Che Rózsa commander covered in medals from the great patriotic Croatian war, Vlaho or me decorated with the order of the grateful nation, Andrija with a fine black marble tombstone with no corpse, To our brother the Hero, he no longer has a body, Andrija, no bones beneath his slab, no gold pin on his jacket he’s a name a phrase a brother and a hero, I was thinking of him in Baghdad conquered humiliated subjected and pillaged as I passed Rózsa the Hungarian from Bolivia a convert to Islam and to international aid, president of the Muslim community of Budapest, or something like that, after having been a fervent defender of Opus Dei, was he informing for the Hungarians, or the Russians, or the English, were we still colleagues, colleagues of the shadows — in the night of war, of the Zone, of memories of the dead, we were living together, without seeing each other, we were sharing the same life, passing each other by the edge of the Tigris, that Styx like the Tiber like the Jordan the Nile or the Danube like all those deadly rivers running into the sea, river of urine along a wall, fluvial ways intersect each other like railroads and weave a spiderweb around the void, in the center the hollow sea abstract and moving, ink-black at night water-green during the day and steel-blue at dawn, I always wondered why Eduardo Rózsa had joined the Croats, why those volunteers, that international brigade of which I could have been a member, he says in his books that he was fighting for Justice, to help the weak against the strong, the Serbs though also felt their rights were being threatened, they were defending their land, which was their land because their houses and their dead were there, and volunteers came to their aid too, just as Rózsa and his people came to the Croats or the mujahideen came to the Bosnians, they all saw an international affair in it, a fight of right against wrong, aside from Rózsa’s more or less apolitical comrades there was in Croatia a group of foreign fighters in the ranks of the HOS, the Croatian extreme right, neo-fascists who knew the Ustashi songs by heart, Frenchmen mostly, I knew a few of them by sight, glimpsed at a rally in Paris, it’s a small world when it comes to that community, I saw them again in arms outside of Okučani then later in Zagreb, they were cheerful coarse soldiers, they were happy to be there — as Le Pen said the one-eyed nationalist ocular emulator of Millán-Astray military experience is always good for the little ones, he had had his own in Algeria, and the networks of international solidarity sent recruits to paint their faces green and learn the language in old songs from the 1940s, I could have been one of them, I could have been one of them that’s for sure if I hadn’t set out on a completely different tangent, at bottom we were all volunteers, even Vlaho who had deserted the Yugoslav army in the middle of his military service almost 700 kilometers away from home to join the ranks of the national guard right where he was, near Osijek, he had stayed with us, Vlaho the Dalmatian, despite the cold and the rain that froze his bones, and yet God knows he was fat when he arrived, fat, gentle, and funny, with a completely round, angelic face, Vlaho was a volunteer like Andrija like me like the French of the HOS like Eduardo Rózsa, like Orwell during the Spanish War, like Blaise Cendrars in Champagne in ’14, just as Sashka’s half-brother, Kolia, had fought at the side of the Serbs, Slavic Orthodox solidarity against Catholic Slavs, ex-communists against ex-fascists, she hadn’t seen him for years she told me, Kolia the skinny mystic back from Afghanistan had wandered round aimlessly in too-confining Russia at the end of the 1980s before launching into a military adventure with the Chetniks, sajkaca on his head, probably whistling Tchaikovsky’s Marche Slave, I can see Sashka lying on her blue sofa in Trastevere when she finds out I was a soldier in Croatia she says what a coincidence, my brother was at war with the Serbs, was at war, those are her words, moj brat pobyval na vojne, the paths of Slavitude meet in the lines of fire, where was he, I ask her, gdje, I might have seen him, maybe we sized each other up through our Kalashnikovs, maybe he killed one of my comrades, maybe one of his shells hurled us head over heels into the soft mud of the corn fields, she replies in Serbia, konjechno, the clear eyes of Sashka on her sofa don’t understand the question, she doesn’t see the war, she can’t understand, I should be clearer, I know it’s pointless — in the Slavic-Latin pidgin we speak there’s no room for the nuances of war, we had so few words in common, old Slavic words and Italian terms that were transparent in French, too few to shed light on the motivations of international volunteers Russian French or Arab and that’s all the better, imprecision the impossibility of going into detail, everything stays outside when I’m with her, the war, the Zone, the suitcase I’m filling, meaning passes through hands through hair through Sashka’s immense gaze the coincidences that link us to each other the railroad tracks of the past that intersect, in Jerusalem, in Rome, like with Eduardo Rózsa my Hungarian double converted to poetry and international politics, what could I explain about my involvement — leaving for a noble cause, the cause of my Habsburg ancestors who had defended Vienna against the Turks, the cause of my maternal family, the bourgeoisie of Zagreb linked to Austria and Italy, Mama cried from sadness and joy when I left, I know she went to church every day to pray for me, and my father without admitting to praying as such thought again about his own war, his two years in Algeria, quite happy that my own had some meaning, as he said, even if that meaning escaped him a little, he knew almost nothing of Croatia, aside from a few of his wife’s cousins, but respected passion for one’s Country, himself a discreet French Catholic nationalist, an engineer without much curiosity about the world, a little self-effacing, but tender and attentive — I remember the huge electric train he had laid out for us, a whole network on giant wooden planks, patiently, dozens of trees, tracks, switches, signal lights, stations, and villages, all controlled by transformers, complex potentiometers that regulated the speed of the engines passing each other, waiting for each other, turning on their red headlights in the Christmas dusk, getting lost in tunnels beneath plastic mountains covered with a too-green, rough grass smelling of glue mixed with the ozone smell of all those electric motors functioning at once, from the switchyard to the level crossing, meters and meters of little red and blue cables ran alongside the tracks nailed to the board, for the street lights, the gates, the houses, I remember there was a freight train with a steam engine, a grey German military transport, French passenger cars, for years in the basement of our house in Orléans we added tracks trees scenery trains to this fantastic assemblage built on the HO scale, I can imagine the fortune swallowed up little by little by this set that’s sleeping in boxes today, since our move to Paris and the painstaking dismantling of the installation that put a precise end to childhood, farewell small-scale models make way for real trains like this one, somewhere between Parma and Reggio Emilia — Eduardo Rózsa writes in one of his books about the anger of his communist father when he learned that his son was fighting beside the Croats, fascists, he thought, descendants of the Ustashis of the NDH,