Zone (3 page)

investment
and
safety
, I wondered, as now the exhausted landscape is hypnotizing me, just as the French say dusk is “the hour between dog and wolf,” who were the dogs and who were the wolves, these people who were so courteous, I watched, I listened to my boss, that’s what I called him, I listened to my boss convince these pleasant predators, some had sold weapons to the Croats in Bosnia, others to Muslims, still others in Africa before changing over to smuggling with Iraq—the lords of the Zone in that sumptuous hotel in Cairo were present at an informal meeting during which we tried to convince them to go along with us, we informed them of the situation, of the help we could offer them in selling Iraqi oil at the best price, they owned whole tankers full of it, black gold is voluminous and it floats, the Syrians charged them fortunes to send it as if it came straight from their dried-up wells on the Euphrates whereas it had been loaded in Latakia, strange route, everyone had tons and tons of crude oil to sell, so much that a few years later French diplomats coming from Baghdad strolled about Paris in broad daylight with thousands of barrels to sell as if they were pots of jam, they reminded me of the trafficking of the Blue Berets in Bosnia, who sold their rations, their gasoline, and rented out their armored vehicles like taxis for Split or Zagreb, as naturally as anything, happy, with a good conscience and the pocket money these services got them, but still complaining about the danger, just as our businessmen from the Zone didn’t see the threat behind the outstretched hand, the deadly games that would play out in the course of the years to come, and of course I was unaware that all that would end up propelling me like a cannonball towards Rome at 150 kilometers an hour over the frozen plain streaked with trees from the landscape, this landscape eroded by the Lombard twilight illumined suddenly by the Lodi train station: the Lodi bridge over the Adda must not be far away, during the first Italian campaign, not long before going to Egypt, Bonaparte too fought there—Bonaparte maybe the greatest Mediterranean soldier along with Hannibal and Caesar, the somber Corsican beloved of Zeus faced my Croatian ancestors serving under the Austrians lined up neatly in front of the bridge on the other shore of the Adda, 12,000 soldiers, 4,000 horsemen with their cannons, their heavy muskets with the endless bayonets and their military music, Napoleon lent a hand, he helped aim the weapons, he was an artilleryman, right beside his men, he breathed courage and determination into them as Athena did for the Greeks, they will cross, against all expectation they will attack a wooden bridge on which bullets and grapeshot are raining down, a column of 6,000 grenadiers charges on the carpet of their own corpses fallen to the rhythm of the Austrian salvos, in the middle of the bridge they hesitate Lannes the little dyer from Gers advances shouts and with sword drawn at the head of his men emerges onto the opposite shore facing the enemy gunners seized with panic the French forge a path for themselves through the lines with their swords as the cavalry having forded the river upstream massacres the panicking Croats, 2,000 killed and wounded, 2,000 Hapsburgians fallen in a few hours lie strewn across the river’s shore, 2,000 bodies that the Lombard peasants will strip of their valuables, baptismal medals, silver or enamel snuffboxes, in the midst of the death rattles of the dying and the wounded on that night of 21 Floreal 1796 Year IV of the Revolution 2,000 ghosts 2,000 shades like so many shapes behind my window, the poplar trees, the factory chimneys, we’re heading for the Po the countryside is becoming darker, the Grande Armée which is not called that yet enters Milan the day after the battle of the Lodi bridge, the Little Corporal is born, the myth is underway, Bonaparte will pursue his adventure into Russia, passing through Egypt—he will land in Alexandria two years later with the idea of carving out an empire for France like that of British India, and the dead will be strewn not along the shores of the Adda but around the slopes of the pyramids: 15,000 human corpses and a few thousand Mameluk horses will rot at the entrance to the desert, the ripples of worms will give way to swarms of shifting black flies, on the channels of blood absorbed by the sand, there where, today, it’s tourists that succumb to the blows of vendors of postcards and all sorts of souvenirs, in Egypt the flies are innumerable, not far from the Fertile Valley, on the slaughtered cows hanging in the covered markets, irrigated by putrid ditches where the blood of sacrificed animals calmly flows, the smell of dead flesh must have been the same after battle, the flies always win, I rest my head gently against the window, pressed by the speed in the half-light, sleepy from the memory of the dense heat of Cairo, of the dusty mango trees, the shapeless banyan trees, the dilapidated buildings, the pale turbans of the porters and the boiling fava beans that made the dawn stink as much as the livestock hanging in the sun, a stone’s throw away from the British embassy where in the 1940s spies swarmed the way stoolpigeons do today, in a nameless boarding house on the top floor of a building whose elevator shaft served as a garbage chute where there piled up, as far as the second-floor landing, ripped-open mattresses and rusty bikes, my room had by some miracle a little balcony and at night, in the entirely relative calm of the city that never sleeps, I looked out on the dark strip of the Nile with the smell of catfish, streaked by the plunging lights of the new opera house on the island of Gezira, magnificent silurid with long luminous mustaches, I read Tsirkas’s
Drifting Cities
, without really understanding it, without recognizing in the schemes of the shadowy figures in his pages my own steps as an international informer, just as today, sitting below my suitcase, motionless at over a hundred kilometers an hour, I let myself be carried through the twilight without perhaps really being aware of the game I’m taking part in, of the strings that are pulling me as surely as this train is carrying me towards Rome, and in that gentle fatalism that weariness and insomnia push you into my eyes get lost in the middle of the December evening among the frost fireflies the train illumines at intervals on leafless trees, life can seem like a bad travel agency brochure, Paris Zagreb Venice Alexandria Trieste Cairo Beirut Barcelona Algiers Rome, or like a textbook of military history, conflicts, wars, my own, the Duce’s, Millán-Astray’s the one-eyed legionnaire or else before that the one in 1914 and so on ever since the Stone Age war for fire, a good soldier I arrived at the Gare de Lyon this morning right on time, what a funny idea I hear myself saying on the phone, what a funny idea to come by train, I guess you have your reasons, I don’t have any, I think, I simply missed the plane and in the train that brought me to Milan, half asleep, I dreamed—how long has it been since I took a train—about the Spanish War and the Polish ghettos, probably influenced by the documents in my briefcase, whose computer ink must have flowed onto my seat and penetrated my sleep, unless it was Marianne’s diaphanous fingers with the bluish veins, in this point of inflection in my life, today, December 8
^th
, I dreamed, sitting between two dead cities the way a tourist, swept along by the ferry that carries him, watches the Mediterranean flow by under his eyes, endless, lined with rocks and mountains those cairns signaling so many tombs mass graves slaughter-grounds a new map another network of traces of roads of railroads of rivers continuing to carry along corpses remains scraps shouts bones forgotten honored anonymous or decried in the great roll-call of history cheap glossy stock vainly imitating marble that looks like the two-penny magazine my neighbor folded carefully so as to be able to read it without effort, the drug overdose of the Italian businessman, the scandals of actresses and call girls that aren’t very scandalous, the deeds and gestures of unknown people, actually quite close to the contents of the suitcase, secrets I’ll resell to their legitimate owners, fruits of a long investigation in the course of my activities as an international informer: in 1998 between two meetings I was walking through the city in the still-clear winter of Cairo, when the dust is possibly less abundant than in summer and above all the heat is bearable, when the Egyptians say it’s cold, a strange idea in a city where the temperature never goes below 70 degrees, on the Avenue Qasr el-Ayni at the edge of the decadence of Garden City the eminently British, crumbling neighborhood where my hotel was there stood a liquor store run by Greeks, I went there from time to time to stock up on Ricardo the real pastis of Alexandria, in the window so as not to shock Muslims one saw only mountains of boxes of tissues, blue, pink, or green whereas inside old wooden shelves were bent beneath the Metaxa, the Bordon’s gin and Whack Daniels
made in the Arab Republic of Egypt
probably all made from the same source alcohol the immense majority of which was then used as additives in cleaning products, to polish metals or clean windows, the Egyptians didn’t risk it, my military men drank only imported drinks bought in duty-free shops, the Greek poisoners must not have made much, in fact they sold mostly beer to people in the neighborhood and a little anis to adventurers either idiotic or amused by the labels, they wrapped the bottles up in the pages of an old issue of
Ta Nea
from Athens, then in a pink plastic bag taking care to explain to you in flowery French that
it was better not to use the handles
, always without a smile, which instantly reminded me of the Balkans and the old joke according to which you needed a knife to make a Serb smile, Hellenes are without a doubt Balkan, if only for the stinginess of their smile—among the Greeks of Qasr el-Ayni there was always an oldish man sitting there in a corner of the store on a wooden chair bearing the effigy of Cleopatra, he spoke French to the shopkeepers with a strange accent, he held a quarter liter of Metaxa or “Ami Martin” cognac wrapped up in newspaper and thus discreetly and methodically got drunk while making conversation with his hosts, the first time I heard him he was copiously insulting Nasser and the Arabists, as he said, twenty-five years late, Nasser had died a long time ago and pan-Arabism with him or mostly, it was quite surprising to hear that old drunkard with his face marked by the sun of Cairo, thin in a dark-grey suit that was too big for him, seeming like a local, to have such vindictiveness against the father of the nation, he reminded me of the grandfather of my wartime comrade Vlaho, an old Dalmatian wine-grower who spent his time bad-mouthing Tuđman and calling him a fascist bigot, because he had been a partisan, the grandfather, and had fought on the Neretva with Tito, he insulted us freely, calling us little Nazis and other nice things, he must have been part of the seven or nine percent of the population who called themselves “Yugoslavs,” and was probably the only peasant in that fraction, the only peasant and the only Dalmatian, and in that Greek liquor store in Cairo I remembered the old man this strange guy calling Nasser a thief and a pimp without pulling his punches as he knocked back his firewater that had apparently not managed to make him blind, but maybe mad, he was Dutch, his name was Harmen Gerbens, he was seventy-seven years old and had lived in Egypt since 1947, a force of nature, as they say, to have so long resisted adulterated drink, born in 1921 in Groningen—he might be dead now, as a few drops of melted snow streak the Milanese countryside behind the window, did he die in his bed, by surprise, or after a long illness, a diseased liver or a heart that gave up, or else run over by a taxi as he crossed the Avenue Qasr el-Ayni to go visit his Greek friends, who knows, maybe he’s still alive, somewhere in a home for old people or still in his immense gloomy apartment in Garden City, what could he live on, he got a little Egyptian pension fund as mechanical “engineer,” a big word for someone who had been enlisted in 1943 as a mechanic in the 4
^th
Brigade of
Panzergrenadier
SS “Nederland” the last elements of which surrendered to the Americans in May 1945 west of Berlin after two years on several fronts, Gerbens is a talkative man, one afternoon he tells me his life story, in his dark, empty lair on the second floor of a dilapidated building, above all he tries to explain to me why Nasser was a son of a bitch—what made me think of the old cantankerous Batavian off Lodi, at the time I didn’t know the “Nederland” brigade had been posted for a few months in Croatia to fight against the partisans after the Italian surrender in fall 1943, maybe he had fought against Vlaho’s grandfather, maybe, maybe I thought about Harmen at a time of choice, of my own departure for another life like him after a year of privations and indignities in a country destroyed ravaged by war had gone to seek his fortune elsewhere through the intermediary of a cousin who since the days before the war had been working in the port of Alexandria, now that Egypt is one of the images of poverty it seems strange that anyone would emigrate there as a supervisor to improve his lot, I ask Harmen if his past in the
Waffen-SS
had something to do with his decision to leave, he says no, or yes, or maybe, after the defeat he had spent many months in a military prison, after all I was just a mechanic, he said, and not a Nazi, I repaired caterpillar tanks and trucks, that’s not what gives you the
Ritterkreuz
, is it? I don’t remember anymore, they let us leave pretty quickly, it was the first time I’d been in prison—for three years he worked in the port of Alexandria, repairing and maintaining the cranes, the fork-lifts, and all the harbor machinery, he had two children, two daughters, with a woman from Groningen, in the beginning she liked Egypt fine, he said, at the outset, and I think of my mother also displaced, growing up far from her country she almost doesn’t know, my neighbor with the
Pronto
has folded up his magazine, he gets up and goes to the bar or the toilet, who knows where his own parents were born, maybe they emigrated from Naples or Lecce, still young, to try their fortune in the prosperous North, Harmen Gerbens had gone to the prosperous South—he had then left Alexandria for a better job in Helwan near Cairo in the brand-new weapons factory that made Hakim rifles, heavy 8mm adapted from a Swedish model, all the equipment and the machines came directly from Malmö, including the engineers: I got on well with them, Harmen says, I was in charge of maintenance, the Hakim was a wonderful rifle, better than the original, almost without recoil despite the immense power of the Mauser cartridge, it could even survive sand getting in the ejection mechanism I was very proud to make it—after Nasser’s revolution everything began to go “sideways” Harmen tells me, I was the only foreigner left in the factory, everyone left, the Greeks, the Italians, the British and then one day war broke out: the English, the French, and the Israelis intervened in Suez—they arrested me for espionage on October 31
^st
, 1956, the day after the bombing of the airport, and locked me up in the “foreigners’ section” of the Qanater prison, Harmen never knew either why or how, or for whom he was supposed to have spied, Harmen Gerbens was already seriously drunk when he told me this story, he was drooling a little, tea stuck to his drooping mustache then streamed into the corners of his mouth, his accent was increasingly pronounced and his chin trembled as much as his hands as the setting sun plunged the empty apartment into shadow, empty of the wife and two daughters who had been “deported” back to Holland soon after his arrest, Harmen Gerbens the alcoholic Batavian stayed in Qanater for eight years, forgotten by the gods and his embassy, afterwards I knew why, eight years in the foreigners’ section next to the jail where my Islamists rotted forty years later, he was the appointed mechanic of the prison director, Gerbens spits on the ground at the mere mention of his name, he pours a swig of hard stuff into the dregs of his tea utters terrible Dutch curses and I wonder if this story is true, if it’s actually possible that this man spent eight years in prison for some obscure reason, isn’t he just some lost guy, some old madman gnawed by solitude and rotgut—why don’t you go back to Holland, I can’t he replies, I can’t and that’s none of your business, I say nothing I take my leave of the old drunkard he has tears in his eyes he accompanies me to the door—the stairway is strewn with trash and I go down back into the red death throes of Cairo evenings that smell of mummies