of the armies the zone we’re coming close even if you don’t hear the cannon you see it you’re coming close, your throat contracts, you get out of the train, you walk through a group of wounded men who are waiting to be evacuated and they’re moaning, you get into a truck driven by a slightly bad-te
mpered guy, just a bit abrupt, jealous of a man on leave, then you end up on foot, you greet the artillerymen whom you envy for being so cozily entrenched at the side of their howitzers, even if they all end up half-deaf that’s not serious, you advance through the lines, through the half-buried networks following the directions written on wooden signs or on German helmets stuck in the clay, you hope that the first night will be calm, for now it’s the English taking it on the chin over there towards Ypres, you forbid yourself from thinking about the girl you’ve just left, about the last load you shot in a furnished apartment, the last shot you drank alone in the Place de Clichy because all your friends are at the front or at work, the waiter at the café still too young to leave felt envy and respect for you the poilu, but his turn will come, when will he die, will he fall in a few months on the Chemin des Dames, cut in half by a machine gun, decapitated by barbed wire or disintegrated by a mine in his trench, will he cry as he holds his warm smelly guts in his hands, will he call for his mother, will he look like a ghost for his arm sticking up somewhere in the mud, you’re in the ground, in the first lines that are made of dirt churned up by bombs, barely shored up, you reach the 329th infantry commanded by an officer you’ve never seen before, there’s X, there’s Y, they all know it’s best to leave the man on leave to his silence, they’re all muddy covered in lice starving it’s been seventy-two hours since you saw them unconsciously you look for the missing ones you see the missing ones then you say nothing, the lieutenant makes a curt sign with his head you set down your kit you look for a position you clutch your Lebel sitting as if in a train you’re back and a part of you most of you has remained behind, back there where you savor the end of the world, the pistol shot of Gavrilo Princip in Sarajevo marks the beginning of the race to horror, on June 28, 1914, Gavrilo nineteen years of age thin and tubercular weapon in hand cyanide in his pocket pieces together the destroyed world three empires and rushes me without knowing it into this train ninety years later, near Parma judging from the suburban lights, Gavrilo the Bosnian Serb believed in the Great Serbia that I did my share to undo, the little activist was lucky, like Jaurès’s assassin on the Rue Montmartre he was in a café, the plans failed, the bomb that was supposed to make an end to Franz Ferdinand didn’t explode beneath the right car, the archduke is still alive, for his misfortune Gavrilo Princip is beloved of Hera, the clever goddess will blind the Austrian chauffeur and the motorcade will come up to Princip, up to his café, Moritz Schiller’s café at the corner of the street facing the tiny bridge it’s a fine day he just has to go out leave his cup half empty take the capsule of poison in his left hand the weapon in his right and shoot, did he have time to observe the Habsburg’s surprised mustaches, the quivering lips of the beautiful Sophie his wife killed instantly, did he glimpse the millions of dead who gushed forth along with the Austro-Hungarian blood, was he happy with his shot, did the son of Leto guide his shots, was he proud of his four cartridges, did he hesitate, did he think it’s nice out today I’m in a café I’ll set off the massacre some other day, probably he didn’t have time to reflect, he went out, and according to the police reports he fired from five feet away, eye to eye—Gavrilo Princip would die in turn in Theresienstadt, in the prison of the Czech city where the Reich would install a model ghetto in 1941, thus paying absurd homage to the man who indirectly allowed its advent, piling death on death, a ghetto for artists, for intellectuals, one of the worst concentration camps, it superimposed farce on horror, Gavrilo in his cell in the Theresienstadt castle died in 1918 without having seen the birth of the Kingdom of the Southern Slavs for which he had indirectly fought, and the cyanide capsule served no purpose, he died slowly from tuberculosis, which is why he had been recruited to begin with: a band of tubercular terrorists, condemned men doomed to die soon, that’s the ideal thing, you feel much less remorse sending them to the slaughterhouse—the first time I went to Sarajevo I passed by the former Moritz Schiller café on the corner by the bridge, on the side of the embankment there’s a proud plaque, what does it mean today, what did it mean then, at the height of the siege, along the river where every now and then Serbian or Bosnian mortar shells landed, to remind the international community that times were hard they didn’t hesitate for long to shoot at each other, like the recruits of 1917, just as the waiter on the Place de Clichy gone to the Chemin des Dames would shoot himself in the foot to escape the slaughter, the Muslim army probably shot itself in the foot once or twice, in the agony of the city where Gavrilo Princip, coughing, spitting blood, had killed the brother of the emperor, a bomb looks like a bomb, it has no owners once it’s thrown, the self-mutilations were countless during the war of 1914, some in the hand, others in the fat of the belly, and I understand those Bosnian artillerymen, exasperated by international indifference, who probably used the tactics of the exhausted poilu, hoping that the American planes circling around them would end up putting the Serbian batteries out of commission and I imagine, just as the young soldier points his Lebel at his shoe and pulls the trigger, that they must have hesitated for a long time before shooting at their own men, or not, maybe like Gavrilo Princip at nineteen they were determined, hardened by the certainty of death that was the ambiance of Sarajevo during the last war—the battalion of tubercular Serbs of the Black Hand presaged the number of desperate, suicidal, sacrificed ones that are the army of shades of the century, or of all of history, maybe there was something foundational in Princip’s 32-caliber, was it really him who pulled the trigger, he was already dying, condemned, a ghost, a plaything in the hands of the wrathful gods, one instant of glory is given to Diomedes son of Tydeus, to the Ajaxes, to Koca Seyit Çabuk the artilleryman in the Dardanelles, Gavrilo had his moment of glory before going to rot in Theresienstadt, with his own hand he sets loose the thunder of war, the Terezín prison where he lumbers and suffocates will survive him, and will see many other condemned men, Jews, Czech communists, enemies of all kinds shot or hanged in a back courtyard by Gestapo agents, cousins of the SS who just across, on the other side of the river, were running one of the most terrifying ghettos, holding almost 50,000 detainees, Jews from Prague, from Germany, from Austria and elsewhere, in the complex geography of deportation a ghetto where you died in music, where you created, where you could reflect at leisure on your epitaph, inscribed in brown clouds in the sky over Auschwitz, most often, the great space of the sky after the filth and pain of concentration, Terezín model for the good conscience of the entire world, look how well-penned our animals are, how healthy and well-groomed our livestock is, and the Red Cross won’t find anything to say to this sturdy model whose pictures, duly stamped “Made in Third Reich Germany,” were broadcast throughout all of Europe, showing without showing what everyone knew without knowing, that concentration was the prelude to destruction, just as branding—of steer, of steer left free in the corral—was the beginning of the end, mark something to slaughter it, control it, separate good from evil the good from the bad your own from another’s in order to construct yourself make the self stand out your shoulders thrust against difference against the Orthodox Jew the barbarian the titans order against chaos thus Gavrilo Princip builds his Slavic kingdom by killing the Habsburg: I’ve seen dozens of them over the years, in my files, martyrs candidates for martyrdom torturers enlightened ones desperate ones activists full of the cause or of God without really knowing which they were serving, whether it was Ares aegis-bearing Zeus or Pallas Athena, hooked on a single God who is all that at once, order and chaos the beginning and the end, who scatters their bodies with an entirely Olympian pleasure, Algerians Egyptians Palestinians Afghans Iraqis in my own zones of activity between 1996 and today how many have died I have no idea, they interest only a few, those victims who make victims the grandchildren of Gavrilo Princip the great instigator—the crossword enthusiast who looks vaguely like Hemingway because of his beard is having a coughing fit at this precise moment and I can’t help but smile, history always has its winks, I turn round in my seat, I close my eyes no
t far from Parma pleasant city I recall I stayed there once on my way to Greece on my first vacation as a young bachelor agent, Marianne’s kick had put me on the straight path I returned to political science I finally got my degree my war was described as “long-term training period abroad with the Croatian Ministry of Defense” and got me extra points I think, where could I have found the strength to sit on school benches again, the pain in my balls maybe, the long inactivity in Venice, or simply my share of fate—I could have tended my garden after a fashion like Vlaho the crippled near Dubrovnik, slowly decompose like Andrija, go into a factory like Ghassan the exile, or stay sitting in front of the television at my parents’, never leave the 15th arrondissement, my mother had added a photo of me in uniform to the patriotic altar, Pavelić, her photo as a teenager with Ante Pavelić in Spain, the Pope, grandfather, Tuđman, the flag and me, that’s her world, but I wasn’t in a hurry to go back home, on the contrary, I wanted to leave again, and I was preparing for exams with the most various and most exotic administrations: I saw my salvation in the beautiful crystal chandeliers in the Quai d’Orsay, in the gold cravats of plenipotentiaries, in the dark blue of diplomatic passports, and in the old-fashioned phrases of letters of credit, not knowing anything about the diplomatic service but what you could learn in Albert Cohen’s Belle du Seigneur, which seemed an entirely enviable fate to me, even attractive, sparkling, in fact, in the heart of the world, with the highest salaries in all the civil service, with chauffeurs, receptions, and countries where you’d never have thought to settle, Mauritania, Guinea-Bissau, Congo, Bhutan, so I forced myself to learn, to train for these abstruse tests, law, synthesis, history, God knows what else, with no success, obviously—either because of my dubious soldiering past, or simply because my test results weren’t up to that prestigious ministry the diplomatic corps turned me down after two different examinations, despite, at least this is what I was told later, an honest oral presentation, and my huge disappointment seems to me today, ten years later, in man’s estate, in this train to the Vatican, hard to understand: I couldn’t see what thundering Zeus was saving for me, a fate in a much more obscure administration than Foreign Affairs, on the Boulevard Mortier, Mortier marshal of the Empire survivor of all the Napoleonic campaigns where they employed me, against all expectations, as defense delegate, or so the title of the administrative exam delicately worded it, and I suppose the hundred candidates present in that absolutely commonplace exam room all knew what defense delegate meant, or at least they thought they did, information agent, more or less secret agent, an agent more or less from outside, for action wasn’t in our purely administrative and linguistic program, an exam pretty much identical to the one for the prefecture, Social Services, or the Naval Command, and as Parma slides by the window I see again my first days at the Boulevard, the curiosity, the training, the strange ultra-secure building, without a coffee machine so as not to encourage idle conversation among the staff, armored toilets, soundproof offices, endless files, dozens of files to go through one by one, to synthesize, classify, tally with their sources, fill out forms to ask for information in one direction or another, under such-or-such a surname spotted in reports coming from “stations” or “correspondents” with code names, transmit, refer to the superior, write up notes, work for the defense of the nation, in the shadows, in the shadow of a stack of manila folders, and my only geographic expertise had obviously been ignored in purest military logic, no Balkans for me, no Slavs: I was thrown into the Arab world of which I knew nothing, aside from Ghassan’s stories, the mosques of Bosnia and whatever history books wanted to say about it, I began in the Algerian hell as Chief Classifier in the third rank, in a world of child-slaughterers and polite mass-murderers with names that were all alike to me, in the madness of the 1990s the stench of medieval war, disembowelments, amputations, corpses scattered everywhere, houses burned down, women kidnapped, villagers terrified, bloodthirsty bandits, and God, God everywhere to control the dance of death, little by little I learned the names of the cities and hamlets, Blida, Medea, viciously, I began with seven decapitated monks’ heads seven red roses their eyes half-open onto their advanced age the Tibhirine affair on May 21, 1996 which was the beginning of my two Algerian years at the Boulevard Mortier, the marshal with the long saber—he too had used it from Jemappes to Russia, maybe he had decapitated robed monks, women, children, in the imperial storm, every morning I thought of him, of his uniform, his epaulettes as I went to my ultra-secure hideaway to deal with my files, in the heavy grey atmosphere of that world of secrecy where I read my reports of throat-slittings and military operations without understanding a word, without talking to anyone about it, I burrowed into the Zone without passion but also without disgust, with an increasing curiosity about the dealings of the wrathful gods, patiently in my armored tent I guarded the hollow vessels, I defended Algeria from itself in the darkness, and just afterwards, as I took the metro, when I went home to Rue Caulaincourt, I always saluted Mortier on the boulevard plaque, my guardian angel, knowing that I was very likely being followed and observed by my own colleagues who had to make absolutely sure, all throughout my first year—civil servant trainee, beginning spy—that I was not in the pay of foreign nations or God knows what extremist movement, I could verify this recently when I read, almost ten years later, the report of the preliminary security investigation on me, a strange mirror, a dried-out life, a leaf in an information herbarium, dates places names suspicions psychological outlines relationships guilty or not family assessment of the case officer and so on up to codes references additions classifications assignments various notes absences requests for leave like those that led me to Athens passing through Parma to escape for a few days the Algerian horror and the dead monks they had dumped on me so I could archive the massacre out of sight so I could give a plausible version of the incredible confusion of the Algiers station, Parma I remember I had dinner there not far from the baptistery and the cathedral, thinking about the Farnese family dukes of Parma and Piacenza, about Marie Louise the empress, above all not about Algeria or Croatia or anything having to do with war, except for the pyre of a strange monk, Gherardo Segarelli burnt by the inquisitors in 1300, a preacher of evangelical poverty for whom it wasn’t a sin to lie down naked next to a woman without being married, and to touch, Segarelli wanted to rediscover the beauty of apostolic love, poverty generosity and the caresses of female bodies, he paced up and down Parma with his followers preaching until an inquisitor got hold of him hauled him in for questioning and decided to condemn him to the stake, Segarelli did not fear death, he thought that the decadence of the Church was one of the signs of the end of days, that they were all going to die, all the prelates the bishops they’d all end up in hell, when the flames licked him Segarelli screamed, to the great delight of the spectators, his head fell onto his chest, his body burned for a long time, attached to the post, then the two executioners broke his bones in the still-smoking logs, threw his half-carbonized limbs on top of each other in a pile and covered them with another batch of wood, taking care to salvage the still intact heart of the monk of love in order to place it on top of the fire and thus be certain that it would burn completely, then the next morning, once the man was completely reduced to ashes, once they were sure that Gherardo Segarelli could no longer take part in the resurrection of the body on the Day of Judgment, the two sinister vergers scattered his grey powdery remains in the Parma River, tittering giddily—sitting on a terrace near the square where the eternal Church had tortured the monk who sought perfection in the coming together of bodies, my car parked in a garage nearby, I was crossing Italy seemingly the most civil country in the world to get a ferry in Bari to see the Acropolis before losing myself in the islands, eating squid salad and lamb kebabs, in the heat of the evening, the reflections of the fishing lamps on the Aegean and I’d happily go and forget myself in the windy winter of the Cyclades now change trains in Bologna go back to Bari cruise off Albania or go to Sicily island of the end of the wo
rld sit down in the Greek theater in Taormina and watch the bay of Naxos bathe the hillsides, but I have to finish the sale hand over the suitcase stay in Rome for Sashka with the angelic smile remake my life as they say with the price of treason which isn’t much the money accumulated in my spy’s account, erase everything empty myself of my man’s life finish my share of existence leave trains journeys movement in general listen to the marine forecast far inland in a deep armchair, that’s it for adventure without adventure files sources endless investigations into the networks of the world that continually meet and meet again, train tracks, fasces of spears, rifles with bayonets joined, fascis of lictors, whose rods whipped the condemned and whose axes decapitated them, those same fasces from which Mussolini would make his and his empire’s emblem, the world surrounded by spikes rods and an axe, everywhere: I meet myself in Milan or in Parma, I check up on myself like my sources on the Boulevard Mortier, and yesterday, tidying up my desk for the last time before going to wander alone through deserted Paris and missing the plane, my empty desk in fact for you never leave anything trailing behind, the usage guide the dictionary a box of paper clips I thought of all the names I had encountered all the places all the affairs the files on site or abroad the long list of those I had observed for a while just as I am now observing the passengers in this oppressively hot train car, the crossword enthusiast and his wife, I could offer them my dictionary for their puzzles if they weren’t Italian, my neighbor the Pronto reader, in front of me the heads I can glimpse, a blond girl, a bald man, further on boy scouts or something similar with scarves and whistles on a chain, I can still see them with my eyes closed, a professional habit maybe, when the first thing they teach you, in a spy’s training, is the art of passing by unperceived while nothing escapes you, the theory of the butterfly net, said my instructor, you have to be transparent invisible discreet but with your net taut, information agencies are establishments of light-hearted and usually bucolic butterfly hunters, which greatly amused Sashka the first time she asked me my profession, I’m an entomologist, a natural historian, a hunter of insects I said, she replied laughing that I didn’t have the build, that I was much too serious for such an activity, but it’s a serious discipline, completely serious, I said, and I added that I divided my time between the office and research trips, like any good scientist, that I was a civil servant, like any good French scientist—she confessed that she hated insects, that they frightened her, an unreasonable fear, like lots of people, I said, lots of people are afraid of insects that’s because they’re not familiar with them I could have talked to her about the stick insect, the dormant kind that camouflages itself as a tree branch and waits for years before it acts, or about the Coleopteran, which you have to spot when it’s still a larva, before it flies away and becomes much harder to catch, about the suitcase-carrying dung beetles, the midges, tiny informers, the big blue carrion flies, the ants with or without wings, the army of cockroaches, we call informers cockroaches too, that whole invisible world in my office but I said nothing, and now in this train near Parma, so much for insects but the specialist’s reflexes still remain, the discretion of the professional observer, the information man, defense attaché, this Henri Fabre of shadows, who wants to hang up his net and his magnifying glass, stop seeing the faces of his travel companions, stop noticing the wine stain on the shirt of the crossword-solving Hemingway or the absolutely submissive air of his young companion, I can’t wait to arrive, I can’t wait to arrive now that I think of Sashka she’s not waiting for me or else not really what will I say to her I’m still all sticky from the night before still shaky from the alcohol, a little feverish, last night comes back to me with a big wave of shame, the door closed on the darkness on Hades devourer of warriors life in parentheses on a train taking me to Rome, to her clear gaze—she’ll look surprised when she sees me, seeing me in this state, transparent wide open from alcohol and night, from the meetings in the night, yesterday when I left the Boulevard Mortier for the last time I wandered from bar to bar in Montmartre until I ended up dead drunk ethereal like a soothsayer an oracle foreseeing the end of the world and all that follows, meetings hesitations wars global warming the cold colder the heat hotter Spaniards fleeing the desert to take refuge in Dunkirk the palm trees in Strasbourg but for now outside it’s freezing it’s raining the Alps were full of snow this morning I saw almost nothing I snoozed to the rhythm of the train from the Gare de Lyon after two hours of sleep a horrible awakening an aspirin and half an amphetamine to make the journey even harder—but I didn’t know I was going to miss the plane, that I’d run to catch the nine o’clock train, just barely and without a ticket, my breath must have frightened the conductor, always these difficulties in leaving, after Marianne’s kick in the balls ten years ago another kind of pain in my testicles today, shame makes me shiver, I squeeze my eyelids shut until I crush an angry tear of regret for last night, that night the absurd encounter of alcohol drugs and desire, at the Pomponette on the Rue Lepic the only bar in the neighborhood that’s open until 4:00 or 5:00 A.M., old Montmartre joint that you always leave staggering, yesterday aside from the regulars there was a woman in her sixties very thin with a long angular face what came over me, she was very surprised by my interest, mistrustful, I broke loosely into her solitude, smiling, she couldn’t make up her mind about me and I desired her, her name was Françoise, she was drinking a lot too, I don’t know why I went over to her, I’d rather not think about it, night entomologist pinning that insect maybe, I could have told her I want to pin you violently if I had thought about anything but I just kissed her out of mischievousness in fact as a dare out of joy at my last Parisian night her tongue was very thick and bitter she was drinking liqueur I turn my eyes away from the window I observe the companion of the crossword-Hemingway, there’s an elegant weariness in her features, she has lain her head on the man’s shoulder her hair loose now is slightly covering the crossword journal—Françoise didn’t talk about pinning, she said I want you to plow me, she talked to me about plowing her, in my ear, with a lot of modesty, she said I want you to plow me thinking it was a euphemism, because I want it she said, and that’s what happened, a plowing, nothing more, her eyes wide open onto nothing like a blind person, her wrinkles became furrows in the half-light, in the weak oblique light from the street, she wanted to stay in the dark, ground floor former concierge box on the Rue Marcadet a plowing without any preliminaries she went to the bathroom quickly without saying a word or even turning back, and once the stupor of orgasm was over I understood that she wasn’t going to come out again until I left, that she was just as ashamed as I was once desire was slaked I got dressed in a minute I slammed the door to take refuge in the fresh air under the rain that hadn’t stopped, wet dog with his caudal appendage sticky in his trousers, the pitch-black night and the return to the bar all full of shame stupid and filthy, sent to the bottom with one more little humiliation, as I looked for my change I lightly nicked the pad of my index finger against the condom wrapper stuffed without thinking back into my pocket and now fifteen hours later there’s a little diagonal wound on the finger that I crush against the cold window: I regret I don’t know why I regret, you regret so many things in life memories that sometimes return burning, guilt regrets shame that are the weight of Western civilization if I had caught the plane I’d have been in Rome for hours already, I turn round once more in my seat my head facing right towards the great void outside, going backwards, I’m going backwards my back to my destination and to the meaning of history which is facing forward, history which is taking me directly to the Vatican, with a suitcase full of names and secrets: I’ll find Sashka in Rome, her fat cat, the apartment, her short hair in my hands and that strange silence there is between us, as if through her ignorance I could erase the weight of remorse, the women, the insects, the traces, the war, The Hague, the ghosts of my Service files, Algeria first of all, then the Middle East, and recently I dreamed of a post to South America, for a change of polluted air, names, and
languages, maybe that’s the reason for this journey, moving through phonemes as if into a new world, neither my father’s language nor my mother’s, a third language, another one, and in the rhythm of this monotonous train rewrite myself to be reborn when I get out—the tired traveler invents idiotic games for himself, memories, daydreams, companions to pass the time since the landscape is completely invisible in the night, unable to sleep, I see again despite myself the photos of the Tibhirine monks faces without bodies I had a copy of them in my file, immortalized by the Algerian embassy, the first shock of my new life as a spy that all of a sudden brought me back to wounds to massacres to revenges to the cold rage of revenge the muddy blackened heads I was entering the Zone entering Algerian land that brought forth limbs and corpses more abundantly than Bosnia, then the long carefully recorded list only grew, Sidi Moussa, Bentalha, Relizane, one after the other, stories of axes and knives in the shadows in the flames the scenarios all identical: a few hundred meters away from a post of the Algerian army a band of terrorists got into the village began systematically massacring the population women men men women children newborns their throats cut their bellies ripped open burned shot slammed against walls skulls burst jewelry torn from fingers from wrists with axes beautiful virgins carried off into the mountains as spoils the share of honor for the conquerors with no enemies in the night and the warriors killed killed killed villagers just as poor as they or farmers even poorer, there was nothing in our notes and our reports, nothing whatsoever aside from endless torrents of blood names of villages and emirs scrublands chaparral touched by the fury of Ares, bearded men who spoke more and more incomprehensibly, more and more abstrusely, who spoke of Satan and God of the vengeance of God of all those farmers those Algerians who were infidels and deserved to die, the translators transcribed into French for me the pamphlets the declarations of war the anathemas the insults against the West the army the government farmers women alcohol livestock life and God himself whom they ended up excommunicating because he was too forgiving in their eyes, they worshipped their saber their rifle their leader and when they weren’t fighting amongst themselves they went cheerfully off to massacre and raid in darkness, in front of my civil servant’s eyes, why didn’t they provide night vision equipment in the Algerian army, that was their only excuse for not intervening, they were blind, night was night it belonged to the warriors and I knew better than anyone the terror of combat in the dark, in the midst of civilians between houses they could do nothing—but without provoking it terror suited them, turmoil favored them, Europe had no other choice than to support their dying regime against the barbarism and extremism to protect the oil the mines the villagers the workers the laypeople the infidels the liberals the region the quaking Tunisians and Moroccans, they had to hold firm, the Trojans were outside the ramparts, about to invade the camp and push us out to sea in our hollow vessels, the Islamists were the common enemy and this already before 2001, before the Great Accord that would have us exchanging terrorists galore, the Great Cleanup, suspects activists of all kinds sent off to Guantánamo, chucked out of planes in the middle of the Indian Ocean, tortured in Pakistani or Egyptian cellars, lists and more lists as long as possible until the Iraqi bone of contention, Troy took ten years to fall, and in my well-guarded office I began as an accountant of bodies, like someone who becomes a referee after having been a boxer and himself no longer touches the faces that explode beneath fists, he counts the blows, I gave Algeria beaten down by KOs several chances, and even raised high the arms of winners in my endless reports: Lebihan my boss constantly congratulated me on my prose, you’d think you were there he said, you are the all-round champion of notes, but couldn’t you be a little drier, get a little more to the point, just think, if everyone were like you we wouldn’t know if we were coming or going, but bravo my good man bravo—poor Lebihan, he constantly had health problems, never very serious, always very annoying, hives, pruritus, alopecia, all kinds of fungus, he was nice to me, he addressed me with the formal “vous,” I never knew anything about him or almost nothing, aside from the fact that he came from Lille, which his name did not suggest (if that really was his name), and that he wore a wedding ring—he was a specialist in the ISF, the GIA, all sorts of more or less violent movements, we’d find their names and their members’ names for years to come scattered throughout the four corners of the globe, sometimes with a different spelling or nickname, sometimes in a list of those “presumed dead,” because of the problems in Arabic transcription there were guys with us who had three or four index cards that had to be grouped together, some died three times in a row in three different places and finding a man was not always easy, even if that wasn’t our main objective, as Lebihan gently pointed out to me, the threats against internal security are the concern of the DST, the internal state security department, and cops didn’t at all mind throwing a spanner in our works whenever they could, convinced that we’d do likewise, which was no doubt the case—in the incredible muddle of the affair of the Tibhirine monks everyone had taken credit for himself, Foreign Affairs, the Service, everyone, and afterwards, when the DST picked up an Algerian officer who had “gone over to France” or an Islamist who asked for asylum, they kept the information to themselves, carefully doling out what might be useful to us in dribs and drabs, like us, more or less, with the information the agent gathered, those false solitary diplomats, immured in their embassy whose only contact with the outside was their precious “sources”: I went there one time, with an Agency passport and an assumed name, barely forty-eight hours, just enough time to meet the two guys we had over there and a local soldier whose name I forget, Algiers the white city was grey, dead after sunset, drowned beneath the unemployed and the dust, Cervantes the survivor of Lepanto had spent five years here in captivity, dreaming of escape plans just like the Islamists in the government jails, we had a meeting with the “source” in a magnificent villa atop the city, which I was allegedly supposed to be renting, an immense furnished villa, with a pool, property of a merchant who had taken refuge in Nice—the contact was brief, I remember his swaggering air, almost scornful of us, and the fear, the great fear we could still sense in his voice: the deal was clear, he wanted to go to Paris, get a residency permit and money for sensitive information, they all dreamed of the same thing, they thought they were selling themselves at a high price and didn’t realize that for us the price was laughable, that any engineer in pharmaceuticals or biotechnologies was worth ten or fifteen times more than they, the third world remains the third world even in the most specialized transactions, the advantage of the cost of living, and I myself if I think about it carefully I could have sold myself for much more, who knows, if I had offered my documents elsewhere, that’s the law of the trade, the seller fixes the price, I could have included my room at the Plaza in it and a piece of the true Cross and they would have agreed, what’s a little money compared to Eternity—Cervantes was ransomed by a congregation of monks for 500 escudos just as he was about to be deported to Istanbul, in 1996 Algiers the white smelled of sweat burnt tires hot oil and cumin, I had put places and landscapes into my notes, faces, smells into my summaries, fear, the mustiness of fear that reminded me of the odors of Mostar and Vitez, the Islamists were afraid of the army, the army was afraid of the Islamists and the civilians were dying of fear of everyone, cornered between the saber of the true Faith and the combat tanks of the toughât, the “tyrants” of the government, Algiers the white where my father served, between 1958 and 1960, I see myself exchanging impressions with him, memories—of course against all the rules of security I had spoken to him about my trip, he was very surprised, in this day and age, he said, ever since my return from Croatia he looked at me suspiciously, always trying to stare straight into my eyes, maybe to find the traces of war there, I didn’t understand why, I would understand later on, for now I was learning little by little to distinguish the parties, the emirs, the factions, and the tiny groups and I had my work cut out for me, as they say, to train m
yself in my Zone, I was sinking into it without realizing it, now I’ve become an expert, a specialist in politico-religious madness which is an increasingly widespread pathology, which is spreading the way the fungi or pustules spread on Lebihan’s body, now there isn’t one country that doesn’t have its future terrorists, extremists, Salafists, jihadis of all sorts and Parma that’s fleeing into the night with its Napoleonic nobility is giving me a headache, or maybe it’s fear, fear panic of darkness and pain