Zone (13 page)

A.M.
, old Montmartre joint that you always leave staggering, yesterday aside from the regulars there was a woman in her sixties very thin with a long angular face what came over me, she was very surprised by my interest, mistrustful, I broke loosely into her solitude, smiling, she couldn’t make up her mind about me and I desired her, her name was Françoise, she was drinking a lot too, I don’t know why I went over to her, I’d rather not think about it, night entomologist pinning that insect maybe, I could have told her I want to pin you violently if I had thought about anything but I just kissed her out of mischievousness in fact as a dare out of joy at my last Parisian night her tongue was very thick and bitter she was drinking liqueur I turn my eyes away from the window I observe the companion of the crossword-Hemingway, there’s an elegant weariness in her features, she has lain her head on the man’s shoulder her hair loose now is slightly covering the crossword journal—Françoise didn’t talk about pinning, she said I want you to plow me, she talked to me about plowing her, in my ear, with a lot of modesty, she said I want you to plow me thinking it was a euphemism, because I want it she said, and that’s what happened, a plowing, nothing more, her eyes wide open onto nothing like a blind person, her wrinkles became furrows in the half-light, in the weak oblique light from the street, she wanted to stay in the dark, ground floor former concierge box on the Rue Marcadet a plowing without any preliminaries she went to the bathroom quickly without saying a word or even turning back, and once the stupor of orgasm was over I understood that she wasn’t going to come out again until I left, that she was just as ashamed as I was once desire was slaked I got dressed in a minute I slammed the door to take refuge in the fresh air under the rain that hadn’t stopped, wet dog with his caudal appendage sticky in his trousers, the pitch-black night and the return to the bar all full of shame stupid and filthy, sent to the bottom with one more little humiliation, as I looked for my change I lightly nicked the pad of my index finger against the condom wrapper stuffed without thinking back into my pocket and now fifteen hours later there’s a little diagonal wound on the finger that I crush against the cold window: I regret I don’t know why I regret, you regret so many things in life memories that sometimes return burning, guilt regrets shame that are the weight of Western civilization if I had caught the plane I’d have been in Rome for hours already, I turn round once more in my seat my head facing right towards the great void outside, going backwards, I’m going backwards my back to my destination and to the meaning of history which is facing forward, history which is taking me directly to the Vatican, with a suitcase full of names and secrets: I’ll find Sashka in Rome, her fat cat, the apartment, her short hair in my hands and that strange silence there is between us, as if through her ignorance I could erase the weight of remorse, the women, the insects, the traces, the war, The Hague, the ghosts of my Service files, Algeria first of all, then the Middle East, and recently I dreamed of a post to South America, for a change of polluted air, names, and languages, maybe that’s the reason for this journey, moving through phonemes as if into a new world, neither my father’s language nor my mother’s, a third language, another one, and in the rhythm of this monotonous train rewrite myself to be reborn when I get out—the tired traveler invents idiotic games for himself, memories, daydreams, companions to pass the time since the landscape is completely invisible in the night, unable to sleep, I see again despite myself the photos of the Tibhirine monks faces without bodies I had a copy of them in my file, immortalized by the Algerian embassy, the first shock of my new life as a spy that all of a sudden brought me back to wounds to massacres to revenges to the cold rage of revenge the muddy blackened heads I was entering the Zone entering Algerian land that brought forth limbs and corpses more abundantly than Bosnia, then the long carefully recorded list only grew, Sidi Moussa, Bentalha, Relizane, one after the other, stories of axes and knives in the shadows in the flames the scenarios all identical: a few hundred meters away from a post of the Algerian army a band of terrorists got into the village began systematically massacring the population women men men women children newborns their throats cut their bellies ripped open burned shot slammed against walls skulls burst jewelry torn from fingers from wrists with axes beautiful virgins carried off into the mountains as spoils the share of honor for the conquerors with no enemies in the night and the warriors killed killed killed villagers just as poor as they or farmers even poorer, there was nothing in our notes and our reports, nothing whatsoever aside from endless torrents of blood names of villages and emirs scrublands chaparral touched by the fury of Ares, bearded men who spoke more and more incomprehensibly, more and more abstrusely, who spoke of Satan and God of the vengeance of God of all those farmers those Algerians who were infidels and deserved to die, the translators transcribed into French for me the pamphlets the declarations of war the anathemas the insults against the West the army the government farmers women alcohol livestock life and God himself whom they ended up excommunicating because he was too forgiving in their eyes, they worshipped their saber their rifle their leader and when they weren’t fighting amongst themselves they went cheerfully off to massacre and raid in darkness, in front of my civil servant’s eyes, why didn’t they provide night vision equipment in the Algerian army, that was their only excuse for not intervening, they were blind, night was night it belonged to the warriors and I knew better than anyone the terror of combat in the dark, in the midst of civilians between houses they could do nothing—but without provoking it terror suited them, turmoil favored them, Europe had no other choice than to support their dying regime against the barbarism and extremism to protect the oil the mines the villagers the workers the laypeople the infidels the liberals the region the quaking Tunisians and Moroccans, they had to hold firm, the Trojans were outside the ramparts, about to invade the camp and push us out to sea in our hollow vessels, the Islamists were the common enemy and this already before 2001, before the Great Accord that would have us exchanging terrorists galore, the Great Cleanup, suspects activists of all kinds sent off to Guantánamo, chucked out of planes in the middle of the Indian Ocean, tortured in Pakistani or Egyptian cellars, lists and more lists as long as possible until the Iraqi bone of contention, Troy took ten years to fall, and in my well-guarded office I began as an accountant of bodies, like someone who becomes a referee after having been a boxer and himself no longer touches the faces that explode beneath fists, he counts the blows, I gave Algeria beaten down by KOs several chances, and even raised high the arms of winners in my endless reports: Lebihan my boss constantly congratulated me on my prose, you’d think you were there he said, you are the all-round champion of notes, but couldn’t you be a little drier, get a little more to the point, just think, if everyone were like you we wouldn’t know if we were coming or going, but bravo my good man bravo—poor Lebihan, he constantly had health problems, never very serious, always very annoying, hives, pruritus, alopecia, all kinds of fungus, he was nice to me, he addressed me with the formal “vous,” I never knew anything about him or almost nothing, aside from the fact that he came from Lille, which his name did not suggest (if that really was his name), and that he wore a wedding ring—he was a specialist in the ISF, the GIA, all sorts of more or less violent movements, we’d find their names and their members’ names for years to come scattered throughout the four corners of the globe, sometimes with a different spelling or nickname, sometimes in a list of those “presumed dead,” because of the problems in Arabic transcription there were guys with us who had three or four index cards that had to be grouped together, some died three times in a row in three different places and finding a man was not always easy, even if that wasn’t our main objective, as Lebihan gently pointed out to me, the threats against internal security are the concern of the DST, the internal state security department, and cops didn’t at all mind throwing a spanner in our works whenever they could, convinced that we’d do likewise, which was no doubt the case—in the incredible muddle of the affair of the Tibhirine monks everyone had taken credit for himself, Foreign Affairs, the Service, everyone, and afterwards, when the DST picked up an Algerian officer who had “gone over to France” or an Islamist who asked for asylum, they kept the information to themselves, carefully doling out what might be useful to us in dribs and drabs, like us, more or less, with the information the agent gathered, those false solitary diplomats, immured in their embassy whose only contact with the outside was their precious “sources”: I went there one time, with an Agency passport and an assumed name, barely forty-eight hours, just enough time to meet the two guys we had over there and a local soldier whose name I forget, Algiers the white city was grey, dead after sunset, drowned beneath the unemployed and the dust, Cervantes the survivor of Lepanto had spent five years here in captivity, dreaming of escape plans just like the Islamists in the government jails, we had a meeting with the “source” in a magnificent villa atop the city, which I was allegedly supposed to be renting, an immense furnished villa, with a pool, property of a merchant who had taken refuge in Nice—the contact was brief, I remember his swaggering air, almost scornful of us, and the fear, the great fear we could still sense in his voice: the deal was clear, he wanted to go to Paris, get a residency permit and money for sensitive information, they all dreamed of the same thing, they thought they were selling themselves at a high price and didn’t realize that for us the price was laughable, that any engineer in pharmaceuticals or biotechnologies was worth ten or fifteen times more than they, the third world remains the third world even in the most specialized transactions, the advantage of the cost of living, and I myself if I think about it carefully I could have sold myself for much more, who knows, if I had offered my documents elsewhere, that’s the law of the trade, the seller fixes the price, I could have included my room at the Plaza in it and a piece of the true Cross and they would have agreed, what’s a little money compared to Eternity—Cervantes was ransomed by a congregation of monks for 500 escudos just as he was about to be deported to Istanbul, in 1996 Algiers the white smelled of sweat burnt tires hot oil and cumin, I had put places and landscapes into my notes, faces, smells into my summaries, fear, the mustiness of fear that reminded me of the odors of Mostar and Vitez, the Islamists were afraid of the army, the army was afraid of the Islamists and the civilians were dying of fear of everyone, cornered between the saber of the true Faith and the combat tanks of the
toughât
, the “tyrants” of the government, Algiers the white where my father served, between 1958 and 1960, I see myself exchanging impressions with him, memories—of course against all the rules of security I had spoken to him about my trip, he was very surprised, in this day and age, he said, ever since my return from Croatia he looked at me suspiciously, always trying to stare straight into my eyes, maybe to find the traces of war there, I didn’t understand why, I would understand later on, for now I was learning little by little to distinguish the parties, the emirs, the factions, and the tiny groups and I had my work cut out for me, as they say, to train myself in my Zone, I was sinking into it without realizing it, now I’ve become an expert, a specialist in politico-religious madness which is an increasingly widespread pathology, which is spreading the way the fungi or pustules spread on Lebihan’s body, now there isn’t one country that doesn’t have its future terrorists, extremists, Salafists, jihadis of all sorts and Parma that’s fleeing into the night with its Napoleonic nobility is giving me a headache, or maybe it’s fear, fear panic of darkness and pain

VII

everything is harder once you reach man’s estate, living shut up inside yourself harried destitute full of memories I’m not taking this trip for nothing, I’m not curling up like a dog on this seat for nothing, I’m going to save something I’m going to save myself despite the world that persists in going forward laboriously at the speed of a handcar operated by a man with one arm, blindly a train at night in a tunnel the dark even denser I had to sleep for a bit, if only I had a watch, I just have a telephone, it’s in my jacket hanging on the hook, but if I take it out I’ll be tempted to see if I have any messages and to send one, always this passion for writing into the distance, sending signs into the ether like smoke signals gestures with no object arms hands stretching out to nothingness, to whom could I send a message, from this prepaid phone that I took care to get a tramp to purchase for me in return for a big tip, as luck would have it he had an identity card and wasn’t too wasted, the seller didn’t cause any trouble, I left my apartment dropped off a few things at my mother’s sold my books in bulk to a bookseller at the Porte de Clignancourt took three or four things, as I was sorting through things I of course came across some photos, I saw Andrija again in his over-sized uniform, Marianne in Venice, Sashka at twenty in Leningrad, La Risiera camp in Trieste, the square chin of Globocnik, Gerbens’s mustache, I took everything, and I can say that everything I own is above me in a slightly scaled-down bag, next to the little briefcase that’s going to the Vatican and that I plan to hand over as soon as I reach Rome, then tonight in my room at the Plaza on the Via del Corso I’ll go drink at the hotel bar until it closes and tomorrow morning I’ll take a bath buy myself a new suit I’ll be another man I’ll call Sashka or I’ll go straight to her place I’ll ring at her door and God knows what will happen, Zeus will decide the fate that’s suitable to allot me the Moirae will bustle about for me in their cave and what will happen will happen we’ll see if war will catch up with me again or if I’ll live to be old watching my children grow up the children of my children hidden away somewhere on an island or a suburban condo what could I possibly be living on, what, like Eduardo Rózsa I could tell the story of my life write books and screenplays for autobiographical films—Rózsa born in Santa Cruz de la Sierra in Bolivia of a communist Jewish father a resistant in Budapest was the special correspondent for a Spanish paper in Zagreb before he became a commander in the Croatian army, I met him once or twice on the front and later in Iraq, an admirer of Che Guevara and war who founded our international brigade, a group of volunteers who spoke English among themselves Warriors of the Great Free and Independent Croatia who all arrived like me after the first images of the Yugoslav madness, Eduardo was already there, he landed in Croatia in August 1991 one month before me during Osijek and the first clashes, he came from Albania and before that from Budapest and Russia where he trained for espionage for guerilla warfare for comparative literature and philosophy, a poet—today he writes books collections of poems and plays himself in films, maybe Che Guevara would have ended up the same if he hadn’t made Achilles’s choice, if he had been given life he too might have become—weapons put away, life over—an actor, he was so good-looking: like Hemingway Eduardo Rózsa wrote fast, I picture him on an August night on the terrace of the Hotel Intercontinental in Zagreb where all the foreign press stayed, the
Vanguardia
from Barcelona reproached him for describing the fighting too much and for not talking enough about politics, he downed shots as he described the first battles, the Yugoslav tanks against the shabby Croats, his hotel room was transformed into a real War Museum, pieces of shrapnel ammunition the tail-ends of rockets maps relics of all kinds, Eduardo a funny character idealist warrior converted to Islam after having fought for the Catholic crucifix, vice president of the Muslim community of Hungary, formerly press secretary for the first free Iraqi government, men want causes, gods that inspire them, and in that scorching August of 1991 in front of the Intercontinental’s pool his R5 riddled with bullets in the garage his pen in hand he thought about the Bolivian sierra about socialism about Che and his old hole-filled uniform, he had just been shot at by Serbs on the highway from Belgrade, he writes his article, it was the first time he was under fire, the half-open window shattered to pieces, the passenger seat opened up suddenly spitting out its stuffing with hisses and metal clangor, with the speed and distance he probably didn’t hear the explosions, he swerved turned off the headlights instinctively and kept going straight ahead his hands damp clutching the steering wheel sweat in his eyes up to the suburbs of Zagreb, up to the hotel, up to the foreign colleagues the two French photographers who were sharing his room, they see Eduardo arriving dripping with sweat beside himself those two twenty-five-year-old journalists also came to Croatia to get shot at and to run around the countryside with Yugoslav tanks on their tail, to them Eduardo is a master, a man of experience and now he’s arriving trembling and sweating, he says nothing, he takes out his notebook and quietly goes to get drunk on plum brandy by the pool watching the American reporters laughing in the water at their cameraman’s jokes, that’s where it happens, touched by Zeus Eduardo
Che
Rózsa chose his camp, the next day in Osijek he’ll go see the Croatian officers, he’ll enlist, join the Achaean ranks in a fine rage, a rage against the Serbs: the journalists saw him one fine day in a khaki uniform, a rifle on his shoulder and when I arrived at the end of September he had abandoned the pen to devote himself to war, he would come back decorated medaled honorary citizen of the new Croatia, a hero, godfather of I don’t know how many children, and he would write his exploits himself, play his own role in the film—the first time I saw him it wasn’t on the screen, he was sitting in the middle of the trench in which I was crawling in Osijek, I was scared stiff, absolutely clueless, the shells were raining down in front of us there was the Yugoslav army its tanks and its elite troops, I didn’t know where I was going I climbed up the trench my nose in the autumn smell, in the humus, to escape, to go home, to find again the attic room and Marianne’s caresses, I couldn’t hear anything and I couldn’t see much I had glimpsed my first wounded man fired my first cartridges at a hedge, the uniform of the national guard was just a hunting jacket that didn’t protect much I was shivering trembling like a tree under the explosions Rózsa was sitting there I crawled right onto him he looked at me and smiled, he gently moved the muzzle of my gun away with his foot, had me sit down, he must have said something to me of which I have no memory and when our people began firing he’s the one who propped me up against the parapet with a pat on the back so I’d start shooting too, before he disappeared, Athena comes to breathe courage and ardor into mortals in battle, and I fired calmly, I fired well before jumping out of the trench with the others, fear evaporated, flew away with the shells towards the enemy and the farm we were supposed to take, far from Zagreb, far from the Hotel Intercontinental from its covered pool its terrace and its sauna that I had never seen, far from Paris,
Che
Rózsa would continue his career, I heard his name many times during the war, heroic and other more mysterious deeds, like the murder of a Swiss journalist accused of espionage for I don’t know whom, some people thought he had come to infiltrate the brigade: he was found dead by strangulation during a patrol, a dozen days before the British photographer Paul Jenks was shot in the back of the head as he was investigating the previous man’s death, heroes are often wreathed in shadows, marked by Hades great eater of warriors, Eduardo as well as others, even though in those days journalists were falling like flies, in Croatia at least, or later on around besieged Sarajevo—in central Bosnia, between Vitez and Travnik, they made themselves much scarcer, aside from a few reporters from the television channel owned by the HDZ, the Croatian party in Bosnia, who had the strange habit of emerging from nowhere, like a jack-in-the-box, of appearing at the unlikeliest times and some British reporters clinging to the white tanks of the nuisances from BRITFOR—those photographers and journalists were plying a strange trade indeed, public spies in a way, professional informers for public opinion, for the majority, we saw them that way, high-end informers who hated us as much as Her Majesty’s soldiers scorned us, frustrated by inaction their hands on the triggers of their 30-millimeter guns, perched on top of their Warriors painted white, ice-cream trucks they were called in Croatia, what possible use could they serve, they collected the corpses and negotiated cease-fires so they could go on leave to Split, where they swam, danced, drank whisky before returning to count the shots in Travnik, through binoculars at their windows, or to jog around the stadium—Eduardo
Che
Rózsa ex-secret agent ex-journalist ex-commander of one of the best-organized brigades in eastern Slavonia writer poet screenwriter turned Muslim and activist for Iraq and Palestine, in Budapest in his suburban house, is he thinking about the Chetniks he killed, about his first two dead, torn to pieces by a grenade in a barn by the Drava River, about his comrades fallen like mine, is he still thinking about the war, about Croatia, he a Catholic by his mother a communist by his father, a murderer by the grace of God, does he remember the freezing rain of the winter of 1991 in the outskirts of Osijek, Eduardo who grew up in Chile until the coup against Allende, deported to Budapest on a chartered flight of foreign “Reds” who couldn’t be sent to the firing squad or tortured, Eduardo going in the opposite direction from me began in intelligence before he became a journalist, then a volunteer to fight with the Croats, by our side, and returned, enriched with wisdom’s store, to live in Hungary through his remaining years, in poetry screenplays books strange missions, plus everything I don’t know about him probably, Eduardo
Che
Rózsa who didn’t recognize me when we met in Baghdad by the Tigris not long after the invasion, between a cheap restaurant and a peanut-vendor, during the fleeting euphoria of victory, of dictatorship overthrown, justice restored—the treasures of Troy were still burning, manuscripts, works of art, old men, children, while already the coalition forces were congratulating each other on the river’s shores, not worrying about the first attacks, the signs of a catastrophe of the same caliber as the one in the 1920s, or even worse, Eduardo Rózsa was strolling in the company of a few officials by the eternal Tigris, I was eating a corncob from a street vendor with a guy from the embassy, I had just met Sashka and I didn’t want war or peace or the Zone or to remember Croatia or Bosnia I wanted to go back to Rome even for just twenty-four hours to be with her, and then Commander Rózsa walks by without seeing me, a ghost, was I the ghost or him, I had already begun to disappear I was burying myself little by little in the contents of the suitcase, in Sashka whom I thought I’d seen for the first time in Jerusalem years before, in Iraq the heat was incredible, a damp vapor rising from the slow Tigris bordered with reeds where from time to time corpses and decaying carcasses ran aground like the Sava River in 1942 without perturbing the American patrols who were still strolling about like Thomson and Thompson in Tintin a blissful look on their faces as they observed around them the country they had just conquered which they didn’t know what to do with, Baghdad was drifting, ungovernable like Jerusalem or Algiers, it was decomposing, an atom bombarded by neutrons, hunger, sickness, ignorance, mourning, pain, despair without really understanding why the gods were persecuting it so, destroyed, sent back into limbo, into prehistory the way the Mongols did in 1258, libraries, museums, universities, ministries, hospitals ravaged, Rózsa and I the ex-warriors come to share the spoils or inhale its remains, as specialists of defeat, of victory, of the New World Order, of the peace of the brave, of weapons of mass destruction that gave the soldiers a good laugh, they slapped each other on the back as they drank their Budweisers like after a good joke, in Basra the British were the same as in Bosnia, very sportsmanlike, professional and indifferent, they unloaded humanitarian aid trucks as I’d seen them do in Travnik, as Rózsa had seen them in Osijek, except this time they were authorized to use their weapons, which they weren’t shy about using: they hunted former Ba’athists the way others hunt deer or rather wild boar in the Ardennes, the English soldiers were returning to Basra, to the same place where their grandfathers had been stationed in 1919, after the Dardanelles, after the Hejaz and Syria, the exhausted Tommies rested their legs in the country of palm trees and dried lemons, by the edge of the swamps and meanderings of the Shatt al-Arab, they stuffed their faces with dates and lambs stolen from native shepherds, wondering how much longer the war would last, it lasts forever, almost a century after Gavrilo Princip’s Balkan gunshot, the referee’s pistol shot in a long-distance race, all the participants are already at the starting line, ready to dash forward into the world of Ares great eater of warriors, hoping to return loaded with treasure and glory:
Che
Rózsa commander covered in medals from the great patriotic Croatian war, Vlaho or me decorated with the order of the grateful nation, Andrija with a fine black marble tombstone with no corpse,
To our brother the Hero
, he no longer has a body, Andrija, no bones beneath his slab, no gold pin on his jacket he’s a name a phrase a brother and a hero, I was thinking of him in Baghdad conquered humiliated subjected and pillaged as I passed Rózsa the Hungarian from Bolivia a convert to Islam and to international aid, president of the Muslim community of Budapest, or something like that, after having been a fervent defender of Opus Dei, was he informing for the Hungarians, or the Russians, or the English, were we still colleagues, colleagues of the shadows—in the night of war, of the Zone, of memories of the dead, we were living together, without seeing each other, we were sharing the same life, passing each other by the edge of the Tigris, that Styx like the Tiber like the Jordan the Nile or the Danube like all those deadly rivers running into the sea, river of urine along a wall, fluvial ways intersect each other like railroads and weave a spiderweb around the void, in the center the hollow sea abstract and moving, ink-black at night water-green during the day and steel-blue at dawn, I always wondered