XIX
everything is harder once you reach man’s estate the sensation of being a poor guy the approach of old age the accumulation of sins the body lets go of us white traces at your temples veins more prominent your sex shrinks ears stretch illness lies in wait, alopecia Lebihan’s fungi or the cancer of my father laid low by Apollo and Machaon’s knife can do nothing for it, the arrow was too well embedded, too deep, despite many operations the sickness returned, spread, my father began to dissolve, dissolve then dry out, he seemed increasingly taller, drawn out, his immense pale face was furrowed with bony crevices, his arms were emaciated, the man who had always been so low-key was almost completely silent, my mother spoke for him, she said your father this, your father that, in his presence, she was his Pythia, she interpreted his signs, your father is happy to see you, she said when I visited, he misses you, and the paternal body in its armchair said nothing, when I went over to him to ask him how he was my mother replied today he’s very well, and little by little everyone lost the habit of addressing him directly, we consulted his oracle, my father remained sitting for hours on end reading Saint Augustine or the Gospels and it was strange that a scientist, an engineer, a specialist in the most invisible kind of matter found a place for God at the heart of his waves, he was settling his account with the beyond no doubt, preparing his passport for Hades great eater of warriors, we were all convinced he was going to get better, get better or drag his illness out for years, but the Moirae had decided otherwise, and Zeus himself could do nothing, so after a visit to my parents I went back to my place stopping by the bistro below to drink a few shots before climbing up to pick up a book too, any book, to pass the time, the Zone documents or whatever the bookstore on the Place des Abbesses palmed off on me, trashy novels literature essays everything came through there, ever since Stéphanie left in place of her skin I had to caress thousands of pages in solitude, enough to make you mad, like Rudolf Hess in his interminable prison, my father was fading away my mother was holding up and playing ever more difficult pieces four hours a day furiously, Chopin Liszt Scriabin Shostakovich nothing resisted her, the Boulevard was grey and more somber than ever, the sword of Maréchal Mortier was rusting now under the directorship of Jean-Claude Cousseran, diplomat specialist in the Zone, from Jerusalem to Ankara not excluding Damascus, pleasant cultivated and intelligent, not much liked among the experts of intrigue and shadow plays, all that was too high up for me, from my office I saw nothing but Lebihan who wheezed from meeting to meeting waiting for his discharge, the reforms and transformations of flow charts, the budget given to such-or-such agency to the detriment of some other, in other words everything that makes up an excessively opaque administration, about which no one really knows exactly how it functions, not even us: by magic the reports files missions weekly or special bulletins still reached their destinations, the propaganda and various manipulations ended up getting the better of Cousseran and his team, overthrown by staunch Chirac supporters, Cousseran left for Cairo as ambassador, he must still be there, by the shores of the Nile, a stone’s throw from the zoo, watching the monkeys gamboling from his big varnished desk while he absentmindedly initials his insignificant documents on a magnificent green leather blotter—I down my Sans Souci to his health, it’s very pretty this beer bottle with the white boat on a blue background, we must be nearing Orvieto, the landscape is undulating gently in the moonlight, the Chianti has made the Americans very jolly, they keep chuckling, Sans Souci is bottled for Moretti Inc. in Udine says the label, Udine capital of Friuli beautiful Venetian city where Franz Stangl was billeted at the end of the war, in charge of the fight against the partisans once the camps of Bełżec, Sobibór and Treblinka were destroyed, closed for lack of customers, mission accomplished: Globocnik, Wirth, Stangl and the happy band of the Aktion Reinhardt had eliminated two million Jews from the General Gouvernement of Poland, with carbon monoxide gas, according to the method tested by Wirth the savage in Bełżec, and all these sinister technicians of destruction were sent in early 1944 to the Operationszone Adriatisches Küstenland the capital of which was Trieste the Hapsburgian, the place was dangerous, uncontrollable, groups of Resistants held entire regions and mounted deadly operations against the Germans, like the one that cost Christian Wirth his life in May 1944, maybe they had sent them there for that very reason after all, so they’d die, so that the only real witnesses of the camps in Poland would disappear, witnesses of the mass graves where the badly burned bodies of hundreds of thousands of asphyxiated men women and children rested, Globocnik nicknamed Globus by Himmler was born in Trieste when it was still Austrian, the swine was detested by anyone with an ounce of sense, he was a liar, a thief, willing to do anything to increase his personal wealth which he had built by appropriating a share of the Jewish possessions intended for Berlin, because massacres brought in millions and millions of reichsmarks, might as well combine business with pleasure, thought Globus the ironic, just like Wirth the pretentious, only Stangl wasn’t cunning enough to fill his pockets, he was a little spineless Austrian cop who ended up mechanically carrying out unpleasant tasks, he drank a lot after Treblinka, he drank a lot, for him the Jews were wood, freight that had to be “dealt with,” he hated having to go by himself to see the bodies taken out of the gas chambers, he secretly detested Wirth the mustachioed brute, Stangl liked beautiful things, in Treblinka he had organized a Kommando of gardeners to strew the camp with ornamental plants, and had even installed a little zoo, with turtles a monkey and a yellow-and-white parrot, where he liked to spend hours on end in the tropical heat while 500 meters away, in the death camp, corpses were being roasted all the blessed day, in Treblinka Stangl wore a handsome immaculate white jacket, his virginal carapace, those were the days, in Udine he was afraid, especially after the attack on Wirth on the road to Fiume, he spent most of his time closeted in his office and only went out when he absolutely had to, mainly to go to Trieste, he was solitary, even though he sometimes drank and played cards with Arthur Walter and Franz Wagner, with whom he had traveled through the whole extermination chain, from euthanasia of the mentally ill in Germany to the shores of the Adriatic, where everything was going badly: the Slovenian, Croatian, and Italian partisans were at least as numerous as the few troops left to them after the collapse in the East and the Allied advance into Italy, the end was near, at what moment does he realize that the war is lost, maybe in June 1944, maybe before, when he arrives Stangl is at first posted to Trieste itself, as the head of a police transit camp called La Risiera di San Sabba, set up in a former factory for the processing of rice, where arrested partisans come through with Jews who were about to leave for Auschwitz, Mauthausen, Dachau, or Buchenwald depending on the transports, Globocnik’s diligence soon fills the place out, in the beginning of 1944 Wirth asks Erwin Lambert a gas and cremation technician to build an oven there to get rid of the bodies of the 5,000 people killed on site, usually with a club, their ashes are thrown, at night, into the nearby sea by the Ukrainian executioners whom the specialists in destruction have brought with them, in Trieste the White, port of Austria Italy Slovenia and Croatia, in 1992 with Vlaho and Andi on a binge we didn’t see anything of the city, bars bars icy wind rain fried fish a long seafront a whitecapped bay lined with hills a lighthouse a few rare girls in grey coats running to take refuge in empty taverns, we were staying near the train station in a pension run by Slovenians, Vlaho was sulking, he didn’t understand what the hell we were doing there, when we could easily have gone to his place in Split and party and raise hell, tourism didn’t justify everything, what’s more Italy was ruinously expensive, but it was a change from Zagreb with its deserted nightclubs and whores’ bars full of soldiers and mafiosi the sad ambiance of the capital of our country at war, in Trieste I forgot the fighting the dead comrades for a while, for Andi it was all the same, so long as there was something to drink, we stuffed ourselves on spaghetti with seafood washed down with white wine before going to nightclubs that were no doubt also very sad but
which seemed to us the height of gaiety, because we were the only soldiers there in the midst of the students of Trieste, they had no idea where we could be coming from, despite our smell and our short hair, three drummer boys on the way back from war, three drummer boys, I remember dancing for a few minutes with a young Italian in her early twenties, she kept smiling at me, we danced shoulder to shoulder without exchanging a word, she had long hair pulled back, pleasant features, I thought if she wants me I won’t go back to Herzegovina, to Bosnia, I’ll stay in Trieste, if she wants me, Aphrodite was coming to save me, she danced with her wrists up to her forehead, her head bent forward, she wore a black cotton long-sleeved dress that contrasted with her fair skin and her blond bangs, at her neckline a brooch gleamed, a little ceramic red rose, at times she raised her eyes and looked at me smiling, the music was a Pearl Jam or Nirvana hit I forget, she was murmuring the words, her feet made her hips sway right and left rhythmically, once the song was over she smiled at me one last time before moving slowly away, with measured steps, Andi took me by the arm to pull me over to the bar, I hesitated, I watched the girl being swallowed up in the crowd and I went to drink vodka with Andrija and Vlaho, they were smiling too, we thumped each other on the shoulder, then I went to look for her, she had disappeared, in the muffled din of the nightclub that would soon be closing, I hadn’t understood, I couldn’t understand the shape Fate sometimes takes, I went to Bosnia, I signed up for a few more months of war, maybe she would have saved me, that unknown girl, who knows, when we went out we went to find some whores, to console me said Vlaho, maybe that girl would have saved all three of us, in Italy there were no brothels but shady bars where a few sad dumpy Albanian women were hanging around, I declined, Vlaho our champion nothing could diminish his libido since his cold got better disappeared into a back room with one of them, we kept drinking, drinking still and always as if the world were turning liquid, the whole world, and we went back to Herzegovina—forty years earlier the members of the Einsatz R. drank everything they could in Trieste, the Wirths, the Stangls, the Wagners got drunk unremittingly while waiting for death or defeat, the tired Ukrainians forgot themselves in the rage of torture and the whip, scattered between Udine, Fiume, and Trieste the old companions in massacre saw little of each other, and when they did meet they didn’t talk about Poland, about Treblinka or Sobibór, in the meantime Stangl had gone back to his place in Austria, to see his wife and children, he missed them, he was anxious for the war to be over, to go back to the comfort of his hearth, I wonder if he intuited that the dead of Treblinka and Sobibór would prevent him from ever returning to his home, probably not, all those guys lost on the shores of the Adriatic must have been dreaming of an improbable victory of the Reich, or clinging to the illusion that they had hidden their crimes well enough, which weren’t even crimes, in any case, for Stangl it wasn’t a crime since the Reich had excluded these bodies from humankind, wood, they were wood that was suitable for burning, a mistake of nature to be rectified, a prolific species to be eradicated and even if the stench was extremely unpleasant it was impossible to recognize oneself in these imploring victims dripping from the filthy cattlecars, euthanasia with carbon monoxide was painless after all they were well treated, Globocnik had dealt with Poland the way you attack a field of potatoes that had been invaded by beetles or blight, Wirth and Stangl had carried out their duty, with varying degrees of pleasure and enthusiasm, and it was very hard to bear, this responsibility, especially when they had to reopen the mass graves that the gases of decomposition and putrid fluids made ripple like the sea, what a weight all that was, take out all those compressed liquefied bodies pierced with worms burn them on big grates built from railroad tracks, Wirth the ingenious had even recycled a stone-crushing machine to get rid of the bones that didn’t burn, the most fertile land in Poland said Wirth the humorist, we’re leaving here the most fertile land in Poland: upon leaving, once the camp was destroyed, to mislead the curious they had set up a little farm for a couple of Ukrainians, where the land was in fact so fertile that the beets and cabbages grew huge, the wheat sprang up before their eyes, the bread the woman kneaded for her husband required almost no leavening, the ash and fir trees grew in record time, carrying in their nascent trunks their leaves and needles the sap of dead Jews, their substance and memory up to the sky, there is nothing to see in Treblinka, nothing to see in Sobibór, aside from immense trees sagging beneath the snow in silence, they rustle, that’s all you hear there, a movement of branches and the crackle of footsteps on the ground, nothing more, a doe, a fox, a bird, the great cold of the plains, the flowing River Bug, the terminus of absence, nothing—in Trieste the Einsatz R. so well-trained went on with its labors, its war effort, against the Slav partisans and dissembling Jews, Globus began by transforming the great synagogue devastated in 1942 into a warehouse for despoiled possessions and he got down to work, roundup after roundup the little community of Trieste was sent to Auschwitz or Dachau passing through the San Sabba camp, farewell Trieste gate to Jerusalem departure-point for ships from Lloyd’s that were taking the first emigrants to Palestine, Trieste meeting-place of the Ashkenazi of the North and the Sephardim of the South, farewell, it didn’t matter that the agents of Aktion Reinhardt were tired or that they were heavy drinkers, they all knew their job, counting rounding up misleading expediting exterminating, in the beginning of 1944 the method was perfected and who better than Wirth or Stangl knew what was waiting for the Jews at the end of the journey, there is a little bit of Trieste, of Corfu, of Athens, of Salonika, of Rhodes in the land of Poland, bluish ashes, Rolf the Gentle told me all this in Trieste, Rolf the Austrio-Italian is neither Jewish nor Slavic, Rolf Cavriani von Eppan is a cousin of the Hapsburg-Lorraines and the Princes of Thurn und Taxis inventors of the postal services, born in Trieste during the war, a little mustachioed gentleman last descendant of a ducal family that used to own half of Bohemia and Galicia, Rolf knew why I had come to see him and he showed me around the city, Trieste had changed quite a bit since 1992, as I remembered it there hadn’t been so many pedestrian malls the buildings weren’t so white the people not so elegant, I wondered if I was going to see the girl from the nightclub, the one who had let me go to Bosnia, just as Stéphanie had let me go to Trieste, let me fill my suitcase and without realizing it set me off to Rome and the end of the world, Rolf Cavriani had agreed to meet me in a beautiful café decorated with mosaics and wood moldings a stone’s throw away from the synagogue, Rolf is the owner of an international banking compensation company that launders the money of thousands of more or less legal enterprises by making it pass through tax havens as opaque as they are exotic, he owns a castle outside of Salzburg a manor house in Carinthia and a magnificent villa perched above Trieste, where he rarely goes, nostalgic for a time when the Empire held the region, when Joyce the drunk Berlitz professor haunted the brothels and taverns of the old city, destroying his liver: in July 1914, a few days after the shots fired by Gavrilo Princip the tubercular from Sarajevo Joyce is on the main quay of Trieste in the middle of the crowd, a vessel belonging to the Austrian navy has just berthed, the bells are sounding the alarm, the whole city is there to see the remains of Franz Ferdinand and the beautiful Sophie solemnly brought to land in a catafalque covered with the flag with the two crowns then conveyed to the train station, where a special railway car will carry them to their tomb in the Artstetten Castle, do Joyce and his very young wife understand that these imperial corpses and the Serbian bullets signify the end of the city they know, and that soon the First World War will send them to the North, to boring Switzerland, and will bring an end to a stay of almost ten years in the Hapsburg port: when he returns the man with the little hat and the veiled eyes will not find the city he knew, Italianized, cut off from the Slavs, the Austrians, its immense port empty of all activity, in competition with Venice La Serenissima hidden in the shadows, farewell Trieste, Joyce will go to Paris—on July 3, 1914 on the main quay his companion Nora takes him by the arm, impressed by the
royal coffins, she says to him how sad, they say she was beautiful, James does not reply, Sophie’s beauty doesn’t matter much to him, not many things matter to him, in any case, that very night he’ll have forgotten everything, in one of the bars of Trieste the tolerant where he will get drunk, to the lugubrious sound of the foghorns of the mortuary boat that is sounding its departure, without his realizing it, one of the unsuspected consequences of the pistol shot of Gavrilo Princip the TB victim, an assassination in Sarajevo sends Joyce to Paris, Joyce said when Finnegans Wake was published that at night nothing was clear, Joyce such a wise professor during the day became a lustful drunkard by night, obscure to himself, obsessed with money, with a God he didn’t want, with shameful urges, for very young girls that looked like his own daughter, fragile and alienated like Yvan Deroy the mad, Joyce wanted to write a piece of shadow, 600 pages of a dream of all dreams, all languages all shifts all texts all ghosts all desires and the book had become living dying sparkling like a star whose light arrives long after death and this matter was decomposing in the reader’s hands, unintelligible dust because Joyce did not dare to confess his secret desires, the violence that inhabited him and his guilty love for his own daughter, he was forced to hide it in writing, poor little man with the perforated ulcers and sick eyes, Joyce had been happy in Trieste, in the brothels of the old city, the brothels and hangouts that have disappeared, today the Irishman from the continent is a tourist attraction there like any other, like Italo Svevo or Umberto Saba, statues are erected to them in the streets they frequented, statues so alive that you want to take your hat off to them, Rolf Cavriani took off his hat to Joyce to Svevo to Saba whenever he passed them thus petrified by Medusa the decapitated Gorgon, at a bend in the street, between two stores, in front of the municipal library, and I don’t know if these bronzes are life-size but they all come up to your shoulder, headgear included, which made Rolf say laughing that to be famous in Trieste you had to be little, that today’s inhabitants couldn’t bear grandeur, their past and foreign grandeur, and so they belittled great men in the secret aim of surpassing them by a few centimeters, the way a guy with an inferiority complex uses inserts, Cavriani von Eppan had his complexes too, much more tragic ones, he had never used his title of duke, and that ate away at him, for not only was this duchy about to disappear with him but even while he was alive he didn’t dare make use of it, which earned him both the ire of his ancestors from beyond and a great shame in this laughable life, Rolf Cavriani was born in his great villa in Opicina, on top of Trieste, a stone’s throw from the old road to Vienna, in 1941, his father died of illness not long after his birth, during the defeat his mother had carried the very young Rolf to holy Austria, just before the debacle, before Tito’s supporters occupied the region for a while and took savage reprisals on the few soldiers and civilians they could find here and there, then the family had returned a few years later, my mother was a very capable woman, said Rolf, she was wealthy, and this wealth allowed her to turn her nose up at the new European borders, as she had done in 1918, she continued, like my grandparents before her, to spend six months every year in Trieste, spring and fall, summer in cool Carinthia and winter at the theaters and operas in Vienna, for my mother the nation or party in power was absolutely immaterial, he said, she had excellent relations with everyone, the Italian royalty, the fascists and even the Nazis, God knows though that they hated nobility, which didn’t mean she wasn’t afraid, that great lady, especially at the fall of Mussolini in the chaos of autumn 1943 when the communists had begun to massacre the fascists right and left and throw them into bottomless foibe, until the Reich intervened she had taken refuge in impregnable Austria, and similarly when the defeat was there, in April 1945, she had hurriedly cut short her spring stay to return to the hoarfrost of Carinthia—her relations with the German occupation authorities were cordial, she watched them burying their dead in the military cemetery close to her residence, with all the same a profound disgust for stiff-arm salutes and the Nazi flag, out of pure aesthetic concern, understand, there was never a woman who had less ideology than my mother said Rolf, she had high-ranking Wehrmacht officers over for dinner, Colonel Kalterweg with the strange name, dashing Hohnstetter commander of the panzers, and even a few SS officers, especially Rösener and Globocnik the Trieste native, after all he had been Gauleiter of Vienna, and Rösener was the commander in chief of military operations in Slovenia, he sometimes visited Ljubljana, my mother didn’t much like them, it was almost a social obligation, during the few times she spent in Trieste during the year she entertained little, that was normal, she knew nothing of the horrors committed in Slovenia or Poland, you know? still when Globocnik offered my mother a brigade of laborers to rebuild the wall around her property she accepted, could she have refused, I suppose so, but could she know that Globus the perverse was going to send her a commando of partisans who were about to be executed, with an escort armed to the teeth, guys fished out of the special jails of La Risiera di San Sabba to go play at being masons, their lacerated torsos still bore the marks of the tortures they’d undergone, she housed them in the beautiful vaulted cellar, because a solid metal grille closed it off, the escort stayed in the outbuildings with the servants, this was in February 1945, imagine, everything was lost for the Reich, it was just a question of weeks, my mother was in Trieste since the Red Army was approaching Vienna, the wall did need to be repaired, an entire section had collapsed, the poor Slovenians or Croatians set to work, closely supervised by their warders, the work went quickly, I remember I was almost four and I think I saw those convicts in our garden, I was fascinated by the guards’ weapons and uniforms, you understand, the repairs were almost finished by early March, the news was bad, the Allies had just crossed the Rhine in Germany and were approaching Italy, it was agony, my mother much altered by events decided to organize one last dinner, a farewell dinner, with Rösener, Globus, Kalterweg and others whose names I don’t know, a few women too of good Austrian and Trieste society, they all knew the game was up, that soon they’d have to go take refuge near Klagenfurt to avoid the Yugoslav partisans who were massacring everything as they went, nevertheless the evening was very gay, everyone wanted to forget the war, to forget the imminent end of the Reich and the enraged messages from Berlin that were giving orders to burn the land, the last crates of champagne were opened in euphoria, the gramophone kept spinning, the women had put on their most beautiful dresses, all that must have had a whiff of the apocalypse about it, the end of a world, after midnight the guests were drunk, they sang “Lili Marleen” at the top of their lungs, without caring either about the proprieties or the women present, my mother must have been shocked I suppose, maybe not, maybe she was tipsy too, after all my father had been dead for almost three years, she could have a little fun, the times were dark, a little joy was welcome—I imagine Rolf’s noble mother drunk, her eyes glittering her dress riding up a little revealing her black stockings felt up from afar by the lustful gaze of the fat Globus, I imagine the fear, the fear of defeat and punishment in the Nazis’ eyes, the thousand year Reich was indeed going to provide beautiful ruins but much sooner than Speer had foreseen, we left the elegant café for a little stroll, Rolf von Eppan was in a nostalgic mood, he took me to the wooded neighborhood above the station where Globocnik had his villa, requisitioned from a certain Angelo Ara, at Number 34 on the Via Romagna, a beautiful Art Deco residence that Globus the ingenious connected by underground passageways to the courthouse buildings where he had his offices, it reminded me of his house in Lublin in Poland, just as strategically situated, next to the SS quarters, the occupation administration and the HQ of Aktion Reinhardt, a villa with two floors and a garden, just like the one in Trieste, Lublin the red was prettily paved, a commercial artery led to the monumental gate to the old city cut in half by the Nazis to install the ghetto there, the dark little streets were not reassuring at night, a little lower down was the castle, a big rather austere barracks, I was there in winter, an icy snowy winter that had
no reason to envy the winter of 1943 where temperature is concerned, in the center of Lublin not many things had changed, I was staying at the Grand Hotel, transformed during the war into a Deutsches Haus, with an officers’ mess, Stangl had slept there with his wife when she had come from Austria to visit him, it had become a giant hotel with Communist rooms, grey wall-to-wall carpeting and formica cabinets, there were two splendid bars, one looked out onto the square, with a piano and high ceilings, the other was cozier, more intimate, the former library of the Deutsches Haus, in the morning I had taken Stangl’s road, to Sobibór, near the Ukrainian border, miles and miles of magnificent forests, under snow, flat forests, without a hill in sight, so smooth you could have slid to Moscow without realizing it, not a mountain this side of the Urals, birch trees, birch trees to the heart’s content, birch trees and a few firs, there were not many cars, mostly pedestrians who walked by the side of the road to get to the nearest bus stop at the outskirts of villages, and then nothing else, the forest, I had passed the railroad which told me I was headed in the right direction, the heat turned up high in the car, the silence and the noise of the engine, the noise of the engine of the Russian tank that Stangl and Bauer had brought from Lvov, the malfunctioning diesel engine propelled black gases into the little brick room at the end of the open-air corridor bordered with thick hedges made of branches stuck in the barbed wire, the naked Jews ran with their feet in the snow in the winter it wasn’t necessary to whip them much the cold whipped them well enough the cold and the snow are effective the shouts the door the silence and the sound of the engine, in the interminable straight line I suddenly see a young woman in a black coat standing by the road, alone at the edge of the trees, I must have been dreaming, no, she is really there in the rearview mirror, what is she doing motionless by the side of the road in her coat a little black shoulder bag a thousand miles away from any inhabited land I hesitate to make a U-turn, she must be waiting for the bus, next to trees collapsing beneath the snow, there is nothing here, no village no farm no house just a woman in the middle of the cold the snow and the dead Jews is she waiting for me, a reincarnation, a ghost, strange omen, I don’t do anything, silence and fear, like many others I do nothing, I don’t turn my car around, a sign indicates the train station of Sobibór on the right, a snowy path in a dense wood, my wheels spin at times, there are blankets of fog I am approaching the terminus then the narrow-gauge line, Stangl’s house where he drank vodka with comrades whom he detested, the train station, the important little camp where thanks to German meticulousness hundreds of thousands of bodies were processed, tons of flesh among the birch trees, there it is, the terminus is approaching, the end of the line, there is nothing, a green cabin the museum closed in winter I park the car against a heap of snow, behind me railroad workers are sending off a train loaded with logs, nothing changes, they’re laughing because I got covered in snow, next to a memorial that no one visits, before they laughed because strangers came to die in these lands made for hunting deer for wood for snow but not for running naked towards a tank engine started by a red-faced German, the Poles have a good laugh when faced with disaster, they’re used to it they’ve been working here for generations, I’ve come to see so I get out of the car but I know that the trees aren’t going to speak, I sink into the whiteness up to my ankles I go forward into the forest, a wide lane leads to a clearing where there is a great dome of silence, the Eastern terminus, here end the railways that leave from Salonika Westerbork Ternopol Theresienstadt Paris from so many cities and villages, the only traces are those left by the does and birds in the snow, there is nothing but the unimaginable and the tallness of the trunks, the wind blows gently the sky is opaque I wander around for a while in the clearing without trying to determine exactly where the buildings were the ditches the bodies my brain is white as linen white as virgin skin I pushed the car managed to make a U-turn and started off again for Lublin, the young woman wasn’t waiting anymore in the middle of the deserted forest, back at the Grand Hotel I’m stone-cold, frozen stiff I sat down in a club chair in the immense bar wondering what Stangl the gardener drank when he was here with his wife, the night was pitch-black, outside vehicles were skidding on the melted snow turned muddy, I was very far away, very far, I ordered a tea in an immense and glacial solitude, a blind man came in accompanied by an old lady, she sat him down at the piano, a black ancient-looking baby grand, he said a few words and started up a ballad by Chopin, the instrument was out of tune and sounded off-key, I quietly finished my tea, determined to brave the cold and the snow to buy myself a bottle of vodka in the closest supermarket and confront the long Polish night, the blind man attacked “My Way” in a particularly mawkish tempo, a sign said for the blind and crippled next to a wicker basket, I left him all my change—in Trieste there’s no pianist in the luxurious restaurant where Rolf the banker took me, he’s talking to me about Globocnik the snake, I don’t dare ask him if Himmler’s man was his mother’s lover, probably not, Globus the boor must not have been tempting to Austrian nobility, or vice-versa, Rolf Cavriani von Eppan the nostalgic has been keeping us informed about the covert accounts of his clients for years, companies, various mafias, façades for suspicious activities, out of philanthropy, or almost, and I suspect him of acting in the same way with a number of European agencies, which explains why his business is prospering and out of the law’s reach, Rolf the son of the duchess who was slumming it with champagne with the heads of the Adriatisches Küstenland early in 1945, who had the idea first, back then, Kalterweg, Rösener, or Globocnik the swine, we’ll never know, Mme la Duchesse maybe, maybe the mother of Rolf the cynic asked the same question as Stéphanie, the great question with no answer, as the soldiers in black uniforms told them about their feats of arms, what is it like to kill a man? Globus hooted outright with laughter, he answered you’re about to see, Madame, after you, and all the guests blind drunk thought it was an excellent idea, a demonstration, a demonstration, the women hitched up the bras on their breasts, rearranged their creased dresses to head for the cellar where the ten Slovenians were piled up behind respectable iron bars, the prisoners saw the charming company coming down towards them without understanding, pausing at the bottom of the steps, a meter away from the grille, they got up, Rösener took out his P38, Kalterweg too, the panic-stricken Resistants huddled against the walls like insects Rösener said who wants to begin? and a very drunk lady answered me! me! Rösener took her by the waist put the weapon in her hand feeling her up a little they went over to the bars Rösener guided her arm she saw a shadow in the right corner she pulled the trigger the shot resounded under the beautiful vault the wounded Slovenian shouted and collapsed the audience cried bravo! bravo! encore! And the four pieces that belonged to the SS present were emptied onto the poor guys like the bottles of champagne before everyone wanted to try their hand at death the explosions vibrated in the powder-heavy air the blood spattered the whitewashed walls the women quivered with fear and pleasure, sobered up fast by the adrenaline, the dying men twisted onto the corpses of their companions, the guests’ ears whistled in the great silence that always follows massacres: everyone went back upstairs without saying a word, Globus the rational gave orders for the bodies to be collected and burned at La Risiera which they should never have left, the women were pale, Hohnstetter too, Globocnik himself felt a little melancholy, he shouted cognac! cognac! and the trembling majordomo immediately brought him a bottle of grappa, Rolf’s mother asked to be excused, she wasn’t feeling very well, and she went back to her apartments to take refuge in her son’s room, next to the heavy sleep and tender perfume of unattainable childhood—the young Eppan had of course no memory of this, he was sleeping piously in his bed, but his mother’s diary is very clear, he says, that’s what happened, even though the duchess certainly minimizes her own role, unable to confess, even alone in the intimacy of her journal, what might really have happened that night, as an epitaph she notes that she walled up the part of the cellar where “the events” as s
he calls them took place, so as never to see the place again, Rolf recently added a brass plaque to it engraved, here died ten Slovenian heroes killed by the Nazis, a commemorative plaque in his own house, a memorial that he alone can see, when he goes downstairs to look for a good bottle for his guests: when we leave the restaurant the day is beginning to come to a close, the sea has very soft, very smooth grey tones, Rolf is in a nostalgic mood, he would readily order a cognac or a grappa like Globus but he is in a hurry to come to an end, the documents are in the trunk of my car he says, we walk over to the parking lot, Rolf strides a little hunched over, I feel as if he’s hesitating about whether to tell me something, he pulls up the neck of his tweed jacket to protect himself from the breeze, his noble Daimler is bottle-green, with a Liechtenstein license plate, even the trunk gives off a scent of leather and luxury, Rolf grabs an elegant bag, he hands it to me saying it has no value, you know, I nod, it has no more value than a corpse or a name on a grave, poor Rolf the noble from whom the Nazis took away his title, from whom history took away his title, he is getting revenge by giving me these documents, the reports from Globocnik to Himmler between 1942 and 1945, all the activities of the Aktion Reinhardt in Poland and Italy, he is getting rid of a weight, Rolf, he looks relieved at contributing to the filling of the suitcase, he shakes my hand, I thank him for lunch, he sketches a smile and gets into his car, Rolf doesn’t know that I know his dilemma, I know that vengeful Fate wanted him to be born Duke of Auschwitz, Duke of Auschwitz and Zator, Rolf von Auschwitz und Zator, an ancient princely title going back to the eleventh century, that is his name, the name of his ancestors which the Nazis tarnished, forcing his coat of arms to remain in shadow forever, Rolf whose fief is today linked to the largest death factory ever built bears the weight of history more than others, I wonder if one should laugh or cry at his heraldic scruples and his mother with the troubled friendships, the sun has set, I walk slowly up the seafront, two million dead aren’t so heavy, in fact, words and numbers on paper, men are great technicians at taking notes, at keeping things brief, ever since well-guarded Troy the bearded bard and Schliemann the archeologist great spotter of warriors, I’m going to arrive in Rome very soon, very quickly, render unto Caesar, render unto eternity, get hold of the ransom for my cowardliness and then what, then what, find Sashka again the only female painter of icons, in her closed world, Sashka the blind with the big light-colored eyes and her apartment in Trastevere, I don’t know if I want to see her again, she doesn’t have the power to reach me, to cure me, or the will to either, I feel I’m going to destroy her like Marianne, torment her like Stéphanie, who will take me out of myself, who like Intissar will come to look for the corpse of Francis fallen between the lines, who will look into the eyes of my murderer, observe my ghost in the distance through the gunman’s sights, Sashka is a dream of ice, one of those mirrors that do no good since they always enclose us in our own image, in our future grave, what will I do when this train arrives in the station, when its brakes wheeze against the Termini platform, I met Sashka by chance she doesn’t know me I don’t know her any better than her brother the volunteer for the savage Serbs, front against front waiting for the angel to inspire us, despite the signs that the unpredictable gods have placed on our pathway, Jersualem lost in history, Nathan the busy survivor promptly cutting off Palestinian lives, the bullets the shells exchanged in Slavonia, and Rome, Rome where all roads lead before being lost in the night what will I do you’re always tempted to retrace your steps to go back to where you lived, the way Caravaggio painter of decapitation wanted to see Rome again, despite the luxury of Malta the rotting beauty of Naples, constantly and ceaselessly Caravaggio desired the Eternal City the shady neighborhoods the cutthroats around the mausoleum of Augustus the casual lovers games brawls laughable life where will I go back to, me, to Mostar crushed by the shells to Venice with the handsome Ghassan and Ezra Pound the mad, to Trieste to the cursed villa of the Herzog von Auschwitz, to Beirut with the fierce Palestinians to Algiers the white to lick the blood of martyrs or the burnt wounds of the innocent men tortured by my father, to Tangier with Burroughs the wild-eyed murderer Genet the luminous invert and Choukri the eternally starving, to Taormina to get drunk with Lowry, to Barcelona, to Valencia, to Marseille with my grandmother in love with crowned heads, to Split with Vlaho the disabled, to Alexandria the sleeping, to Salonika city of ghosts or to the White Island graveyard of heroes, what would Yvan Deroy the mad do where would he go I watch the Americans having fun talking loudly in the restaurant car, outside the countryside is still just as dark Antonio the bartender is preparing to close his mobile bar we’re going to be there soon, we’re going to be there soon, and then what, what are you going to do Yvan where are you going with your thirty pieces of silver in your pocket find a welcoming tree a rope not too rough for your delicate neck, rejoin Sashka the unreachable and her turpentine smell, the turpentine of Chios or Cyprus thick blood of the pistachio tree, throw yourself once again into a river look for a weapon to put in your mouth or one bottle too many, nothing very original my old pal Yvan you who were destined for great things in the kingdom of shadow, now you want to find the light again, and it’s a dark night, it’s a dark night on December 8th on the verge of winter the rain is going to pour down in Rome the furious Tiber will carry thousands of plastic bags tons of the various species of junk that will decorate the trees at Christmas when the water level drops, Joyce the unusual detested Rome and the Romans, I picture him with Nora eating a soft lukewarm pizza behind the Piazza Navona, swearing, Joyce has a beautiful grave in Zurich next to Elias Canetti’s, that’s an idea, Yvan, a handsome tomb in Zurich, a stone’s throw from the zoo, an isolated place to enjoy the ballet of the monkeys and the lions’ roars, lying down quietly with your hands behind your head—just an hour now till Rome say the Americans good news or bad, I don’t know the train is moving at top speed now we’re rocked from right to left depending on the tunnels I sit back down, it’s long, an hour, it’s long and it’s short opposite me the lady who got on in Florence doesn’t even glance at me absorbed in her book, I’ll pick mine up again, I want to know what will happen to Intissar, maybe she can save me, she was washing Marwan’s body in the hot Beirut night, and now:
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