Zone

by Mathias Enard

  XVIII

  in Rome in 1598 Michelangelo Merisi called Caravaggio organizes his first decapitation: he has the head of an old horse cut off by an athletic brigand recruited in front of one of the many houses of ill repute around the mausoleum of Augustus, in his studio he attentively observes the naked killer’s muscles bulge under the weight of the sword, the curve of shoulder when he brings the blade down onto the animal’s throat, the nostrils smoking from fever, prostrate with illness the animal is condemned Caravaggio has no time to draw it of course, he studies the reflection on the metal when it penetrates the neck the spurt of black blood that soaks the warrior’s thigh and turns purple, the horse’s legs convulse, the metal returns to the charge, the savage mercenary again lifts the weapon and strikes higher up opening a new wound the horse has stopped moving the man has reached the vertebrae, the executioner is red and soaked to his waist, he bends forward to finish his work, Michelangelo Merisi watches him grasp the mane cut off the last pieces of flesh and with his left hand brandish the heavy head, effortlessly, it is dripping and its eyes are staring, Caravaggio feels nauseous, his two domestics throw buckets of water over the shuddering executioner, one can almost see his heart beating in his hairless chest, Caravaggio starts drawing, muscles, swords, gushes of blood, while the hired killer washes himself, before Merisi the invert pays him for something entirely different, a ritual that was much more reprehensible at the time than the death of a sick horse, Rome is a somber dangerous city full of daggers disfigured prostitutes cutthroats dark alleyways, Caravaggio loves this city, after his flight he won’t rest until he returns to it, even though Naples has its charm, its distress, even though you can find lovers and heads to cut off as far as Malta the prim, it’s always Rome the plebes of Rome the pomp of Rome that will attract Caravaggio the sacrificer, the man in love with bodies night and decapitation, Rome that’s coming quickly closer in the Tuscan night, tomorrow the Americans to whom Antonio the bartender is serving another Chianti might stop at Saint Louis of the French, San Luigi dei Francesi, on their way to the Piazza Navona, to see the three canvases in the Contarelli Chapel, the calling, the inspiration, and the martyrdom of St. Matthew, among the most famous works by Caravaggio, the sword of the naked man standing over the saint lying on the ground, the beauty of the angel, a few meters away in the first chapel to the left are the commemorative plaques for the French soldiers who died in Italy, the officers of free France who commanded Moroccans Tunisians Algerians Senegalese West Indians, no one looks at them, poor forgotten guys, the Moroccan troops and the Algerian goumiers, sacrificed so easily by the allied generals—withdrawn from the Italian front in July 1944 after having left 10,000 dead and missing there, they take part in the landing in Provence, will travel across all of France before crossing the Rhine in April 1945, it seems to me I’ve seen their mule trains from the window, in Italy the fear of “Moroccaning” becomes a real panic, blown out of all proportion given the facts, a few hundred violent acts by the colonial troops, they had to eat, to cheer themselves up, to earn something from war that otherwise gave nothing but pain, the French officers had the authority to send their soldiers to the firing squad at the slightest misdemeanor, without any further ado than a note sent to headquarters, there were about a hundred of these, a hundred guys shot for one reason or another, among the thousands of members of the French Expeditionary Corps that would not see the Atlas again, the Rif, Constantine, Kabylia, many of the survivors would put their military experience to the service of the FLN a few years later, some would be tortured, killed without warning or caught in ambushes facing the colonial officers who had led them to victory or to a plaque, a little marble plaque a few feet away from Caravaggio’s Saint Matthew, a plaque to summarize the thousands of names in French cemeteries scattered throughout Italian soil between Naples and Lake Trasimeno: in Salonika, once Drifting Cities was shut, between taverns and bottles of Macedonian wine, thanks to a travel guide bought by chance in a newspaper kiosk I went to see the Zeitenlick necropolis, the cemetery for the Balkan campaign, where there are 9,000 French graves and the bones of 8,000 Serbs from the years 1915–1917, forgotten next to a large avenue, in the middle of town, the survivors of the Dardanelles, landed in 1915 to support the retreating Serbs, in the necropolis there is a well-kept British plot, a Russian section, an Italian monument, a giant Serb ossuary, a corner for the Algerian Muslims, for the Jewish French, for the Buddhists from Indochina, the Madagascans and Senegalese the whole world had come to get murdered by the savage Bulgarians the Germans and their Austrian allies, and the whole world was resting now between the cypresses on the Avenue Langada two kilometers away from the sea, in the August sun, I thought back to my visit to the Dardanelles with Marianne six years earlier, hundreds of pages earlier, now by chance on my own I saw the next episode, the names of those who were still alive when we were discovering the tormented landscapes along the peninsula, the forts of Kilitbahir, Cape Helles, now I could follow their journey, 9,000 more had keeled over a little further away, in the meantime I had waged war myself, I had stopped over in Venice, Marianne had left, I had become a civil servant of the shadows and I found myself alone by chance in Thessalonica before all these graves that so to speak belonged to me, the way Atatürk’s native house belonged to me climbing the little streets of the high city, a restored Ottoman residence, ocher-pink, Mustafa Kemal whose museum I had visited in the Dardanelles, his path was opposite, eastwards, to glorious Anatolia, when he was born in 1881 Salonika was the second-largest city in the Ottoman Empire, peopled half with Sephardic Jews and half with Turks, Greeks, Slavs, and Europeans, Pabst’s Spies from Salonika, that film fascinated me when I was little, why in 1912 after the Balkan Wars did Mustafa Kemal continue his military career, until he sent the British and the French back to the sea in Gallipoli, then sent the Greeks from Asia Minor in 1923, as for the Jews they pursued their studies, until the Germans caught them in 1941, so that by mid-1943 only a handful remained, scattered among the mountains with the Resistance—the transit camp in Salonika was next to the train station, the trains began leaving in March 1943, for Treblinka, Sobibór, and Birkenau, by August 50,000 people had been deported, and almost 40,000 gassed, I learned all that in the Jewish Museum, before the communities of Athens and Rhodes the community of Thessalonica was destroyed by Alois Brunner the furious specialist, who had arrived in Greece in February 1943, until then anti-Jewish measures had been limited to prohibiting bicycles and radios, Brunner took things in hand, the bull by the horns, he organized a Jewish police of hoodlums to help him in his task, and six months later not a single Jew was officially left in Salonika, the last Prominenten including Grand Rabbi Zevi Koretz were put onto a train headed for one of the camps of Bergen-Belsen, not a question of extermination for him, the Germans feel they owe him something, as well as the 300 Jews of Spanish nationality whom Franco’s consul is calling for, the surprising Spaniards insist on recovering their Jews, so a convoy leaves for Bergen-Belsen, whence a transport is organized for the south, and the Sephardim take the return route to the lands of Isabella of Castille that they left 400 years earlier, through Vichy France, do they meet one another in the stations of Narbonne or Bordeaux, the ones heading for destruction and the ones escaping it, I have no idea, after arriving in Spain they were confined in military buildings in Barcelona: in January 1944 those inhabitants of the Aegean coasts found themselves on the other side of the Mediterranean, after weeks of trains, transit camps, negotiations, privations, and illness, from Macedonia to Saxony from Saxony to France from France to Catalonia before finally being sent to Spanish Morocco, undesirable on the homeland’s soil, and undertaking, for themselves this time, a new exile that would lead some as far as Palestine, luckier in the end than Grand Rabbi Zevi Koretz: he died of typhus just after the liberation of the camps, Zevi Koretz the German-speaking Ashkenazi had understood Alois Brunner’s orders very well and had scrupulously carried them out, he thought he was acting for the best, maybe he was afraid of German
violence, maybe he didn’t know what was awaiting his fellow-citizens around Krakow, we’ll never know—leaving the Museum of Jewish Presence my solitude is beginning to feel more and more weighty, I’m hot, I’m thirsty, the long summer afternoon still has time ahead of it so I’ll go eat and drink in an air-conditioned place, thinking about the journeys of the children of Israel, and trying to imagine Salonika speaking Judeo-Spanish, French, and Turkish, between a hammam, a mosque, and two Byzantine churches, that year the city is the cultural capital of Europe, sad recompense for the few survivors of the former Jerusalem of the Balkans, like Leon Saltiel, whose Memoirs I bought in the museum, Leon Saltiel is Jewish and a communist and after the first measures of the SS in the beginning of 1943, roundups, branding, he joins ELAS, the Greek partisans, in the mountains, where he takes part in some heroic actions, until civil war broke out between the Resistant factions in the beginning of 1944, then Leon Saltiel left the Resistance to return secretly to Salonika accompanied by a comrade from Ioannina, Agatha, with whom he is hopelessly in love, he realizes that his entire family has been deported and that the collaborators are selling off Jewish property, he conceals himself with his fellow fighter and lover at the house of a friend, Stavros, but he is denounced, arrested, tortured and sent to Mauthausen, he arrives after an atrocious journey, in the company of Yugoslav partisans and another Greek Resistant, Manos Hadjivassilis from Macedonia, he too crossed the Balkans on foot rifle in hand before being arrested in Slovenia, Manos kills himself as soon as they arrive in the camp, he throws himself onto the barbed wire, the SS guards finish him off, Leon Saltiel speaks many languages, he makes friends with the Spanish communists who organize resistance in the camp, did he meet Francesc Boix the photographer, it’s likely, Leon Saltiel is sick during the liberation, he stays for two months in an American infirmary, between life and death, he is up and about in June 1945, 3,000 kilometers away from his country, he learns that there has been a civil war, that there has been fighting in Athens, that the communists are opposing the British and the royalists, Leon wants to see Agatha and Salonika again, he gets a passport from the Red Cross and starts out on the long journey, on foot through Austria and Hungary, he reaches Belgrade where he is arrested for reasons he doesn’t understand, ends up being released and sent back to Italy by way of Zagreb with a contingent of prisoners of war, in Venice after two weeks of medical quarantine in a humid transit camp they put him on a train for Ancona, in Ancona he meets some Greeks, they find him a spot on a freighter that finally berths in Patras on December 1st, 1945: on his thirtieth birthday Leon Saltiel is in Greece, he reaches Athens easily and from there gets to Salonika, he’s afraid of what’s waiting for him, in the meantime his hair has grown back, his poor civilian clothes provided by the Red Cross are in ruins, his clogs too, he has a wild beard, hollow eyes, he goes to the center of town, back up Egnatia Avenue, he’ll go back to where he started from, to Stavros’s café the place where he was arrested, he’ll drink a coffee with no sugar, calmly, watching the few post-war cars jolt by, he veers off to the left, to Santa Sophia Street, to the border of the upper town, it’s almost 6:00 P.M., he has a few drachmas in his pocket given to him by his coreligionists in Athens, they also suggested they let someone know of his arrival by phone, he refused, now he’s just a hundred meters away from Stavros’s place, Leon Saltiel hesitates, he could go back down and see the building where his mother lived, his brother-in-law’s shop, even though he knows there’s nothing left there, that they’re all dead, he knows it better than anyone for he has seen the piles of corpses, the summary executions, he has smelled the stench of burnt flesh, when the icy wind made the Danube ripple, he could go to the synagogue, the community has surely planned something for the returning ones, he must not be the only one to come back, he could also go to party headquarters, he doesn’t know if he wants to all that much, to talk, tell stories, explain, there were a few Greeks with him in Mauthausen, a dozen, no Jews, they all died, one of them hanged himself with the cord that was holding his pants up, Adonai, Adonai, Leon has never been religious, the last of his comrades died of pneumonia after the liberation, others had arrived after the evacuation of Auschwitz, some even from Salonika, but they had already left again when Leon got out of the infirmary, the Americans didn’t know how to repatriate him to Greece, he walked along the Danube as far as Vienna, the soldiers looked at him as if he were one of the walking dead and now at the corner of the street a hundred meters away from the café he hesitates, he is ashamed, Stavros is a good friend, was he captured by the Germans too, Leon Saltiel goes up to the café terrace, he glances inside, waits an instant, enters, walks up to the bar, Stavros is there, he hasn’t changed, he stands in front of him, without saying anything, Stavros glances at him absentmindedly without recognizing him, annoyed Leon sits down at a table, he waits, he doesn’t know what to say, he says Stavros a coffee with no sugar please, busy behind the counter the man repeats the order to the kitchen, one no sugar, Leon is at a loss he hesitates to shout Stavros it’s me he remains silent a woman emerges from the kitchen holding a little aluminum tray it’s Agatha, Leon lowers his head, she puts the coffee and the glass of cold water abruptly down on the table, Leon stares at the brown froth in the little cup, he has seen the wedding ring on her right hand, he suddenly thinks of Aris Andreanou who hanged himself in the showers with his belt, of his overlong twisted neck, his eyes looking up, his mouth open, he waits patiently for the coffee grounds to settle, he knows now that neither Agatha nor Stavros is going to recognize him, because he is a ghost, because for them he is dead, he suddenly understands why and how he was arrested, Leon Saltiel drinks his bitter coffee, then a little water, he throws down a coin that rattles on the metal tray, and goes out—I do the same, halfway through Saltiel’s Memoirs I pay for my drinks and I go out, I’ve been reading for a good two hours in English, something I haven’t done since the worthy Institute of Political Science in Paris, the afternoon is far advanced, I climb up to the old city sweating, I need air, I need to see the sea from high up, tomorrow I’ll leave I’m not really sure why but suddenly I want to take my car and go north, to go back to Paris by road, to go through Bulgaria and Serbia, after all I have a French passport, it’s August, there are tourists, I’ll go through the Iron Gates and follow the Danube to Budapest, to see the other side, what does the river look like in Voivodina, on the other shore, in 1997 the war had been over for two years, the region was catching its breath again, what a funny idea when I think about it, to go throw myself into the jaws of the mustachioed Chetnik wolf, without permission, I wasn’t supposed to go to that sort of country, in theory I was supposed to ask for special authorization for all movements abroad, which beats everything for a spy, but really, I didn’t think much could happen to me, aside from my car breaking down, I’d never seen either Belgrade the white, or Novi Sad the Austrian, maybe the Serb souls buried in the military cemetery in Salonika had put this idea in my head, they were trying to take revenge on my Austro-Hungarian ancestors who sent them to their graves, they wanted to lure me into a trap and drown me in the Danube, in October 1915 Kaiser William II backs up the Austrians in battle, on October 9th Belgrade is taken, the Serbs withdraw on all fronts, all the more so since Ferdinand of Bulgaria, to whom Macedonia and Kosovo have been promised, has just stabbed proud Serbia in the back, retreat is necessary, the army is destroyed and its scattered remains will be added to the Allied Front of Salonika, where they will fight until 1917, in all almost 300,000 Serbian soldiers would meet their death during the First World War, they say, while the Austrians would put their occupied country to fire and sword—the report by Rudolph Archibald Reiss in 1915, used for years as propaganda, came back to me, those nice men disemboweled, civilians enucleated, vaginas opened up by bayonet to let the semen of dozens of troops ooze in, noses cut off, ears torn off, all described with the coldness of the forensic police specialist: whether it was used by one side or the other didn’t take away any of the veracity from the testimony, attested
by the force of the revenge, the hatred of whoever espouses that revenge, hatred he will purge, dozens of years later, using it against his enemies, out of fear, fear stemming from tradition, from the legend that impels him too to go towards the other with his blade leading the way, the way the stories of Serbian atrocities drove us, in fear, to cut their corpses up into pieces, terrified no doubt that such warriors had the power to come back to life, the series of Serbo-Croatian massacres always proved the previous story right, without any one ever being wrong, since everyone, like the Austrians in Serbia, could cite an atrocity committed by the other camp, the Other per se, you had to erase his humanity by tearing off his face, prevent him from procreating by cutting off his balls, contaminate him by raping his women, annihilate his descendants by slicing off breasts and pubic hair, return to zero, annul fear and suffering, history is a tale of fierce animals, a book with wolves on every page, Chedo1 is going to cut your throat my child, and he will surely do it, just as surely as you yourself, he thinks, have already burned his brawling offspring in the burning ditch, for us the collective stems from the story of individual suffering, the place of the dead, of corpses, it’s not Croatia that’s bleeding it’s the Croats, our country is where its graves are, our murderers, the murderers on the other side of the mirror are biding their time, and they will come, they will come because they have already come, because we have already gone to cut their ears to a point, put our stakes in their wives’ stomachs and tear out their eyes, a great wave of screaming blind men will cry for revenge, will come defend their graves and the bones of their dead, as surely as the tide, having gone out, comes back in to the rhythm of the moon’s movements, I want to take my car and travel across the land of my enemies, I want to drink some pear brandy in Zemun watching the Sava swell the Danube, to see if the girls are pretty, to listen to turbo-folk sung by the buxom wife of Arkan the Tiger, to buy myself a T-shirt with the head of Milošević or Mladić on it and laugh a little, I want to laugh thinking that a few years ago this waiter might have killed me without batting an eye around Osijek and that it’s over now, it’s the Kosovars’ turn, then the Albanians will take revenge in turn and eat Orthodox Christians for breakfast, we’re all attached to each other by indissoluble ties of heroic blood, by the intrigues of our jealous gods, all that is over, after a few years of purgatory in an office in the midst of files I’m in the last train before the end of the world, before the great light and the revival, when there will be zebras gazelles and lions that will from time to time eat a stray tourist, when we’ll drink a superb Norwegian wine, when Yvan Deroy, at seventy years of age, will watch the monkeys playing on the slopes of the Argentario planted with eucalyptus and breadfruit trees, the Americans are impatient to get to Rome, me too, I’ve been in the train far too long, one of the American women looks vaguely like the woman at La Pomponette last night, she must think I’m a poor guy, I feel all sticky as if I were leaving her place, her dark concierge loge on Rue Marcadet, men are spineless, they want to fight hunt fuck drink sing from time to time and play soccer, they’re cowardly faced with their passions, I’d like it all to be over like in Modern Times, when Chaplin links arms with his beloved and sets out on the road, I couldn’t take Stéphanie by the arm, when I went back to my place two hours later passably drunk and soaking wet after the incident with the pistol she wasn’t there anymore, the gun was still on the floor in the same place Stéphanie was gone I took a pencil and paper and wrote her a letter of excuse, explaining to her that I knew of course that the weapon couldn’t work, that it was a very bad joke, and then I ended up crying over my fate as a former fighter to attract her pity, how the war was still too present for me and idiocies of that sort, a sentimental cowardly drooling letter so she’d forgive me, love makes you do stupid things, I thought, I was drunk but not blind, I put the letter into an envelope which I deposited in her letterbox as I went to work, it had its effect, my missive, I made sure I didn’t come across Stéphanie on the Boulevard Mortier before she read it, and the next day I added another bit, flowers, delivered to her place around eight o’clock, when I was sure she was home, and I don’t know if it was the calming effect of the roses or the balm of my excuses, but at 8:30 precisely the phone rang, it was her, she asked me if I wanted to go out to dinner, as if nothing were wrong, I said OK, we can meet halfway, around République for instance, she chose a chic restaurant on the Canal Saint-Martin, when I saw her by the water I hugged her close in my arms, apologizing in her ear, she said never do that to me again, OK? and promise me you’ll throw that gun away, I said of course, of course, not meaning a word of it, I kept it for a lot longer, the little Zastava, in the end I gave it a few months ago to Lebihan for his retirement, with a brand new firing pin bought on the Internet, he liked it very much—neither Stéphanie nor I saw that this incident had opened up a breach, a place for violence, I didn’t understand that the tide was rising, that it was going to catch us, that the more I filled the suitcase with names and pictures, the more I sought to avoid the memories of Croatia, Bosnia by diving into the Zone, the wider the crack grew, and Stéphanie the great strategist who spent her days with generals and Cabinet ministers was blind, or maybe not, like Marianne she let herself be seduced by the dark side, the taste for danger, warriors gleam with a dark light like Ares himself, Andi the wild was attractive too, a handsome brute despite his ugliness, one of those angelic devils who so pleased Jean Genet the introvert in love with Palestinian fighters, Andi would have done anything to possess a girl like Intissar the Palestinian, I’m sure of it, I wonder if Rafael Kahla the writer was a fighter himself, if he had dealings with those Palestinians, we all tell the same story, at bottom, a tale of violence and desire like Leon Saltiel the Greek Jew in his Memoirs, the betrayed Leon who wanders through deserted Salonika, his family, his friends have disappeared in the camps, his comrades are hiding in the mountains of Macedonia and Epirus, with armed groups that will soon resume fighting the fascist monarchy, Agatha married Stavros, they’re the ones who denounced him to the Germans, every day in Mauthausen he thought of Agatha before falling asleep, he constructed an idyllic love for himself in order to survive, clung to her memory as if to a tree so as not to fly up the crematorium chimney, Agatha’s eyes, Agatha’s hands and today in half-dead Thessalonica that solid wood is now nothing but an old keel eaten away by the sea, Saltiel wanders around for many days before deciding to go back to the family apartment, now occupied by a surviving cousin whom he makes promise not to reveal his presence to anyone, Leon locks himself up for eight days, for eight days he drinks and smokes in the dark, pursued by the brief agony of Manos Hadjivassilis the electrocuted, by the twisted neck and open mouth of Aris Andreanou, by the wedding ring on Agatha’s finger, nothing and no one is left to him so Saltiel decides to make an end of it, exhausted by suffering and alcohol he coarsely ties together a short rope with a sheet, knots one end around his neck and looks for a high spot, a pipe, a beam, to tie the other end to, no success, he finds nothing high up that could support his weight, so despairing, the sheet still around him, he climbs onto a window ledge to throw himself into the void, it’s late, the night is fine, a cool wind caresses his bare legs, the sea is quite close, the sheet with which he was going to hang himself is a pleasant scarf, the sea breeze draws Leon Saltiel out of the mist, Zeus the assembler of clouds has seen his distress and comes to his aid, the black pain fades away is mixed with the sea spray with the moondust and stardust on the gulf of Salonika, Leon clings to the windowsill, he is standing five floors above ground, he has almost hanged himself and thrown himself into the void, what for, who for, there is no one left, he goes back into the apartment collapses on his bed and falls into a sleep of the dead, the rope still around his neck—the next day Leon trims his beard but doesn’t shave it off, he has had a dream, he saw his fate clearly, he puts on a nice shirt, a handsome jacket, too bad if all these clothes are too big for him now, too bad, he is very busy all day, he is active until late at night, he doesn’t tremble even
during the most difficult moments, when Agatha cries out, pleads with him, when her skirt bares one of her legs, Leon Saltiel methodically carries out his duty, like a bailiff or an accountant, before rejoining the communists in the mountains, in 1948 he is arrested and deported to Makronisos the prison island, for political reasons, which have nothing to do with the torture of Agatha under the staring eyes of Stavros gagged tied to his chair, or with the leather belt around the young woman’s thin throat, or with the bullet that a little later goes through the neck of Stavros the traitor to cut short his agony: Saltiel returns from his second deportation in 1953, and, still according to his Memoirs, leaves Greece once again in 1967, during the dictatorship of the colonels, he won’t return until 1978, to die, in Salonika, and it wasn’t to die among his people, since his people, Jews, communists, Agatha, Stavros, had all disappeared a long time ago—I wonder why Agatha denounced Saltiel, out of love no doubt, love in troubled times, I imagine they had thought out a plan to rid themselves of the nuisance, she and Stavros the snitch, maybe, or maybe she had nothing to do with all that, Saltiel doesn’t say if he tortured her out of pure vengeance or to find out, to find out if she had really given him away to the Germans, a Communist Jew, a real treat for the Gestapo, Saltiel doesn’t explain either how he escaped the firing squad in the prison yard of the Heptapyrghion, at the very top of the town, did he talk, did he trade information to get sent to a concentration camp instead, already putting one foot in the grey Zone, our own, the Zone of shadows and manipulators, Salonika pearl of the Aegean reminded me of Alexandria, in the lower town the noble façades of banks, insurance companies, shipping lines from the beginning of the century sat in state, like the cotton market and the Bank of Egypt in the Egyptian metropolis, Aristotle Square looked a little like Saad-Zaghloul Square in front of the Cecil, where all the British tourists went on pilgrimage, the nostalgic crowded around the bar at the Hotel Cecil with a book by Lawrence Durrell in their hands, looking for Justine or Melissa and pretending not to notice the renovations and improvements of modernity, the business center, the plastic plants, the obvious kitsch of an international luxury hotel, whereas they were looking for the red leather from before the war, the smoke of cigars, the Greeks the Italians and the Jews of Alexandria, the war and Nasser little by little sent them into exile, to the North, today Alexandria is an immense Egyptian city more populous than Paris, sanctimonious and poor, but it takes pride in a beautiful library, built by a government in love with pharaonic projects, one of the emptiest libraries on the planet, symbol of the regime of Mubarak the opinionated, a beautiful grey shell in Aswan marble—nothing returns from what has been destroyed, nothing is reborn, neither dead men, nor burned libraries, nor submerged lighthouses, nor extinct species, despite the museums commemorations statues books speeches good will, of things that have gone only a vague memory remains, a shadow gliding over sorrowful Alexandria a phantom shivering, and that’s all the better no doubt, all the better, you have to know how to forget, let men animals things leave, with Marianne I had met a well-born British couple who were exploring the city in a horse-drawn carriage, they didn’t want to take a taxi, they were willing to pay hundreds of maravedis to sit enthroned behind a team of scrawny horses driven by a turbaned Egyptian, the Englishwoman was wearing cream-colored jodhpurs and a close-fitting jacket, the man was in a safari jacket with a wide-brimmed hat model ANZAC 1915, and the only touch of color in this riot of earth-tones was their faces roasted by the Egyptian sun, two ripe tomatoes under old-fashioned hats, he was reading the guide to Alexandria written by E.M. Forster in 1920 and she Death on the Nile, they were a little over twenty and very much in love, of course they were staying at the Cecil, we had discovered these specimens in a historic patisserie near the Grand Place, and it was like finding two pteranodons at the traffic circle on the Champs-Elysées or two dolphins from the Yangtze in the Seine, Marianne was delighted to talk with them, although she was a tiny bit jealous of leather luggage and luxury hotels, their English was very refined, very elegant, accompanied by the bobbing of a prominent Adam’s apple, they were at their ease sunk into armchairs in the immense patisserie, sipping teabag tea, they were well-informed cultivated knew Cavafy by heart and ancient Greek, real characters, I wasn’t especially jealous, the ruddy British girl was bony her breasts flat nothing to compare to Marianne’s white blouse whose buttons looked as if they were about to pop from the pressure, Marianne whole and spontaneous was leagues apart from the affected Englishwoman, the Egyptians seemed not to notice anything abnormal, they were happy with the tips and other bakshish the young couple showered them with, in the greatest colonial tradition—his name was James and he was Scottish, a fan of rugby and Greek statuary, they offered to take us on an excursion in their carriage, to Montazah, to visit the palace and gardens, I wanted to say we’ll see if ridicule does any harm, but I abstained, after all it was amusing and the next morning we were ready, Marianne was wearing her “country” outfit, a red gingham blouse and a little matching scarf, we piled into the coupé despite the cries of the turbaned postilion, who wanted us to take two vehicles, James ended up convincing him to accept the overload for our weight in pounds sterling, and we were off, in the midst of taxis and crowded buses and exhaust in traffic jams car horns tram bells the mare’s feet struck hard on the asphalt at a jogging pace, we were shaken by the tired springs our eardrums pierced by the constant scrape of the badly greased axles and the carriage-driver’s shouts who whipped his palfrey like a madman, it was a wonder to watch dung escape from the animal’s ass and pile up on the pavement at every stop, we weren’t about to win the gold sulky, despite the coachman’s aggressiveness toward his courser, to reach Montazah we had to travel six or seven miles, the horse had trouble trotting, which got her a double ration of the whip, our British friends sat enthroned, straight as I’s in the jolts, taking in the landscape of the sea plain, proud and happy, to the point where I wondered if we were seeing the same thing, the distress of the old nag sweating under the charioteer’s meanness the poverty of Egypt the hell of the traffic the discomfort of the jiggling cart the whiffs of diesel oil from the buses the begging children black with filth who ran after us and whom the driver chased away like flies lashing them with his knout, maybe our hosts had visions of Cleopatra, of Durrell, of Forster, of Cavafy, blinded by the lighthouse of Alexandria, Marianne wasn’t much at ease either, the cars passed us in a fury honking their horns, forty-five minutes later we were in Montazah, why did the British have to love their barouche, I was exhausted my buttocks beaten to a pulp almost as much as the heroic nag’s, the palace in question was in the midst of magnificent gardens planted with mangos pepper plants bougainvillea oleanders, a castle that looked as if it had been built from red-and-white Legos an exceeding strange building, Austro-Ottoman-kitsch for Farouk forced to abdicate by the Free Officers, by General Naguib and Nasser the Alexandrian with the thick eyebrows, finished with princes and princesses of sumptuous palaces, make way for martial themes and shouted speeches of the revolution underway in the tremolos and sighs of Umm Kulthum the chubby-cheeked, since there wasn’t much to see aside from the gardens we went to drink mango juice at the terrace of a hotel that the tourist board had had the good taste to place by the water like a black chancre with twenty floors, our phlegmatic friends had another visit to suggest, this one more original, it involved going to see the childhood home of Rudolf Hess the aviator friend of Hitler and vice-Führer of the Reich, Alexandria had produced everything, poets warriors spies singers high-ranking Nazis, for James it was an almost familial visit, Hess fell into my uncle’s garden, he said, in May 1941 Rudolf Hess at the controls of a Messerschmitt modified for the purpose flies to Scotland under the nose of the English coastal defenses, and, short of gas, parachutes down to land on the property of a Scottish nobleman dumbfounded by the unexpected appearance of Hitler’s dauphin in his hydrangea, we still don’t know why, probably to try to negotiate peace with Great Britain before the invasion of the USSR, without
the Führer’s orders perhaps, Churchill immediately had him locked up in the Tower of London, then sentenced to life in prison in 1946 at Nuremberg the deranged aviator went to keep company with Speer the builder of Teutonic temples in Spandau Prison, mad amnesic hypochondriac depressive his agony would last until 1987, in sadness and solitude, the last inmate of a jail demolished after his death, in his last years Rudolf was haunted by the memory of the bay of Alexandria, all day long he sketched Greek porticos and views of the vanished lighthouse, obsessed with the city he had left eighty years earlier, the Mediterranean light last flame of his empty eyes, unable to remember his trial in Germany but speaking of his Italian governess with tenderness, of his garden, his school, the girls in white dresses, the receptions at the Place des Consuls, his swimming lessons at the Chatby baths, his father’s splendid villa in the Santo Stefano neighborhood, a stone’s throw from the sea, fourteen years of childhood in Alexandria and over forty years of prison, what to think about, what to remember, did he think of Antony and Cleopatra when he took his life at the venerable age of ninety-three, one hot August day Hess managed to isolate himself in a garden shed in the Spandau bastion with five feet of stolen electric cable that he twists around his neck, he squeezes hard with the help of a window bolt, more ingenious than Leon Saltiel, more determined too, Hess asphyxiates himself to escape overlong life, the interminable fate of the recluse, Hess warrior with no battles, with no glory aside from an air raid and an exceptional longevity, having left Alexandria in 1910 the man of no interest the war criminal with no war dies in the ambulance where they try hard to revive him, last great living Nazi last representative of an extinct species, James the eccentric Scot had reason to be disappointed, at the spot of the Hess family villa by the sea there was a grey building similar to hundreds of others in front of the Corniche, might as well say in front of the highway, no more luxuriant garden, no more sumptuous residence, the trace of Hess’s fate had been erased without a qualm by modern Egypt, so we got back into the jolting carriage in the midst of the yellow taxis and warning signals to get back to the center of town, the horse had begun to limp and stubbornly refused to trot, it kept to a walking pace and unleashed the fury of the coachman who shouted, standing up to whip the obstinate horse with all his strength, furiously, the leather lash struck hard and scattered flies and drops of sweat, the old nag shook its neck, neighed, it looked ready for the knacker’s yard, its driver was in the process of finishing it off, the animal stumbled from time to time on the asphalt, in the carriage the ambiance was nothing to write home about, the Brits no longer looked at the gleaming sea but at the horse on its last legs receiving the turbaned charioteer’s fury, Marianne ground her teeth and let out a little yelp every time the whip came violently down on the animal, four young proper Europeans were responsible for the torture of a nag covered with foam, its nostrils dilating, but no one got out, the carriage ended up bringing us back to the front of the Cecil, James resettled his hat straight on his head and paid the agreed-on price to the coachman who demanded extra for his poor Rosinante, and the Scotsman told him literally to fuck off, if I understood right, with great pleasure—he was close to taking the whip himself and administering a neocolonial thrashing to the Egyptian, the British are sensitive when it comes to horses, he however was responsible for the suffering of the little mare, we separated as good friends promising to see each other again, every time I returned to Alexandria I thought of the anachronistic couple, of Rudolf Hess and the carriage, lunching with my Egyptian generals lovers of whisky great hunters of terrorists, they proudly showed me the construction site for the new library, let’s hope it experiences a fate different from its burned-down ancestor, a respite in time before ending up drowned by the rising water of the Mediterranean, after the polar ice melts, its beautiful ash-colored granite jetty transformed into a smooth pleasant beach for the laughing seals, who will play there sliding on their bellies trumpeting with delight