Zone (44 page)

levkas
, the haloes of the four saints applied with gold leaf, the little sable brush with which she fills in the background with brown ocher, then the clothes with silver-white vermilion-red cobalt-blue, slowly and meticulously the magic image takes shape, it’s wonderful to watch Sashka work, among the Theotokions, the Saint John the Golden-Moutheds, the dizzying Stylites, the red dragons, Demetrius of Salonika pierced by spears, Theodore emperor of Byzantium, John Climacus on top of his ladder, James cut into pieces, a crowd of martyrs, of colors, of almost identical faces, the four little Dalmatian sculptors find a golden life in the magnificent shadow of martyrdom, before joining the seabed, Sashka the serene is not moved by all these massacres, she is protected by Luke the Evangelist, patron saint of painters and doctors, there is great gentleness in her drawing, infinite patience, when I met her I thought she was the angel herself appearing to me in her golden halo, at night, the troubled night of Rome, at a café terrace, back from an endless visit to the papal chancellery, Campo de’ Fiori, right next to me Sashka lit the square up the whole bar had eyes only for her, in that place they offer you peanuts with your aperitif, whole, in their stringy shells, and the customers looked like monkeys in the zoo, compulsively throwing the useless husks on the ground: the terrace littered with goober shells crunched underfoot, opposite the statue of Giordano Bruno the tortured, I imagine the spectacle, in February 1600 the filthy ribalds from the vicinity came to check if the impious one given over to the flames would cry out despite the gag, everyone ran up to hear the flesh crackle and fill their nostrils with the aroma of human meat, at the very place where today tourists are gulping down peanuts, Bruno the swordsman magician cosmologist occultist and poet was a great traveler, he visited half of Europe before being betrayed by the Venetians and brought before papal authority: that same authority recently expressed its regrets about burning him, sorry, they say today, for having tortured a naked philosopher chained to a metal stake on a pyre of logs, Giordano Bruno dead by pontifical stupidity opposite the bar where I shelled peanuts without being able to drag my eyes away from the young woman so beautiful, so present at the table next to mine, in the company of a man who was devouring her with his eyes, she didn’t seem to be paying attention to his concupiscence, even less to my own or to the carbonized body of Bruno, her eyes were too light for the demon to be reflected in them, too light, I heard her rolling pretty
r
s, she spoke Italian slowly, calmly, with a slight accent, I was sure she was Slavic and I prayed secretly for her to be Croatian, or Slovenian, or even Serbian, I would have had a hold over her through language—of course she had to be Russian, from Russia mother of Orthodoxy tanks and assault rifles, that’s all I knew, I could have itemized to her at leisure all the models, the variations, the calibers or secret activities of Great Russia in the Zone, at great length, spoken about Russia’s equivocal relations with certain Arab countries, about the curve of the cartridge clip, the Kalashnikov’s stroke of genius, but no, we talked about Jerusalem the gentle, about my entomological field trips in the Libyan desert or in the north of Morocco, quickly, without insisting, she is not curious, Sashka, she lives in a world of images, she expects nothing from anyone, especially not from words—I asked her why she had left St. Petersburg and she told me that she hadn’t left St. Petersburg, she’d left Leningrad, precisely because Leningrad was disappearing, that she had arrived in Jerusalem by chance, with a contingent of fake Jews looking for a host country, and there wasn’t a single ideological ulterior motive in her, no nostalgia, she was just uttering facts, when I asked her if she wanted to go back to Russia she replied simply that the Russia she knew no longer existed, that the city of her childhood had disappeared, that the people, the streets had changed, but she added immediately it’s just as well like that, and what for another would have been an utter I-don’t-give-a-fuck attitude in her signaled a detachment, an elsewhere, her life is in her gestures, in the movements of her brush, of her wrist, in her eyes riveted on a saint to be reproduced, a face to be modeled, the drape of a garment, she doesn’t have any pretensions that she’s creating, inventing new representations, no, she repeats ad infinitum what tradition has left to her, content to be able to make a living from this singular activity and towards me she acts in the same way, Sashka the distant, if I’m there so much the better, if not, too bad, she doesn’t try to convert me to anything, does she see me, even, she sees what I show her, which is nothing, or so little, disarmed by her simplicity and her statue-like forms, how could she know, if I don’t tell her anything, she has neither the universal maternity of Marianne the generous nor the devouring curiosity of Stéphanie the headstrong, Sashka is a mirror from which I keep myself hidden, my face veiled so as not to be reflected in the tormented faces of the executioners scalding the saints, whipping them to death before drowning them in the Adriatic like the four crowned ones from Split—in 1915 it was hundreds of bodies with no coffins they sent to the bottom, valiant Serbs, a little south of Corfu last stop before Ithaca, the British have a taste for islands even in the Mediterranean, Minorca Malta Corfu Cyprus belonged to them, and their ships with the bulging sides were masters of
Akdeniz
, the Turks’ name for the Mediterranean, the White Sea, when I landed in Corfu coming from Igoumenitsa after having crossed the steep-sloped Epirus the British were knocking down huge beers in the shade of ad-covered umbrellas on the coasts of Phaeacia, forget about Nausicaa washing her laundry on the bank, what was awaiting me was a Greek cop with a big mustache he ordered me to move my car as fast as possible, hitting the tired automobile’s roof hard with his club,
quickly car quickly
, as if he were addressing a horse, despite the pink Brits the pretentious French the mistrustful Germans and the rowdy Italians the island was beautiful, the narrow old city looked more like Venice than Athens, thank God, and even tired of vacation pursued by the heads of decapitated monks and apocalyptic evangelists in my sleep Corfu wedged between the imposing Venetian fortresses was a repose, it was a pleasure to get lost there, to drink for a long time watching the sea lick the wounds on the walls, the Ottomans had tried to take the island many times, without success, Phaeacia last rampart of the West had held strong, the inscriptions on the walls recalled the siege of 1716, when the Turk had made his appearance for the last time off of Palaio Frourio, as in Malta the heroic before the defenders with their shining cuirasses had resisted the cannons, the sapping the continuous assaults of the fierce Easterners, there were masses of Croats and Dalmatians among the mercenaries defending the city, I imagine one of my ancestors flung into the sea by a cannonball, after having recommended himself to God having been brave and having sent many Janissaries to Hades: there almost was a mosque in Corfu, as there was in Rhodes, as in Belgrade, as in Mostar, Ares decided otherwise, it’s the only building missing in the old city, no Trojans at the bronze doors of the palace of Alcinous the grey, or almost none, strolling by chance through the colorful streets I chanced upon a building that announced
Srpska Kuća
, Serbian House, a museum devoted to the retreat of Peter I’s army in 1915, the soldiers in the ossuary in Salonika had passed through Corfu, before being sent back by sea to the Balkan front, just as the French and the English had survived the Dardanelles to end up in a grave in Thessaly, the valorous survivors of the most terrible military retreat since Berezina had fallen later on facing the Bulgarians, the museum was moving, dozens of period photos related the fierce rout of the Serbian army defeated by the Kaiser and his Austrian ally, through the mountains of Montenegro to the Albanian coast where the French took them on board, a retreat with women and children, on foot in the snow, long columns almost without food traveled for 400 kilometers in the intense winter cold, carrying their king on a straw chair, an entire country was leaving for the sea, 150,000 died along the way in the mountains of Kosovo and the outskirts of Podgorica, victims of the cold, of hunger, of German bullets, they kept dying after they arrived, malnourished, exhausted, installed in makeshift camps on the little wooded island of Vibo before the entrance to the harbor, with no tents, almost with no medical care, nothing could be done to keep them from dying, they fell like flies at the rate of 300 a day, the French and the British couldn’t get over it, they had survived the most terrible of all journeys to keel over by the thousands once they’d reached their destination, they were no longer supported by their homeland’s soil, they were in a foreign land, in the rain, on a rock in the Ionian Sea, there was no room to bury all these people, these thousands of people so the French hospital-ship
Francis of Assisi
the charitable took on board truckloads of corpses to go bury them at sea a few miles away, these Serbs from Belgrade who had never seen any sea but the Danube, they rest today dissolved in the waves, in the stomachs of thousands of fish and marine algae, the immense blue cemetery where Thetis descends to adorn their memorials with flowers, their children’s too, who died with them—the survivors prepared again for war, reorganized by the allies returned by boat to the other side of the Balkans, where they bravely started up the fight again, and Peter I the brave, over seventy, who had survived humiliation, illness, defeat, and exile to Corfu, could be crowned King of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenians, my king, I looked at him, old and sick, carried on the shoulders of his soldiers in the snow, flanked by an Orthodox priest and a doctor just in case, and I was proud that he was in a way my king, the only one what’s more, his son Alexander would be assassinated in Marseille in front of my grandfather’s eyes by the hired assassins of Pavelić the patriot, at the end of the war Corfu was strewn with Serbian cemeteries, the whole island was a tomb, the generous Greeks had lent their land for the dead and their theater for the Parliament, those same Greeks would in turn go to fight around Sarajevo the well-guarded, an exchange of graves, Serbian ossuaries here, Hellenic burial grounds there, the great circle round the rim of Achilles’ shield, the macabre humor of the relentless gods—as I left the
Srpska Kuća
I felt a little melancholy, I felt cold despite the August heat, I went and sat down at a café terrace my eyes on the blue necropolis thinking about Peter I Karageorgevich, who had fought against so many enemies, against the coarse Prussians in the French army in 1870, against the savage Turks in Bosnia in 1875, against the well-helmeted Austrians in 1914, exhausted, the old Montenegrin monarch forced to leave his country on foot, without however abandoning the homeland and the liberation of the Slavs of the South, sure that in Slavonia and in Bosnia he would have given us a real kick in the rear, the old Saint-Cyr military school alum with the white panache who swam across the Loire to escape Bismarck’s soldiers, Peter I found himself in exile on the island where Kaiser Wilhelm spent his vacations, in the shadow of a splendid palace called the Achilleion, with luxuriant gardens, planted with cypress, laurel, and palm trees, where the statue of dying Achilles contemplates the blinding blue of the Mediterranean, he prays to Thetis his mother, the place is completely devoted to the furious son of Peleus, to the eternal cycle of revenge: the palace was built by Sissi, Empress of Austria Queen of Hungary, who liked to come live a few months a year by the wounded warrior’s side, before she in turn was assassinated on the banks of Lake Geneva by Luigi Lucheni an Italian anarchist with a stiletto right through her heart, was Kaiser Wilhelm II thinking of her when he rested his feet in the water, or rather of the son of Peleus conquered by Fate, or even of the Italian assassin, whose head he had seen preserved in formaldehyde at the Hotel Métropole in Geneva, the only hotel in the world to pride itself on human remains, Lucheni decapitated post mortem by a Swiss fetishist after he had hanged himself with his belt in his cell, Corfu was overflowing with dead people famous or unknown, ever since Poseidon had his revenge on the sailors who had brought Ulysses back to Ithaca by turning them to stone, I was spinning in circles among corpses, from bar to bar, museum to museum, the plague victims of Lazaretto Island gave way to Greek resistants and communists shot during the civil war, the 2,000 Jews imprisoned in the old Venetian fortress before being deported to Auschwitz, the sea seemed to have no bottom, it contained too many bodies, even the body of Isadora Duncan, who spent six months in Corfu in 1913 to get over the death of her two children drowned in the Seine, the American dancer with the bare feet was pursued by Athena jealous of her beauty, the tall silhouette of her ghost danced naked in the summer night, I imagined the movements of her torso, her hips draped in a transparent cloth among the shadows of the gardens of Achilles, among Sissi the empress, Kaiser Wilhelm II and Peter I of Serbia, now I see the handsome Sergei Yesenin at her side, in the darkness of the train window, Yesenin hanged at the age of thirty in his room at the Hotel d’Angleterre in St. Petersburg, after having written a farewell poem in his own blood, Sashka looks like him, she has the same round face, the very light eyes, an eternally childlike face accentuated by blond hair, Isadora Duncan knew only three words of Russian and Yesenin no foreign language, they didn’t speak, they danced, they drank, Sergei especially, Isadora says in her autobiography that the poet was passionate, so passionate that he could spend a week without sobering up, so passionate that he married the dancer eighteen years his senior, so passionate that he left her to go back to Russia and plunge into depression, in Corfu in the heart of summer it was hard to imagine the long night in Petrograd in December, the cord and the pipe in the room of the respectable hotel or else the last thoughts of Yesenin the hanged man, we still don’t know if he really committed suicide, maybe two or three somber Chekists helped hang him from the heating pipe, aided by the passivity of his permanent drunkenness, Sergei Yesenin dies in the absent sun and the first sheets of ice clinging to the shores of the Neva, his hotel room looks out onto the front of Saint Isaac’s Cathedral, could he glimpse through the window the catafalque of General Kutuzov Napoleon’s destroyer, between two gilt icons, probably not, the Revolution had closed the doors of churches to transform them into warehouses, forbidden to people, for the obstinate Bolsheviks were so superstitious that they feared the harmful influence of the very form of the building on Marxist zeal, if they were changed into theaters or meeting houses, as had been suggested in the beginning by suspicious pragmatists, who were perhaps liquidated as cleanly as Yesenin, Yesenin in love with his mother Russia cemetery of the Grande Armée where the 300,000 soldiers of Napoleon’s Old Guard lie mowed down by the frost or the cannons in 1812, the cavalrymen ate their horses that died of hunger, the Belorussian peasants ate the cavalrymen that died of hunger, Napoleon lord of Corfu for ten years dreamed of the sun of Austerlitz and of the victory of Lodi as he crossed the bridge over the Berezina erected in haste by the genius of the pontoon builders ancestors of the French sailors who transported the survivors of the Serbian army through the Ionian Sea, among them the Serbian soldier Jean Genet fell in love with in Barcelona, Stilitano the coward with the missing hand—in Corfu near the palace of Achilles Venetians Ottomans Frenchmen Austrians Serbs met and even an American dancer in love with the Russian poet, Isadora Duncan would die not long after Yesenin the alcoholic saint, in the same way, her neck choked cervical vertebrae crushed along the shores of the Mediterranean, dragged behind a car like the snipers in Beirut, the goddess jealous of her beauty and her multicolored shawl snags it in the rear wheel of the convertible driving at top speed on the Corniche, in Nice, it’s evening, a light September breeze is blowing in from the sea, to protect her fragile throat and her soft breasts the dancer wrapped herself up in her immense scarf that snaps in the wind like a deadly pennant, when the driver accelerates the silk scarf gets caught in the axle immediately tightens and drags Isadora out of the vehicle, onto the pavement, her head against the tire’s rough rubber, in the time it takes for the driver to stop she’s already dead, sitting with her back against the spokes of the blue Amilcar, her eyes wide open onto the Mediterranean, her head stuck to the car, her tongue sticking out, like Saint Mark the Evangelist hauled on the paving stones by a cart near Alexandria, Saint Mark accompanied by the lion on the icons painted by Sashka the angel as blond as Yesenin: she paints martyrs and I collect corpses, bodies scattered in the snow, arms fallen on the ground, bones sleeping at the bottom of sea graves, Corfu last stop before Ithaca seemed like one of Fate’s points of inflection, the home of the implacable Moirae, I drank a final ouzo in the garden of the palace of Sissi the stabbed empress, watching Achilles massacre the Trojans, I thought one last time about the Serbs chilled to the bone, about Stilitano the one-armed coward, about Isadora caught again by divine vengeance after her children and her husband, and I started off again for the North—the North, that is the shadow of Maréchal Mortier where I was going back to officiate a few days later, Mortier great killer of Spaniards, Teutons, and Slavs, his boulevard a proud address for our arcana, barely had I arrived than I found Lebihan who welcomed me with a So Francis, ready to get back in the saddle? he was surprised I wasn’t more tanned, after a stay on the islands, I told him nothing about my vacation other than the names of exotic places, what was there to say, dead Greeks dead Jews dead Evangelists and dead Serbs, I returned one more time to the battle of Algiers, dead Muslims, the GIA had a new emir and was changing their strategy, or rather abandoning all strategy for the tactics of cutting throats, at night Queen Mab the tiny fairy incubated my azure-colored dreams, arid mountains plunging into the sea and television Nausicaas, to console me probably for the darkness of the day, the ritual, the offering to Maréchal Mortier, the Porte-des-Lilas metro line, the change at Belleville, the smell of peanuts and sweat of the Parisian metro, getting out at Pigalle, Blanche, or Place-de-Clichy, depending on my mood, to stop by and have some drinks in the midst of the crowd of drunkards at the bar in the 18
^th
arrondissement, commenting on another sort of news, usually connected to sports, to teams that aren’t doing so well, to results that are always disappointing, losing or winning at dice, with the surprising sensation, for someone returning from vacation, of discovering your family, your friends, and your house still in the same place, a place where there’s somewhere to drink, what’s more, and where you can crush your butts out on the ground without risking a reprimand, you find yourself patting the owner’s dogs as if they were distant cousins, endless demonstrations of affection, everyone’s happy to see you again, everyone celebrates with relief that this haven of manhood hasn’t yet been conquered by females the police or public health, and once you’re nice and tipsy you go back up to your place, you leave the zinc under your elbow for the zinc over your head, with all the windows open in order to get rid of the heat of Paris in early September, an armchair, a detective novel, and the warm smell of asphalt that invades the room as night falls—Stéphanie didn’t like my rituals, neither the bar nor the trashy novels, when the passion from the early days fades away, these nice character traits turn into unbearable defects, little by little the crack becomes an abyss of reproaches and annoyances that has to be filled with the plaster of lies and dissimulation, month after month, summer after summer, burying myself in the Zone, filling my briefcase with corpses right and left, as I traveled to Damascus Jerusalem Cairo Trieste Valencia, I was detaching myself from her as surely as from Marianne in Venice: my guilt after the incident of the fake suicide changed into constant aggressiveness, everything went downhill, into the bottom of the sea, the way a shroud becomes unraveled thread by thread, this is going to end badly, we thought sometimes, each at one end of Paris in our respective apartments, it will all end badly, and one day as I got out of the Intercity coming from Frankfurt at the Gare de l’Est, exhausted after a sleepless night in the Prague train in the company of a talkative railway fanatic, having gone back to my place with new documents for my suitcase of catastrophes, my devil’s cauldron, a little jetlagged, confused, hazy, having reached my place in the early afternoon I didn’t go to the office right away, to check some minor details and put in an appearance, I should have, it’s very cowardly but I should have gone instead of taking a shower and sitting quietly in my armchair gazing off into space, she rang the doorbell at around five o’clock, I heard her voice on the intercom and I was surprised, she hardly ever came to my place, almost never and especially not without warning, she knew I was supposed to get back from Prague in the afternoon she had left the Boulevard a little early to run here, I heard her climbing the stairs, a little anxious, why was she coming, maybe one of those proofs of love that you plug the cracks with, a surprise, she came in smiling and kissed me tenderly saying just