VI
the route is predictable, despite the failing light there will be Reggio Emilia then Modena Bologna Florence and so on until Rome, its sweetness like overripe fruit, Rome, rotting flamboyant corpse of a city you understand too well the fascination it can exercise over certain people, Rome and the suitcase I’m going to hand over there the time I’ll spend there maybe the choice has been made the choice has been made ever since the goddess sang of the wrath of Achilles son of Peleus, his warlike choice his honor the love that Thetis his mother bore him and Briseis his desire whom Agamemnon took just as Paris possessed Helen, the one waiting for me in Rome in her most beautiful peplos, maybe, the train is slowing down now approaching a station, boredom is holding me in its grip, on the other side of the aisle a man in his fifties is doing crosswords with his wife in a paper called La Settimana Enigmistica, the puzzle week or something like that, his wife looks much younger than he, in man’s estate everything is harder, in the nothingness of indecision that is the world of rails and shuntings, she is waiting for me, I like to think Sashka is waiting for me, that her body is waiting for me, I think about the life we abandon and about the one we suddenly choose for ourselves, about the clothes we take off, the beautiful greaves, the breastplate, the leather sustaining the breastplate, the beechwood spear cast into the fire, the shield, all those times when you get undressed, when you show yourself, naked with nothing else but the shivering of skin — those naked men taken by the hundreds out of trains blind their clothes piled up in a corner of the yard the air suddenly frozen the arms that cross the hands that cover the elbows to clothe with flesh the naked flesh marked in its center by the birthmark of the pubis: the enemy always rushes at the conquered to strip them, and we ourselves we strip our enemies for money for a souvenir for a rare weapon and our prisoners too before finishing them off, on principle, in the cold, we order them to get undressed sometimes so as not to stain or make a hole in the uniform, the jacket that could always be useful of course, but also to enjoy the power of man over naked animal, the man standing up against the shorn and trembling animal, laughable it was easier to take despicable life away from them, the gentleman with the Settimana Enigmistica seems very paternal, he explains the words, the letters that fit, his companion is looking through a little pocket dictionary, she’s a brunette, her hair long and tied back, in man’s estate you leave your suitcases, you cling to the youth of others, you strip your women, you undress them, it’s been almost ten years since I left Venice since Marianne left and the other life that was beginning without my knowing it in the train from Milan by a dull pain in the testicles is coming to an end today, the resignation handed in, treason consummated, dread of the world now, I am entrusting my entire self to another train, one more, I’m no longer a kind of snitching pen-pushing nosey civil servant but a free man, and this cumbersome freedom fruit of my treachery I’ll spend it in the company of Sashka who is waiting for me maybe, Marianne is so present now, close down one existence open up the one before, ten years later, livelier than ever, what could have become of her, I picture her a teacher in a Parisian high school, a mother, of course, she whose body and education were pushing her towards teaching and maternity, just like mine towards the war that for it was entirely natural, for a boy brought up in violence, used to the idea of weapons since childhood, primary school and cartoons, raised in the idea of God and the nation oppressed by his mother’s wailing, finding himself one day with an assault rifle in his hand, near Osijek, propelled by his parent’s tears and drawn by the summons of Franjo Tuđman the Savior, it’s the bland but pleasant face of the crossword enthusiast that makes me think of him, dazed by the fruitless drowsiness of the train’s rhythm, Tuđman whose photograph soon joined that of Ante Pavelić in uniform on my mother’s patriotic altar, along with Christ and a weeping Virgin, Tuđman arrived in Zagreb as King of Kings, to transform my existence radically, save me or ruin me, who knows, and in front of our television in the 15
th arrondissement, in the dark, religiously, we listened to his elegiac speeches only half of which I understood, which my mother translated for me with devotion, on the day Christ arrived in Jerusalem, he was welcomed as a prophet, shouted the newscaster, today the Croatian capital is the new Jerusalem: Franjo Tuđman has come for his own, Croatia was born again, it emerged completely armed from Tuđman’s helmet, finally dragged itself out of its Titoist sleep, found in war wounds a strength a courage a youth and in the clash with its enemies a will a power a beautiful pain whose names were inscribed in letters of fire on television screens, Knin, Osijek, Vukovar, the hairy drunken Serbs were marching against innocence and beauty, they were massacring us, taunting us as they massacred us, in my entire Parisian quiet student’s existence, those trips on the metro, those for me abstruse classes in public law, history, and politics, those daily meetings with Marianne all slipped into the void that I was discovering within myself the silent void of the summons of a homeland in danger, hunger desire appetite for a sense of struggle of combat of another life that seemed to me terribly true, real, you had to fight the injustice that was being unleashed on the young State all the bolts of the archer Apollo protector of the East, and the more images and speeches reached me, the more my mother cried both from joy and from pain, the more I slipped towards Croatia, the more I disappeared from Paris from the university I was escaping Marianne and the present, I was burying myself in news reports in Krajinas in surrounded Dubrovnik in the provocations of the Yugoslav army in patriotic songs that I was discovering and even the language even the language that I had half-forgotten never really learned scorned in fact for years even the language came back to me realer and stronger than ever to the great displeasure of my father I began speaking Croatian at home he who hardly understood a word felt excluded from this nationalistic madness as he called it probably rightly, you look like your grandfather said my mother, podsjećaš me na djeda, you look like your grandfather, it was a trap, I fell into it just as a train plunges into the night I followed in my grandfather’s footsteps without knowing who he was, two years of war, two full years aside from three getaways, one to Trieste with Andrija and Vlaho and two in Paris, mostly to see Marianne again, to feel again what the poilus of 1914 told about, the incomprehension of people not at the front, the impossibility of telling about it, of speaking, like those children leaving school who don’t know how to say what they did all day: when Marianne questioned me about the war, both of us lying in the dark in her tiny attic room I replied “nothing,” I did nothing, saw nothing learned nothing I didn’t know how to say it, it was impossible, I told my mother that we were fighting for the glorious homeland, that’s all, I saw nothing in war and then I left, I took the night train from Italy or Austria and the next night I was in Zagreb, I thought about the poilus who left Paris, I imagined, in that civilized, comfortable train, that I was a Hapsburg soldier on leave who was returning to the front, who was returning to fight the Italians over there on the Isonzo in the foothills of the Alps in 1917 while on the other side of the aisle the crosswords are in full swing, the man older than his companion is talking to her like a professor, Hemingway and his nurse, Hemingway who came this way before going to play at being ambulance driver in the mountains, did he too feel the discrepancy, the impossible gulf hollowed out by the war, between those not at war and the soldiers, the ones who saw, who know, who suffer, the ones who have become dead or death-dealing flesh, and in that immense flat countryside extended by night I think of those who went up to the front on the Somme after seventy-two hours in Paris, after downing their little drinks after being very sad after having sadly and thoroughly fornicated they are like us silent in their car they don’t exchange a word in the distance a few bright flashes announce the zone of the armies the zone we’re coming close even if you don’t hear the cannon you see it you’re coming close, your throat contracts, you get out of the train, you walk through a group of wounded men who are waiting to be evacuated and they’re moaning, you get into a truck driven by a slightly bad-tempered guy, just a bit abrupt, jealous of a man on leave, then you end up on foot, you greet the artillerymen whom you envy for being so cozily entrenched at the side of their howitzers, even if they all end up half-deaf that’s not serious, you advance through the lines, through the half-buried networks following the directions written on wooden signs or on German helmets stuck in the clay, you hope that the first night will be calm, for now it’s the English taking it on the chin over there towards Ypres, you forbid yourself from thinking about the girl you’ve just left, about the last load you shot in a furnished apartment, the last shot you drank alone in the Place de Clichy because all your friends are at the front or at work, the waiter at the café still too young to leave felt envy and respect for you the