Made in Third Reich Germany,” were broadcast throughout all of Europe, showing without showing what everyone knew without knowing, that concentration was the prelude to destruction, just as branding — of steer, of steer left free in the corral — was the beginning of the end, mark something to slaughter it, control it, separate good from evil the good from the bad your own from another’s in order to construct yourself make the self stand out your shoulders thrust against difference against the Orthodox Jew the barbarian the titans order against chaos thus Gavrilo Princip builds his Slavic kingdom by killing the Habsburg: I’ve seen dozens of them over the years, in my files, martyrs candidates for martyrdom torturers enlightened ones desperate ones activists full of the cause or of God without really knowing which they were serving, whether it was Ares aegis-bearing Zeus or Pallas Athena, hooked on a single God who is all that at once, order and chaos the beginning and the end, who scatters their bodies with an entirely Olympian pleasure, Algerians Egyptians Palestinians Afghans Iraqis in my own zones of activity between 1996 and today how many have died I have no idea, they interest only a few, those victims who make victims the grandchildren of Gavrilo Princip the great instigator — the crossword enthusiast who looks vaguely like Hemingway because of his beard is having a coughing fit at this precise moment and I can’t help but smile, history always has its winks, I turn round in my seat, I close my eyes not far from Parma pleasant city I recall I stayed there once on my way to Greece on my first vacation as a young bachelor agent, Marianne’s kick had put me on the straight path I returned to political science I finally got my degree my war was described as “long-term training period abroad with the Croatian Ministry of Defense” and got me extra points I think, where could I have found the strength to sit on school benches again, the pain in my balls maybe, the long inactivity in Venice, or simply my share of fate — I could have tended my garden after a fashion like Vlaho the crippled near Dubrovnik, slowly decompose like Andrija, go into a factory like Ghassan the exile, or stay sitting in front of the television at my parents’, never leave the 15th arrondissement, my mother had added a photo of me in uniform to the patriotic altar, Pavelić, her photo as a teenager with Ante Pavelić in Spain, the Pope, grandfather, Tuđman, the flag and me, that’s her world, but I wasn’t in a hurry to go back home, on the contrary, I wanted to leave again, and I was preparing for exams with the most various and most exotic administrations: I saw my salvation in the beautiful crystal chandeliers in the Quai d’Orsay, in the gold cravats of plenipotentiaries, in the dark blue of diplomatic passports, and in the old-fashioned phrases of letters of credit, not knowing anything about the diplomatic service but what you could learn in Albert Cohen’s Belle du Seigneur, which seemed an entirely enviable fate to me, even attractive, sparkling, in fact, in the heart of the world, with the highest salaries in all the civil service, with chauffeurs, receptions, and countries where you’d never have thought to settle, Mauritania, Guinea-Bissau, Congo, Bhutan, so I forced myself to learn, to train for these abstruse tests, law, synthesis, history, God knows what else, with no success, obviously — either because of my dubious soldiering past, or simply because my test results weren’t up to that prestigious ministry the diplomatic corps turned me down after two different examinations, despite, at least this is what I was told later, an honest oral presentation, and my huge disappointment seems to me today, ten years later, in man’s estate, in this train to the Vatican, hard to understand: I couldn’t see what thundering Zeus was saving for me, a fate in a much more obscure administration than Foreign Affairs, on the Boulevard Mortier, Mortier marshal of the Empire survivor of all the Napoleonic campaigns where they employed me, against all expectations, as defense delegate, or so the title of the administrative exam delicately worded it, and I suppose the hundred candidates present in that absolutely commonplace exam room all knew what defense delegate meant, or at least they thought they did, information agent, more or less secret agent, an agent more or less from outside, for action wasn’t in our purely administrative and linguistic program, an exam pretty much identical to the one for the prefecture, Social Services, or the Naval Command, and as Parma slides by the window I see again my first days at the Boulevard, the curiosity, the training, the strange ultra-secure building, without a coffee machine so as not to encourage idle conversation among the staff, armored toilets, soundproof offices, endless files, dozens of files to go through one by one, to synthesize, classify, tally with their sources, fill out forms to ask for information in one direction or another, under such-or-such a surname spotted in reports coming from “stations” or “correspondents” with code names, transmit, refer to the superior, write up notes, work for the defense of the nation, in the shadows, in the shadow of a stack of manila folders, and my only geographic expertise had obviously been ignored in purest military logic, no Balkans for me, no Slavs: I was thrown into the Arab world of which I knew nothing, aside from Ghassan’s stories, the mosques of Bosnia and whatever history books wanted to say about it, I began in the Algerian hell as Chief Classifier in the third rank, in a world of child-slaughterers and polite mass-murderers with names that were all alike to me, in the madness of the 1990s the stench of medieval war, disembowelments, amputations, corpses scattered everywhere, houses burned down, women kidnapped, villagers terrified, bloodthirsty bandits, and God, God everywhere to control the dance of death, little by little I learned the names of the cities and hamlets, Blida, Medea, viciously, I began with seven decapitated monks’ heads seven red roses their eyes half-open onto their advanced age the Tibhirine affair on May 21, 1996 which was the beginning of my two Algerian years at the Boulevard Mortier, the marshal with the long saber — he too had used it from Jemappes to Russia, maybe he had decapitated robed monks, women, children, in the imperial storm, every morning I thought of him, of his uniform, his epaulettes as I went to my ultra-secure hideaway to deal with my files, in the heavy grey atmosphere of that world of secrecy where I read my reports of throat-slittings and military operations without understanding a word, without talking to anyone about it, I burrowed into the Zone without passion but also without disgust, with an increasing curiosity about the dealings of the wrathful gods, patiently in my armored tent I guarded the hollow vessels, I defended Algeria from itself in the darkness, and just afterwards, as I took the metro, when I went home to Rue Caulaincourt, I always saluted Mortier on the boulevard plaque, my guardian angel, knowing that I was very likely being followed and observed by my own colleagues who had to make absolutely sure, all throughout my first year — civil servant trainee, beginning spy — that I was not in the pay of foreign nations or God knows what extremist movement, I could verify this recently when I read, almost ten years later, the report of the preliminary security investigation on me, a strange mirror, a dried-out life, a leaf in an information herbarium, dates places names suspicions psychological outlines relationships guilty or not family assessment of the case officer and so on up to codes references additions classifications assignments various notes absences requests for leave like those that led me to Athens passing through Parma to escape for a few days the Algerian horror and the dead monks they had dumped on me so I could archive the massacre out of sight so I could give a plausible version of the incredible confusion of the Algiers station, Parma I remember I had dinner there not far from the baptistery and the cathedral, thinking about the Farnese family dukes of Parma and Piacenza, about Marie Louise the empress, above all not about Algeria or Croatia or anything having to do with war, except for the pyre of a strange monk, Gherardo Segarelli burnt by the inquisitors in 1300, a preacher of evangelical poverty for whom it wasn’t a sin to lie down naked next to a woman without being married, and to touch, Segarelli wanted to rediscover the beauty of apostolic love, poverty generosity and the caresses of female bodies, he paced up and down Parma with his followers preaching until an inquisitor got hold of him hauled him in for questioning and decided to condemn him to the stake, Segarelli did not fear death, he thought that the decadence of the Church was one of the signs of the end of days, that they were all going to die, all the prelates the bishops they’d all end up in hell, when the flames licked him Segarelli screamed, to the great delight of the spectators, his head fell onto his chest, his body burned for a long time, attached to the post, then the two executioners broke his bones in the still-smoking logs, threw his half-carbonized limbs on top of each other in a pile and covered them with another batch of wood, taking care to salvage the still intact heart of the monk of love in order to place it on top of the fire and thus be certain that it would burn completely, then the next morning, once the man was completely reduced to ashes, once they were sure that Gherardo Segarelli could no longer take part in the resurrection of the body on the Day of Judgment, the two sinister vergers scattered his grey powdery remains in the Parma River, tittering giddily — sitting on a terrace near the square where the eternal Church had tortured the monk who sought perfection in the coming together of bodies, my car parked in a garage nearby, I was crossing Italy seemingly the most civil country in the world to get a ferry in Bari to see the Acropolis before losing myself in the islands, eating squid salad and lamb kebabs, in the heat of the evening, the reflections of the fishing lamps on the Aegean and I’d happily go and forget myself in the windy winter of the Cyclades now change trains in Bologna go back to Bari cruise off Albania or go to Sicily island of the end of the world sit down in the Greek theater in Taormina and watch the bay of Naxos bathe the hillsides, but I have to finish the sale hand over the suitcase stay in Rome for Sashka with the angelic smile remake my life as they say with the price of treason which isn’t much the money accumulated in my spy’s account, erase everything empty myself of my man’s life finish my share of existence leave trains journeys movement in general listen to the marine forecast far inland in a deep armchair, that’s it for adventure without adventure files sources endless investigations into the networks of the world that continually meet and meet again, train tracks, fasces of spears, rifles with bayonets joined,