IX
aside from murdering my neighbor strangling him maybe like Lowry and his wife there’s nothing to do just remain silent close your eyes open them search for sleep December 8th today at this instant in Rome on the Piazza d’Espagna the Holy Father is making his speech he keeps kicking the bucket this pope maybe he’s immortal as well as infallible that would crown it all, all of a sudden a man refuses to die, he does not pass away like his brothers, he survives, despite it all he hangs on, bedridden, trembling, senile but he hangs on, he reaches his hundredth birthday, then his 110th, then his 120th, everyone takes bets on his demise but no, he reaches 130 years and one fine day people realize he’s not going to die, he’ll remain suspended between life and death stuck there with his Parkinson’s, his Alzheimer’s, mummified but alive, alive, for ever and ever and this discovery saddens his potential successors so much that they of course decide to poison him, the eleven o’clock broth for the cumbersome old man, no luck, just like the first Christian martyrs he survives the poisoning, he loses his sight but his heart is still beating, from time to time he whispers some words into his visitors’ ears, in Latin, thousands of pilgrims stand in line to catch a glimpse of him, his hair is sold strand by strand like so many pieces of eternity, one of the last eternal locks of the blessed man who keeps dying, just as the end of the world keeps arriving, imputrescible locks like the corpses of those saints who never decompose and then in the end they’re forgotten in a corner of the palace, with servants all of whom they outlive, little by little dust covers them over they disappear from memory, from the present they’re a tableau vivant a bust a statue to which not much importance is granted—I can’t complain about the Holy See though I owe my new life to it, money in exchange for the briefcase, to that papal nuncio in Damascus who introduced me to the curial secretary concerned in my affair, in secret of course, Damascus city of dust almost as much as Cairo, city of dust and whisperings, of fear and police informers, where they bury you alive in a grey prison in the middle of the desert, Syrian oubliettes are deep, you don’t often climb back up out of them, how many Syrians or Lebanese are still missing in action, caught at a roadblock or arrested at home no one knows what’s become of them, if they’re still rotting at the bottom of a dungeon or if they were shot down with a bullet in the head in Mezzeh or Palmyra, hanged a stone’s throw from the ruins of Queen Zenobia’s city the Temple of Ba’al and legendary tombs, beneath the palm trees you sometimes see an open truck full of guys with shaved heads, everyone turns his eyes away then so as not to see them, they’re detainees being transferred from Damascus or Homs, they’ll be thrown into Tadmor prison for eternity: looking at them brings bad luck, like looking at men condemned to death, the prison is a few kilometers away from the palm grove at the entrance to the endless stone steppe, I went to see it out of curiosity, at a respectable distance, an old French barracks, they say, surrounded by a grey wall and barbed wire, no daylight no walkway no air or sky, the prisoners spend most of their time blindfolded, I thought about Rabia, one of our sources at the Syrian Ministry of Defense, the son of a good family who loved money too much fancy convertibles drugs and danger, he disappeared one fine morning and his contact told us airily he’s in Switzerland, a euphemism used in Syria to designate that penitentiary in the middle of the rocks a few feet away from one of the most famous ancient sites in the Middle East, so beautiful when the saffron dawn illumines the white columns and the Arab castle like their shepherd on its hill, Palmyra-Tadmor caravan city today peopled with caravans of tourists and prisoners, city of sheep butchered in the middle of the street in front of the terrified eyes of passing Europeans, capital of the Syrian steppe where that same Rabia whom I never saw must still be rotting if he survived, in Switzerland, that’s to say in Tadmor in Sadnaya in Homs or formerly in Mezzeh in one of those military prisons Meccas of torture and summary executions where all throughout the 1980s and ’90s the Syrian members of the Muslim Brotherhood were hanged, by the dozen, by the hundreds, their corpses buried in mass graves nestled in desert valleys, along with the bodies of those dead from torture or disease, tuberculosis, all kinds of abscesses, blood poisoning, malnutrition, piled up hundreds to a barracks, no visits allowed, Muslim activists were rounded up in Hama, in Aleppo, in Latakiyah and sent, blindfolded, to Palmyra in Arabic Tadmor the well-named, where they stagnated for ten, fifteen years until they were set free, paranoid, delirious, malnourished, or crippled, I met one of them in Jordan, one more source in my Zone, fourteen years in a Syrian prison, between 1982 and 1996, from sixteen to thirty, his youth tortured, broken, one eye missing, a leg lame, he told me that his main pastime in prison was counting the dead, he kept track of the hanged men in the prison yard, the ones who disappeared amid shouts in the middle of the night, in the beginning I tried to remember their names, he said, but that was impossible, so I just kept count, I clung to that as if it were my life, to know if I died what number I’d be, day after day, in fourteen years I counted 827 dead over half of them by hanging, usually by a chain, at night—I was arrested in front of my house in Hama during the events of 1982, I knew nothing about Islam or the Koran, I was an ignoramus, they arrested me because one of our neighbors was with the Brotherhood, I had just turned sixteen, they put a blindfold over my eyes and they beat me, I don’t know where I was, in a barracks I guess, I spent two days without drinking a drop of water and I was transferred to Palmyra in a truck, no one knew where we were going, we arrived at night, they made us get out with blows from a cudgel—the soldiers tortured us until dawn, that was the custom for newcomers, they had to break us, make us understand where we were, they broke my leg with an iron bar, I fainted, I woke up in a barracks like a giant dormitory, my leg was purple all swollen I was thirsty, I didn’t know what was more painful, if it was the thirst or the fracture, I couldn’t speak, one of the prisoners gave me some water and made me a sort of harness with an old crate that’s the only medical care I got, the bone didn’t reset right and ever since I’ve limped I can’t run anymore, no more soccer but in prison you didn’t think about soccer, the yard was mostly for hanging people, thank God I got out, I learned the Koran by heart, books were forbidden, pens too, but the Koran circulated by word of mouth, whispers, I learned sura after sura beginning with the shortest ones, I learned them from the mouths of the older prisoners, in the dark, a continuous almost inaudible flow pressed against each other we all prayed together, so the guards didn’t notice anything we bowed down to God by bending just the pinky finger, as is permitted for the ill, God willed that I survive, when I counted the 492nd death one of my eyes got infected it turned into a big suppurating painful ball and never opened again, I had a good constitution I was young, time passed in Palmyra they never called you except for one reason, to hang you, the guards hardly ever spoke to us, sometimes after midnight they called out names, that was the day’s list of men to be hanged, we saluted them everyone was used to executions, the first thing I did when I arrived in Jordan was go to the mosque to pray standing up, finally, to be able to kneel down even though my leg hurt, to thank God for having gotten me out of that hell, he ended his story and I thought he should have thanked God too for having put him there, in that hell, but for him the Baathist Alaouites in power in Syria were infidels, agents of the devil, Hasan (we’ll call him Hasan) readily informed me about the Syrian opposition and their clandestine activities that he still followed closely but was much more reluctant to talk about the Jordanians or the Palestinians, he ended up being killed by the Mossad in 2002, during the Great Purge, when the CIA sent endless lists of “individual suspects” all over the world the luckiest of whom ended up in Guantánamo their eyes blindfolded tortured once again for many of them had already fallen into the clutches of the Jordanians the Syrians the Egyptians the Algerians or the Pakistanis for different reasons but with the same results, they ended up on the island of rum and cigars and mulatto women sculpted by the sun and by dictatorship, they sweated in Cuba in their high-security orange jumpsui
ts much more visible and pleasing to the guards’ eyes than the striped or plain pajamas of Palmyra the magnificent: Hasan didn’t have that luck, if you can call it that, he died hit by a little radio-controlled Israeli missile that completely destroyed the vehicle in which he was traveling along with his young wife and their two-year-old daughter, he died because of information I’d supplied, I’m the one who sold him to Nathan Strasberg in exchange for information about American civilian contracts in Iraq, as proof of good will I sacrificed a source that was in any case a little outdated by then, Hasan the lame had taken part in organizing two attacks on Jerusalem and another one against Israelis in Jordan, he was becoming less and less communicative, lied too often, farewell Hasan survivor of Tadmor, farewell Rabia the son of the dignitary fallen in disgrace after the death of Hafez al-Assad the old lion of Damascus who had managed, against all expectations, to die in his bed, or rather on the telephone, on the day of his death you couldn’t find a single bottle of Champagne in Syria, Beirut, or Jerusalem, the Old Man of the Mountain had played Middle-Eastern poker for thirty years and he was unbeatable, he had played with Kissinger, with Thatcher, with Mitterand, with Arafat, with King Hussein, and many others, always winning, always, even with a pair of sevens, because he was clever possibly but above all because he didn’t have any useless scruples, ready to sacrifice his pieces to go back on his alliances to murder half his compatriots if need be, Hasan the lame owed fourteen years of prison to him, lucky compared to the perhaps 20,000 dead from the repression in the 1980s, lucky Rabia, his dignitary father an Alaouite minister let him get rich off his fellow citizens and experience a few years of abundance before he ended up in the slammer for a while: whenever I went to Damascus, Aleppo, or Latakiyah I always felt as if I were putting my head in the wolf’s mouth, in that country of informers where half the population was spying on the other half you had to be twice as careful, the only advantage being that the other half was by the same token perfectly willing to work for foreign countries, in return for cold hard cash, I went to Damascus “as a tourist” and so as not to blow my cover too quickly I had to see the sights, in Palmyra, in Apamea, visit the museum in Aleppo, go see the Church of Saint Simeon Stylites the saint chained on top of his pillar the base of which still exists today, explore the old city of Damascus, marvel inside the cortile of the Umayyad Mosque where there is, they say, one of the severed heads of John the Baptist, and above all eat, eat, drink, and get bored watching the fine winter sleet fall on the city of sadness and dust, of course the French embassy was a forbidden zone for me, that’s too bad, I would have liked to see the beautiful Arabic house where Faysal settled in 1918, Faysal the sharif of Mecca whom Lawrence of Arabia had made King of the Arabs, before the French and General Gouraud threw him out of his new capital and the British recovered him to place him on the throne in Iraq by giving a Hashemite legitimacy to that country newly founded by the joining of three Ottoman provinces that had no intention of cohabiting peacefully within a puppet state, even to please Churchill or Gertrude Bell the archeologist spy, in that Near- or Middle-East that the French and English had shamelessly divided among themselves in 1916, what could be left of Faysal in the residence of the powerful French ambassador to Syria, the first velvet armchair in which the Bedouin king had sat, maybe, the tired springs of the bed where he had slept, did his ghost come to disturb the sleep of a charming ambassadress, causing dreams of horses galloping through the scorching desert, nightmares of thirst, or erotic dreams of frenzied Arabic nights—nights in Damascus or Aleppo were not very conducive to lust or Capuan luxury, the very prudish Syrian dictatorship preferred a martial austerity, Aphrodite passed only rarely through the mountains of Mount Lebanon, on the shores of the almost dry Barada River there were a few cabarets where drunken Saudis showered banknotes on fat, wrinkled belly-dancers with acid music accompaniment, a very ugly gentleman armed with a red plastic bucket collected the carpet of notes while these ladies continued shaking their breasts into the mustaches of emirs who immediately ordered another bottle of Johnny Walker to make their hard-on go away, in Aleppo in a side-street between two spare-parts stores there was a similar kind of establishment but full of Ukrainian and Bulgarian women in swimsuits who raised their legs French-Cancan-style for a few beer-drinking soldiers with mustaches, after each number they’d go sit on the clients’ laps, I remember one of them had lived in Skopje and spoke a passable Serbian, she said she’d visit me in my hotel room in exchange for the modest sum of 200 dollars, at that rate the Syrians must not have screwed much, she told me that she had arrived in Aleppo in reply to a job offer for dancers, she loved to dance, she said to herself that dancing in a Syrian troupe would be a beginning I didn’t know if I should believe her or not, and also the salary was good, it wasn’t prostitution, she said, it was dancing, she seemed as if she were trying to convince herself, she was just on twenty, a smiling face she was blonde as wheat, they were all blonde as wheat, she got back on stage for the next number, she looked at me as she jigged up and down, the five girls took sensual poses to “My Way,” they mimed kisses with depressed little pouts I left to go back to my hotel and to the solitude of my room very happy not to need to succumb to the charms of the swimsuit-wearing dancers, I remember the next day I had a “meeting” with a man about whom I knew nothing on a café terrace facing the incredible Citadel of Aleppo, I was supposed to sit on a terrace with a red sweater and a wool scarf placed on the back of the chair opposite me—sometimes reality becomes a spy movie from the 1960s, probably this honorable correspondent had read too many Cold War spy novels, in the Zone things were very different, still I was a little worried, I didn’t much want two Syrian secret service agents to sit down at my table and say “so, red sweater and wool scarf, eh?” and kick me out of Syria after giving me a beating, or worse, the most likely thing would be for them to keep me in secret somewhere while they waited to exchange me for someone or something, and even if there is in fact a share of risk in my business it always seems very remote, in the Agency I never carried a weapon or anything of that sort (I did have a little 7.65 Zastava at my place but that was an unusable war souvenir) but that morning when I went to the meeting at the Citadel I wasn’t entirely at ease, because it was Syria, because Syria is the country of informers, because in Syria there aren’t many tourists and it’s not as easy to melt into the crowd as in Cairo or Tunis, I walked through the endless Aleppo souk on foot, I bought three knickknacks for Stéphanie the brunette (to hell with secret trips), some bay-leaf soap, a silk scarf, and a little copper hookah probably impossible to smoke but at least I looked like a perfect tourist when I emerged from the covered market onto the Citadel square, I settled onto a café terrace, I asked for coffee, coffee, café, please, I placed my scarf on the chair in front of me, and I waited as I contemplated the glacis of the impregnable fortress, a masterpiece of Arabic military architecture said the Lonely Planet open on the table to give me the look of a solitary adventurer, I had finished my coffee when a man about sixty, quite tall, with white hair, came up to me and asked if I spoke French, I replied yes, of course, and he said in French it’s a pleasure to meet you, he added come, we’ll go visit the Citadel, he paid for my coffee before I could even react and took me by the arm as if I were a lady, he didn’t let it go for the entire visit, and I confess that this unaccustomed tenderness gave our strange couple an entirely natural look, he insisted on paying the entrance fee, he pointed out the machicolations, the hallways that twisted to foil invaders’ attacks, the iron grates on the ceiling to bombard assailants, and it wasn’t until we emerged from the central donjon onto the immense mound in the middle of the ramparts that he began to speak in earnest, I didn’t say anything, I wanted to listen first, feel, try to make out if it was to my advantage to do business with him or not, as Lebihan the chief said you have a gift for human relations, the contact had spoken of a source of exceptional interest, which justified my presence, I grew doubtful when I realized that it was impossible to settle this busines
s through the mail, a real exceptional source doesn’t take risks, normally we never meet, it’s a Syrian network that forwards the information but here the nice source held my arm as if he were my father, at the windswept summit of the Citadel of Aleppo the grey, from which we could see the whole city, the big mosque below, the countless pigeons whirling around the minaret, the black rooftops of the souk, the little cupolas of the caravanserai, the modern buildings in the suburbs all the way out to the countryside where the earth looked red in the winter sun, my name is . . . um . . . my name is Harout, his hesitation was not very professional, I began to sense a base trick, my contact’s mistake, I sighed internally, sheesh, all that for this, I said Harout, fine, whatever you like, on my passport at the time my name was Jérôme Gontrand, with a d, I just said “Jérôme,” I was patient you have to know how to wait to be calm I had my butterfly net in hand I waited for Harout to relax a little before I caught him and added him to my collection of Lepidoptera, he was the one who was going to capture me I didn’t know that of course, it was he who would hurtle me into this train five years later, look a city already, probably Modena, just forty kilometers or so until Bologna, the Pendolino slows down, at night all Italian suburbs look alike, during the day too probably, it is Modena, I just caught a glimpse of the sign announcing the station, Modena, pretty little city, sister of Reggio with two specialties, charcuterie and luxury cars, pork and Maseratis that’s a very Italian way of putting it just like my neighbor the Pronto reader he probably wouldn’t turn up his nose at either one, with his Ferrari cap, he should wave it out the window, we just passed close by the Scuderia factories, I remember the historical center of Modena, magnificent, squares, churches, Duomo, just a year ago on Thursday, December 11th Mohammad el-Khatib blew himself up at 5:00 in the morning at the corner of the Piazza Mazzini a few meters away from the synagogue, one of the most beautiful in Italy, the Palestinian born in Kuwait had a Jordanian passport he set fire to his white 205 Peugeot he parked it in front of the synagogue, the policemen on duty tried to intervene with a fire extinguisher but without success, Mohammad waited at the steering wheel in the burning vehicle its doors and windows closed, he waited until the LPG gas exploded and ripped the car apart scattering his body to the four winds, he was possibly already dead carbonized when everything blew up, the synagogue was very slightly damaged, there were no victims, aside from Mohammad and a very old Yorkshire terrier with a heart condition which died from fear in its urine on the second floor of the building across the way, a few broken windows, nothing more, the dog was named “Pace,” peace, strange coincidence that no newspaper revealed—without knowing it Mohammad el-Khatib set off all the anti-terrorist alarms in the world, we all tried to find out if the poor fool was connected to a known cell, if his name was already listed somewhere, in a file, in a report, until the Italian services confirmed the police version, a suicide, not a suicide bomber, just a suicide: Mohammad el-Khatib, unknown, depressive, psychotic, violent, on tranquilizers had set fire to himself maybe without even thinking about the explosion that would follow, he wanted to die in front of the synagogue, maybe die like the Palestinian martyrs in Jerusalem or Tel Aviv, in glory and flames, or maybe sacrifice his life to protest against the occupation, peacefully, or else maybe simply to die, in the heart of a grey December night, when Hades is calling—still the fact is that there were no more Jews to kill in Modena, the synagogue is open only for the high holidays, and at 5:00 in the morning not many people are to be found in the city streets, the carabinieri and the assistant public prosecutor patiently collected the crimson ruins of Mohammad’s body, they gathered them into black plastic bags, the municipal services hurried to make every trace of the death disappear, they cleaned the asphalt, repaired the streetlights, replaced the broken windows and then burned, in a dump, the remains of the old dead pooch whose mistress didn’t know what to do with it, I thought about Attila József, the Hungarian poet who stretched out on the railroad tracks near Lake Balaton to get himself cut into three pieces by the first train, or into two lengthwise by the sharp wheels, Attila József had a twofold influence in Hungary, poetic and deadly, if I can put it that way, dozens of poètes maudits or over-lucid teenagers came down to die on the tracks at the same place he did, or, when the railroad administration, alarmed, decided to fence off the place, a little further up on the same line—in the same way Mohammad was following the example of the Palestinian martyrs those little solar Christs who cut their bodies in half at the waist with a belt of explosives, Nathan Strasberg told me that their heads were propelled dozens of meters high into the air, like a plastic bottle by a firecracker, I imagine their final moments, they contemplate Jerusalem one last time, from so high up, in a final blink of their eyes they see the Dome of the Rock shining, at the top of their final ascension, at the point of equilibrium, as when you throw a ball into the air, their bleeding heads freeze for a split second in the sky before falling back down—there are traditions in suicide, groups, fraternities: hanging, somewhat rustic, firearms and knives, more warlike and manly means of transport, resolutely modern, that of poison or bleeding into your bath in the old style, of gas with or without explosion, of being burned alive, for my part I belong to the category of the drowned, water signs tempted by the total disappearance of their bodies in the dark stream, Mohammad el-Khatib demonstrated as he died, he made one final gesture, maybe the only one that counted for him, that December morning a few hundred meters from the train station that we’re hurtling through, he was taking his place with the most famous deaths of his people, joining them despite his Italian exile, his suicide didn’t stop Luciano Pavarotti from getting married two days later at the Teatro di Modena (the theater is the artists’ church, he would say) a few hundred meters away, with 700 guests, among them Bono the U2 singer and Zucchero who sang “Stand By Me” in the midst of Armani dresses, policemen on horseback, jewels, male and female socialites, the tenors Placido Domingo and José Carreras, a gospel choir, and a string ensemble surely to help Mohammad el-Khatib and the dead dog climb to paradise, there are so many ways to react to suffering and injustice, Pavarotti put a list of humanitarian organizations on his wedding register, the Palestinian of Modena set fire to himself in front of an empty synagogue and Harout in Aleppo held me by the arm as he tried to explain something to me that I did not understand, on top of the citadel, on the big windswept terreplein, something to do with eighty-year-old massacres, with death marches in the middle of the desert, and I couldn’t see what this had to do with our negotiations, after half an hour I finally interrupted him, I was freezing and wanted to get straight to the point, he replied don’t worry, don’t worry you’ll get your information, you’ll know everything you want to know, and even more, at the highest level, you can find out the color of Hafez al-Assad’s boxer shorts if that strikes your fancy, you’ll get special channels to negotiate with the Syrians if necessary and an attentive ear at the presidential palace, everything you want finally in Syria and Lebanon, but on one condition: that France officially recognize the genocide of the Armenians—I was stunned, I couldn’t believe my ears, this guy was definitely off his rocker, what could I do about recognition of the Armenian genocide, he smiled at me very calmly, I said to him listen, you should really speak with someone at the embassy, it’s diplomats you need I think, in any case I’ll see what I can do, Harout interrupted me and said don’t worry, there’s no hurry you know, it was already so long ago that it can wait a few more years, Harout was in fact only the representative of “honorable correspondents” whose services and information would possibly turn out to be so useful to France that despite the damages produced in Franco-Turkish relations the National Assembly on January 18, 2001 finally adopted the bill recognizing the Armenian genocide whereas in 1998 a similar initiative had not fared so well, the text having been “lost” in the Senate, where it was never placed on the agenda, and I don’t know to this day if the man or rather men that Harout represented had something to do with that business or not
, in Aleppo in 1997 in any case official recognition of the genocide by France seemed entirely unlikely, and one year later the Assembly voted unanimously for the act the first time, what’s more a big historic conference was organized at the Sorbonne, the Turks were seething with rage and burned the tricolor in Ankara, the French presented themselves once again as the Just and France as the homeland of human rights, the deputies all embraced each other as they left the chamber, some had difficulty holding back their tears as if they themselves had just saved thousands of men from the massacre, forgetting that the bodies had been sleeping for almost a hundred years already in Deir ez-Zor in the Syrian desert, around Aleppo or in Eastern Anatolia, that little historic Armenia where the best proof of the destruction is the absence of Armenians today, where have they all gone, they disappeared, disappeared from Van, from Diyarbakir, from Erzurum—in May 1915 the prefect of Jezireh complained about the corpses carried along by the Euphrates, linked two by two, killed with a bullet in the back or by the long knives of the Circassians or the Chechens whom the Ottomans recruited as stalwart executioners, Harout told me all this in Aleppo, at the bar of the Baron Hotel where the Young Turks had slept, come from Stamboul to supervise the butchery, the caravans of deportees coming from the north spent some time in the concentration camp of Bab a few kilometers away from the city, everyone has forgotten, said Harout, everyone has forgotten that the death camps were here, around Aleppo, in Rakka on the Euphrates, in Deir ez-Zor, in Hama, in Homs, as far as the Djebel Druze, almost a million Armenians passed through here on their long march to death and those who survived in the camps were always sent further away, on foot or by wagon, until their numbers were so reduced that it became feasible to kill them by hand, to burn them alive, to blow them up with dynamite or drown them in the river, the witnesses talk about cannibalism caused by famine, children feeding on animal excrement, Arab Bedouins who raided the columns of deportees, kidnapping the nubile young women, a brief apocalypse, a few months, between 1915 and 1916, at a time when the British and French soldiers were falling like flies on the hills of the well-guarded Dardanelles facing the soldiers commanded by Mustafa Kemal who wasn’t called Atatürk yet, Harout told me, over a glass of arak in the shiny old leather armchairs in the Baron Hotel, about the killing of the Armenians and how the community of Aleppo, present in the city since the Crusades, had been ransomed but more or less spared, he told me about the end of the most brilliant Ottoman Empire, the most beautiful empire in the Mediterranean and the Balkans as far as Libya, which still had protected its Christian minorities for centuries, in exchange for a tribute—Harout Bedrossian born in 1931 showed me photos of his family around 1900, the men in tarbooshes and the women in black dresses, he took me to taste the best soujouk and basturma in Aleppo, his French was impeccable and distinguished, colonial, with a beautiful strange accent, we did not speak about work, of course, he was just an intermediary, like me, we were two suitcase-carriers, shady businessmen, on good terms and nothing more, the man or men he represented were businessmen close to government ministers whose palms they greased to get the right to deal with foreign countries, clients of Alaouite bigwig apparatchiks ruling over a country of countless varieties of police and information services in the country of cages and prisons with no exit, its desert littered with Armenian bones that the government glorified mostly to annoy the Turks their hereditary enemies, the Turks spearhead in the fight against the Axis of Evil, with whom military cooperation was in full swing, France was training Turkish officers in military schools, French officers left to train in Turkey, materiel was exchanged for expertise as well as information mainly about Iran and the Russian Caucasus, despite appearances our bilateral relations were entirely cordial and a few hundred thousand dead and forgotten Armenians were not going to jeopardize the geo-strategic equilibrium of the post-Cold War, we would go on working together, nothing stops, even when the deputies legislated for Turkey’s own good, to bring it, they said, to look its past in the face or something like that, which made the ex-Ottomans in the wings laugh out loud, France would do better to set its own corpses in order, the France that in 1939 evacuated the last Armenians during the Alexandretta affair, with the cynicism proper to the Republic, after having put down the Syrian revolts it sold part of the Syrian territory to the enemy, France enraged and violent bombed the civilians of Damascus furiously in 1945 as it was leaving, a farewell gift, policy of scorched earth, I’ll withdraw my guns but I’ll use them one last time, leaving a few hundred unknown dead on the ground, nothing really serious, some Arabs, some treacherous and incomprehensible Orientals for General Oliva-Roget the one responsible for the gunfire, convinced that British agent-provocateurs were behind the riots that he suppressed before heading off with weapons and baggage for Paris to report to De Gaulle the great shepherd of warriors, France embarrassed Turkey in 1998 by throwing thousands of Armenian bones in its face, to which the Turks retorted with thousands of Algerian corpses, and this same Parliament of the Fifth Republic which had voted for the law of amnesty for war crimes in Algeria officially recognized the Armenian genocide, moved to tears, in 2001—the massacres of others are always less awkward, memory is always selective and history always official, I remember with Marianne in the Dardanelles the Turkish guide sang the praises of Atatürk father of the nation great organizer of the resistance on the peninsula, destined for a noble fate: that destroyer of the Empire had rehabilitated the Young Turks as soon as he came to power in 1923, after they had been tried in Istanbul in 1919 and condemned for the massacres of 1915-1916, to recognize the genocide today would be to betray the Sacred Memory of the mustachioed Father of the Turks, just as repealing the 1968 law of amnesty for Algeria is impossible and pointless, a betrayal of the Memory of the victorious General: Memory, that mortuary of texts and monuments, of miscellaneous engraved tombs, of textbooks, laws, cemeteries, handfuls of ex-soldiers, or dead soldiers rotting beneath rich gravestones, no paltry almost anonymous crosses in a cemetery of multitudes, but a marble vault, solitary like that of Charles Montagu Doughty-Wylie in Kilitbahir in the Dardanelles: the British officer fallen in April 1915 was probably the only one of his contingent who could speak Turkish fluently, who knew the Empire he was fighting against intimately, where he had resided as consul between 1906 and 1911, in Konya and Cilicia, Charles Doughty also mustached had then been a military attaché to the Ottoman troops during the Balkan war, in charge of organizing aid for the wounded, he even won a decoration for his bravery and his selflessness, the sultan pinned a crystal rose onto his jacket lapel, ironic medal, Charles Doughty would get a Turkish bullet full in the face on top of a remote hill in the Mediterranean, without being able to enjoy the sublime view over the Aegean, the Trojan hills he knew so well, torn apart by naval cannons—and he certainly did not know, at the moment of death, that the Armenians that he had saved in 1909 in Cilicia were in the process of being massacred yet again, this time without anyone being able to intervene, neither the American consul nor the few witnesses to the massacres, in 1909 in Konya Charles Doughty-Wylie and his wife receive a visit from a British traveling archeologist, Gertrude Bell, who photographs them in their garden, in the company of their servant and their huge black poodle, Mrs. Doughty-Wylie in a white dress, wearing a hat, with an unattractive face, hard features, jealous, perhaps, of the adventuress’ success with her husband, with reason—Gertrude is in love with the handsome Charles, the first female “intelligence officer” in Her Majesty’s government is taken with the elegant soldier diplomat, she will go pay her respects in secret to his grave, in the Dardanelles, a few years later, when she is plotting the formation of modern Iraq and offers the throne to Faysal King of the Arabs, Gertrude Bell the archeologist spy is surely responsible for many of the woes of the region, I thought of her in Baghdad in front of the museum she founded that had just been pillaged, they would find Mesopotamian cylinder seals as far away as America, everyone offered you ancient relics, the people from the UN left with their pockets full of an
cient coins, statuettes and medieval manuscripts, the disemboweled country was losing its riches from its bowels and Gertrude Bell’s grave, green and silent, was still there in Baghdad where no one remembered her anymore or her role in the birth of the country, her intrigues or her friendship with T. E. Lawrence of Arabia, or her mysterious death, suicide or accident, of an overdose of sleeping pills on July 12, 1926: I slept in Gertrude Bell’s room at the Baron Hotel in Aleppo, thinking about Charles Doughty-Wylie and the Armenians, before going on with my tour, as a good carnival tourist, I went to Latakiyah, by train, from the Aleppo station where the Istanbul Express used to arrive after having made the tour of the Taurus Mountains—the Syrian train that crossed the mountains had no windows, I was absolutely frozen in the compartment, now I’m suffocating, I have a terrible hangover, I’m all shaky, blurry, sticky, in Latakiyah the sky was purple after the rain, the immense sea an unsettling grey I booked a room in a hotel with the absurd name of “The Gondola,” I had dinner in a restaurant run by Greeks, the fish was quite good as I remember it with a sesame sauce, there was nothing to do in Latakiayah aside from drinking in a pretty sordid bar where Russian pilots were on a binge, drunk as only Slavs can be, two giants from the Urals with uniforms and caps were dancing a grotesque, monstrous waltz, tenderly clasping each other their huge paws placed on their shoulders, they swayed from one foot to the other as they sang some Russian song, they were drinking undiluted arak straight from the bottle to the great disgust of the owner, a tanned slightly overwhelmed Syrian, the two ex-Soviet bears tumbled over a table provoking the hilarity of their comrades who offered me a drink, the boss wanted very much to throw them out but didn’t dare—I went back drunk to my not very cheerful hotel room, on the wall photos of Venice plunged me into depression I felt more alone than ever Marianne had left me Stéphanie was about to leave me my shadowy profession was one of the most sordid there is I looked at the ceiling or the reproductions of gondolas as I thought about Harout Bedrossian’s dead Armenians, about the Kurds and Arabs duped by Gertrude Bell, about the Dardanelles about Troy the well-guarded about the secret lagoon in the winter fog about death everywhere around me I thought about the Syrian prisons the hanged men the tortured Islamists about all those wasted existences thrown into the sea like the rain that was pelting hard on the window and now a fine Italian drizzle streaks the night horizontally in the outskirts of Bologna, and despite the suitcase the decision the new life before me I am in no better shape than in that hotel room in Latakiyah on the Syrian coast the profession of solitude despite the contact of bodies despite Sashka’s caresses I feel as if I’m unreachable as if I’m already gone already far away locked up in the bottom of my briefcase full of torturers and the dead with no hope of ever emerging into the light of day, my skin insensitive to the sun will remain forever white, smooth as the marble gravestones in Vukovar
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