Now Marwan is dead, his body is turning black under the Beirut sun near the airport, a scant hundred kilometers from his birthplace.
Ahmad. Ahmad’s presence next to Marwan disturbs Intissar. Ahmad the cruel. Ahmad the coward. What were they doing together? Ever since the incident they were joined solely by a common cause and a cold hatred. But the first time she saw Ahmad something in her trembled. It was on the front line, a year earlier, when some combatants were returning from the South. Ahmad was almost carried in triumph. He was handsome, crowned with victory. A group of Fedayeen had gotten into the security zone, had confronted a unit of the Israeli army and destroyed a vehicle. Even Marwan admired their courage. Intissar had shaken Ahmad’s hand and congratulated him. Men change. Weapons transform them. Weapons and the illusion that they produce. The false power they give. What you think you can obtain by using them.
What earthly purpose can the Kalashnikov, which is lying across her thighs like a newborn child, serve now? What can she get with her rifle, three olive trees and four stones? A kilo of Jaffa oranges? Vengeance. She will get peace for her soul. Avenge the man she loves. Then defeat will be consummate, the city will sink into the sea, and everything will disappear.
V
half-starved wretch sublime those Palestinians with the heavy shoes what a story I wonder if it’s true Intissar pretty name I imagine her beautiful and strong, I am luckier than she is, I went to Palestine, to Israel, to Jerusalem I saw paralyzed pilgrims one-armed people one-legged people people with no legs weird people bigots tourists mystics visionaries one-eyed people blind people priests Catholic and Orthodox pastors monks nuns every kind of habit all the rites Greeks Armenians Latins Irish Melchites Syriacs Ethiopians Germans Russians and when they weren’t too busy “fighting over cherry stems while ignoring the cherries” as the French saying goes all these lovely folk mourned the death of Christ on the cross the Jews lamented their temple the Muslims their martyrs fallen the day before and all these lamentations rose up in the Jerusalem sky sparkling with gold at sunset, the bells accompanied the muezzins at top volume the ambulance sirens drowned out the bells the haughty soldiers shouted bo, bo at suspects and loaded their assault rifles one finger on the trigger ready to fire at ten-year-old kids if they had to, fear strangely was in their camp, the Israeli soldiers sweated from fear, at the checkpoints there was always a sniper ready to fire a bullet into the heads of terrorists, staked out behind bags of sand a twenty-year-old conscript spent his day keeping Palestinians in his sights, their faces in his cross-hairs: the Israelis know that something will happen sooner or later, the whole point is to guess where, who, and when, the Israelis wait for catastrophe and it always ends up coming, a bus, a restaurant, a café, Nathan said that was the most discouraging aspect of their work, Nathan Strasberg the one in charge of “foreign relations” for the Mossad took me around Jerusalem and stuffed me with falafel, don’t believe the Lebanese or the Syrians, he said, the best falafel is Israeli, Nathan was born in Tel Aviv in the 1950s his parents, survivors from Łódź, were still alive, that’s all I knew about him, he was a good officer the Mossad is an excellent agency, never losing sight of its objectives, cooperation with them was always cordial, sometimes effective — out of dozens of Palestinian, Lebanese, American sources they were the best on international Islamic terrorism, on Syrian, Iraqi, or Iranian activities, they kept watch over the traffic in arms and drugs, anything that could finance Arab agencies or parties at close range or from a distance, all the way to American and European politics, that was the game, they readily collaborated with us on some cases while trying to block us on others — Lebanon especially, where they thought that any political support for Hezbollah was a danger for Israel, Hezbollah was for them hard to penetrate, nothing at all like the divided, greedy Palestinians: the sources on Hezbollah were fragile not very reliable very expensive and always liable to be manipulated from above, of course with Nathan we never spoke about that, he showed me thrice-holy Jerusalem with a real pleasure, in the old city you heard dozens of languages being spoken from Yiddish to Arabic not counting the liturgical languages and the contemporary dialects of tourists or pilgrims from all over the world, the Holy City could duplicate all joys and all conflicts, as well as all the various cuisines smells tastes from the borscht and
kreplach of Eastern Europe to the Ottoman basturma and soujouk in a mélange of religious fervor commercial buzz sumptuous lights chants shouts and hatred where the history of Europe and the Muslim world seemed to wind up despite itself, Herod Rome the caliphs the Crusaders Saladin Suleiman the Magnificent the British Israel the Palestinians confronted each other there argued over the place in the narrow walls that we watched grow blanketed with purple at sunset, over a drink with Nathan at the King David Hotel, the sumptuous luxury hotel that also seemed to be at the heart of the world: famous for the attack of the Irgun Zionist terrorists who had killed a hundred people in 1946, the hotel had also welcomed exiles, unfortunate monarchs dislodged from their thrones by one conflict or another, Haile Selassie pious emperor of Ethiopia driven away by the Italians in 1936 or the disastrous Alfonso XIII of Spain put to flight by the Republic in 1931 who ended his days in the Grand Hotel on the Piazza Esedra in Rome, for a few weeks Alfonso XIII occupied a suite on the fifth floor of the King David in Jerusalem where he had a view over the gardens and the old city, I wonder what the Iberian sovereign thought about when he contemplated the landscape, about Christ probably, about the Spanish monarchy that he saw go out in one last golden reflection on the Dome of the Rock and that he hoped to see come to life again: they say that Alfonso XIII collected slippers, he had dozens of them, plain, embroidered, or luxurious and all those wools those furs those felts around his feet were his real home in exile, in Jerusalem Alfonso XIII bought sandals which he was still wearing when he expired in his Roman luxury hotel without having seen Madrid again, condemned to international hotels those chateaux of the poor — at the King David bar that British jewel I sip my bourbon in the company of Nathan without knowing that Jerusalem would soon catch fire, we spoke about the end of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict not knowing that violence would very soon resume on the Temple Mount, you could make it out in the distance, that’s where my collection begins, in Jerusalem talking with Nathan in the golden-brown twilight, the man of the Mossad an accomplice despite himself gives me some pieces of information, the first, about Harmen Gerbens the alcoholic Cairo Batavian, out of kindness, without questioning me about my interest in this forty-year-old affair, wanting to please me, just as he offered me falafel in the old city and whiskies at the King David he told me that Harmen Gerbens had of course never worked for Israel, but his name appeared in an old file on the Suez expedition that Nathan had gotten from the Shin Bet, cleared of ever-embarrassing military considerations four decades later — why this interest in the old Dutchman, in the “foreigners” rounded up in Egypt in 1956 and 1967, in the Qanatar Prison, maybe it was the effect of Jerusalem, a yearning for penance or a way of the cross, do we always know what the gods are reserving for us what we are reserving for ourselves, the plan we form, from Jerusalem to Rome, from one eternal city to the other, the apostle who three times denied his friend in the pale dawn after a stormy night perhaps guided my hand, who knows, there are so many coincidences, paths that cross in the great fractal seacoast where I’ve been floundering for ages without knowing it, ever since my ancestors my forefathers my parents me my dead and my guilt, Alfonso XIII driven out of his country by history and collectivity, the individual against the crowd, the monarch’s slippers for his crown, his body versus the function of his body: to be both an individual in a train crossing Italy and the bearer of a sad piece of the past in an entirely ordinary plastic suitcase wherein is written the fate of hundreds of men who are dead or on the point of disappearing, to work as pen-pusher man of the shadows informer after having been a child then a student then a soldier for a cause that seemed just to me and that probably was, to be a string on the bobbin that the goddess spins as she proceeds on a straight path among passengers each one in his body pushed towards the same terminus if they don’t get off along the way, in Bologna or Florence, to meet one of those madmen who haunt the station platforms announcing the end of the world: my neighbor has turned on his Walkman, I hear sounds but can’t really tell what he’s listening to, I can make out a high-pitched rhythm superimposed over that of the train tracks, Sashka can’t live without music either, CDs galore Russian or Hebrew airs melodies ancient or modern when I met her the night was very dark, a glance is stronger than a ship’s mooring says a Dalmatian proverb one look and you’re pulled out to sea — in the little Roman streets painted with ivy, perfumed by rain, stricken too with the sickness of history and death like Jerusalem Alexandria Algiers or Venice, I cling to lies and to Sashka’s arm, I pretend to forget Paris the Boulevard Mortier violence and wars the way, when I was a child, a ray of light would always slip beneath the door to reassure me, the distant conversations of the adults lulled me with indistinct murmurs pushing me little by little into the world of dreams, Sashka is the nearby body of a distant being, surrounded as we are by all these ghosts my dead and hers whom we resist by putting our arms round each other’s shoulders near the sad Tiber great carrier of refuse, it’s over, I left Paris my civil servant’s studio apartment my books my souvenirs my habits my lunches with my parents I filled lots of trash bags threw it all out or almost all got loaded one last time by accident in my old neighborhood slipped into the skin of Yvan Deroy and farewell, on the road to the end of the world and a new life, they all float past the window in the darkened plain, Nathan Strasberg, Harmen Gerbens, and the ghosts of the suitcase, the torturers of Algeria, the executioners of Trieste, all that foam on the sea, a white slightly sickening froth made from the putrescence of a load of corpses, I needed patience to collect them, patience, time, intrigues, leads, not losing the thread, consulting thousands of archives, buying my sources, convincing them by following the rules of information-gathering I’d learned haphazardly through the years, sorting through the information, compiling it, organizing it into a file that can be consulted easily, by name, date, place, and so on, personal stories life stories worthy of the best Communist paranoid administrations, archives such as there are by the millions records traces — maybe it was in The Hague that I began, in 1998 before Jerusalem I take a few days’ leave to go to the International Court of Justice where the trial of General Blaškić was taking place, the commander in Vitez of the HVO the army of the Bosnian Croats, in his box at the beginning of the hearing Tihomir Blaškić recognizes me and nods to me, after becoming brigadier-general he is facing twenty major charges, among them six infractions of the Geneva conventions, eleven violations of the laws and customs of war, and three crimes against humanity, committed in the context of “grave violations of humanitarian international law against Bosnian Muslims” between May 1992 and January 1994, I left Bosnia on February 25, 1993, I had gotten there from Croatia in April 1992, and after a few months’ stay on the front near Mostar I joined Tihomir Blaškić in central Bosnia, his headquarters had since November 1992 been located in the Vitez Hotel, he was an efficient, respected officer, I felt bad when I saw him in the midst of that multilingual administrative circus of the ICJ where a large chunk of time was lost in arguments over procedure, in misunderstandings of the American prosecutor’s quibbles, in countless witnesses and hours and atrocities while I knew perfectly well who had committed them, I could see again the places, the flames, the battles, the punitive expeditions until my departure after Andrija’s death: at bottom I hadn’t been attached to anything, theoretically I was answerable to the Croatian army but we were supposed to have resigned and left for Bosnia so as not officially to embarrass Croatia, I went to see the captain then the major I said