He bends over her, catches her by the hair and pulls her violently into the apartment, she slides over the tile, half raises herself, shouts with surprise and pain, falls silent, he throws her onto the unmade bed, she buries her head into the pillow. Her gun is still at the front. Her strength, her willpower are there too. She wants to disappear. She hears Ahmad’s belt and pants fall onto the floor next the bed. She doesn’t want to look. She doesn’t want to see him. She stiffens when a feverish hand searches between her legs to undress her. She struggles instinctively, Ahmad takes her by the hair and crushes a knee into her kidneys, Ahmad is talking but she doesn’t hear him. She doesn’t want to hear him, she feels a moist contact, Ahmad spat on her closed thighs, she doesn’t want to hear him she doesn’t want to feel him she doesn’t want to feel those two clumsy fingers penetrating her sex she doesn’t even want to groan. Marwan, please. Marwan help me. Ahmad crushes her he is lying on top of her his breath against her neck she doesn’t hear him he doesn’t succeed he pushes her roughly shakes her he tries to turn her over she clings to the edge of the bed she doesn’t want to see him she doesn’t want to see him he hits her pulls at one of her legs she resists he spits again hits her again Ahmad presses with all his weight on her he doesn’t succeed he gets annoyed she feels sick she feels sick and suddenly there’s a terrible noise in her ears, a huge detonation, very close, deafening, followed by a warm liquid pouring onto her left shoulder, into her hair, against her cheek, a smell of powder, a smell of blood, Ahmad collapsed on top of her, she pushes him away and rolls to the bottom of the bed, she is on the ground, she crawls in the dark to the bathroom, she touches Marwan’s cold body, she stretches out, she faints next to him.
•
Abu Nasser wakes her gently in the Beirut dawn. The pale light dazzles her. Abu Nasser supports her, helps her get up, pours water over her face, she drinks, sees herself in the mirror, covered with blackened blood. Marwan is lying on a white sheet. Abu Nasser almost carries her to the bedroom. On the bed, Ahmad is stretched out, half his head gone. The wall is splattered with flesh and blood. Abu Nasser has tears in his eyes. His handsome uniform is stained now. He was dressed for the burial of his son, she thinks. Abu Nasser helps her put on a bathrobe. Two soldiers carry Marwan’s body on a stretcher.
“I’m taking you home, Intissar, it’s over.”
He gently takes her arm. She hears him shout orders to the fighters accompanying him, throw this bastard into the first ditch you see. Abu Nasser will have Intissar move to his house in Raouche. He will go alone to bury his son. Marwan will disappear into the ground.
Intissar will not be there to hear the din of the city falling behind her, exile will open up like a precipice in the middle of the empty sea, an immense shadow into which useless rifles and abandoned tanks will sink, caresses of the dead and the living, far from the enemy and from the fight that gave its fragile and vertiginous meaning to the existence that defeat has just annihilated to send her into anxious wandering, a roaming where her feet, which felt the disaster first, listlessly strike the earth and, as if they were afraid now of wounding it, will never leave their mark on it again.
By dint of tenderness, Abu Nasser managed to make her let go of Marwan’s heavy 9-millimeter that she was still hugging with all her strength, like a part of herself.
XXI
what a story poor Intissar Marwan puts his gun in her hand, his ghost saves her, there are loves, promises that withstand death, especially in books, books and plays, the Palestinians will be scattered throughout the Mediterranean, some to Tunis, some to Algiers, some to Syria, Arafat the grey will try to return to Lebanon to Tripoli in 1984 with his fighters before the Syrians send him back to the sea with a nice kick in the rear, the way you’d kick a dog, poor Intissar, Ahmad poor guy victim of his desire and his violence, victim who makes victims, like us in Bosnia, like the fair-greaved Achaeans, the ones that will sack Troy kill children and carry off women into slavery, me I haven’t saved anyone, either by letting my gun lie by the bedside or by being resurrected from the dead, no one, neither Andi nor Vlaho, and no one has saved me, not Marianne not Stéphanie not Sashka the blonde, I wonder if Rafael Kahla is like me, why does he write these terrifying stories, did he try to strangle his wife like Lowry, or did he kill her like Burroughs, did he incite people to hatred and murder like Brasillach or Pound, maybe he’s a victim like Choukri the wretched, or a man three times vanquished like Cervantes—who will wash my body once I’m dead, it’s very sad this story, very sad, a city falling, collapsing, a city breaking like glass in the hands of those who think they’re defending it, Barcelona in 1939 Beirut in 1982 Algiers in 1992 Sarajevo in 1993 and so many others, so many others with the masses of fighters doomed to death or exile, like Intissar, alone with Abu Nasser, Intissar the innocent who thinks she’s paying for a sin she did not commit, I still have two stories left to read by this Rafael Kahla, other war stories, sometimes you come across books that resemble you, they open up your chest from chin to navel, stun you, I’d like to have Marwan’s nobility, is that still possible, let’s think about it Yvan what are we going to do in Rome aside from getting properly plastered taking a bath and treating ourselves to a new suit, dark and luxurious, how to become Marwan, tomorrow morning, once the money is acquired and the dead in the suitcase are buried in the Vatican archives, what am I going to do with the piece of gold of Charon the ferryman, how to set death’s obol on each eye of all my corpses, Cocteau said about Ezra Pound the old madman that he was “the rower on the river of dead,” now I’m in the same situation or very nearly, Ezra Pound has a beautiful grave in San Michele the cemetery by the sea in Venice, the foggy little island off the Fondamente Nuove where the celebrities are crammed in, a green plot with a tiny plaque in the shade of the cypress trees for the fascist preacher of Radio Roma, obsessed with money and Jews, to the point of madness, of course in Venice I had no inkling of the magical Cantos, of Apollo’s oracle in 110 chapters, closed, esoteric, strange, which cover the past century in ten languages 800 pages and end in Rome, poem with these lines, Le chapeau melon de saint Pierre / you in the dinghy (piccioletta) astern there, if I had the volume of the Cantos I’d use it now to read my cards, open it haphazardly and see where it sends me, to Gethsemani Kyoto Pisa New Orleans to the City of London to Paris no definitely not to Paris, Ezra Pound the godless prophet shouted anti-Semitic diatribes and insults at the United States his homeland over the waves of the fascist radio, I wonder what the Americans in the café car would think of him, maybe they’ve visited San Michele, Venice the surprising is probably the only city in the world where lovers and couples on their honeymoon go to the cemetery, Venice eats away at your soul as surely as nitre on a cave wall, it was Stéphanie who gave me an anthology of Ezra Pound, with a tender little inscription, to my favorite fascist and the date, I had told her about my youthful passions for raised-arm salutes and shaved skulls, bad acquaintances, the weight of heredity who knows, my devotion to Brasillach the martyr by whom I hadn’t read a single line aside from his prison poems and a few texts on cinema, in our very Parisian high school Yvan was the real fascist, the violent ideologue, in combat boots bomber jackets the whole end-of-century bad-boy uniform, he came from a real family of historic Nazis firm believers who scorned the rank populism of the Front National, Yvan detested the Catholic Church which had to be brought to heel, he hated with a fine fury anything that wasn’t him, Jews communists Arabs British fairies the swarming Orientals the perverted capitalists corrupt politicians an endless list of hatreds and disgusts motivated by the reading of paranoid screwball pamphlets decorated with swastikas, crosses paty, rosy crosses, every possible kind of cross imaginable except the Gaullist Cross of Lorraine, fasces battleaxes sheaves of wheat crossed spears brandished swords glaives dark helmets, photocopied on bad paper or venerable newspapers from the good old days that he had to cover in plastic to keep them from crumbling to pieces so much had they been handled, Yvan had a real passion, ardent and contagious, I l
et myself be convinced by his admirable rage, probably I was predisposed to it, despite my grandfather’s escapades in the Resistance: my father was worried about my new acquaintances, my politicization and my black shirts, my mother of course said to him youth will have its fling, it was Yvan who had me meet Bardèche the historic, it was a pilgrimage, a little journey of initiation to the land of the master, who what’s more was charming, he offered us tea and a lecture just a tiny bit confused about collaboration Jewish manipulations and the importance of The Charterhouse of Parma, I remember the old man had an upper lip that trembled, an uncontrollable tic, physical expression of resentment, from time to time a drop of shining mucus beaded on his nostril to end up falling on his dressing gown without seeming to bother him in the least, the great Maurice liked me, he asked me what I wanted to study, I replied “political science” and he smiled, I couldn’t really tell if this smile was ironic scorn for that noble subject or an encouragement, then the worthy Mussolinian writer gave us little gifts, a brochure denouncing “the farce” of the Nuremberg trial for Yvan and The History of the Spanish War which had just been reprinted for me, with a dedication, to Francis, wishing you the best for the future, with a slightly hesitant pen, the brother-in-law of Brasillach the Catalan added a commentary, it’s something, he said, this book is constantly being reprinted in Spain, we had immediately seen and understood the whole interest of this war, Bardèche and Brasillach inseparable Laurel and Hardy went many times to the Iberian peninsula between 1936 and 1939, to witness the democratic anarchy and the importance of Franco the savior, they saw Europe on the march in it, thanks to Mussolini’s troops, Hitler’s planes, the Reds destroyed by law and order, they demonstrated that the massacres attributed to the nationalists were inventions of Republican propaganda, that the real bloodthirsty ones were the rojos the Reds the great eaters of clergymen, they defended the greatness of General Yagüe the fine strategist, from Millán-Astray’s Legion, the Italians with the handsome black feathers, and thus began a long battle of numbers that Bardèche would continue alone after Brasillach’s execution, all the corpses are communist or Jewish propaganda, all the dead served the USSR or Israel, so they didn’t exist, or hardly mattered, Bardèche is the champion of the avenging scrawls on gravestones, you’re not so dead as all that in Badajoz, there aren’t as many dead as they say in Auschwitz, that’s all lies to hide the crimes of the Republicans or the Resistance, those are the real criminals, the ones who raped nuns with pleasure before sending them to the firing squad, the ones who tortured the middle class in the prisons of Madrid and Barcelona, today his blindness seems so obvious to me that he could only be guided by hatred, a fierce secret hatred for those who had taken away from him the man he loved, Brasillach the martyr, a hatred of the Jews so strong so powerful that he couldn’t even manage to convince himself of their extermination, pursued by Jewish ghosts into his grave, the old Bardèche, senile, convinced of the universal conspiracy against the Good and the Right, Yvan my friend also firmly believed in these theories as old as the world that declared international Jewry the enemy to be killed, despite all my efforts I had difficulty convincing myself of the danger a few philosophers journalists or psychoanalysts could represent for the nation, I was a feeble anti-Semite, a bad racist, Yvan said to me it’s because you don’t deal with Jews or Arabs, if you knew them you’d hate them immediately, I trusted him, even though my beloved history books on the twentieth century proved precisely the contrary, according to Yvan that was because all of history had been written by the Jews, which no doubt explained his deplorable grades and his lack of interest in the subject, Mr. Moussempès our teacher in senior year was a nice man from the Landes a native of Dax with a strong southwestern accent difficult to suspect of crypto-Semitism however, his Gascon fluency made him an extraordinary orator when it came to telling about battles diplomacy political intrigues it’s probably thanks to him that I miraculously passed the prestigious entrance exam for the Sciences-Po later, Yvan respected me mostly because of my Ustashi background and my family photos full of dark uniforms, adolescence is in love with images, images and strong friendships for life and beyond the grave secret oaths arms raised above a patriotic altar, Yvan’s madness showed through at times but only rarely as I remember it, sometimes he became fixated on a subject and spun in circles like a record on a gramophone, for days and days locked up in his room reading the same minuscule paragraph over and over without saying anything but that’s it, that’s it, that’s it ad infinitum, a fragment of a speech on the economy by Hitler involving currency and inflation, for example, could set off one of his attacks, he’d stop going out, couldn’t even manage to drag himself to the bathroom and urinated into plastic bottles reading the text in question over and over, that’s it, that’s it, that’s it, as if he had discovered the Holy Grail, he was writing a biography of the Brothers of Christ, a treatise on their importance in the occult struggle against communism, where he traced the origins of all the secret societies defending the West to the forgotten children of Joseph and the Virgin Mary, the ones who remained in the shadow even though they’re mentioned in the Gospels, also baptized by John the Baptist the Beheaded and I forget what else, his anxious parents wanted him to go to the doctor but that was obviously impossible, because psychiatry and all of psychology were in the hands of the Jews who were trying to corrupt him, to rot his brain, and so on until the dawn of a day like any other, in the springtime, a little while before graduation, on the way to high school Yvan came nose to nose with people putting up posters from I don’t know what party for I forget which election, peaceful-seeming guys in their forties who were decking out a municipal billboard for the purpose, I don’t know why but Yvan saw red, he savagely attacked them, furiously, with the bike chain he always carried in the pocket of his orange-and-black jacket, he lashed one man’s face threw himself onto the second like a baboon tore off one of his ears with his teeth showering him with kicks in the groin, possessed, enraged, relentless, the third man didn’t think twice faced with the surprise of the attack with its extraordinary violence with his companions’ screams of pain with Yvan’s roars he brought the glue-brush down on his skull, a good straight strong blow that split his occiput and got him a huge number of stitches, even today no one can say if that fracture of his skull played a determining role or if his madness was already well advanced but Yvan went to the emergency room at the psychiatric hospital and then to a rest home for uncontrollable lunatics, Yvan schizophrenic paranoic catatonic and violent, incurable despite the tons of medications, electroshocks and various therapies his doctors have tried, Yvan plunged into the dark, when he speaks it’s to recite a paragraph from Mein Kampf or anti-Semitic insults, the yids the yids are trying to assassinate me, during his few minutes of consciousness a week Yvan is terrified, terrified or utterly violent, depending on the treatment that never managed to “stabilize” him, lost in the limbo of resentment and fright—for me the shock was terrible, Yvan had fallen in combat, brought down by a blow of that campaign bludgeon on his skull, I immediately went to see him at the hospital, I talked for a long time with his parents, and soon faced facts, he had a real fracture, a fine furious madness worthy of Ares, which brought tears of sadness to my eyes, I thought I’ll avenge you, I’ll avenge you, I’ll avenge Yvan with the staring eyes and the lolling tongue, Yvan the pale chained to a chair and shouting to the death: I saw his mother quietly crying afraid to approach him, afraid to approach her own son whose failing brain was oozing violence hatred and pain, now I’ll avenge you old pal I’ll give you a new life, you’ve gotten a little bit out of the asylum, your name at least, even if it’s with my face on your passport, Francis has slipped into the useless body of Yvan the Terrible for his reincarnation—after Yvan was committed I passed my baccalauréat to go get bored in a private preparatory class where I was supposed to be taught the subtleties of scholarly essays and general knowledge, I was bored stiff, I wanted violence and revenge so much that I went slogging in the army for si
xteen months, Yvan would have liked that a lot, the virile songs and the nocturnal sagas, the maneuvers, the training in weapons, tactics, and orientation, until that trip to Egypt on my own to celebrate my discharge and meet Marianne the prudish—my Nazi stories made Stéphanie laugh a lot, especially the episode of Yvan the poor guy felled by a glue brush, still she was a little sorry for me, for having lost all that time, she said, all that ideological time she meant, before yielding to democratic reason, I replied halfway, I only yielded halfway, I’ve never voted in my life, neither did Ezra Pound, I suppose, I have no idea, he too the deranged poet wrote epic-political poems to the glory of the fascist economic model, against usury and usurers, from his house on the outskirts of Genoa the American said terrible things about the leaders of his country with keen hearing who condemned him for high treason in 1943, Pound replied that he didn’t see how the simple fact of talking into a microphone even loudly could constitute treason, he was going to pay for it dearly, locked up in 1945 in a cage in the middle of a military detention camp in Pisa, a cage three meters by three with a canvas roof two meters from the ground, Pound slept on the concrete a surveillance spotlight constantly on, in the humid heat of the Tuscan summer, secluded in this hutch that prefigured the ones in Guantánamo, never leaving it, watched day and night, humiliated, gaunt, Pound ended up cracking and was rushed to the infirmary—he barely escaped the death sentence, probably because the authorities decided that he was in fact crazy and that his case required not the firing squad but psychiatry, Pound the friend of Joyce of Eliot of all the artists poets musicians in Paris and elsewhere was declared an officially deranged enemy of the people and sent back a little while later to civilian life, he hurried to return to Italy scarcely had he stepped off the liner than he greeted the journalists come to meet him with the fascist salute, so that the reporters had the impression, for the space of a second, that they were the ones coming back from afar and Pound, Pound the scrawny bearded man, who had never budged, who had already remained in a phantom country, his arm raised high to the rhythm of the clicking of martial heels and iron boots, the inner country, where there is only oneself, no enemies no treacherous Jews no money no perversions pain or lies, poor Pound it didn’t matter that he knew thousands of obscure Chinese ideograms he lived enclosed, in the company of statues and busts of himself, he outlived Eliot Yeats Joyce Hemingway William Carlos Williams Cocteau to end up croaking in Venice at the age of eighty-seven, in Venice the humidity is deadly, me too I very nearly succumbed to the mildewy beauty of the City of the Doges, what am I going to do now, you leave a lot of things by the wayside convictions comrades women objects you cherished you thought you’d keep all your life wedding rings gold chains tattoos you get tired of scars that fade away, as for Vlaho he got used to his new condition he doesn’t moan about Fate he accepts, despite the phantom pain, it seizes him from time to time he told me, in Bosnia we were running in front of the great Serbian winter offensive of 1993 we were running as we had rarely ever run before, turning back from time to time to fire a shot or shoot a rocket nothing very effective we were running watching the villages burning behind us we told ourselves we were going to cover the distance all the way to the sea or the Neretva if it went on like that there was nothing to be done, then the front stabilized by a miracle we found ourselves in the trenches hurriedly digging fortifications burying mines trying to defend a ridgeline the United Nations helicopters roamed around us it was a real temptation to down one but of course that was forbidden, we could only at most take a potshot at the white paint on their tanks, just so they’d hear ding ding ding inside and feel they weren’t welcome, then those guys would go back to Split saying “they shot at me, they shot at me” which earned them glory and prestige over a beer while we were freezing our balls off in the mud, Yvan Deroy the mad might have enlisted with me if they hadn’t committed him, there wasn’t more than one Frenchman in the ranks of the HOS until its dissolution after the attack on Zagreb and the assassination of Kraljevic in Bosnia, Yvan would probably have detested the filth the cold and the ideological confusion, despite everything I felt I had found my cause, Croatia and the Croats, God and country, liberty, beautiful Liberty guiding the people in the painting by Delacroix, she who never appeared before the Serbian tanks with her breasts bare: what we saw arriving in front of the Yugoslav tanks were scruffy, panic-stricken refugees, wounded and crying but never with flag and rifle in hand or face turned to the right, torso so luscious you wanted to bite it, all that is fine for painters and filmmakers, for us it took on a different quality, that of poor shivering guys fighting for a scrap of land a farm a valley a village on fire their families and comrades dead in a great storm a blizzard of flames and fright worthy of Hephaestus the lame, the Scamander afloat with decaying carcasses, mutilated bodies, debris of houses and ruined hamlets, what we had seen in Slavonia stretched out, augmented, resounded endlessly, in a duel of violent acts and savageries on this one or that one, Serb or Croat or Muslim, according to all possible combinations of horror, the Russians and Greeks next to the Serbs Arabs and Turks next to the Muslims Catholic Europeans next to Croats bastions of the West all these lovely people hated each other, Andi had said to me you’ll see, you’ll hate the Serbs and Muslims sooner or later, I was surprised, the Serbs maybe, but the Muslims, and Andi had been right, I had a burning hatred in my chest, instilled there by Eris the indefatigable goddess of Strife, which took a long time to calm down—I never went to Serbia, in the end, despite my hesitations in Thessalonica city of the absent, I headed west, as always, towards the luminous west, in Igoumenitsa I put the car on a ferry headed for Corfu the British, Corfu last stop before Ithaca, without realizing that I would find thousands of Serbs there of course, I didn’t know the twists and turns of Atropos the implacable who had made many fates meet on this little island, fates driven by hatred and war, it’s hard to understand hatred when you haven’t experienced it or when you’ve forgotten the burning violence the rage that lifts your arm against an enemy his wife his child wanting revenge wanting pain for them make them suffer too, destroy their houses disinter their dead with mortar shells plant our semen in their females and our bayonets in their eyes shower them with insults and kicks because I myself had cried when I saw the solitary body of a beheaded kid clutching a toy in a ditch, a grandmother disemboweled with a crucifix, a comrade tortured enucleated grilled in gas like a shriveled-up grasshopper, his eyesockets empty and white, almost gleaming in the carbonized mass of the corpse, images that still today set my heart beating faster, make my fists clench, ten years later, like Andi’s corpse seen lying in his steaming droppings in the middle of the idyllic landscape of a Bosnian valley, there’s nothing to be done these images lose none of their force, how to rid myself of them, how, where to leave them, to whom can I confide them, Vlaho the disabled doesn’t have to carry this weight, he’s happy in peace funny and serene, he left his burden in Bosnia, during an absurd counter-attack to get out of our muddy trenches, we hurtled down the hillside like devils and the shells began to rain down, my helmet fell half over my eyes, Vlaho is just on my right, Andi the furious is in front of course right in front, fleet-footed Andi, I shout to give myself courage, we have to reach the edge of the trees and try to stay there shells are flinging up waves of soft earth grass and metal my ears are whistling I have no way to breathe I run without having time to breathe my lungs blocked I am running solely on adrenaline like a robot on its battery Andrija has reached the first trees he has disappeared under cover I’m almost there, I’m almost there and a huge explosion knocks me down, I’ve collided with a wall of hot air, the breath of a dragon, I’ve gotten a huge hit in my helmet, it rang like a bell, I’m on the ground, stunned, I don’t hurt anywhere, it’s the silence, I can hear only my breathing, my face is splattered with mud, I sit up cross-legged, in the great buzzing, I see Vlaho a few feet away lying on his stomach a second explosion wakes me up, I can hear again I hear the rumble of the shells volleys of shots machine guns I get up
and run bent over to Vlaho, I accidentally kick a smoking forearm, a hand sliced off I mechanically pick it up still shocked I go over to the Dalmatian lying on the ground his elbow neatly severed by a huge piece of shrapnel, I call out to him Vlaho Vlaho kako si kako si Vlaho no answer, his eyes are closed, his heart is beating very quickly, very quickly and weakly, I grab the wound to check it blood flows through my fingers two other comrades come to the rescue, they put a makeshift tourniquet on it and drag him to cover, he’s bleeding from his side too, the shrapnel burned the canvas jacket and opened a blackish wound below his ribs, I realize I’m still holding Vlaho’s severed arm, I let it go, I feel nauseous all of a sudden, Andi arrives with a nurse, I look at the pale contorted hand on the ground, the friendly hand with the pink bone, the right hand, right or left I have no idea I sit down on the ground no I collapse rather I collapse onto the ground and pass out, with probably Vlaho’s dead palm on my forehead, to sponge away my sweat one last time: when I come to Andi is next to me, pale too, I say to him his hand his hand give him back his hand, as if it were still on me, Andrija looks at me without understanding, the hand isn’t there anymore, I hear the noise of gunfire straight ahead, we have to go there, all the rest of the day we fight thinking that Vlaho is dead, dazed and too caught up in the battle to think, Andi explains to me that the nurses covered Vlaho with a blanket his hand with a plastic bag and carried all of it to a first-aid post, might as well say to Hades, here Machaon lacks supplies and above all it is almost impossible to evacuate the wounded, I feel empty, empty weary and sad, no shouts of revenge, no cries, no tears for now, just the rifle that feels a little heavier than usual, Vlaho so loved to feel girls up with both hands, one on each buttock, I have the secret hope that they’ll be able to sew it back on, so cleanly cut off by the metal, that should be easy, a good cast a few stitches and we’ll see him tomorrow or the day after alive and bawdy as ever, Vlaho is just twenty years old, twenty he needs his life his two arms to drive badly at breakneck speed and trim his vines, fortunately our counter-attack comes to an abrupt end, the Serbs give us a good kick in the butt and we climb back up the hill with many losses and a lot of trouble to position ourselves in a destroyed village, our unit is lagging a little behind as soon as we’re settled in we send our guys to go find out about Vlaho, relieved we learn that he’s out of danger, a haughty medic tells us he’s been evacuated, so with a naïve childlike voice impressed by expertise Andi asks the question I had on my lips, and . . . and his arm, did they put it back on? the doctor makes him repeat it before bursting out laughing, he replies Moraće se naučiti tući lijevom, he’ll have to learn to jack off with his left hand, we stayed there with our mouths open, hung out to dry by all-powerful medical science that has just thrown our hopes into the trash where Vlaho’s limb is slumbering, his fingers of a driver, a shooter, a handler of bayonets and burrower in females, his fingers will decompose before he does, it’s strange to think that, like his baby teeth somewhere in a box with his grandmother’s jewelry, his forearm is planted in Bosnia, a tree with no fruit, should we set up a plaque to it, here lies the right forelimb of Vlaho Lozović, whose remaining body rests elsewhere, the way those traffickers of medieval relics scattered corpses from Byzantium to Barcelona, bones by the ton, a tibia here a femur there, ossicles for the poor skulls for the rich, a fragment of Saint Somebody for the devotions of peasants frightened of hell, a chunk of the deceased to take out on feast days, the bone will be on display in its gilded reliquary, to ward off plagues poxes wars curses nothing like parading a piece of a stiff, the all-powerful head of Saint Matthew Saint Luke or Saint John the Baptist, we should have preserved the arm of Vlaho Lozović the Unknown, Vlaho the Smiling, Vlaho who accepted, who left the violent acts of his right arm by the wayside, sins war and revenge, he didn’t close himself up in the circle of reprisals, Vlaho, he was still in the hospital in Mostar when I told him about Andi’s death, his round face was suddenly covered in tears, I almost said don’t worry, I avenged him, but he wouldn’t have understood, that wouldn’t have consoled him, Vlaho the magnanimous, he was just sad, immensely sad at the departure of his friend, without hatred, without rage, I hugged him, we’ll see each other soon, I lied, the day before I had gone to the headquarters of the HVO in Vitez to announce that I was pulling out, that I’d had it, and there in front of Vlaho facing his eyes shining with tears I didn’t have the courage to repeat it to him, two or three days later though he went back to his home in Split, I could have waited for him, but I didn’t have the strength, I had spent all my energy in revenge, in the fury and dangerous crossing of the Muslim lines, by the only road (a path, rather) that we still controlled, I was exhausted by that absurd war where the allies against the Serbs were killing each other fifty kilometers to the east, our positions paralyzed, Andi with no grave his corpse taken away to be probably exchanged later in a truck of dead bodies I couldn’t bear any more, I couldn’t bear any more militia highwaymen disguised as soldiers, I was emptied out, no more friends no more anything no more desire, I had the image of Andi in my head lying with his pants down to his knees and the vision of the living-dead arm in the grass, I thought I saw it digging into the earth like a crab trying to hide itself, I said goodbye Vlaho, out of habit I held out my hand to his stump, Vlaho the debonair caught my fingers in his left mitt, he gave me one last smile, and I left for the North—maybe I too should have cut off my criminal hand, I might not be in this train ten years later, on my way to Rome the Catholic great reservoir of remains, I wasn’t able to accept the hand held out by Marianne, or Stéphanie, Sashka doesn’t offer anything, lost in her colors and the faces of illuminated saints that she paints all day long, what I am is of no interest to her my past is of no interest to her my life is of no interest to her she lives in her pictures, Christ Pantocrators, praying Virgins, Saint Georges, Saint Michael the Archangels, Saint Innocents, Saints Cosmas and Damian, which she sells at a very high price to sincere believers who do not know that women can’t paint icons, the prudish angel doesn’t whisper into their ears, we have in common neither language nor passion nor history, she is so far away, I’m not going to rush over to her place after all I’ll wait, wait and see, maybe I’ll manage to detach myself, detach myself from the suitcase from Vlaho’s arm from Andrija’s corpse from Sashka and the whole works, in Venice I thought I’d succeeded, in Venice queen of fog everything almost ended in a canal, the way Leon Saltiel the Jew from Salonika is about to hang himself or throw himself out the window before finding peace in revenge, the way Globocnik the killer brings an end to his days by biting a pen full of arsenic when the Allies capture him, the way Hess the inexhaustible manages to strangle himself with a cable, the way Manos Hadjivassilis throws himself onto the electrified barbed wire in Mauthausen, the way my Islamists blow themselves up in Jerusalem and see the city from high up their eyelids blinking in the middle of the sky, but they fished me out, they gave me a second life which I lost in the Zone everything comes in threes what’s waiting for me before the end of the world, what’s waiting for me, the friendly hand was sliced off in Bosnia, Yvan Deroy the mad has been far away for years, Sashka the unreachable lives in the gilt world of images, my father never emerged from his silence—I picture him alone with the cries of his own ghosts, he the son of a Resistant and he tortured Algerians as ardently as the Gestapo did his old man, they had perfectly remembered the lesson of water-boarding and the bike wheel, for the good of the community, if those rats didn’t talk bombs would go off, Frenchmen would die, it was mostly Algerians who died, how many, 500,000, a million, we’ll never know, the ones who died in combat, died from torture, died in prison, died from a bullet in the head, died inside the barbed wire of the detention camps, the suitcase is full of them, names testimonies secret reports memos from generals repentant or proud of their work and pictures, hundreds of photos, what could possibly have motivated all those soldiers to document the horror, why did the armed forces take the trouble to photograph electrocuted Algerians, half-drowned Al
gerians, beaten up Algerians, maybe to refine their techniques or give an account of their activities to anxious Parisian authorities, you see we’re not idle, here we’re grinding away, we’re slaving away, we’re keeping busy, did they get a glimpse of the catastrophe, the exile of a million people repatriated in 1962, a million French Spanish Italian Jewish gypsy Maltese German refugees crossing the Mediterranean to scatter from Alicante to Bastia, the greatest maritime displacement since the expulsion of the Mudejars 400 years before, Bône and Oran emptied of half of their inhabitants, Algiers of a third, desertion desolation victimization the memory of the dead, plunge a country into hell, their executives in the FLN will turn into skillful executioners and torturers too, lost in the Zone where I counted the blows the throat-slittings the decapitations the massacres and the bombs, lulled by the exotic sound of the patronymics of the emirs of the GIA and the AIS, the rising generation confronted the old ones from the war of independence, some of whom had fought in regiments of mountain goumiers on the Italian slopes, the world turns, the great-great-great-grandchildren of immigrants from Minorca sent to colonize Algiers in 1830 would return to Ciutadella city of horses and of Saint John the Baptist 130 years later driven out by the valorous fighters of the FLN and the French torturers, murderers letting fall dark cloudbursts of victims, all those circles drawn on a golden shield, it’s the mothers who provide the weapons, Thetis the loving consoles Achilles her child by giving him the means to take revenge, a breastplate a sword a blinding shield in which the whole world is reflected, just as Marija Mirković my mother provided me with homeland history heredity Maks Luburić and Millán-Astray the one-eyed hawk, don’t cry Achilles, dry your tears and go avenge yourself, be reconciled with the remorseful son of Atreus and kill Hector with your fury, revenge, revenge, I feel revenge rumbling through this train hurtling through the hills, my innocent neighbor still has her eyes glued to her book, she doesn’t know who’s sitting opposite her, she can’t imagine that her fate has crossed mine, that soon the white pearls of her necklace will be in my possession, her bag, her wool sweater, I’ll dance on her body in the light of the Tuscan moon the bronze gleaming in my hand, ready to sack Rome with the wide walls, Rome conquered by the victorious Allies, Rome pillaged and burned by the swordsmen of the Hapsburg son of Joanna the Mad, Rome split open by the intrepid Normans, by the fierce Visigoths, by the Gauls with the short blades, Rome daughter of Aeneas with the swift spear, Rome descendant of Ilion in ruins, revenge, revenge for Patroclus son of Menoetius, for Antilochus son of Nestor, revenge, one more ransacking, more hecatombs, libations, smoking pyres for Andrija the Slavonic who begged me in a dream to find his body, to burn it, revenge, for the lost arm of Vlaho the magnanimous, seeding the land, vengeance, for everyone, the glaive heated by warm blood, the time is coming, I feel it the train is vibrating I’m almost there I’ve almost reached the end of the journey, in the black landscape my eyes closed skeletons spinning and rattling they’re the sparks of color of the inner world calm your breathing, Francis, try to breathe regularly and let the thoughts flow that are leading you towards revenge, let Dream, the messenger, incubate his oracles in you, in the Middle Ages they were afraid of sleeping for fear of being assailed by the terrible succubae that gave pleasure, a hidden and confused pleasure, squat men frightened by the universe woke up in a sweat with a cursed erection that they concealed poorly from their panic-stricken wives, I venture Queen Mab hath been with you, Mab the messenger, with her team of magic fireflies, no bigger than an agate-stone, what would she say to me, to me, the tiny fairy of the kingdoms of the night, nothing, last night all steeped in alcohol in cold caresses in a concierge’s lodge drowned in shadow, against the body marked by old age of the ugly woman with the bitter tongue, after the pleasureless ejaculation and the shame, once home ashamed and sad I collapsed on my sheetless bed in the empty apartment, my last night in Paris, Queen Mab has brought me to Sashka, to her tiny studio in Trastevere I see her pale hands stained with gold paint she is painting a pious picture of four crowned saints, four Dalmatian martyrs Severus, Severianus, Victorinus, and Carpophorus, handsome and brown-haired, she explains that they were skillful stone-carvers whom the Emperor Diocletian wanted to employ in his palace in Split to erect a pagan statue, of Jupiter the unyielding or Venus the temptress, the four artists had sworn their faith to Christ and refused to carve the idol, which enraged Caesar, he sentenced them to be whipped to death, the executioner belabored their bodies for days on end, with no noticeable effect, the four men resisted both the leather and the metal balls, the stripes on their skin disappeared as the torture went on, Diocletian the inflexible was scarcely moved by the miracle, he had them enclosed in four iron coffins that were thrown into the Adriatic where they sleep to this day, among pale blue jellyfish and wrecks of Venetian galleys, the four pious sculptors are reborn under the brushes of Sashka the iconographer, she has in front of her an illuminated book from which she draws her inspiration, a linden board hollowed out with a chisel and covered with levkas, the haloes of the four saints applied with gold leaf, the little sable brush with which she fills in the background with brown ocher, then the clothes with silver-white vermilion-red cobalt-blue, slowly and meticulously the magic image takes shape, it’s wonderful to watch Sashka work, among the Theotokions, the Saint John the Golden-Moutheds, the dizzying Stylites, the red dragons, Demetrius of Salonika pierced by spears, Theodore emperor of Byzantium, John Climacus on top of his ladder, James cut into pieces, a crowd of martyrs, of colors, of almost identical faces, the four little Dalmatian sculptors find a golden life in the magnificent shadow of martyrdom, before joining the seabed, Sashka the serene is not moved by all these massacres, she is protected by Luke the Evangelist, patron saint of painters and doctors, there is great gentleness in her drawing, infinite patience, when I met her I thought she was the angel herself appearing to me in her golden halo, at night, the troubled night of Rome, at a café terrace, back from an endless visit to the papal chancellery, Campo de’ Fiori, right next to me Sashka lit the square up the whole bar had eyes only for her, in that place they offer you peanuts with your aperitif, whole, in their stringy shells, and the customers looked like monkeys in the zoo, compulsively throwing the useless husks on the ground: the terrace littered with goober shells crunched underfoot, opposite the statue of Giordano Bruno the tortured, I imagine the spectacle, in February 1600 the filthy ribalds from the vicinity came to check if the impious one given over to the flames would cry out despite the gag, everyone ran up to hear the flesh crackle and fill their nostrils with the aroma of human meat, at the very place where today tourists are gulping down peanuts, Bruno the swordsman magician cosmologist occultist and poet was a great traveler, he visited half of Europe before being betrayed by the Venetians and brought before papal authority: that same authority recently expressed its regrets about burning him, sorry, they say today, for having tortured a naked philosopher chained to a metal stake on a pyre of logs, Giordano Bruno dead by pontifical stupidity opposite the bar where I shelled peanuts without being able to drag my eyes away from the young woman so beautiful, so present at the table next to mine, in the company of a man who was devouring her with his eyes, she didn’t seem to be paying attention to his concupiscence, even less to my own or to the carbonized body of Bruno, her eyes were too light for the demon to be reflected in them, too light, I heard her rolling pretty rs, she spoke Italian slowly, calmly, with a slight accent, I was sure she was Slavic and I prayed secretly for her to be Croatian, or Slovenian, or even Serbian, I would have had a hold over her through language—of course she had to be Russian, from Russia mother of Orthodoxy tanks and assault rifles, that’s all I knew, I could have itemized to her at leisure all the models, the variations, the calibers or secret activities of Great Russia in the Zone, at great length, spoken about Russia’s equivocal relations with certain Arab countries, about the curve of the cartridge clip, the Kalashnikov’s stroke of genius, but no, we talked about Jerusalem the gentle, about my entomologi
cal field trips in the Libyan desert or in the north of Morocco, quickly, without insisting, she is not curious, Sashka, she lives in a world of images, she expects nothing from anyone, especially not from words—I asked her why she had left St. Petersburg and she told me that she hadn’t left St. Petersburg, she’d left Leningrad, precisely because Leningrad was disappearing, that she had arrived in Jerusalem by chance, with a contingent of fake Jews looking for a host country, and there wasn’t a single ideological ulterior motive in her, no nostalgia, she was just uttering facts, when I asked her if she wanted to go back to Russia she replied simply that the Russia she knew no longer existed, that the city of her childhood had disappeared, that the people, the streets had changed, but she added immediately it’s just as well like that, and what for another would have been an utter I-don’t-give-a-fuck attitude in her signaled a detachment, an elsewhere, her life is in her gestures, in the movements of her brush, of her wrist, in her eyes riveted on a saint to be reproduced, a face to be modeled, the drape of a garment, she doesn’t have any pretensions that she’s creating, inventing new representations, no, she repeats ad infinitum what tradition has left to her, content to be able to make a living from this singular activity and towards me she acts in the same way, Sashka the distant, if I’m there so much the better, if not, too bad, she doesn’t try to convert me to anything, does she see me, even, she sees what I show her, which is nothing, or so little, disarmed by her simplicity and her statue-like forms, how could she know, if I don’t tell her anything, she has neither the universal maternity of Marianne the generous nor the devouring curiosity of Stéphanie the headstrong, Sashka is a mirror from which I keep myself hidden, my face veiled so as not to be reflected in the tormented faces of the executioners scalding the saints, whipping them to death before drowning them in the Adriatic like the four crowned ones from Split—in 1915 it was hundreds of bodies with no coffins they sent to the bottom, valiant Serbs, a little south of Corfu last stop before Ithaca, the British have a taste for islands even in the Mediterranean, Minorca Malta Corfu Cyprus belonged to them, and their ships with the bulging sides were masters of Akdeniz, the Turks’ name for the Mediterranean, the White Sea, when I landed in Corfu coming from Igoumenitsa after having crossed the steep-sloped Epirus the British were knocking down huge beers in the shade of ad-covered umbrellas on the coasts of Phaeacia, forget about Nausicaa washing her laundry on the bank, what was awaiting me was a Greek cop with a big mustache he ordered me to move my car as fast as possible, hitting the tired automobile’s roof hard with his club, quickly car quickly, as if he were addressing a horse, despite the pink Brits the pretentious French the mistrustful Germans and the rowdy Italians the island was beautiful, the narrow old city looked more like Venice than Athens, thank God, and even tired of vacation pursued by the heads of decapitated monks and apocalyptic evangelists in my sleep Corfu wedged between the imposing Venetian fortresses was a repose, it was a pleasure to get lost there, to drink for a long time watching the sea lick the wounds on the walls, the Ottomans had tried to take the island many times, without success, Phaeacia last rampart of the West had held strong, the inscriptions on the walls recalled the siege of 1716, when the Turk had made his appearance for the last time off of Palaio Frourio, as in Malta the heroic before the defenders with their shining cuirasses had resisted the cannons, the sapping the continuous assaults of the fierce Easterners, there were masses of Croats and Dalmatians among the mercenaries defending the city, I imagine one of my ancestors flung into the sea by a cannonball, after having recommended himself to God having been brave and having sent many Janissaries to Hades: there almost was a mosque in Corfu, as there was in Rhodes, as in Belgrade, as in Mostar, Ares decided otherwise, it’s the only building missing in the old city, no Trojans at the bronze doors of the palace of Alcinous the grey, or almost none, strolling by chance through the colorful streets I chanced upon a building that announced Srpska Kuća, Serbian House, a museum devoted to the retreat of Peter I’s army in 1915, the soldiers in the ossuary in Salonika had passed through Corfu, before being sent back by sea to the Balkan front, just as the French and the English had survived the Dardanelles to end up in a grave in Thessaly, the valorous survivors of the most terrible military retreat since Berezina had fallen later on facing the Bulgarians, the museum was moving, dozens of period photos related the fierce rout of the Serbian army defeated by the Kaiser and his Austrian ally, through the mountains of Montenegro to the Albanian coast where the French took them on board, a retreat with women and children, on foot in the snow, long columns almost without food traveled for 400 kilometers in the intense winter cold, carrying their king on a straw chair, an entire country was leaving for the sea, 150,000 died along the way in the mountains of Kosovo and the outskirts of Podgorica, victims of the cold, of hunger, of German bullets, they kept dying after they arrived, malnourished, exhausted, installed in makeshift camps on the little wooded island of Vibo before the entrance to the harbor, with no tents, almost with no medical care, nothing could be done to keep them from dying, they fell like flies at the rate of 300 a day, the French and the British couldn’t get over it, they had survived the most terrible of all journeys to keel over by the thousands once they’d reached their destination, they were no longer supported by their homeland’s soil, they were in a foreign land, in the rain, on a rock in the Ionian Sea, there was no room to bury all these people, these thousands of people so the French hospital-ship Francis of Assisi the charitable took on board truckloads of corpses to go bury them at sea a few miles away, these Serbs from Belgrade who had never seen any sea but the Danube, they rest today dissolved in the waves, in the stomachs of thousands of fish and marine algae, the immense blue cemetery where Thetis descends to adorn their memorials with flowers, their children’s too, who died with them—the survivors prepared again for war, reorganized by the allies returned by boat to the other side of the Balkans, where they bravely started up the fight again, and Peter I the brave, over seventy, who had survived humiliation, illness, defeat, and exile to Corfu, could be crowned King of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenians, my king, I looked at him, old and sick, carried on the shoulders of his soldiers in the snow, flanked by an Orthodox priest and a doctor just in case, and I was proud that he was in a way my king, the only one what’s more, his son Alexander would be assassinated in Marseille in front of my grandfather’s eyes by the hired assassins of Pavelić the patriot, at the end of the war Corfu was strewn with Serbian cemeteries, the whole island was a tomb, the generous Greeks had lent their land for the dead and their theater for the Parliament, those same Greeks would in turn go to fight around Sarajevo the well-guarded, an exchange of graves, Serbian ossuaries here, Hellenic burial grounds there, the great circle round the rim of Achilles’ shield, the macabre humor of the relentless gods—as I left the Srpska Kuća I felt a little melancholy, I felt cold despite the August heat, I went and sat down at a café terrace my eyes on the blue necropolis thinking about Peter I Karageorgevich, who had fought against so many enemies, against the coarse Prussians in the French army in 1870, against the savage Turks in Bosnia in 1875, against the well-helmeted Austrians in 1914, exhausted, the old Montenegrin monarch forced to leave his country on foot, without however abandoning the homeland and the liberation of the Slavs of the South, sure that in Slavonia and in Bosnia he would have given us a real kick in the rear, the old Saint-Cyr military school alum with the white panache who swam across the Loire to escape Bismarck’s soldiers, Peter I found himself in exile on the island where Kaiser Wilhelm spent his vacations, in the shadow of a splendid palace called the Achilleion, with luxuriant gardens, planted with cypress, laurel, and palm trees, where the statue of dying Achilles contemplates the blinding blue of the Mediterranean, he prays to Thetis his mother, the place is completely devoted to the furious son of Peleus, to the eternal cycle of revenge: the palace was built by Sissi, Empress of Austria Queen of Hungary, who liked to come live a few months a year by the wounded warrior’s side, before she in turn
was assassinated on the banks of Lake Geneva by Luigi Lucheni an Italian anarchist with a stiletto right through her heart, was Kaiser Wilhelm II thinking of her when he rested his feet in the water, or rather of the son of Peleus conquered by Fate, or even of the Italian assassin, whose head he had seen preserved in formaldehyde at the Hotel Métropole in Geneva, the only hotel in the world to pride itself on human remains, Lucheni decapitated post mortem by a Swiss fetishist after he had hanged himself with his belt in his cell, Corfu was overflowing with dead people famous or unknown, ever since Poseidon had his revenge on the sailors who had brought Ulysses back to Ithaca by turning them to stone, I was spinning in circles among corpses, from bar to bar, museum to museum, the plague victims of Lazaretto Island gave way to Greek resistants and communists shot during the civil war, the 2,000 Jews imprisoned in the old Venetian fortress before being deported to Auschwitz, the sea seemed to have no bottom, it contained too many bodies, even the body of Isadora Duncan, who spent six months in Corfu in 1913 to get over the death of her two children drowned in the Seine, the American dancer with the bare feet was pursued by Athena jealous of her beauty, the tall silhouette of her ghost danced naked in the summer night, I imagined the movements of her torso, her hips draped in a transparent cloth among the shadows of the gardens of Achilles, among Sissi the empress, Kaiser Wilhelm II and Peter I of Serbia, now I see the handsome Sergei Yesenin at her side, in the darkness of the train window, Yesenin hanged at the age of thirty in his room at the Hotel d’Angleterre in St. Petersburg, after having written a farewell poem in his own blood, Sashka looks like him, she has the same round face, the very light eyes, an eternally childlike face accentuated by blond hair, Isadora Duncan knew only three words of Russian and Yesenin no foreign language, they didn’t speak, they danced, they drank, Sergei especially, Isadora says in her autobiography that the poet was passionate, so passionate that he could spend a week without sobering up, so passionate that he married the dancer eighteen years his senior, so passionate that he left her to go back to Russia and plunge into depression, in Corfu in the heart of summer it was hard to imagine the long night in Petrograd in December, the cord and the pipe in the room of the respectable hotel or else the last thoughts of Yesenin the hanged man, we still don’t know if he really committed suicide, maybe two or three somber Chekists helped hang him from the heating pipe, aided by the passivity of his permanent drunkenness, Sergei Yesenin dies in the absent sun and the first sheets of ice clinging to the shores of the Neva, his hotel room looks out onto the front of Saint Isaac’s Cathedral, could he glimpse through the window the catafalque of General Kutuzov Napoleon’s destroyer, between two gilt icons, probably not, the Revolution had closed the doors of churches to transform them into warehouses, forbidden to people, for the obstinate Bolsheviks were so superstitious that they feared the harmful influence of the very form of the building on Marxist zeal, if they were changed into theaters or meeting houses, as had been suggested in the beginning by suspicious pragmatists, who were perhaps liquidated as cleanly as Yesenin, Yesenin in love with his mother Russia cemetery of the Grande Armée where the 300,000 soldiers of Napoleon’s Old Guard lie mowed down by the frost or the cannons in 1812, the cavalrymen ate their horses that died of hunger, the Belorussian peasants ate the cavalrymen that died of hunger, Napoleon lord of Corfu for ten years dreamed of the sun of Austerlitz and of the victory of Lodi as he crossed the bridge over the Berezina erected in haste by the genius of the pontoon builders ancestors of the French sailors who transported the survivors of the Serbian army through the Ionian Sea, among them the Serbian soldier Jean Genet fell in love with in Barcelona, Stilitano the coward with the missing hand—in Corfu near the palace of Achilles Venetians Ottomans Frenchmen Austrians Serbs met and even an American dancer in love with the Russian poet, Isadora Duncan would die not long after Yesenin the alcoholic saint, in the same way, her neck choked cervical vertebrae crushed along the shores of the Mediterranean, dragged behind a car like the snipers in Beirut, the goddess jealous of her beauty and her multicolored shawl snags it in the rear wheel of the convertible driving at top speed on the Corniche, in Nice, it’s evening, a light September breeze is blowing in from the sea, to protect her fragile throat and her soft breasts the dancer wrapped herself up in her immense scarf that snaps in the wind like a deadly pennant, when the driver accelerates the silk scarf gets caught in the axle immediately tightens and drags Isadora out of the vehicle, onto the pavement, her head against the tire’s rough rubber, in the time it takes for the driver to stop she’s already dead, sitting with her back against the spokes of the blue Amilcar, her eyes wide open onto the Mediterranean, her head stuck to the car, her tongue sticking out, like Saint Mark the Evangelist hauled on the paving stones by a cart near Alexandria, Saint Mark accompanied by the lion on the icons painted by Sashka the angel as blond as Yesenin: she paints martyrs and I collect corpses, bodies scattered in the snow, arms fallen on the ground, bones sleeping at the bottom of sea graves, Corfu last stop before Ithaca seemed like one of Fate’s points of inflection, the home of the implacable Moirae, I drank a final ouzo in the garden of the palace of Sissi the stabbed empress, watching Achilles massacre the Trojans, I thought one last time about the Serbs chilled to the bone, about Stilitano the one-armed coward, about Isadora caught again by divine vengeance after her children and her husband, and I started off again for the North—the North, that is the shadow of Maréchal Mortier where I was going back to officiate a few days later, Mortier great killer of Spaniards, Teutons, and Slavs, his boulevard a proud address for our arcana, barely had I arrived than I found Lebihan who welcomed me with a So Francis, ready to get back in the saddle? he was surprised I wasn’t more tanned, after a stay on the islands, I told him nothing about my vacation other than the names of exotic places, what was there to say, dead Greeks dead Jews dead Evangelists and dead Serbs, I returned one more time to the battle of Algiers, dead Muslims, the GIA had a new emir and was changing their strategy, or rather abandoning all strategy for the tactics of cutting throats, at night Queen Mab the tiny fairy incubated my azure-colored dreams, arid mountains plunging into the sea and television Nausicaas, to console me probably for the darkness of the day, the ritual, the offering to Maréchal Mortier, the Porte-des-Lilas metro line, the change at Belleville, the smell of peanuts and sweat of the Parisian metro, getting out at Pigalle, Blanche, or Place-de-Clichy, depending on my mood, to stop by and have some drinks in the midst of the crowd of drunkards at the bar in the 18th arrondissement, commenting on another sort of news, usually connected to sports, to teams that aren’t doing so well, to results that are always disappointing, losing or winning at dice, with the surprising sensation, for someone returning from vacation, of discovering your family, your friends, and your house still in the same place, a place where there’s somewhere to drink, what’s more, and where you can crush your butts out on the ground without risking a reprimand, you find yourself patting the owner’s dogs as if they were distant cousins, endless demonstrations of affection, everyone’s happy to see you again, everyone celebrates with relief that this haven of manhood hasn’t yet been conquered by females the police or public health, and once you’re nice and tipsy you go back up to your place, you leave the zinc under your elbow for the zinc over your head, with all the windows open in order to get rid of the heat of Paris in early September, an armchair, a detective novel, and the warm smell of asphalt that invades the room as night falls—Stéphanie didn’t like my rituals, neither the bar nor the trashy novels, when the passion from the early days fades away, these nice character traits turn into unbearable defects, little by little the crack becomes an abyss of reproaches and annoyances that has to be filled with the plaster of lies and dissimulation, month after month, summer after summer, burying myself in the Zone, filling my briefcase with corpses right and left, as I traveled to Damascus Jerusalem Cairo Trieste Valencia, I was detaching myself from her as surely as from Marianne in Venice: my guilt after the incident of the fake suicide chan
ged into constant aggressiveness, everything went downhill, into the bottom of the sea, the way a shroud becomes unraveled thread by thread, this is going to end badly, we thought sometimes, each at one end of Paris in our respective apartments, it will all end badly, and one day as I got out of the Intercity coming from Frankfurt at the Gare de l’Est, exhausted after a sleepless night in the Prague train in the company of a talkative railway fanatic, having gone back to my place with new documents for my suitcase of catastrophes, my devil’s cauldron, a little jetlagged, confused, hazy, having reached my place in the early afternoon I didn’t go to the office right away, to check some minor details and put in an appearance, I should have, it’s very cowardly but I should have gone instead of taking a shower and sitting quietly in my armchair gazing off into space, she rang the doorbell at around five o’clock, I heard her voice on the intercom and I was surprised, she hardly ever came to my place, almost never and especially not without warning, she knew I was supposed to get back from Prague in the afternoon she had left the Boulevard a little early to run here, I heard her climbing the stairs, a little anxious, why was she coming, maybe one of those proofs of love that you plug the cracks with, a surprise, she came in smiling and kissed me tenderly saying just surprise! she asked me if I’d had a good trip, she observed the disorder, the clothes scattered on the floor, the photographs, the books, the papers cluttering the ground and she laughed, at least you’re faithful to your mess, she was in good form, very beautiful, her hair falling loose absorbed the light, she went into the kitchen to put something in the fridge, I should have guessed, I should have but I didn’t want to, I was tired, happy to see her, but surprised and tired, I hazarded I forgot your birthday, is that it? she gave a slightly false laugh, how stupid you can be, she simpered, almost inane all of a sudden, she was at a loss, looked for a place to sit down, decided to remain standing, I had a foreboding of something despite myself, I didn’t say anything, she chatted, I handed her the little transparent crystal star from Bohemia that I had bought for her, the object carved by the slaves in Theresienstadt wrapped up in red tissue paper, I said look, this is for you, she said oh, that’s nice, thanks, thanks and she was so nervous as she tore open the wrapping that the trinket fell down, that got on my nerves, for no reason, I picked up the gleaming star saying hey, watch out, and I was holding it when Stéphanie whispered I’m expecting a baby and let herself slide into the armchair, looking at me intensely, I didn’t say anything, I wasn’t sure I’d understood, the usual phrase was I’m pregnant, I’m pregnant and not I’m expecting a baby, I handed her the little glass star, you almost broke it, her eyes misted over a little, she murmured that’s all you have to say? we were on opposite sides of a river, making incomprehensible signs to each other, I replied and you? I felt absolutely nothing at this announcement, nothing, four unreal words, I turned my head away, she said I’m such an idiot, we never keep our mouths shut at the right time, I stammered no, no, she got up, muttered I knew I shouldn’t have come, I repeated no no, she got annoyed, she shouted am I staying or leaving? we never keep our mouths shut at the right time I sighed whatever you like, she trembled and went out almost running leaving me alone with the Prague star still between my fingers—I didn’t rush over to the stairway I didn’t shout come back I sat down in the chair to look my share of fate in the face, impossible to imagine what Stéphanie’s words represented impossible to see what there was in her belly I remembered the last time we had slept together four days before but it wasn’t that coitus it was another one lost in the number of coituses of the previous weeks, during the weekend in Istanbul maybe, you can’t know did Stéphanie know, what, what was there to know, it was there in front of me have a child don’t make the choice of Achilles the sterile but that of Hector, Hector talks with Andromache his wife of the beautiful peplos, on the ramparts of Troy, Hector protector of his city, his wife begs him tenderly not to go to war, not to go, not to leave great-walled Ilion, despite the cowardice of his brother Paris the wretched fop, he sweeps her complaints away with a gesture, he says “leave the toils of war to men,” for you the children, for me the keen sword, I know that I’m going to die and that Troy will fall, that’s how it is, I will have a child, there’ll be a sparkling mobile in a colorful nursery, a male or a female, and Troy will fall, there will be an Astyanax somewhere who will look like me, who will carry his father on his shoulders the way I carry mine, outside of the city on fire, I saw myself with my father on my back, and him with his, a pyramid of fathers as high as the ladder of St. John Climacus, all of them overlapping each other laughing like demons at seeing their sons bending beneath them, so I got up and went into the kitchen, I rushed over to the bottle of champagne in the fridge, that’s what Stéphanie had put there, a bottle of champagne, and joy came over me, a powerful joy that resisted the Veuve Clicquot, that lasted despite all the drinking, in my chair, trying to understand what had just happened, I drank alone, I had forgotten Prague the trains the Czech railway fanatic the suitcase foreign criminal investigation departments I thought about rattles women contracting sweating bloody thighs, with the help of alcohol I saw myself wiping a bead of sweat off Stéphanie’s forehead in the middle of labor, changing the diapers of a hairy monkey, brown as night, a little scrap of a man, discovering the relationship between primate and its progeny, soon I was drunk, it was time to go to bed let Dream bring me the news and I accidentally crushed the crystal star, next to the armchair, I crushed it with my shoe, by mistake, I heard it crack, the glass broke into a million glittering pieces, I was drunk, I was drunk I sat down on the ground to watch my tears of sorrow set off slivers of light as they fell on the debris of the dead object—the gods are fighting, the gods are fighting among themselves they are taking back what they have given, a child, that was a very small hand to pull me out of the water, a tiny paw to drag me out of the darkness, the next day Stéphanie the proud went to the gynecology clinic on the Rue des Lilas a stone’s throw away from our boulevard, she insisted, she trotted out all her persuasion her professional cards procured straightaway a meeting with the psychologist and the anesthetist, Stéphanie decided it, in the late afternoon they put a sort of vacuum between her legs, I didn’t know, I called her without success for twenty-four hours, I was shaken, anxious and happy, I kept calling her, I was afraid I’d wounded her, frightened her like a wild animal, the wild animal was me my father was right, old Priam was right, she couldn’t have a child with a barbarian, the choice of Achilles is no choice, the Moirae decided for him, Stéphanie decided for me, so much the better, so much the worse, who knows what would have come of this offshoot, son or daughter of workers in the shadows, I didn’t understand, I didn’t understand why, the day after that I managed to speak with her for five minutes, in a café on the Place de la République, she was very pale, defeated, she said to me you are a monster, I know everything about you you are a monster, I never want to see you again, how could she have changed so quickly, two days before she arrived at my place holding a bottle of champagne and now I was a monster, maybe she’d hoped for a transformation, a change, until the very end, maybe she had imagined she could live with the monster, I said nothing, I looked at her with a great sadness, she left, I had been a father for forty-eight hours, a monstrous father who eats his children, it was 7:30 I ordered a plum brandy, a little brandy of mourning for the tiny fists of the one I would not have, then another, for the monstrous barbarian, then a third, for my own dad, a fourth, for mortals, the poor fate of mortals, a fifth, for the gods who were fighting on top of Olympus, a sixth, for revenge, for the revenge that would come one day, sweet and bloody and when the joint closed I was so drunk that the waiter had to support me by my jacket collar so I wouldn’t collapse before reaching the cold, grey, wet sidewalk
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