Zone (43 page)

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 Algerians, 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