Zone (18 page)

no, no, no, not so fast, not so fast
, from the neighboring room she seemed to be directing my masturbation herself,
start over, start over
, with that martial tone that had the gift of making me enraged beyond belief, with a rage mixed with shame, as if she had surprised me with my thing in my hand, as if she couldn’t leave me alone with this student, she took her away from me and the girl left once the lesson was over I gave her back her coat, usually my mother called me immediately,
your homework, stop gaping, your homework, your father will be home soon
, obviously my sister had already settled down pen in hand, so I took a malicious pleasure in shoving her elbow to cause a nice blot on her impeccable page, which could provoke tears of sadness or, according to her humor, a frustrated anger similar to my own and we’d start fighting until my teenage strength got the better of her, she ended up on the bottom I immobilized her with my knees on her arms and tortured her as I threatened to let my saliva fall onto her face, she twisted around in horror, I caught the thread of spit at the last instant, she sobbed, conquered, that was my vengeance over those women of the family who prevented me from having pretty women from outside and usually at that exact moment my father arrived, alerted by Leda’s shouts as soon as he crossed the threshold into the apartment he said to me
you’re a savage, leave your sister alone
, which provoked the immediate intervention of my mother,
no, your son is not a savage
, etc., I belonged by rights to my mother, I was her kid she defended me against the male’s intervention, I then had to apologize to the little tattletale pest erase the ink stain on her notebook and start my homework dreaming about the breasts the buttocks of the young pianist until dinner—in our family alchemy my father ruled from his silence and his reserve my mother was an authoritarian regent who saw the world like a music score, hard to interpret, but able to be deciphered with order effort and application and that’s how she brought us up, order, effort, work, she the exile who hadn’t known her own country had constructed herself in exercises, in Scriabin’s etudes which are the hardest thing in the world, and even though she had given up her career as a concert pianist when she met her husband she preserved that power, that arid ability to rule over, to direct, to make an effort, in the same way she made an effort to control her fingers on the piano by an iron discipline, my mother would have made an excellent soldier, like Intissar the Palestinian, enduring, obedient, giving herself the means to fulfill her mission, at least as much as my father: his sober, even austere, nature predisposed him to the barracks as much as to the monastery, as at ease in the Port-Royal Abbey as at the École Militaire, Catholic, respectful of the Law more than he was a lover of order, with an idea of the homeland and the Republic that came to him from his modest family where no one ever studied beyond high school, for him my mother represented culture, culture and the bourgeoisie, a bourgeoisie brought down by exile of course, but for that very reason accessible, on the other hand I wonder how my mother, for whom social origin and even
race
are so important, could have fallen in love to the point of defying the prejudices of her family to marry him—maybe she had seen in him his Christian virtues, guessed his patience, his resignation, maybe also glimpsed that crack behind the silence, the wound from fierce Algeria, which so resembled that of her own father, nonsense after all an engineer with a promising career wasn’t such a bad catch and, even if he had the immense drawback of not being Croatian, this son-in-law was altogether suitable, fear not, they’d teach him to dance the
kolo
, provided he’s neither Orthodox nor Jewish nor communist, that’s what counted, besides hadn’t my uncle the bear from Calgary married a girl from Zagreb of an excellent family, they could allow this eccentricity for the youngest girl—that’s what I imagine, but I suppose my mother didn’t leave them the choice, tired of her tours as a child prodigy, a teenage prodigy then an average concert performer, she chose her existence with the same determination she had at the age of seven when she learned the sonatas of Scarlatti by heart to play them blindfolded to audiences of old people, the greatest Yugoslav pianist of all time was the
France-Soir
headline, which made my grandfather mad with rage,
Yugoslav, they said Yugoslav, why not make it Serbian while they’re at it
, my mother decided, she didn’t make Achilles’s wager, she preferred a home to a hypothetical glory, she carried out the destiny for which she had been prepared for years, to be a wife, a mother, and even a mother of one of the fighters who would liberate the homeland from the Titoist yoke, and her piano was a gentle pastime for a lady, giving concerts was perfect but it wasn’t an accomplishment, it wasn’t
her place
, her place was with us at home, my mother made that choice, without regret, weighing the pros and the cons, she chose my father and great silence—how much I too would have liked to decide, to have been offered Achilles’s choice, instead of letting myself be carried into the darkness from cellar to cellar, from shelter to shelter, from zone to zone, up to this train that’s crawling in the infinite straight line of the Po plain, between Reggio and Modena, with the thousands of names in my suitcase and an Italian Adonis lover of gossip as my sole company, is it really my own doing, this departure, it could be some kind of machination of the Boulevard, of the Agency, a conspiracy hatched with my already suspicious recruitment, now I’m becoming paranoid, it’s the effect of the drug and of years of espionage, let’s call a spade a spade, in 1995 I swapped the Kalashnikov for deadly weapons that were much more subtle but just as effective, chases, hideouts, interrogations, denunciations, deportations, blackmail, haggling, manipulations, lies, which ended up in assassinations wrecked lives men dragged in the mud twisted fates secrets brought to light, could I leave all that behind me, leave behind me the war and the Boulevard the way you forget a hat in a bar, where could I take refuge, in the hard resolution of my mother, in the silence of my father, in the bodyless grave of Andrija, in my own suitcase, in the briefcase of the Vatican light of the world, a little place for my father the lover of electric trains, a little place in the suitcase for my bitter silent pater

IX

aside from murdering my neighbor strangling him maybe like Lowry and his wife there’s nothing to do just remain silent close your eyes open them search for sleep December 8
^th
today at this instant in Rome on the Piazza d’Espagna the Holy Father is making his speech he keeps kicking the bucket this pope maybe he’s immortal as well as infallible that would crown it all, all of a sudden a man refuses to die, he does not pass away like his brothers, he survives, despite it all he hangs on, bedridden, trembling, senile but he hangs on, he reaches his hundredth birthday, then his 110th, then his 120th, everyone takes bets on his demise but no, he reaches 130 years and one fine day people realize he’s not going to die, he’ll remain suspended between life and death stuck there with his Parkinson’s, his Alzheimer’s, mummified but alive, alive, for ever and ever and this discovery saddens his potential successors so much that they of course decide to poison him, the eleven o’clock broth for the cumbersome old man, no luck, just like the first Christian martyrs he survives the poisoning, he loses his sight but his heart is still beating, from time to time he whispers some words into his visitors’ ears, in Latin, thousands of pilgrims stand in line to catch a glimpse of him, his hair is sold strand by strand like so many pieces of eternity, one of the last eternal locks of the blessed man who keeps dying, just as the end of the world keeps arriving, imputrescible locks like the corpses of those saints who never decompose and then in the end they’re forgotten in a corner of the palace, with servants all of whom they outlive, little by little dust covers them over they disappear from memory, from the present they’re a tableau vivant a bust a statue to which not much importance is granted—I can’t complain about the Holy See though I owe my new life to it, money in exchange for the briefcase, to that papal nuncio in Damascus who introduced me to the curial secretary concerned in my affair, in secret of course, Damascus city of dust almost as much as Cairo, city of dust and whisperings, of fear and police informers, where they bury you alive in a grey prison in the middle of the desert, Syrian oubliettes are deep, you don’t often climb back up out of them, how many Syrians or Lebanese are still missing in action, caught at a roadblock or arrested at home no one knows what’s become of them, if they’re still rotting at the bottom of a dungeon or if they were shot down with a bullet in the head in Mezzeh or Palmyra, hanged a stone’s throw from the ruins of Queen Zenobia’s city the Temple of Ba’al and legendary tombs, beneath the palm trees you sometimes see an open truck full of guys with shaved heads, everyone turns his eyes away then so as not to see them, they’re detainees being transferred from Damascus or Homs, they’ll be thrown into Tadmor prison for eternity: looking at them brings bad luck, like looking at men condemned to death, the prison is a few kilometers away from the palm grove at the entrance to the endless stone steppe, I went to see it out of curiosity, at a respectable distance, an old French barracks, they say, surrounded by a grey wall and barbed wire, no daylight no walkway no air or sky, the prisoners spend most of their time blindfolded, I thought about Rabia, one of our sources at the Syrian Ministry of Defense, the son of a good family who loved money too much fancy convertibles drugs and danger, he disappeared one fine morning and his contact told us airily
he’s in Switzerland
, a euphemism used in Syria to designate that penitentiary in the middle of the rocks a few feet away from one of the most famous ancient sites in the Middle East, so beautiful when the saffron dawn illumines the white columns and the Arab castle like their shepherd on its hill, Palmyra-Tadmor caravan city today peopled with caravans of tourists and prisoners, city of sheep butchered in the middle of the street in front of the terrified eyes of passing Europeans, capital of the Syrian steppe where that same Rabia whom I never saw must still be rotting if he survived, in Switzerland, that’s to say in Tadmor in Sadnaya in Homs or formerly in Mezzeh in one of those military prisons Meccas of torture and summary executions where all throughout the 1980s and ’90s the Syrian members of the Muslim Brotherhood were hanged, by the dozen, by the hundreds, their corpses buried in mass graves nestled in desert valleys, along with the bodies of those dead from torture or disease, tuberculosis, all kinds of abscesses, blood poisoning, malnutrition, piled up hundreds to a barracks, no visits allowed, Muslim activists were rounded up in Hama, in Aleppo, in Latakiyah and sent, blindfolded, to Palmyra in Arabic Tadmor the well-named, where they stagnated for ten, fifteen years until they were set free, paranoid, delirious, malnourished, or crippled, I met one of them in Jordan, one more source in my Zone, fourteen years in a Syrian prison, between 1982 and 1996, from sixteen to thirty, his youth tortured, broken, one eye missing, a leg lame, he told me that his main pastime in prison was
counting the dead
, he kept track of the hanged men in the prison yard, the ones who disappeared amid shouts in the middle of the night, in the beginning I tried to remember their names, he said, but that was impossible, so I just kept count, I clung to that as if it were my life, to know if I died what number I’d be, day after day, in fourteen years I counted 827 dead over half of them by hanging, usually by a chain, at night—I was arrested in front of my house in Hama during the events of 1982, I knew nothing about Islam or the Koran, I was an ignoramus, they arrested me because one of our neighbors was with the Brotherhood, I had just turned sixteen, they put a blindfold over my eyes and they beat me, I don’t know where I was, in a barracks I guess, I spent two days without drinking a drop of water and I was transferred to Palmyra in a truck, no one knew where we were going, we arrived at night, they made us get out with blows from a cudgel—the soldiers tortured us until dawn, that was the custom for newcomers, they had to break us, make us understand where we were, they broke my leg with an iron bar, I fainted, I woke up in a barracks like a giant dormitory, my leg was purple all swollen I was thirsty, I didn’t know what was more painful, if it was the thirst or the fracture, I couldn’t speak, one of the prisoners gave me some water and made me a sort of harness with an old crate that’s the only medical care I got, the bone didn’t reset right and ever since I’ve limped I can’t run anymore, no more soccer but in prison you didn’t think about soccer, the yard was mostly for hanging people, thank God I got out, I learned the Koran by heart, books were forbidden, pens too, but the Koran circulated by word of mouth, whispers, I learned sura after sura beginning with the shortest ones, I learned them from the mouths of the older prisoners, in the dark, a continuous almost inaudible flow pressed against each other we all prayed together, so the guards didn’t notice anything we bowed down to God by bending just the pinky finger, as is permitted for the ill, God willed that I survive, when I counted the 492
^nd
death one of my eyes got infected it turned into a big suppurating painful ball and never opened again, I had a good constitution I was young, time passed in Palmyra they never called you except for one reason, to hang you, the guards hardly ever spoke to us, sometimes after midnight they called out names, that was the day’s list of men to be hanged, we saluted them everyone was used to executions, the first thing I did when I arrived in Jordan was go to the mosque to pray standing up, finally, to be able to kneel down even though my leg hurt, to thank God for having gotten me out of that hell, he ended his story and I thought he should have thanked God too for having put him there, in that hell, but for him the Baathist Alaouites in power in Syria were infidels, agents of the devil, Hasan (we’ll call him Hasan) readily informed me about the Syrian opposition and their clandestine activities that he still followed closely but was much more reluctant to talk about the Jordanians or the Palestinians, he ended up being killed by the Mossad in 2002, during the Great Purge, when the CIA sent endless lists of “individual suspects” all over the world the luckiest of whom ended up in Guantánamo their eyes blindfolded tortured once again for many of them had already fallen into the clutches of the Jordanians the Syrians the Egyptians the Algerians or the Pakistanis for different reasons but with the same results, they ended up on the island of rum and cigars and mulatto women sculpted by the sun and by dictatorship, they sweated in Cuba in their high-security orange jumpsuits much more visible and pleasing to the guards’ eyes than the striped or plain pajamas of Palmyra the magnificent: Hasan didn’t have that luck, if you can call it that, he died hit by a little radio-controlled Israeli missile that completely destroyed the vehicle in which he was traveling along with his young wife and their two-year-old daughter, he died because of information I’d supplied, I’m the one who sold him to Nathan Strasberg in exchange for information about American civilian contracts in Iraq, as proof of good will I sacrificed a source that was in any case a little outdated by then, Hasan the lame had taken part in organizing two attacks on Jerusalem and another one against Israelis in Jordan, he was becoming less and less communicative, lied too often, farewell Hasan survivor of Tadmor, farewell Rabia the son of the dignitary fallen in disgrace after the death of Hafez al-Assad the old lion of Damascus who had managed, against all expectations, to die in his bed, or rather on the telephone, on the day of his death you couldn’t find a single bottle of Champagne in Syria, Beirut, or Jerusalem, the Old Man of the Mountain had played Middle-Eastern poker for thirty years and he was unbeatable, he had played with Kissinger, with Thatcher, with Mitterand, with Arafat, with King Hussein, and many others, always winning, always, even with a pair of sevens, because he was clever possibly but above all because he didn’t have any useless scruples, ready to sacrifice his pieces to go back on his alliances to murder half his compatriots if need be, Hasan the lame owed fourteen years of prison to him, lucky compared to the perhaps 20,000 dead from the repression in the 1980s, lucky Rabia, his dignitary father an Alaouite minister let him get rich off his fellow citizens and experience a few years of abundance before he ended up in the slammer for a while: whenever I went to Damascus, Aleppo, or Latakiyah I always felt as if I were putting my head in the wolf’s mouth, in that country of informers where half the population was spying on the other half you had to be twice as careful, the only advantage being that the other half was by the same token perfectly willing to work for foreign countries, in return for cold hard cash, I went to Damascus “as a tourist” and so as not to blow my cover too quickly I had to see the sights, in Palmyra, in Apamea, visit the museum in Aleppo, go see the Church of Saint Simeon Stylites the saint chained on top of his pillar the base of which still exists today, explore the old city of Damascus, marvel inside the
cortile
of the Umayyad Mosque where there is, they say, one of the severed heads of John the Baptist, and above all eat, eat, drink, and get bored watching the fine winter sleet fall on the city of sadness and dust, of course the French embassy was a forbidden zone for me, that’s too bad, I would have liked to see the beautiful Arabic house where Faysal settled in 1918, Faysal the sharif of Mecca whom Lawrence of Arabia had made King of the Arabs, before the French and General Gouraud threw him out of his new capital and the British recovered him to place him on the throne in Iraq by giving a Hashemite legitimacy to that country newly founded by the joining of three Ottoman provinces that had no intention of cohabiting peacefully within a puppet state, even to please Churchill or Gertrude Bell the archeologist spy, in that Near- or Middle-East that the French and English had shamelessly divided among themselves in 1916, what could be left of Faysal in the residence of the powerful French ambassador to Syria, the first velvet armchair in which the Bedouin king had sat, maybe, the tired springs of the bed where he had slept, did his ghost come to disturb the sleep of a charming ambassadress, causing dreams of horses galloping through the scorching desert, nightmares of thirst, or erotic dreams of frenzied Arabic nights—nights in Damascus or Aleppo were not very conducive to lust or Capuan luxury, the very prudish Syrian dictatorship preferred a martial austerity, Aphrodite passed only rarely through the mountains of Mount Lebanon, on the shores of the almost dry Barada River there were a few cabarets where drunken Saudis showered banknotes on fat, wrinkled belly-dancers with acid music accompaniment, a very ugly gentleman armed with a red plastic bucket collected the carpet of notes while these ladies continued shaking their breasts into the mustaches of emirs who immediately ordered another bottle of Johnny Walker to make their hard-on go away, in Aleppo in a side-street between two spare-parts stores there was a similar kind of establishment but full of Ukrainian and Bulgarian women in swimsuits who raised their legs French-Cancan-style for a few beer-drinking soldiers with mustaches, after each number they’d go sit on the clients’ laps, I remember one of them had lived in Skopje and spoke a passable Serbian, she said she’d visit me in my hotel room in exchange for the modest sum of 200 dollars, at that rate the Syrians must not have screwed much, she told me that she had arrived in Aleppo in reply to a job offer for dancers, she loved to dance, she said to herself that dancing in a Syrian troupe would be a beginning I didn’t know if I should believe her or not, and also the salary was good, it wasn’t prostitution, she said, it was dancing, she seemed as if she were trying to convince herself, she was just on twenty, a smiling face she was blonde as wheat, they were all blonde as wheat, she got back on stage for the next number, she looked at me as she jigged up and down, the five girls took sensual poses to “My Way,” they mimed kisses with depressed little pouts I left to go back to my hotel and to the solitude of my room very happy not to need to succumb to the charms of the swimsuit-wearing dancers, I remember the next day I had a “meeting” with a man about whom I knew nothing on a café terrace facing the incredible Citadel of Aleppo, I was supposed to sit on a terrace with a red sweater and a wool scarf placed on the back of the chair opposite me—sometimes reality becomes a spy movie from the 1960s, probably this honorable correspondent had read too many Cold War spy novels, in the Zone things were very different, still I was a little worried, I didn’t much want two Syrian secret service agents to sit down at my table and say “so, red sweater and wool scarf, eh?” and kick me out of Syria after giving me a beating, or worse, the most likely thing would be for them to keep me in secret somewhere while they waited to exchange me for someone or something, and even if there is in fact a share of risk in my business it always seems very remote, in the Agency I never carried a weapon or anything of that sort (I did have a little 7.65 Zastava at my place but that was an unusable war souvenir) but that morning when I went to the meeting at the Citadel I wasn’t entirely at ease, because it was Syria, because Syria is the country of informers, because in Syria there aren’t many tourists and it’s not as easy to melt into the crowd as in Cairo or Tunis, I walked through the endless Aleppo souk on foot, I bought three knickknacks for Stéphanie the brunette (to hell with secret trips), some bay-leaf soap, a silk scarf, and a little copper hookah probably impossible to smoke but at least I looked like a perfect tourist when I emerged from the covered market onto the Citadel square, I settled onto a café terrace, I asked for