Zone (12 page)

Koca
Seyit Çabuk the artilleryman in the Dardanelles, Gavrilo had his moment of glory before going to rot in Theresienstadt, with his own hand he sets loose the thunder of war, the Terezín prison where he lumbers and suffocates will survive him, and will see many other condemned men, Jews, Czech communists, enemies of all kinds shot or hanged in a back courtyard by Gestapo agents, cousins of the SS who just across, on the other side of the river, were running one of the most terrifying ghettos, holding almost 50,000 detainees, Jews from Prague, from Germany, from Austria and elsewhere, in the complex geography of deportation a ghetto where you died in music, where you created, where you could reflect at leisure on your epitaph, inscribed in brown clouds in the sky over Auschwitz, most often, the great space of the sky after the filth and pain of concentration, Terezín model for the good conscience of the entire world, look how well-penned our animals are, how healthy and well-groomed our livestock is, and the Red Cross won’t find anything to say to this sturdy model whose pictures, duly stamped “
Made in Third Reich Germany
,” were broadcast throughout all of Europe, showing without showing what everyone knew without knowing, that concentration was the prelude to destruction, just as branding—of steer, of steer left free in the corral—was the beginning of the end, mark something to slaughter it, control it, separate good from evil the good from the bad your own from another’s in order to construct yourself make the self stand out your shoulders thrust against difference against the Orthodox Jew the barbarian the titans order against chaos thus Gavrilo Princip builds his Slavic kingdom by killing the Habsburg: I’ve seen dozens of them over the years, in my files, martyrs candidates for martyrdom torturers enlightened ones desperate ones activists full of the cause or of God without really knowing which they were serving, whether it was Ares aegis-bearing Zeus or Pallas Athena, hooked on a single God who is all that at once, order and chaos the beginning and the end, who scatters their bodies with an entirely Olympian pleasure, Algerians Egyptians Palestinians Afghans Iraqis in my own zones of activity between 1996 and today how many have died I have no idea, they interest only a few, those victims who make victims the grandchildren of Gavrilo Princip the great instigator—the crossword enthusiast who looks vaguely like Hemingway because of his beard is having a coughing fit at this precise moment and I can’t help but smile, history always has its winks, I turn round in my seat, I close my eyes not far from Parma pleasant city I recall I stayed there once on my way to Greece on my first vacation as a young bachelor agent, Marianne’s kick had put me on the straight path I returned to political science I finally got my degree my war was described as “long-term training period abroad with the Croatian Ministry of Defense” and got me extra points I think, where could I have found the strength to sit on school benches again, the pain in my balls maybe, the long inactivity in Venice, or simply my share of fate—I could have tended my garden after a fashion like Vlaho the crippled near Dubrovnik, slowly decompose like Andrija, go into a factory like Ghassan the exile, or stay sitting in front of the television at my parents’, never leave the 15
^th
arrondissement, my mother had added a photo of me in uniform to the patriotic altar, Pavelić, her photo as a teenager with Ante Pavelić in Spain, the Pope, grandfather, Tuđman, the flag and me, that’s her world, but I wasn’t in a hurry to go back home, on the contrary, I wanted to leave again, and I was preparing for exams with the most various and most exotic administrations: I saw my salvation in the beautiful crystal chandeliers in the Quai d’Orsay, in the gold cravats of plenipotentiaries, in the dark blue of diplomatic passports, and in the old-fashioned phrases of letters of credit, not knowing anything about the diplomatic service but what you could learn in Albert Cohen’s
Belle du Seigneur
, which seemed an entirely enviable fate to me, even attractive, sparkling, in fact, in the heart of the world, with the highest salaries in all the civil service, with chauffeurs, receptions, and countries where you’d never have thought to settle, Mauritania, Guinea-Bissau, Congo, Bhutan, so I forced myself to learn, to train for these abstruse tests, law, synthesis, history, God knows what else, with no success, obviously—either because of my dubious soldiering past, or simply because my test results weren’t up to that prestigious ministry the diplomatic corps turned me down after two different examinations, despite, at least this is what I was told later,
an honest oral presentation
, and my huge disappointment seems to me today, ten years later, in man’s estate, in this train to the Vatican, hard to understand: I couldn’t see what thundering Zeus was saving for me, a fate in a much more obscure administration than Foreign Affairs, on the Boulevard Mortier, Mortier marshal of the Empire survivor of all the Napoleonic campaigns where they employed me, against all expectations, as
defense delegate
, or so the title of the administrative exam delicately worded it, and I suppose the hundred candidates present in that absolutely commonplace exam room all knew what
defense
delegate
meant, or at least they thought they did, information agent, more or less secret agent, an agent more or less from outside, for action wasn’t in our purely administrative and linguistic program, an exam pretty much identical to the one for the prefecture, Social Services, or the Naval Command, and as Parma slides by the window I see again my first days at the Boulevard, the curiosity, the training, the strange ultra-secure building, without a coffee machine so as not to encourage idle conversation among the staff, armored toilets, soundproof offices, endless files, dozens of files to go through one by one, to synthesize, classify, tally with their sources, fill out forms to ask for information in one direction or another, under such-or-such a surname spotted in reports coming from “stations” or “correspondents” with code names, transmit, refer to the superior, write up notes, work for the defense of the nation, in the shadows, in the shadow of a stack of manila folders, and my only geographic expertise had obviously been ignored in purest military logic, no Balkans for me, no Slavs: I was thrown into the Arab world of which I knew nothing, aside from Ghassan’s stories, the mosques of Bosnia and whatever history books wanted to say about it, I began in the Algerian hell as Chief Classifier in the third rank, in a world of child-slaughterers and polite mass-murderers with names that were all alike to me, in the madness of the 1990s the stench of medieval war, disembowelments, amputations, corpses scattered everywhere, houses burned down, women kidnapped, villagers terrified, bloodthirsty bandits, and God, God everywhere to control the dance of death, little by little I learned the names of the cities and hamlets, Blida, Medea, viciously, I began with seven decapitated monks’ heads seven red roses their eyes half-open onto their advanced age the Tibhirine affair on May 21, 1996 which was the beginning of my two Algerian years at the Boulevard Mortier, the marshal with the long saber—he too had used it from Jemappes to Russia, maybe he had decapitated robed monks, women, children, in the imperial storm, every morning I thought of him, of his uniform, his epaulettes as I went to my ultra-secure hideaway to deal with my files, in the heavy grey atmosphere of that world of secrecy where I read my reports of throat-slittings and military operations without understanding a word, without talking to anyone about it, I burrowed into the Zone without passion but also without disgust, with an increasing curiosity about the dealings of the wrathful gods, patiently in my armored tent I guarded the hollow vessels, I defended Algeria from itself in the darkness, and just afterwards, as I took the metro, when I went home to Rue Caulaincourt, I always saluted Mortier on the boulevard plaque, my guardian angel, knowing that I was very likely being followed and observed by my own colleagues who had to make absolutely sure, all throughout my first year—civil servant trainee, beginning spy—that I was not in the pay of foreign nations or God knows what extremist movement, I could verify this recently when I read, almost ten years later, the report of the preliminary security investigation on me, a strange mirror, a dried-out life, a leaf in an information herbarium, dates places names suspicions psychological outlines relationships guilty or not family assessment of the case officer and so on up to codes references additions classifications assignments various notes absences requests for leave like those that led me to Athens passing through Parma to escape for a few days the Algerian horror and the dead monks they had dumped on me so I could archive the massacre out of sight so I could give a plausible version of the incredible confusion of the Algiers station, Parma I remember I had dinner there not far from the baptistery and the cathedral, thinking about the Farnese family dukes of Parma and Piacenza, about Marie Louise the empress, above all not about Algeria or Croatia or anything having to do with war, except for the pyre of a strange monk, Gherardo Segarelli burnt by the inquisitors in 1300, a preacher of evangelical poverty for whom it wasn’t a sin to lie down naked next to a woman without being married, and to touch, Segarelli wanted to rediscover the beauty of apostolic love, poverty generosity and the caresses of female bodies, he paced up and down Parma with his followers preaching until an inquisitor got hold of him hauled him in for questioning and decided to condemn him to the stake, Segarelli did not fear death, he thought that the decadence of the Church was one of the signs of the end of days, that they were all going to die, all the prelates the bishops they’d all end up in hell, when the flames licked him Segarelli screamed, to the great delight of the spectators, his head fell onto his chest, his body burned for a long time, attached to the post, then the two executioners broke his bones in the still-smoking logs, threw his half-carbonized limbs on top of each other in a pile and covered them with another batch of wood, taking care to salvage the still intact heart of the monk of love in order to place it on top of the fire and thus be certain that it would burn completely, then the next morning, once the man was completely reduced to ashes, once they were sure that Gherardo Segarelli could no longer take part in the resurrection of the body on the Day of Judgment, the two sinister vergers scattered his grey powdery remains in the Parma River, tittering giddily—sitting on a terrace near the square where the eternal Church had tortured the monk who sought perfection in the coming together of bodies, my car parked in a garage nearby, I was crossing Italy seemingly the most civil country in the world to get a ferry in Bari to see the Acropolis before losing myself in the islands, eating squid salad and lamb kebabs, in the heat of the evening, the reflections of the fishing lamps on the Aegean and I’d happily go and forget myself in the windy winter of the Cyclades now change trains in Bologna go back to Bari cruise off Albania or go to Sicily island of the end of the world sit down in the Greek theater in Taormina and watch the bay of Naxos bathe the hillsides, but I have to finish the sale hand over the suitcase stay in Rome for Sashka with the angelic smile remake my life as they say with the price of treason which isn’t much the money accumulated in my spy’s account, erase everything empty myself of my man’s life finish my share of existence leave trains journeys movement in general listen to the marine forecast far inland in a deep armchair, that’s it for adventure without adventure files sources endless investigations into the networks of the world that continually meet and meet again, train tracks, fasces of spears, rifles with bayonets joined,
fascis
of lictors, whose rods whipped the condemned and whose axes decapitated them, those same fasces from which Mussolini would make his and his empire’s emblem, the world surrounded by spikes rods and an axe, everywhere: I meet myself in Milan or in Parma, I check up on myself like my sources on the Boulevard Mortier, and yesterday, tidying up my desk for the last time before going to wander alone through deserted Paris and missing the plane, my empty desk in fact for you never leave anything trailing behind, the usage guide the dictionary a box of paper clips I thought of all the names I had encountered all the places all the affairs the files on site or abroad the long list of those I had observed for a while just as I am now observing the passengers in this oppressively hot train car, the crossword enthusiast and his wife, I could offer them my dictionary for their puzzles if they weren’t Italian, my neighbor the
Pronto
reader, in front of me the heads I can glimpse, a blond girl, a bald man, further on boy scouts or something similar with scarves and whistles on a chain, I can still see them with my eyes closed, a professional habit maybe, when the first thing they teach you, in a spy’s training, is the art of passing by unperceived while nothing escapes you, the theory of the butterfly net, said my instructor, you have to be transparent invisible discreet but with your net taut, information agencies are establishments of light-hearted and usually bucolic butterfly hunters, which greatly amused Sashka the first time she asked me my profession, I’m an entomologist, a natural historian, a hunter of insects I said, she replied laughing that I didn’t have the build, that I was much too serious for such an activity, but it’s a serious discipline, completely serious, I said, and I added that I divided my time between the office and research trips, like any good scientist, that I was a civil servant, like any good French scientist—she confessed that she hated insects, that they frightened her, an unreasonable fear, like lots of people, I said, lots of people are afraid of insects that’s because they’re not familiar with them I could have talked to her about the stick insect, the dormant kind that camouflages itself as a tree branch and waits for years before it acts, or about the Coleopteran, which you have to spot when it’s still a larva, before it flies away and becomes much harder to catch, about the suitcase-carrying dung beetles, the midges, tiny informers, the big blue carrion flies, the ants with or without wings, the army of cockroaches, we call informers cockroaches too, that whole invisible world in my office but I said nothing, and now in this train near Parma, so much for insects but the specialist’s reflexes still remain, the discretion of the professional observer, the information man, defense attaché, this Henri Fabre of shadows, who wants to hang up his net and his magnifying glass, stop seeing the faces of his travel companions, stop noticing the wine stain on the shirt of the crossword-solving Hemingway or the absolutely submissive air of his young companion, I can’t wait to arrive, I can’t wait to arrive now that I think of Sashka she’s not waiting for me or else not really what will I say to her I’m still all sticky from the night before still shaky from the alcohol, a little feverish, last night comes back to me with a big wave of shame, the door closed on the darkness on Hades devourer of warriors life in parentheses on a train taking me to Rome, to her clear gaze—she’ll look surprised when she sees me, seeing me in this state, transparent wide open from alcohol and night, from the meetings in the night, yesterday when I left the Boulevard Mortier for the last time I wandered from bar to bar in Montmartre until I ended up dead drunk ethereal like a soothsayer an oracle foreseeing the end of the world and all that follows, meetings hesitations wars global warming the cold colder the heat hotter Spaniards fleeing the desert to take refuge in Dunkirk the palm trees in Strasbourg but for now outside it’s freezing it’s raining the Alps were full of snow this morning I saw almost nothing I snoozed to the rhythm of the train from the Gare de Lyon after two hours of sleep a horrible awakening an aspirin and half an amphetamine to make the journey even harder—but I didn’t know I was going to miss the plane, that I’d run to catch the nine o’clock train, just barely and without a ticket, my breath must have frightened the conductor, always these difficulties in leaving, after Marianne’s kick in the balls ten years ago another kind of pain in my testicles today, shame makes me shiver, I squeeze my eyelids shut until I crush an angry tear of regret for last night, that night the absurd encounter of alcohol drugs and desire, at the Pomponette on the Rue Lepic the only bar in the neighborhood that’s open until 4:00 or 5:00