Zone

by Mathias Enard

  XIV

  destitute magnificent those Palestinians with the heavy boots what a story I wonder if it’s true Intissar washes Marwan’s body it’s very sad all that so sad, I’d have liked to wash Andrija’s body caress it with a sponge one last time, the stories intersect, Marwan’s clothes burning in the Beirut sink like my uniforms in my Venetian bathroom, one more coincidence, poor Intissar, despite the victory cries of some people the summer of 1982 must not have been one of the more cheerful ones, I wonder if Rafael Kahla the author of the story was in Beirut then, no doubt, it’s likely, how old is he, fifty-four says the back cover, yes it’s possible he was just going on thirty at the time, Marwan’s age perhaps, September 1982 the shadow is looming heavily over the Palestinians, they’ll take refuge in Algiers then in Tunis, all those fighters scattered in the Zone—Rafael Kahla about whom I know nothing left Lebanon maybe at the same time as Intissar, maybe to go into self-imposed exile in Tangier, Tingis of the Phoenicians where he will meet Jean Genet, with whom he will talk again about the Palestinians: in September 1982 Jean Genet spends a few days in Beirut in the company of Leila Shahid the diplomat for the Cause, the very active representative of the PLO in Paris who had a file with us as long as your arm, I forget how but the two lightheartedly send Genet to Shatila on Sunday, September 21st, the first day of autumn and the day after the massacre, Jean Genet the heavenly gravedigger strokes the bluish corpses swollen from flies in the narrow streets of the death camp, he walks around, his gaze follows the deceased over to the common grave, he discovers silence and stillness, the smell of flesh in the scent of the sea, maybe that’s the meaning of Rafael Kahla’s story, Marwan’s body abandoned at a crossroads, unreachable, Intissar washes Marwan’s body just as Genet washed the bodies of the old men and children who were killed in Shatila, in front of the eyes of Israeli soldiers who provided the bulldozers to erase the blunder—Andi old friend I couldn’t go look for you, I couldn’t, we heard the volley of gunfire we saw you there, lying in your excrement, and we began fighting, the shots whistled around us, the same bullets that had just gone through your chest, I didn’t have time to cry, no time to caress you, ten seconds after seeing you and hurrying towards you I was stretched out on the ground weapon in hand forced to crawl to escape, to run away leaving you there because we were almost surrounded, trapped, outnumbered, overwhelmed by the pack of mujahideen around us, the last time I saw you your eyes were wide open to the Bosnian sky a smile on your face a contraction I didn’t have Intissar’s luck, I fled in a cowardly way maybe because I didn’t love you enough maybe my own life mattered more than yours maybe life isn’t like it is in books, I was a crawling animal frightened by the sight of blood I had often thought that I could die but not you, we thought you were immortal like Ares himself, I was afraid, all of a sudden, I fled in a cowardly way, an insect trying to escape a boot, we all ran away abandoning you there in the countryside quivering with spring, but don’t worry you are avenged, you are doubly avenged for Francis the coward is in the process of disappearing, after his long journey among the shadows of the Zone he is erasing himself, I will become Yvan Deroy, I owe you this new life, Andi, it’s over, I’m off, we’ll see each other again on the White Island at the mouth of the Danube, when the time comes, farewell Marwan farewell Andrija and shit now I’m crying, this story made me cry I wasn’t expecting this, it’s unfair I rub my eyes turn my head to the window so no one sees me I’m not in very good shape I’m exhausted probably I can’t manage to stop the tears it’s ridiculous now all I need is the conductor to show up, how foolish I’d look, crying like Mary Magdalene a few kilometers outside Florence, it must be the effect of the gin, a trick of perfidious Albion, no, that story is taking me back without my realizing it, too many details, too many things in common, better set the book down for now, even in Venice in limbo in the depths of the lagoon I didn’t cry much and now almost ten years later I’m weeping like a schoolgirl, the weight of years, the weight of the suitcase, the weight of all those bodies collected right and left preserved embalmed in photography with the endless lists of their lives their deaths I’ll bury them now, bury the briefcase and all it contains and farewell, I’ll go join Caravaggio in a pretty harbor at the foot of a little mountain, stuff myself with pasta till it’s coming out of my nose, learn the The Divine Comedy by heart and write my Memoirs and poems like Eduardo Che Rózsa the international warrior, just after Iraq I saw him again on TV, by chance, in a British documentary that Stéphanie almost forced me to watch, she wanted to know, Stéphanie wanted to know what I had seen what I had done in the war, for her those two years of my existence were the key, the heart of the mystery, she wanted to cure me of it, she was convinced I had to talk about it, that I had to empty myself of my memories and confess and she’d listen to me and everything would be all better, of course I knew she wasn’t ready to hear me, so I said nothing, but she returned to the attack trying by every means possible to make me speak, she invented pretexts, today I read a very interesting article about Eastern Slavonia returning to Croatia, I could see her coming a mile off, I’d say Oh? she’d insist what is it like, over there? and so on, I’d get irritated without understanding that at bottom her questions were legitimate, and also she was so beautiful I liked being with her so I was patient, at the time out of respect for the Agency we were living in hiding so to speak, obviously everyone must have known, Lebihan the paternal boss winked at me, he who was so discreet, so professional—I dry my tears, that’s it I’m not crying any more, thank you Mr. Lebihan, it’s over, nothing like your reddened face to soothe my aching heart, on the other side of the aisle the flautist is still sleeping, her husband apparently hasn’t noticed anything, he is looking out the window, trying to pierce the darkness of the countryside, soon Florence, then the train won’t stop any more, it will go fast now, I hope, in a little over two hours I’ll be at the Piazza lost in the crowd of tourists, when I think that I could have been there at ten in the morning if I hadn’t missed the plane, a trick of the gods without a doubt, a prank of Fate to punish me with twelve hours on the train, this morning scarcely had the TGV gotten underway than I fell asleep to awaken in the Alps, in the middle of snow and ice peaks around Megève, it’s the effect of the amphetamine that woke me up probably, I feel as if it’s been a constant night for forty-eight hours for days for years will I see the dawn will I see the dawn will Yvan Deroy the madman see the dawn tomorrow morning as he leaves his hotel room like a good tourist he’ll go to the Forum or to Saint Peter’s, Rome city of autocrats of assassins and sermonizers, I hope tomorrow it will be broad daylight, I hope daybreak will come too for Intissar, the rosy-fingered dawn will envelop Beirut and Tangier, Alexandria and Salonika, one after the other, will draw them out of the shadow, in our war there weren’t many women, a few cold savage ones and others who were tender and friendly, who came as nurses, as cooks, the women were mostly widows mothers sisters, victims, the others were just the exception to the rule, women were mainly images in wallets like the sister of Andi the brave, or Marianne whose photograph I too carried, like all soldiers since there have been painted images—I never looked at it, the photo, I never took it out of my pocket that image of Marianne taken in Turkey by the sea, it was slowly growing moldy along with my credit card, between the folds of leather bleached by sweat, in the beginning I wrote letters, we wrote letters, except Andrija whose parents were right nearby: unlike Marcel Maréchal and the poilus of 1914 I never knew what to say, I was ashamed maybe or afraid of frightening my family, I dished out commonplaces about the powerful enemy, about the courage of our troops, about victory and I said I was doing well, that I wasn’t taking any needless risks, that I had good comrades who were watching out for me, that’s it, then of course the letters became spaced farther apart, they were replaced by a few quick phone calls made for free from some operation HQ, more and more rarely, and quite certainly my parents and Marianne got used to the idea that nothing serious would happen to me, since I didn’t give them any n
ews, either good or bad, but I knew afterwards that my mother was still pretty worried, that she went to church every morning at 7:00 to pray for me and that she burned a considerable number of candles, maybe that’s what saved me after all, all that smoke all that melted wax in the 15th arrondissement in Paris, I find it hard to picture my sister in my place at the front like Intissar, who knows, she might have made an exceptional fighter, after all she is capable of deploying a wealth of contrariness, she is headstrong and patriotic—Marianne wrote to me often, she related her days as a Parisian student to me in detail, gave me the latest cultural and political news, told me she missed me and urged me to come home as soon as possible, she had assumed the role of the faithful fiancée, she would have made a magnificent widow, even more so than Stéphanie, Stéphanie would not have waited for me, she had too much of a feel for the current situation and for time, a taste for the present, much less Christian, in this sense, than Marianne the bourgeois, Stéphanie wanted to know, though, she was curious about the war she had seen the photo where we were all three of us holding court, Andrija and Vlaho and me in uniform, it had become an obsession, to understand and make me “clear the air” as she said, erase the trauma that she imagined, that’s why I saw Commander Eduardo Rózsa again in a documentary on Channel 4, Stéphanie showed up at my place one evening for dinner saying look I recorded this show yesterday, we could watch it, it might interest you, she was surely lying, the film was dated 1994 not very likely that any channel had shown it the day before, she must have moved heaven and earth to find images showing foreign fighters in Croatia, she thought I had fought in an international brigade, which could easily have been the case, I was in a good mood I said why not, if it makes you happy, after all we’d have to go there eventually, I was just back from Trieste I felt happy, it had rained all throughout my stay with Globocnik and Stangl, among the remains of Aktion Reinhardt scattered over the Adriatic, I was happy to see Stéphanie again, we had had dinner, I should never have let myself be persuaded to watch this film, it was in fact an investigation into the death of the British photographer Paul Jenks, dead from a bullet in the neck on the Osijek side, in mysterious circumstances, Paul was a photographer mainly for the Guardian his companion Sandra Balsells worked at the time for the London Times, she too had covered the war and in 1994 she made the journey to Croatia again with a television crew to try to figure out how Paul had been killed, the man she loved, that seems easy to say, she returned to the place where he died on the front where they had worked together in 1991, Stéphanie stared wide-eyed at the screen, she discovered flat desolate landscapes covered in snow, the immense Slavonic plain, she discovered the grey and khaki of war, as if she saw them for the first time, because she was in my presence, I should have known it would end badly, I should have understood from the way she clutched my arm, the way I was beginning to feel cold, in front of the television screen, I listened to what the Croatian soldiers were saying behind the English commentary, guys I thought I recognized sinister faces at every checkpoint, a blackened aluminum kettle that could have been Vlaho’s, a street in Osijek, mismatched uniforms, straight flat highways, muddy fields, destroyed farms, the smell of frost of gas of burnt rubber and the frozen face of Sandra Balsells in back of the car, her few words, the flowers she puts in the ditch where Paul Jenks fell, near the railroad a kilometer before Tenjski Antunovac a poor village that had been occupied by the Serbs, the journalists suspect that the bullet that hit him in the back of the skull didn’t come from that side but from closer by on the right, from the headquarters of the international brigade headed by Eduardo Rózsa the patriot, when I heard his name I started, he appeared on the screen, just the same, a little chubbier maybe, Rózsa the smiling, with his round mug his somber eyes and his humor, of course he denies everything, he says that’s impossible, that Paul Jenks was killed by a Serb sniper from Antunovac, that the other journalist found strangled during a patrol happened unfortunately upon a Chetnik scout, what could he say, Sandra Balsells observed all these soldiers who may have killed the man she loved, Stéphanie watched Sandra Balsells and then me, she looked as if she were asking, what about you, what do you think? who killed Paul Jenks? while my eyes were glued to the screen, in January 1994 when the journalists return to Croatia there is a permanent ceasefire on that part of the front, they get those white ice-cream trucks from the UN which help them get into occupied territory, where the Serbs are, they want to go see the four demolished houses of Tenjski Antunovac, the Serbs are friendly and cooperative, they agree to let them climb up to the highest point, a firing post in the ruins of one of the last houses in the village, a soldier even brings them a magnificent sniper’s brand-new M76 with a very handsome gunsight so they can see with their own eyes, and here Sandra Balsells takes the weapon, she presses her hand against the angle of the butt and puts her eye against the sight, under the black lens-hood, she looks straight north towards the ditch where Paul fell, what is she thinking at that instant, what is she thinking, she is in the exact same position as the shooter who may have killed Paul, beneath the same roof, an identical rifle against her shoulder, she observes the details of the Croatian post 800 meters away, so precise in the crosshairs it seems you just have to stretch out your arm to touch them, there is no longer a corpse in the ditch, she sees the spray of the frozen yellow flowers she put there, is she picturing Paul’s body, is she crying like Intissar the Palestinian I don’t think so, she keeps silent, her long golden hair caresses the varnished wood of the weapon, Athena the perverse has given her the possibility of seeing what no one has ever seen, the dark side, the very hand of death her eye pressed against the lens her breath precise, Sandra lets go of the rifle, a Serb soldier takes it, does he know who she is probably not, they go back down the ladder, get into their car again after thanking the Serbs for their hospitality, in the back seat Sandra doesn’t know anymore who killed Paul, if it was Rózsa’s mercenaries the Chetniks or the goddess herself, she has doubts, Stéphanie is moved to tears, I pour myself a big glass of hard stuff the investigation continues, John Sweeney is now questioning Frenchie, Eduardo Che Rózsa’s Welsh adjunct in the international brigade, not a bad guy, a soldier, he reminds me of Vlaho with his jagged teeth, I wonder if we would have bumped off a journalist if we had to, no doubt about it, after all a photographer is a kind of spy bought by the highest bidder, a parasite who lives off war without fighting it, all those freelance guys were like us, young and inexperienced at the beginning of the conflict, like us they trembled with fear beneath the shells from the Yugoslav tanks, for most of them it was their first assignment, their first contact with war, like us they saw their first corpses like us they shoved their gear in front of their comrades and exchanged bloated, exaggerated tales, everyone outdoing each other in the number of horrors they’d seen, or how close to death they’d come, I’m not watching the screen I’m plunged into my memories I’ve understood that they’ll never find out who killed Paul Jenks they’ll never know I keep drinking leaving Stéphanie to her disgust with mercenaries soldiers Slavonic hail at the end of the tape she stays silent a while she hesitates to ask me questions she doesn’t know where to begin suddenly she realizes something she says so you killed people? and I’m flabbergasted, this cultivated mind is incapable of admitting that she too is touched indirectly by violence, splattered by my actions, this civil servant who prepares strategic options for the French army doesn’t realize what there is at the other end of her work, no, I spent a few months gathering mushrooms and singing dirty songs, I feel a mute rage rising in me, what exactly does she want to know, but . . . how many? it reminds me of those teenage trysts, when you ask “so you’ve slept with how many guys?” I have no idea, Stéphanie is stubborn, she looks like a judge, she insists, a lot? I answer truthfully, I have no idea, it’s impossible to know, and she is so ignorant of what I’m talking about that she thinks she can see on my shoulders thousands of corpses, all of a sudden, she imagines I’m Franz Stangl or Odilo Globocnik, she has tears of
anger in her eyes, she feels deceived, she is discovering that her lover is a murderer, I down my drink at one go and pour myself another, you’re an alcoholic killer, she says between sobs and she begins laughing, laughing and crying at the same time, then she calms down, she calms down dries her tears and says oh my, oh my, she gathers herself together, things follow their course in her mind, she’s pragmatic, she’s curious, she wants to know, she wants to understand, she wants to put herself in my place she insists and what’s it like to kill someone? with a small hesitant voice, almost beseeching, so I explode, I think of Lowry and Margerie in Sicily, I say to her you’ll see for yourself, I get up I find the Yugoslav 7.65 in the wardrobe Stéphanie is dumbfounded like a good conjuror I hand her the weapon I show her the cartridges in the clip I shove the breech lift the safety catch I say to her you see there’s a bullet in the chamber she is paralyzed with fear I go over to her I say you want to know what it’s like to kill someone? so I grab her by the wrist I put the gun in her hand she doesn’t react I place my finger next to hers in the trigger she doesn’t understand she is paralyzed with fear and surprise I stick the muzzle in my mouth Stéphanie shouts no no no she fights I put pressure on her finger she presses despite herself on the release shouting noooo instinctively she hits me with a terrific left jab worthy of Zeus in the mouth the pistol goes click and that’s it, it falls heavily onto the wood floor, Stéphanie collapses too, she’s hiccupping as she sobs, she looks as if she’s going to throw up, she is curled up on the ground her hair hides her face and I leave, I leave her there like that lying alongside the little black Zastava with no firing pin, to go running down the stairs running down the street running onto the bridge over the Montmartre cemetery and so on until the Place de Clichy without even noticing that it was raining I arrive soaked at a bar a burning pain in my jaw I order a brandy that I down in one gulp, I feel my spirits lifting—my spirits are lifting in the midst of drunks, as the jukebox is playing Claude François’s “As Usual,” the original version of “My Way,” what idiocy, what got hold of me, and it’s my turn to have a big sticky cry, standing at the bar, in the midst of a choir of lushes who are repeating in chorus as uuuusual, guilt is flooding through me again now, 1,500 kilometers away and months later, it all can’t be ascribed to the alcohol, what cunning god breathed that idea into me, that macabre, violent farce, Stéphanie convinced that my skull was going to shatter and stain the ceiling, Sandra Balsells her eye in the gunsight, Intissar washing Marwan’s body, Malcolm Lowry with his hands around his wife’s neck, what a trip, the train slows down, we’re in a suburb of Florence the sublime, capital of beauty and tourism—the museums even the Uffizi gallery always give off a funereal smell, artworks, artworks stuck in time and space hung on a nail or placed on the floor, artworks that are more or less macabre like Caravaggio’s decapitations or stuffed human beings, in the Cairo Museum Nasser forbids the crowd of tourists from seeing the mummies of pharaohs, those little men dried by time their inner organs carefully preserved in alabaster vases, ever since his adolescence Nasser has found it disgraceful that colonialist foreigners come to satisfy their curiosity in front of the embalmed remains of the glorious fathers of Egypt, imagine, he said, that a group of Arab archeologists wanted to unearth the kings of France in Saint-Denis to exhibit their coffins and their most intimate bones to the view of all, it seems to me that the French government would oppose that, it’s likely, after all the head of Louis XVI was brandished on the Place de la Concorde but we haven’t seen it since, so Egyptian mummies are locked up in a big room forbidden to the public, except that of Tut-Ankh-Amun and his wooden sarcophagus—on the other hand the Egyptians don’t have that same delicacy with the dozens of animals swaddled 3,000 years ago, ibis, dogs and jackals, cats, swallows, garter snakes and cobras, calves and bulls, falcons, baboons, perch and catfish, a whole zoo preserved in strips of linen and resin fills the Cairo Museum, dignified and dusty like an old Englishwoman, a museum of natural history, before in this kind of establishment they didn’t hesitate to exhibit stuffed men, I read somewhere that a little city in Spain by the sea still possessed, not long ago, a 150-year-old bushman warrior, in a glass cage, with spear and tackle, the plaster skin was regularly repainted ebony black which earned him the nickname El Negro, he sat in state between two human fetuses that were swimming in formaldehyde, in the company of a two-headed cow and a five-footed sheep, the Bushman had been bought in Paris at the taxidermists Verreaux Fils that provided half the museums in Europe with specimens of various species, El Negro disinterred secretly the day after his burial in Botswana was sent to Paris by boat accompanied by a number of skeletons from the same cemetery, after having been eviscerated his skin dried with salt his body smeared with a special preparation, stuffed in France he immediately interested a veterinarian who set him up in 1880 in his collection, I forget where near Barcelona, by the Mediterranean, and the nice black man with his spear and a borrowed loincloth was the delight of generations of Catalan schoolchildren, for he was four and a half feet tall, more or less their height, and I imagine the children playing at hunting lions in the playground after having seen it, for almost a hundred years: dusted, repaired, repainted El Negro was forgotten in the back of a provincial museum until one day they decided to give it a proper burial, out of decency, there had to be an international campaign for the museum of natural history in question to agree to part with the jewel of its collection, but the Bushman ended up finding its way back to Africa again, on a plane, the government of Botswana organized a national funeral for this unknown warrior whose remains now rest next to his own people—in Florence the Noble of course there’s no stuffed black man in the Uffizi gallery, no animal or human mummies, pictures statues gods goddesses saints all the nobility of representation, from the perfectly proportioned busts to the golden hair of Botticelli, one of the most popular museums in Italy, where Caravaggio’s aegis sits enthroned, the Gorgon’s blood-red face on a round shield, a corseless head with crazy eyes, the snakes are still moving in Medusa’s mane, did cultured Stéphanie admire Caravaggio so obsessed with decapitated heads and blood, maybe, always that curiosity about death, that desire to see her own death in that of others, to guess, to pierce the secret of the final instant just as Caravaggio depicts himself in the suffering face of the Gorgon with the cut neck, Stéphanie curious about my war exploits, my courage or my cowardliness, Stéphanie lying on the ground, broken with fear and tears, next to my useless 7.65 abandoned on the floor, did she get an answer to her question, was that really what she was asking me, I’m obscure even to myself, rattled by Fate like a convoy in this tunnel where traces of humidity gleam on the blackened concrete underneath Florence city of flowers