Zone (10 page)

just thinking about it gives me the creeps
, I didn’t know if I should laugh or cry at this story, Ghassan transformed into a living tomb the martyr’s relics enshrined directly in his skin, the union of warriors married by the magic of explosives, Ghassan’s story wasn’t a unique case, strange as it may seem, in Syria Larrey surgeon of the Great Army tells of having removed from the stomach of a soldier a piece of bone stuck straight in like a knife,
sharp as a bayonet, horrified we thought for a moment
, he says,
that the cannons of the place had been loaded with bones, before learning from the very mouth of the wounded man that this fragment came from the dried corpse of a camel, scattered by a cannonball
—Marcel Maréchal the cellist also relates, in his Memoirs of the War of ’14, that a pocket watch from Besançon, a baptism medal, and two fingers (forefinger and middle finger, still attached to each other) landed on his knees after the explosion of a torpedo in the embankment, and that he didn’t know what saddened him more, the flesh or the two objects, infinitely more human, in the midst of the butchery, than the simple bloody knuckles—Ghassan still had under his skin, in his neck mainly, minuscule fragments of bone that were invisible or practically invisible to X-rays which, no one knows why, years later, manifested from time to time in the form of cysts and boils that he then had to have lanced, what annoyed him most was having to explain to the doctor why his body was vomiting ossicles the way others do shards of glass from a windshield: poor warriors’ bodies, I had been lucky, aside from a few scrapes, superficial burns, and a sprain I had gotten out of it pretty well, my flesh didn’t remind me of the war all the time, I have two little scars but they’re in my back and behind my shoulder, I never see them, I’d need two mirrors to examine them at leisure—Sashka caresses them with her finger, I know, when I’m lying on my stomach, she never asked me where they came from, unlike Marianne and Stéphanie who questioned me so often, the story of Ghassan’s wounds reminded me of my seafaring novels, on the ships the wounded were crammed with wood shards, from the gunwale, the pulleys, the tackle, the masts, the cannonballs, or grapeshot chopped up the deck hurling thousands of splinters, so many savage needles that stabbed the crew, like the ones that landed in the left hand and thorax of the arquebusier Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra at Lepanto on October 7, 1571, on board the vessel
Marquesa
, held in reserve in the rearguard of the Christian fleet and engaged in combat around noon to counter the bold attack of Uluj Pasha the brave, he was trying to turn the center held by Don John of Austria the commander of the Holy League who had gotten up in a good mood that day they say, at dawn around six in the morning, one fine fall morning, and this even though the season was already advanced, in the revolting stench of the galley where over 300 people lived piled on top of each other, Don John of Austria had put on his breastplate and his armor when, around seven in the morning, the first Turkish vessels were sighted, within range in two hours more or less, which left the young twenty-five-year-old bastard time to organize his fleet, the day will be long, the opening of the Gulf of Patras sparkles due east in the rising sun, it has become a deadly trap where 208 Turkish galleys and the 120 light vessels that accompany them are enclosed, carrying 50,000 sailors and 27,000 soldiers, janissaries, spahis, volunteers, in twelve hours 30,000 corpses or over 1,800 tons of flesh and blood will have joined the fish in the peaceful blue water, I told Ghassan about the Battle of Lepanto when we visited the arsenal of Venice the tranquil warrior, which without a qualm would negotiate a separate peace with the Ottomans a few years later, thus putting an end to that famous Holy League commanded by Don John of Austria the first bastard of Charles V, hard to imagine the foul smell spread by 500 galleys and their slaves, the illnesses, the parasites, the vermin they transported, the first cannon thunder around nine in the morning, average speed five knots, let’s not rush ourselves, let’s try to preserve marching orders, in the rearguard on board the
Marquesa
Cervantes is feverish, in bed, he insists on taking part in the battle, on deck—better to die standing up in the open air than be drowned or burned alive in a fetid forehold, Cervantes goes back to his arquebus, the enemy galleys are a few miles in front of him, behind the center of the Christian camp where the Austrian’s flagship sits in state, it fires a cannon and raises its flag to identify itself, the Turkish standard-bearing vessel the
Sultana
with Ali Pasha on board does the same, customs are chivalrous, men less so, before long they’ll massacre each other forgetting all the courtesies of war, already the Venetian galleys, veritable battleships of the time, loftier and better armed, break the Turkish central lines and cause terrible damage, it is 11:15 in the morning, the Christian left wing is under fire and seems on the point of being turned round, Barbarigo its commander is hit with an arrow in his eye, his nephew and officer Contarini is already dead, sunk with the
Santa Maria Maddalena
—on the right, facing Andrea Doria the clever condottiere, Uluj Pasha moves to the south, so as not to be outmaneuvered Doria follows him, leaving a void in the line of defense, the galleys of the rearguard advance to fill it, from his arquebus Cervantes sees Don Álvaro de Bazán give the orders: the oarsmen strike the flat sea, the speed increases to ten knots, in a few minutes there will be a confrontation with the Turkish galleys that have detached from Uluj Pasha’s squadron, already the arrows are flying, grapeshot too, at the very instant Cervantes fires his arquebus at the Turkish soldiers fallen into the sea I empty my glass of wine, like Captain Haddock right in the middle of the adventures of the knight François his ancestor, and Ghassan begs me to continue, how was Cervantes wounded, what was the outcome of the battle, despite being Christian he can’t help but be on the side of the Ottomans, which after all is understandable but soon the Turkish center will collapse, the head of Ali Pasha will adorn the galley of Don John, that of Murat Dragut will follow, already their right flank is nothing but a memory, the galleys are captured one by one by the Venetian fleet, boarded in a wild melee, driven against the coast and bombarded from the shore, the Turkish archers confront the muskets and cannons of La Serenissima and Don John of Austria, from the height of his twenty-five years and all his nobility, sees with pleasure the fire and battle on the
Sultana
whose escort his galleys destroy vessel by vessel, the Christian slaves suddenly freed gather together the scuttling axes and massacre their former masters with fury, Uluj Pasha the infidel has seized the standard-bearing vessel of the Knights of Malta, Don Álvaro de Bazán’s squadron launches forward to free it, on the
Marquesa
Cervantes the artilleryman loads his weapon in the company of five soldiers, he aims it at the galley of Saïd Ali Raïs the pirate from Algiers, without knowing that a few years later their fates would cross again, conversely, that Cervantes would be imprisoned and at the mercy of the corsair noble, already near the center of the battle cries of victory resound, the surviving Turkish galleys are trying to escape, one of the vessels opens fire on the
Marquesa
to free Saïd Ali, a volley of grapeshot sweeps the top of the deck where the weapons are in battery, and a shard of wood penetrates Cervantes’s wrist, slices a nerve and deprives him forever of the use of his left hand,
for the greater glory of the right
—what would have happened if the Muslim gunner hadn’t had the noon sun in his eyes, if Cervantes had passed away, anonymous on a forgotten galley, erased by the Glory of Don John of Austria, he would no doubt have been replaced, if there is always someone to take over a cannon there will also be someone to take up a pen and a knight of mournful countenance, his brother Rodrigo who knows, his brother whom the subsequent good fortune of the author of
Don Quixote
has crossed out of history, I imagine he would have related his elder brother’s death with panache, and today, on the ferries that go to Patras from Italy, Bari, or Brindisi, loudspeakers would point out to passengers the monument to the older brother of the one who imagined the old sailor crazy with pirate tales,
on board a galley whose name I prefer to forget
, and so on, soldiers are for the most part unknown, where are the names of the 30,000 drowned, burned, decapitated men of Lepanto, where is the name of the one whose teeth and skull almost killed Ghassan, who knows the name of the Turkish soldier who was on the verge, without realizing it, of changing the course of Western literature and who died in Smyrna or Constantinople, still trembling with rage about the memory of the disaster of Lepanto, mustache in his gruel—at 7:00
P.M.
on that October 7, 1571 the Turkish spoils and the Christian armada are sheltered in the cove of Porta Petala, Don John of Austria has an immense
Te Deum
chanted in the starry night, the Muslim is defeated, the Turk conquered, the allies of the Holy League sing of the glory of God and their captain, that young twenty-five-year-old imperial bastard who has just won the most important naval battle since Actium in 31 BC: a few miles north of Lepanto, in those same waters ruled by Poseidon, the fate of the world has already been played out once before, the divine Antony and Cleopatra the Egyptian confronted Octavian the landowner, the two former triumvirs threw their fleets and their gods into battle, Isis and Anubis against Venus and Neptune, another battle between East and West, between North and South, without anyone knowing very clearly who the barbarians were: all these stories fascinated Ghassan, he swallowed Christian propaganda and was pleased to believe that the Lebanese were Phoenicians, descendants of worshipers of Astarte and Baal, originally from Byblos he imagined his ancestors like himself, cultivated, cosmopolitan, tradesmen, great founders of cities, Carthage and Leptis Magna, Larnaka and Malaga, great navigators and formidable fighters, whose elephants crossed the Alps: Hannibal son of Hamilcar the tamer of warriors first conquered the Romans in Ticino and wounded Scipio the horseman his enemy—out the window, as the Po plain stretches out to the outskirts of Piacenza, a hundred kilometers from Milan, I wonder if I’ll see one of Hannibal’s elephants, who died of cold and of their wounds after having crushed the Roman legions a few kilometers away from here, in Trebbia, in the course of that Battle of Trebbia where 20,000 legionaries and foreign auxiliaries of the Roman army perished, 20,000 corpses looted by the locals—beneath the sediments of the river, beneath the dead of one of Bonaparte’s first battles in Italy, beneath the tons of dust borne by time are the skeletons of pachyderms who were victorious over the Romans but conquered by snow, abundant this year too, I want to ask my neighbor if he knows that there are elephant bones buried right next to us, he never looks out the window, he is content to drowse over his magazine, one December day similar perhaps to this one in 218 BC, the day of the winter solstice says Livy the scholar, 80,000 men 20,000 horses and thirty elephants clashed: Livy the precise counts the legions, centuries, cohorts of horsemen, names the leaders of each troop, the ones who won glory for themselves and the ones who deserved shame, he describes Hannibal the stubborn who, after over fifteen years of war on Roman soil, didn’t manage to wrest surrender from the senate or the people of Rome, despite a series of massacres that are unique in ancient history: in Tunis near Carthage sitting in the Porte de France I order an espresso that they call here a
direct
as I read the paper, in 1996 I paused for a few days in Tunisia to meet Algerians in exile there, within the framework as they say of my new functions, I visit residential and seaside Carthage, cluttered with luxury villas, in Megara, Hamilcar’s gardens are still planted with sycamores, vines, eucalyptus, and especially jasmine, with my source, a friendly reformed bearded man, we stroll along the beach, I think about the Carthaginian vessels come from Sicily, Spain, or the Levant that landed there, acceding to the war orders of the senate inflamed by the memory of the Roman dead at the Battle of Cannae, then they decided to reduce it to ashes,
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam
, and nothing more, Cato the Elder the gravedigger of Carthage certainly wore a beard, like my repentant Algerian Islamist who rounded out his monthly paycheck by snitching, in the name of the Good, on his former comrades who had strayed from the path of God, on the wrong path,
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam
, there are always Carthages to destroy, on the other side of the sea, from Ilion the well-guarded, in that to-and-fro motion, like a tide that gives victory by turns to Constantinople, Carthage, or Rome: on the beach of Megara you still find, washed up by the waves, tiles of mosaics torn from Punic palaces sleeping on the bottom of the sea, like the wrecks of the galleys of Lepanto, the breastplates sunk in the Dardanelles, the ashes thrown in bags of cement by the SS of La Risiera along Dock No. 7 in the port of Trieste, I collect these square multicolored stones, I put them in my pocket just as later on I will collect names and dates to file away in my suitcase, before reconstructing the entire mosaic, the full picture, the inventory of violent death begun by chance with Harmen Gerbens the SS-man from Cairo, locked up in the Qanatar Prison along with Egyptian Jews suspected of collaborating with Israel, which gave Nathan a good laugh at the bar of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, I wonder what those Egyptians could have been thinking, he said, how long did you say they held him? Eight years? They realized what he was, I guess, they didn’t know what to do with him, finally they freed him just before the war of ’67, the enemies of my enemies are my friends, and they granted him Egyptian citizenship, still under his real name, without anyone worrying if he’d be found one day, hidden under the dusty mango trees of Garden City, alcoholic prisoner of eternal Egypt, like the defeated Antony of Actium if he hadn’t preferred death to prison and said farewell with one thrust of the sword to Alexandria, Alexandria that was leaving him forever, in 1956 and 1967 the Jewish community in Egypt had been forced into exile, today it counts fewer than fifty members—the great synagogue on Nebi Daniel Street in Alexandria is nothing but an empty shell now, the old custodian you have to bribe to visit it apes the prayers and ceremonies, he pretends to get out the scrolls, to read them, chant them, making the absence even realer by his sham, no one prays anymore in the synagogues of Egypt, except for a few, come from France from Israel or from the United States, they organize ceremonies for the celebrations, in 1931 however Elia Mosseri director of the Bank of Egypt, one of the wealthiest bankers in Cairo, owner of a magnificent Art Deco palace in Garden City, invested with his brother and friends in Jerusalem on a site located on the ancient Julian Way and built an immense luxury hotel there that would become the King David: strange to think that Harmen Gerbens’s apartment is a few meters away from the former villa of the founder of the hotel where Nathan and I spoke about the Batavian SS-man relocated by the Egyptians at his release from prison to an apartment abandoned by a Jewish family, just as Nathan’s parents, who landed in 1949 in Haifa after many sufferings, would occupy the house of a Palestinian family driven away to Jordan or Lebanon, in a strange Wheel of Fortune where the gods give and take away what they gave—Isabella of Castile promulgated the Alhambra Decree in 1492 and expelled the Jews from Spain, a decree abolished by Manuel Fraga with the pale-faced Minister of Tourism under Franco the Iberian Duce in 1967 when he offered passports to the stateless Jews of Egypt citing the fact that they were Sephardic and thus of Spanish origin, allowing by a fanatical stroke of nationalism the resumption of diplomatic relations with Israel: in the fall of 1967 the Egyptian Jews who had no ties with the Powers, France, Great Britain, or Italy, got off the boat in Valencia in the orange-freighted port where their ancestors might have cast off 500 years before, leaving behind them houses, gold, jewels, and above all the myth of that Andalusian culture of the three religions of the book, to be scattered from Morocco to Istanbul, on the shores of that sea that I walk along with my Algerian Islamist gathering Carthaginian tesserae in 1996, Lebihan my superior at the time often sent me to meet the “sources,” you inspire confidence, he said, they’d hand over the good Lord to you without a confession, with that honest look you have, you’d better go yourself, also because he couldn’t stand Arab food, lover as he is of blanquette of veal oysters Muscadet and celery rémoulade, what’s more he couldn’t bear chili pepper, for him Tunisia was a digestive and circulatory disaster, the fire of Baal—food considerations aside, with information of human origin contact is essential, confidence, especially when the “source” doesn’t present himself first to collaborate, when you have to go to him circle round him stroke him the right way a game of fox and Little Prince, the animal knows it wants to be tamed, it lets itself be, it always steps back once or twice like a frightened virgin, you have to determine its motivations, whether they’re ideological familial venal crooked or vengeful and always keep something up your sleeve for the master stroke, “serving the homeland” still works with some Frenchmen, especially in the sciences or economics, where the risks are all in all negligible, “fighting against the Reds” doesn’t work anymore, people are suspicious of it, replaced by “fighting the rise of Islam,” which comes down to pretty much the same thing, but in my experience the motivations of informers are most of the time pecuniary, money sex power that’s the Holy Trinity of the case officer, it’s better to carry a money clip than a weapon, even if, for obvious psychological reasons, the sources prefer to believe they’re working “for the good cause,” more rewarding than “I sold out”: the nice bearded Islamic fundamentalist was serving the cause of God now by non-violence, as he said, I’ve seen too many massacres, too many horrors, it has to stop, he was a former member of the armed branch of the ISF, close to the Rome negotiators under the guidance of the Sant’ Egidio community, St. Giles of Trastevere a stone’s throw away from Sashka’s place—in the winter of 1995-1996, when I was still a novice spy, thanks to this Catholic intervention the different political parties of Algeria had signed an agreement in principle, a platform of demands supposed to put an end to civil war, they were all there, except the army of course, from the historic Ben Bella to the Islamists, including the Kabylians, the liberal democrats, and even Louisa Hanoune the Red from the Workers’ Party, the only woman in the meeting, they called for democracy for respect of the Constitution for the end of torture and of military machinations, all of that of course was doomed to failure but it offered a fine basis to negotiate a peace to come, at the same time in Algeria the ISA and the GIA were massacring infidels while soldiers were torturing and executing anything that fell into their hands, my source confided concrete information to me, my first source abroad, my first voyage into my Zone, names, organization rules, factions, internal tensions, which I tallied afterwards in my office with other files, other sources, to draw up a memo from it, a piece of paper included in a weekly report sent to the ministers concerned, to the office of the Prime Minister and the President of the Republic, weather forecasts of trouble, this week showers likely over North Africa, fair weather in the Balkans, threatening in the Middle East, storms in Russia, etc., a special service was in charge of compiling the information from the different sections for this secret regular publication, not counting the special memos or the precise requests from X or Y, economic, geopolitical, societal, or scientific anxieties are finished at last for me, the shadowy times are over, one last suitcase and I’ll join Sashka with the transparent gaze, lie down in silence next to her and bury my lips in her short hair, no more lists no more torturers’ victims investigations whether official or not I’m changing my life my body my memories my future my past I’m going to throw everything out of my sight out of the hermetically sealed window into the great black mass of landscape, purify myself, plunge, in Venice La Serenissima one December night I had been drinking, I was staggering home from the end of the Quay of Oblivion, north of Cannaregio I had 300 meters to cover to get back to my Old Ghetto, might as well be a hundred kilometers, or a thousand, I swayed from right to left, pitched forward, headed in the wrong direction, I turned onto the Square of Two Moors, I sprawled into the sculpted well in the middle of the little esplanade, then lifted my painful knees the way you extricate yourself from a trench in wartime, I saw myself again rifle in hand bent double I took three more steps towards the Madonna dell’Orto bridge, two to the left, one to the right, carried forward by my own weight, by the weight of my black cap or my memories in the frozen-mud smell of the Venetian fog, breathing hard as hard as possible to get my spirits up, my mouth wide open my lungs frozen, go forward, go straight ahead if you fall you won’t get up you’ll end up dead killed by the Chetniks behind you by the Turks by the Trojans with the swift mares I breathe I breathe I go forward I cling to the rail of the bridge it’s a tree in the Bosnian mountains I climb, I climb in the night I climb down I see the tall façade of bricks on the church what the hell am I doing here I live on the other side on the other side I make a U-turn stumble miss the bridge and plunge into the dark canal head first, a hand grips me, I’m drowning, it’s the conductor waking me up, he shakes me, asks me for my ticket I hand it to him mechanically, he smiles at me, he looks pleasant, outside it’s still just as dark, I glue my eyes to the window, open countryside, it’s stopped raining