Zone (38 page)

Chedo
¹
is going to cut your throat my child, and he will surely do it, just as surely as you yourself, he thinks, have already burned his brawling offspring in the burning ditch, for us the collective stems from the story of individual suffering, the place of the dead, of corpses, it’s not Croatia that’s bleeding it’s the Croats, our country is where its graves are, our murderers, the murderers on the other side of the mirror are biding their time, and they will come, they will come because they have already come, because we have already gone to cut their ears to a point, put our stakes in their wives’ stomachs and tear out their eyes, a great wave of screaming blind men will cry for revenge, will come defend their graves and the bones of their dead, as surely as the tide, having gone out, comes back in to the rhythm of the moon’s movements, I want to take my car and travel across the land of my enemies, I want to drink some pear brandy in Zemun watching the Sava swell the Danube, to see if the girls are pretty, to listen to turbo-folk sung by the buxom wife of Arkan the Tiger, to buy myself a T-shirt with the head of Milošević or Mladić on it and laugh a little, I want to laugh thinking that a few years ago this waiter might have killed me without batting an eye around Osijek and that it’s over now, it’s the Kosovars’ turn, then the Albanians will take revenge in turn and eat Orthodox Christians for breakfast, we’re all attached to each other by indissoluble ties of heroic blood, by the intrigues of our jealous gods, all that is over, after a few years of purgatory in an office in the midst of files I’m in the last train before the end of the world, before the great light and the revival, when there will be zebras gazelles and lions that will from time to time eat a stray tourist, when we’ll drink a superb Norwegian wine, when Yvan Deroy, at seventy years of age, will watch the monkeys playing on the slopes of the Argentario planted with eucalyptus and breadfruit trees, the Americans are impatient to get to Rome, me too, I’ve been in the train far too long, one of the American women looks vaguely like the woman at La Pomponette last night, she must think I’m a poor guy, I feel all sticky as if I were leaving her place, her dark concierge loge on Rue Marcadet, men are spineless, they want to fight hunt fuck drink sing from time to time and play soccer, they’re cowardly faced with their passions, I’d like it all to be over like in
Modern Times
, when Chaplin links arms with his beloved and sets out on the road, I couldn’t take Stéphanie by the arm, when I went back to my place two hours later passably drunk and soaking wet after the incident with the pistol she wasn’t there anymore, the gun was still on the floor in the same place Stéphanie was gone I took a pencil and paper and wrote her a letter of excuse, explaining to her that I knew of course that the weapon couldn’t work, that it was a very bad joke, and then I ended up crying over my fate as a former fighter to attract her pity, how the war was still too present for me and idiocies of that sort, a sentimental cowardly drooling letter so she’d forgive me, love makes you do stupid things, I thought, I was drunk but not blind, I put the letter into an envelope which I deposited in her letterbox as I went to work, it had its effect, my missive, I made sure I didn’t come across Stéphanie on the Boulevard Mortier before she read it, and the next day I added another bit, flowers, delivered to her place around eight o’clock, when I was sure she was home, and I don’t know if it was the calming effect of the roses or the balm of my excuses, but at 8:30 precisely the phone rang, it was her, she asked me if I wanted to go out to dinner, as if nothing were wrong, I said OK, we can meet halfway, around République for instance, she chose a chic restaurant on the Canal Saint-Martin, when I saw her by the water I hugged her close in my arms, apologizing in her ear, she said never do that to me again, OK? and promise me you’ll throw that gun away, I said of course, of course, not meaning a word of it, I kept it for a lot longer, the little Zastava, in the end I gave it a few months ago to Lebihan for his retirement, with a brand new firing pin bought on the Internet, he liked it very much—neither Stéphanie nor I saw that this incident had opened up a breach, a place for violence, I didn’t understand that the tide was rising, that it was going to catch us, that the more I filled the suitcase with names and pictures, the more I sought to avoid the memories of Croatia, Bosnia by diving into the Zone, the wider the crack grew, and Stéphanie the great strategist who spent her days with generals and Cabinet ministers was blind, or maybe not, like Marianne she let herself be seduced by the dark side, the taste for danger, warriors gleam with a dark light like Ares himself, Andi the wild was attractive too, a handsome brute despite his ugliness, one of those angelic devils who so pleased Jean Genet the introvert in love with Palestinian fighters, Andi would have done anything to possess a girl like Intissar the Palestinian, I’m sure of it, I wonder if Rafael Kahla the writer was a fighter himself, if he had dealings with those Palestinians, we all tell the same story, at bottom, a tale of violence and desire like Leon Saltiel the Greek Jew in his Memoirs, the betrayed Leon who wanders through deserted Salonika, his family, his friends have disappeared in the camps, his comrades are hiding in the mountains of Macedonia and Epirus, with armed groups that will soon resume fighting the fascist monarchy, Agatha married Stavros, they’re the ones who denounced him to the Germans, every day in Mauthausen he thought of Agatha before falling asleep, he constructed an idyllic love for himself in order to survive, clung to her memory as if to a tree so as not to fly up the crematorium chimney, Agatha’s eyes, Agatha’s hands and today in half-dead Thessalonica that solid wood is now nothing but an old keel eaten away by the sea, Saltiel wanders around for many days before deciding to go back to the family apartment, now occupied by a surviving cousin whom he makes promise not to reveal his presence to anyone, Leon locks himself up for eight days, for eight days he drinks and smokes in the dark, pursued by the brief agony of Manos Hadjivassilis the electrocuted, by the twisted neck and open mouth of Aris Andreanou, by the wedding ring on Agatha’s finger, nothing and no one is left to him so Saltiel decides to make an end of it, exhausted by suffering and alcohol he coarsely ties together a short rope with a sheet, knots one end around his neck and looks for a high spot, a pipe, a beam, to tie the other end to, no success, he finds nothing high up that could support his weight, so despairing, the sheet still around him, he climbs onto a window ledge to throw himself into the void, it’s late, the night is fine, a cool wind caresses his bare legs, the sea is quite close, the sheet with which he was going to hang himself is a pleasant scarf, the sea breeze draws Leon Saltiel out of the mist, Zeus the assembler of clouds has seen his distress and comes to his aid, the black pain fades away is mixed with the sea spray with the moondust and stardust on the gulf of Salonika, Leon clings to the windowsill, he is standing five floors above ground, he has almost hanged himself and thrown himself into the void, what for, who for, there is no one left, he goes back into the apartment collapses on his bed and falls into a sleep of the dead, the rope still around his neck—the next day Leon trims his beard but doesn’t shave it off, he has had a dream, he saw his fate clearly, he puts on a nice shirt, a handsome jacket, too bad if all these clothes are too big for him now, too bad, he is very busy all day, he is active until late at night, he doesn’t tremble even during the most difficult moments, when Agatha cries out, pleads with him, when her skirt bares one of her legs, Leon Saltiel methodically carries out his duty, like a bailiff or an accountant, before rejoining the communists in the mountains, in 1948 he is arrested and deported to Makronisos the prison island, for political reasons, which have nothing to do with the torture of Agatha under the staring eyes of Stavros gagged tied to his chair, or with the leather belt around the young woman’s thin throat, or with the bullet that a little later goes through the neck of Stavros the traitor to cut short his agony: Saltiel returns from his second deportation in 1953, and, still according to his Memoirs, leaves Greece once again in 1967, during the dictatorship of the colonels, he won’t return until 1978, to die, in Salonika, and it wasn’t to die among his people, since his people, Jews, communists, Agatha, Stavros, had all disappeared a long time ago—I wonder why Agatha denounced Saltiel, out of love no doubt, love in troubled times, I imagine they had thought out a plan to rid themselves of the nuisance, she and Stavros the snitch, maybe, or maybe she had nothing to do with all that, Saltiel doesn’t say if he tortured her out of pure vengeance or to find out, to find out if she had really given him away to the Germans, a Communist Jew, a real treat for the Gestapo, Saltiel doesn’t explain either how he escaped the firing squad in the prison yard of the Heptapyrghion, at the very top of the town, did he talk, did he trade information to get sent to a concentration camp instead, already putting one foot in the grey Zone, our own, the Zone of shadows and manipulators, Salonika pearl of the Aegean reminded me of Alexandria, in the lower town the noble façades of banks, insurance companies, shipping lines from the beginning of the century sat in state, like the cotton market and the Bank of Egypt in the Egyptian metropolis, Aristotle Square looked a little like Saad-Zaghloul Square in front of the Cecil, where all the British tourists went on pilgrimage, the nostalgic crowded around the bar at the Hotel Cecil with a book by Lawrence Durrell in their hands, looking for Justine or Melissa and pretending not to notice the renovations and improvements of modernity, the
business center
, the plastic plants, the obvious kitsch of an international luxury hotel, whereas they were looking for the red leather from before the war, the smoke of cigars, the Greeks the Italians and the Jews of Alexandria, the war and Nasser little by little sent them into exile, to the North, today Alexandria is an immense Egyptian city more populous than Paris, sanctimonious and poor, but it takes pride in a beautiful library, built by a government in love with pharaonic projects, one of the emptiest libraries on the planet, symbol of the regime of Mubarak the opinionated, a beautiful grey shell in Aswan marble—nothing returns from what has been destroyed, nothing is reborn, neither dead men, nor burned libraries, nor submerged lighthouses, nor extinct species, despite the museums commemorations statues books speeches good will, of things that have gone only a vague memory remains, a shadow gliding over sorrowful Alexandria a phantom shivering, and that’s all the better no doubt, all the better, you have to know how to forget, let men animals things leave, with Marianne I had met a well-born British couple who were exploring the city in a horse-drawn carriage, they didn’t want to take a taxi, they were willing to pay hundreds of maravedis to sit enthroned behind a team of scrawny horses driven by a turbaned Egyptian, the Englishwoman was wearing cream-colored jodhpurs and a close-fitting jacket, the man was in a safari jacket with a wide-brimmed hat model ANZAC 1915, and the only touch of color in this riot of earth-tones was their faces roasted by the Egyptian sun, two ripe tomatoes under old-fashioned hats, he was reading the guide to Alexandria written by E.M. Forster in 1920 and she
Death on the Nile
, they were a little over twenty and very much in love, of course they were staying at the Cecil, we had discovered these specimens in a historic patisserie near the Grand Place, and it was like finding two pteranodons at the traffic circle on the Champs-Elysées or two dolphins from the Yangtze in the Seine, Marianne was delighted to talk with them, although she was a tiny bit jealous of leather luggage and luxury hotels, their English was very refined, very elegant, accompanied by the bobbing of a prominent Adam’s apple, they were at their ease sunk into armchairs in the immense patisserie, sipping teabag tea, they were well-informed cultivated knew Cavafy by heart and ancient Greek, real characters, I wasn’t especially jealous, the ruddy British girl was bony her breasts flat nothing to compare to Marianne’s white blouse whose buttons looked as if they were about to pop from the pressure, Marianne whole and spontaneous was leagues apart from the affected Englishwoman, the Egyptians seemed not to notice anything abnormal, they were happy with the tips and other bakshish the young couple showered them with, in the greatest colonial tradition—his name was James and he was Scottish, a fan of rugby and Greek statuary, they offered to take us on an excursion in their carriage, to Montazah, to visit the palace and gardens, I wanted to say we’ll see if ridicule does any harm, but I abstained, after all it was amusing and the next morning we were ready, Marianne was wearing her “country” outfit, a red gingham blouse and a little matching scarf, we piled into the coupé despite the cries of the turbaned postilion, who wanted us to take two vehicles, James ended up convincing him to accept the overload for our weight in pounds sterling, and we were off, in the midst of taxis and crowded buses and exhaust in traffic jams car horns tram bells the mare’s feet struck hard on the asphalt at a jogging pace, we were shaken by the tired springs our eardrums pierced by the constant scrape of the badly greased axles and the carriage-driver’s shouts who whipped his palfrey like a madman, it was a wonder to watch dung escape from the animal’s ass and pile up on the pavement at every stop, we weren’t about to win the gold sulky, despite the coachman’s aggressiveness toward his courser, to reach Montazah we had to travel six or seven miles, the horse had trouble trotting, which got her a double ration of the whip, our British friends sat enthroned, straight as I’s in the jolts, taking in the landscape of the sea plain, proud and happy, to the point where I wondered if we were seeing the same thing, the distress of the old nag sweating under the charioteer’s meanness the poverty of Egypt the hell of the traffic the discomfort of the jiggling cart the whiffs of diesel oil from the buses the begging children black with filth who ran after us and whom the driver chased away like flies lashing them with his knout, maybe our hosts had visions of Cleopatra, of Durrell, of Forster, of Cavafy, blinded by the lighthouse of Alexandria, Marianne wasn’t much at ease either, the cars passed us in a fury honking their horns, forty-five minutes later we were in Montazah, why did the British have to love their barouche, I was exhausted my buttocks beaten to a pulp almost as much as the heroic nag’s, the palace in question was in the midst of magnificent gardens planted with mangos pepper plants bougainvillea oleanders, a castle that looked as if it had been built from red-and-white Legos an exceeding strange building, Austro-Ottoman-kitsch for Farouk forced to abdicate by the Free Officers, by General Naguib and Nasser the Alexandrian with the thick eyebrows, finished with princes and princesses of sumptuous palaces, make way for martial themes and shouted speeches of the revolution underway in the tremolos and sighs of Umm Kulthum the chubby-cheeked, since there wasn’t much to see aside from the gardens we went to drink mango juice at the terrace of a hotel that the tourist board had had the good taste to place by the water like a black chancre with twenty floors, our phlegmatic friends had another visit to suggest, this one more original, it involved going to see the childhood home of Rudolf Hess the aviator friend of Hitler and vice-Führer of the Reich, Alexandria had produced everything, poets warriors spies singers high-ranking Nazis, for James it was an almost familial visit,