Nezavisna Država Hrvatska, the Independent State of Croatia of 1941: the truth is there were loads of neo-Nazis, hooked on the mythology of victory over the Serbs, on the mythology of the single “independent” Croatian State scoured clean by the partisans, we all had Faith, we were all taking part in history rifle in hand feet in questionable socks with a fresh lungful of air our eyes full of pride for God and the homeland for vengeance for our dead for our children yet to come for the land for our ancestors buried in the land, against Serbian injustice, then for our comrades maybe also for the pleasure of it a taste for steel the pleasure of war the glory of honor fear danger laughter power our honed bodies our scars, and in the tiny apartment in Trastevere it was impossible for me to explain all that to Sashka, just as she couldn’t explain the feelings of her half-brother, they didn’t interest her, she hadn’t seen him since she left Petersburg in 1993, just when Kolia came back from the war, she had left fled to Jerusalem City of Peace, of light and eternal violence, where I like to think I saw her, when she was painting fake Russian icons for American tourists near the Damascus Gate, an angel on her shoulder, I came across her there that’s for sure just as I exchanged bullets with her half-brother around Vukovar, just as trains passed each other on two separate tracks on my father’s plank table, just as I met Eduardo Rózsa ten years later in Baghdad without his seeing me, by the edge of the river — and the thousands of documents in the briefcase that the train is conveying across the Italian countryside are nothing but that, intersections, men glimpsed in Cairo in Trieste or Rome, it was simple, you just had to uncoil the lines follow the tracks wait to meet them at night in my own night gaining on the landscape and the food-processing plants in the region of Parmesan and pasta: the crossword enthusiast has gotten up to go to the bathroom, my neighbor is quietly snoozing, the car is silent, he is snoring or whistling, I don’t know, according to the movement of the tracks, I close my eyes, where would I like to go now, to Beirut the blue to find the Palestinians again and Intissar in the little cream-colored book, not yet, or to Iraq country of hunger and death and Babel, to Troy maybe with Marianne, to the Homeric Dardanelles, to Mycenae city of Agamemnon shepherd of warriors, it overlooks the plain of beautiful mares, far from the mounds and hills near Hisarlik, far from the trenches and ravines where the dehydrated bodies of English and Australian soldiers piled up in 1915, water had to be conveyed there by boat in immense metal vats, I’m thirsty all of a sudden, maybe the crossword enthusiast went to the bar not the toilet, from the Dardanelles to Iraq, from Troy to Babylon, from Achilles to Alexander, thinking again about Heinrich Schliemann the discoverer of Ilion the well-guarded, from Mycenae adorned with gold, to Arthur Evans knight of Her Majesty’s Empire who until his ninetieth year pursued adventure in Crete at Knossos, pipe in his mouth, convinced he had discovered the labyrinth and sanctuary of the potent bulls, and I too, in a way I am an archeologist, brush in hand I search through and probe vanished, buried things, to make them rise up from corpses, from skeletons, from fragments, debris stories copied out on coded tablets, my own Scripta Minoa, begun by the excavation of Harmen Gerbens the brutal alcoholic rapist in Garden City, and followed by thousands of names of killers and victims, painstakingly annotated, delineated like the charred pottery of Troy VII the mysterious burned city, indexed, classified, without my understanding the reason for my passion, like Schliemann or Evans, pushed always further into endless research, standing over the huge charnel pit of history, feet in the void: when I arrived at the Boulevard Mortier, after having been recruited against all expectation despite my war-filled past and my foreign ancestry, plunged into my solitary Zone peopled with ghosts shadows living or dead in the middle of endless secret archives in those soundproof hallways, those tunnels under the boulevard, every night I walked across Paris up to the 18th arrondissement and my new civil servant’s two-room-with-kitchen apartment, thirty square meters of disorder on the sixth floor with no elevator, as it must be, my head beneath the zinc of the Parisian ceiling, my elbow on the zinc of the bar down below, morning and evening, before and after the metro, coffee to go, draft beer on my return, little by little the regulars become the anonymous family of the café-owner patriarch, soldiers of the brewer officer, Jojo Momo Pierre Gilles and the others, madmen and not-so-mad men, alcoholic and sober, loners and family men, some were like cockroaches, impossible to get rid of, others disappeared from one day to the next, and Momo Pierre Gilles and their brothers in bottle speculated then about Jojo’s disappearance, cancer, cirrhosis, or that second wound of the drunkard after his disease, the wife, the spouse who forbids you bar games and after-dinner drinks, it went without saying for all these barflies that you never willingly left a good bar once you’d found one, it was as unlikely in their eyes as leaving a comfortable inexpensive apartment to go live in the Salvation Army, Michael the owner reassured his flock about the fate of so-and-so, I met him in the neighborhood, he’s fine—he was lying that’s for sure so as not to frighten his parishioners, out of generosity, Saint Michael the owner had a great tenderness for his inveterate drinkers, and he regarded it as more than a business, an enterprise for public salvation rather, the fashioning of the social bond he willingly took part in by pouring himself a small whisky from time to time, cheerfully paying for a round when he lost at dice, he lavished affection and advice on matters of love, work, or finance, at the level of a small neighborhood bar, where those who managed to run up a tab were rare (credit is dead, bad debtors killed it) more out of a sense of education and morality, really, more than out of mistrust or greed, the bar in the 18th, might as well say a bar without a name, without anything special in the décor or the brown leatherette banquettes was a part of my life, every night a beer or two standing at the bar before climbing the well-polished steps to my woman-less and television-less home, during the ascent of my Parisian Olympus I slowly rid myself of the filth of the world of the Boulevard, of the Zone, to enter another — my photos of La Risiera di San Sabba on the wall, next to the picture of Globocnik in Trieste, the one of Stangl in Udine, now the snapshot of Sashka in Petersburg, and in its place, before, nicely framed, the image of Stéphanie on the Bosporus, which I found in a closet and threw into a trashcan yesterday morning, the glass broke immediately with a loud noise, for years every night the same ritual climb the steps get out the long bronze-colored key insert it in the old keyhole open the door smell the odor of cold tobacco sometimes of trash or alcohol go over to the window open the shutters watch the cars pass by in the street for a few seconds put away the empty bottles lying around the clothes scattered about then pick up a book sit down in my armchair with, according to my humor and my resources, a glass of wine or a beer in hand — curious this passion for reading, a remnant from Venice, from Marianne great devourer of books, a way to forget to disappear wholly into paper, little by little I replaced adventure novels with simply novels, Conrad’s fault,