Zone (39 page)

Hess fell into my uncle’s garden
, he said, in May 1941 Rudolf Hess at the controls of a Messerschmitt modified for the purpose flies to Scotland under the nose of the English coastal defenses, and, short of gas, parachutes down to land on the property of a Scottish nobleman dumbfounded by the unexpected appearance of Hitler’s dauphin in his hydrangea, we still don’t know why, probably to try to negotiate peace with Great Britain before the invasion of the USSR, without the Führer’s orders perhaps, Churchill immediately had him locked up in the Tower of London, then sentenced to life in prison in 1946 at Nuremberg the deranged aviator went to keep company with Speer the builder of Teutonic temples in Spandau Prison, mad amnesic hypochondriac depressive his agony would last until 1987, in sadness and solitude, the last inmate of a jail demolished after his death, in his last years Rudolf was haunted by the memory of the bay of Alexandria, all day long he sketched Greek porticos and views of the vanished lighthouse, obsessed with the city he had left eighty years earlier, the Mediterranean light last flame of his empty eyes, unable to remember his trial in Germany but speaking of his Italian governess with tenderness, of his garden, his school, the girls in white dresses, the receptions at the Place des Consuls, his swimming lessons at the Chatby baths, his father’s splendid villa in the Santo Stefano neighborhood, a stone’s throw from the sea, fourteen years of childhood in Alexandria and over forty years of prison, what to think about, what to remember, did he think of Antony and Cleopatra when he took his life at the venerable age of ninety-three, one hot August day Hess managed to isolate himself in a garden shed in the Spandau bastion with five feet of stolen electric cable that he twists around his neck, he squeezes hard with the help of a window bolt, more ingenious than Leon Saltiel, more determined too, Hess asphyxiates himself to escape overlong life, the interminable fate of the recluse, Hess warrior with no battles, with no glory aside from an air raid and an exceptional longevity, having left Alexandria in 1910 the man of no interest the war criminal with no war dies in the ambulance where they try hard to revive him, last great living Nazi last representative of an extinct species, James the eccentric Scot had reason to be disappointed, at the spot of the Hess family villa by the sea there was a grey building similar to hundreds of others in front of the Corniche, might as well say in front of the highway, no more luxuriant garden, no more sumptuous residence, the trace of Hess’s fate had been erased without a qualm by modern Egypt, so we got back into the jolting carriage in the midst of the yellow taxis and warning signals to get back to the center of town, the horse had begun to limp and stubbornly refused to trot, it kept to a walking pace and unleashed the fury of the coachman who shouted, standing up to whip the obstinate horse with all his strength, furiously, the leather lash struck hard and scattered flies and drops of sweat, the old nag shook its neck, neighed, it looked ready for the knacker’s yard, its driver was in the process of finishing it off, the animal stumbled from time to time on the asphalt, in the carriage the ambiance was nothing to write home about, the Brits no longer looked at the gleaming sea but at the horse on its last legs receiving the turbaned charioteer’s fury, Marianne ground her teeth and let out a little yelp every time the whip came violently down on the animal, four young proper Europeans were responsible for the torture of a nag covered with foam, its nostrils dilating, but no one got out, the carriage ended up bringing us back to the front of the Cecil, James resettled his hat straight on his head and paid the agreed-on price to the coachman who demanded extra for his poor Rosinante, and the Scotsman told him literally to fuck off, if I understood right, with great pleasure—he was close to taking the whip himself and administering a neocolonial thrashing to the Egyptian, the British are sensitive when it comes to horses, he however was responsible for the suffering of the little mare, we separated as good friends promising to see each other again, every time I returned to Alexandria I thought of the anachronistic couple, of Rudolf Hess and the carriage, lunching with my Egyptian generals lovers of whisky great hunters of terrorists, they proudly showed me the construction site for the new library, let’s hope it experiences a fate different from its burned-down ancestor, a respite in time before ending up drowned by the rising water of the Mediterranean, after the polar ice melts, its beautiful ash-colored granite jetty transformed into a smooth pleasant beach for the laughing seals, who will play there sliding on their bellies trumpeting with delight

XIX

everything is harder once you reach man’s estate the sensation of being a poor guy the approach of old age the accumulation of sins the body lets go of us white traces at your temples veins more prominent your sex shrinks ears stretch illness lies in wait, alopecia Lebihan’s fungi or the cancer of my father laid low by Apollo and Machaon’s knife can do nothing for it, the arrow was too well embedded, too deep, despite many operations the sickness returned, spread, my father began to dissolve, dissolve then dry out, he seemed increasingly taller, drawn out, his immense pale face was furrowed with bony crevices, his arms were emaciated, the man who had always been so low-key was almost completely silent, my mother spoke for him, she said
your father this, your father that
, in his presence, she was his Pythia, she interpreted his signs,
your father is happy to see you
, she said when I visited,
he misses you
, and the paternal body in its armchair said nothing, when I went over to him to ask him how he was my mother replied
today he’s very well
, and little by little everyone lost the habit of addressing him directly, we consulted his oracle, my father remained sitting for hours on end reading Saint Augustine or the Gospels and it was strange that a scientist, an engineer, a specialist in the most invisible kind of matter found a place for God at the heart of his waves, he was settling his account with the beyond no doubt, preparing his passport for Hades great eater of warriors, we were all convinced he was going to get better, get better or drag his illness out for years, but the Moirae had decided otherwise, and Zeus himself could do nothing, so after a visit to my parents I went back to my place stopping by the bistro below to drink a few shots before climbing up to pick up a book too, any book, to pass the time, the Zone documents or whatever the bookstore on the Place des Abbesses palmed off on me, trashy novels literature essays everything came through there, ever since Stéphanie left in place of her skin I had to caress thousands of pages in solitude, enough to make you mad, like Rudolf Hess in his interminable prison, my father was fading away my mother was holding up and playing ever more difficult pieces four hours a day furiously, Chopin Liszt Scriabin Shostakovich nothing resisted her, the Boulevard was grey and more somber than ever, the sword of Maréchal Mortier was rusting now under the directorship of Jean-Claude Cousseran, diplomat specialist in the Zone, from Jerusalem to Ankara not excluding Damascus, pleasant cultivated and intelligent, not much liked among the experts of intrigue and shadow plays, all that was too high up for me, from my office I saw nothing but Lebihan who wheezed from meeting to meeting waiting for his discharge, the reforms and transformations of flow charts, the budget given to such-or-such agency to the detriment of some other, in other words everything that makes up an excessively opaque administration, about which no one really knows exactly how it functions, not even us: by magic the reports files missions weekly or special bulletins still reached their destinations, the propaganda and various manipulations ended up getting the better of Cousseran and his team, overthrown by staunch Chirac supporters, Cousseran left for Cairo as ambassador, he must still be there, by the shores of the Nile, a stone’s throw from the zoo, watching the monkeys gamboling from his big varnished desk while he absentmindedly initials his insignificant documents on a magnificent green leather blotter—I down my Sans Souci to his health, it’s very pretty this beer bottle with the white boat on a blue background, we must be nearing Orvieto, the landscape is undulating gently in the moonlight, the Chianti has made the Americans very jolly, they keep chuckling, Sans Souci is bottled for Moretti Inc. in Udine says the label, Udine capital of Friuli beautiful Venetian city where Franz Stangl was billeted at the end of the war, in charge of the fight against the partisans once the camps of Bełżec, Sobibór and Treblinka were destroyed, closed for lack of customers, mission accomplished: Globocnik, Wirth, Stangl and the happy band of the Aktion Reinhardt had eliminated two million Jews from the General Gouvernement of Poland, with carbon monoxide gas, according to the method tested by Wirth the savage in Bełżec, and all these sinister technicians of destruction were sent in early 1944 to the
Operationszone Adriatisches Küstenland
the capital of which was Trieste the Hapsburgian, the place was dangerous, uncontrollable, groups of Resistants held entire regions and mounted deadly operations against the Germans, like the one that cost Christian Wirth his life in May 1944, maybe they had sent them there for that very reason after all, so they’d die, so that the only real witnesses of the camps in Poland would disappear, witnesses of the mass graves where the badly burned bodies of hundreds of thousands of asphyxiated men women and children rested, Globocnik nicknamed Globus by Himmler was born in Trieste when it was still Austrian, the swine was detested by anyone with an ounce of sense, he was a liar, a thief, willing to do anything to increase his personal wealth which he had built by appropriating a share of the Jewish possessions intended for Berlin, because massacres brought in millions and millions of reichsmarks, might as well combine business with pleasure, thought Globus the ironic, just like Wirth the pretentious, only Stangl wasn’t cunning enough to fill his pockets, he was a little spineless Austrian cop who ended up mechanically carrying out unpleasant tasks, he drank a lot after Treblinka, he drank a lot, for him the Jews were wood, freight that had to be “dealt with,” he hated having to go by himself to see the bodies taken out of the gas chambers, he secretly detested Wirth the mustachioed brute, Stangl liked beautiful things, in Treblinka he had organized a Kommando of gardeners to strew the camp with ornamental plants, and had even installed a little zoo, with turtles a monkey and a yellow-and-white parrot, where he liked to spend hours on end in the tropical heat while 500 meters away, in the death camp, corpses were being roasted all the blessed day, in Treblinka Stangl wore a handsome immaculate white jacket, his virginal carapace, those were the days, in Udine he was afraid, especially after the attack on Wirth on the road to Fiume, he spent most of his time closeted in his office and only went out when he absolutely had to, mainly to go to Trieste, he was solitary, even though he sometimes drank and played cards with Arthur Walter and Franz Wagner, with whom he had traveled through the whole extermination chain, from euthanasia of the mentally ill in Germany to the shores of the Adriatic, where everything was going badly: the Slovenian, Croatian, and Italian partisans were at least as numerous as the few troops left to them after the collapse in the East and the Allied advance into Italy, the end was near, at what moment does he realize that the war is lost, maybe in June 1944, maybe before, when he arrives Stangl is at first posted to Trieste itself, as the head of a police transit camp called La Risiera di San Sabba, set up in a former factory for the processing of rice, where arrested partisans come through with Jews who were about to leave for Auschwitz, Mauthausen, Dachau, or Buchenwald depending on the transports, Globocnik’s diligence soon fills the place out, in the beginning of 1944 Wirth asks Erwin Lambert a gas and cremation technician to build an oven there to get rid of the bodies of the 5,000 people killed on site, usually with a club, their ashes are thrown, at night, into the nearby sea by the Ukrainian executioners whom the specialists in destruction have brought with them, in Trieste the White, port of Austria Italy Slovenia and Croatia, in 1992 with Vlaho and Andi on a binge we didn’t see anything of the city, bars bars icy wind rain fried fish a long seafront a whitecapped bay lined with hills a lighthouse a few rare girls in grey coats running to take refuge in empty taverns, we were staying near the train station in a
pension
run by Slovenians, Vlaho was sulking, he didn’t understand what the hell we were doing there, when we could easily have gone to his place in Split and party and raise hell, tourism didn’t justify everything, what’s more Italy was ruinously expensive, but it was a change from Zagreb with its deserted nightclubs and whores’ bars full of soldiers and mafiosi the sad ambiance of the capital of our country at war, in Trieste I forgot the fighting the dead comrades for a while, for Andi it was all the same, so long as there was something to drink, we stuffed ourselves on spaghetti with seafood washed down with white wine before going to nightclubs that were no doubt also very sad but which seemed to us the height of gaiety, because we were the only soldiers there in the midst of the students of Trieste, they had no idea where we could be coming from, despite our smell and our short hair,
three drummer boys on the way back from war, three drummer boys
, I remember dancing for a few minutes with a young Italian in her early twenties, she kept smiling at me, we danced shoulder to shoulder without exchanging a word, she had long hair pulled back, pleasant features, I thought if she wants me I won’t go back to Herzegovina, to Bosnia, I’ll stay in Trieste, if she wants me, Aphrodite was coming to save me, she danced with her wrists up to her forehead, her head bent forward, she wore a black cotton long-sleeved dress that contrasted with her fair skin and her blond bangs, at her neckline a brooch gleamed, a little ceramic red rose, at times she raised her eyes and looked at me smiling, the music was a Pearl Jam or Nirvana hit I forget, she was murmuring the words, her feet made her hips sway right and left rhythmically, once the song was over she smiled at me one last time before moving slowly away, with measured steps, Andi took me by the arm to pull me over to the bar, I hesitated, I watched the girl being swallowed up in the crowd and I went to drink vodka with Andrija and Vlaho, they were smiling too, we thumped each other on the shoulder, then I went to look for her, she had disappeared, in the muffled din of the nightclub that would soon be closing, I hadn’t understood, I couldn’t understand the shape Fate sometimes takes, I went to Bosnia, I signed up for a few more months of war, maybe she would have saved me, that unknown girl, who knows, when we went out we went to find some whores, to console me said Vlaho, maybe that girl would have saved all three of us, in Italy there were no brothels but shady bars where a few sad dumpy Albanian women were hanging around, I declined, Vlaho our champion nothing could diminish his libido since his cold got better disappeared into a back room with one of them, we kept drinking, drinking still and always as if the world were turning liquid, the whole world, and we went back to Herzegovina—forty years earlier the members of the Einsatz R. drank everything they could in Trieste, the Wirths, the Stangls, the Wagners got drunk unremittingly while waiting for death or defeat, the tired Ukrainians forgot themselves in the rage of torture and the whip, scattered between Udine, Fiume, and Trieste the old companions in massacre saw little of each other, and when they did meet they didn’t talk about Poland, about Treblinka or Sobibór, in the meantime Stangl had gone back to his place in Austria, to see his wife and children, he missed them, he was anxious for the war to be over, to go back to the comfort of his hearth, I wonder if he intuited that the dead of Treblinka and Sobibór would prevent him from ever returning to his home, probably not, all those guys lost on the shores of the Adriatic must have been dreaming of an improbable victory of the Reich, or clinging to the illusion that they had hidden their crimes well enough, which weren’t even crimes, in any case, for Stangl it wasn’t a crime since the Reich had excluded these bodies from humankind, wood, they were wood that was suitable for burning, a mistake of nature to be rectified, a prolific species to be eradicated and even if the stench was extremely unpleasant it was impossible to recognize oneself in these imploring victims dripping from the filthy cattlecars, euthanasia with carbon monoxide was painless after all
they were well treated
, Globocnik had dealt with Poland the way you attack a field of potatoes that had been invaded by beetles or blight, Wirth and Stangl had carried out their duty, with varying degrees of pleasure and enthusiasm, and it was very hard to bear, this responsibility, especially when they had to reopen the mass graves that the gases of decomposition and putrid fluids made ripple like the sea, what a weight all that was, take out all those compressed liquefied bodies pierced with worms burn them on big grates built from railroad tracks, Wirth the ingenious had even recycled a stone-crushing machine to get rid of the bones that didn’t burn,
the most fertile land in Poland
said Wirth the humorist,
we’re leaving here the most fertile land in Poland
: upon leaving, once the camp was destroyed, to mislead the curious they had set up a little farm for a couple of Ukrainians, where the land was in fact so fertile that the beets and cabbages grew huge, the wheat sprang up before their eyes, the bread the woman kneaded for her husband required almost no leavening, the ash and fir trees grew in record time, carrying in their nascent trunks their leaves and needles the sap of dead Jews, their substance and memory up to the sky, there is nothing to see in Treblinka, nothing to see in Sobibór, aside from immense trees sagging beneath the snow in silence, they rustle, that’s all you hear there, a movement of branches and the crackle of footsteps on the ground, nothing more, a doe, a fox, a bird, the great cold of the plains, the flowing River Bug, the terminus of absence, nothing—in Trieste the Einsatz R. so well-trained went on with its labors, its war effort, against the Slav partisans and dissembling Jews, Globus began by transforming the great synagogue devastated in 1942 into a warehouse for despoiled possessions and he got down to work, roundup after roundup the little community of Trieste was sent to Auschwitz or Dachau passing through the San Sabba camp, farewell Trieste gate to Jerusalem departure-point for ships from Lloyd’s that were taking the first emigrants to Palestine, Trieste meeting-place of the Ashkenazi of the North and the Sephardim of the South, farewell, it didn’t matter that the agents of Aktion Reinhardt were tired or that they were heavy drinkers, they all knew their job, counting rounding up misleading expediting exterminating, in the beginning of 1944 the method was perfected and who better than Wirth or Stangl knew what was waiting for the Jews at the end of the journey, there is a little bit of Trieste, of Corfu, of Athens, of Salonika, of Rhodes in the land of Poland, bluish ashes, Rolf the Gentle told me all this in Trieste, Rolf the Austrio-Italian is neither Jewish nor Slavic, Rolf Cavriani von Eppan is a cousin of the Hapsburg-Lorraines and the Princes of Thurn und Taxis inventors of the postal services, born in Trieste during the war, a little mustachioed gentleman last descendant of a ducal family that used to own half of Bohemia and Galicia, Rolf knew why I had come to see him and he showed me around the city, Trieste had changed quite a bit since 1992, as I remembered it there hadn’t been so many pedestrian malls the buildings weren’t so white the people not so elegant, I wondered if I was going to see the girl from the nightclub, the one who had let me go to Bosnia, just as Stéphanie had let me go to Trieste, let me fill my suitcase and without realizing it set me off to Rome and the end of the world, Rolf Cavriani had agreed to meet me in a beautiful café decorated with mosaics and wood moldings a stone’s throw away from the synagogue, Rolf is the owner of an international banking compensation company that launders the money of thousands of more or less legal enterprises by making it pass through tax havens as opaque as they are exotic, he owns a castle outside of Salzburg a manor house in Carinthia and a magnificent villa perched above Trieste, where he rarely goes, nostalgic for a time when the Empire held the region, when Joyce the drunk Berlitz professor haunted the brothels and taverns of the old city, destroying his liver: in July 1914, a few days after the shots fired by Gavrilo Princip the tubercular from Sarajevo Joyce is on the main quay of Trieste in the middle of the crowd, a vessel belonging to the Austrian navy has just berthed, the bells are sounding the alarm, the whole city is there to see the remains of Franz Ferdinand and the beautiful Sophie solemnly brought to land in a catafalque covered with the flag with the two crowns then conveyed to the train station, where a special railway car will carry them to their tomb in the Artstetten Castle, do Joyce and his very young wife understand that these imperial corpses and the Serbian bullets signify the end of the city they know, and that soon the First World War will send them to the North, to boring Switzerland, and will bring an end to a stay of almost ten years in the Hapsburg port: when he returns the man with the little hat and the veiled eyes will not find the city he knew, Italianized, cut off from the Slavs, the Austrians, its immense port empty of all activity, in competition with Venice La Serenissima hidden in the shadows, farewell Trieste, Joyce will go to Paris—on July 3, 1914 on the main quay his companion Nora takes him by the arm, impressed by the royal coffins, she says to him