Nostromo and Heart of Darkness, one title calls for another, and maybe without really understanding, who knows, I let myself be carried away, page after page, and although I’ve already spent a large part of my day as an ambiguous functionary reading — notes, reports, forms, on my well-guarded screen — there is nothing I desire more then than a novel, where the people are characters, a play of masks and desires, and little by little to forget myself, forget my body at rest in this chair, forget my apartment building, Paris, life itself as the paragraphs, dialogues, adventures, strange worlds flow by, that’s what I should be doing now, going on with Rafael Kahla’s story, finding Intissar the Palestinian again and Marwan dead on a corner in Beirut, a journey within the journey, to ward off fatigue, thoughts, the shaky train, and memories — warrior, spy, archeologist of madness, lost now with an assumed name between Milan and Rome, in the company of living ghosts like Eduardo Rózsa the Hungarian righter of wrongs dressed in black who went to Mass willingly, everything I was trying to forget as I read in my armchair in Paris, sinking into the Zone into Algeria of the beheading and the beheaded, the Zone land of the wrathful savage gods who have been clashing with each other endlessly since the Bronze Age at least and maybe even before, since the caves the stone hatchets and the flints that caused spectacular jagged wounds, not counting the maces, clubs, cudgels, bludgeons, ancestors of the hammer of the Stara Gradiška camp with which my Ustashi cousins smashed in Jewish and gypsy Serbian skulls as a boredom-dispelling switch from the knife, at the same time in Trieste at La Risiera the Ukrainian guards were finishing off the Croatian and Slovenian partisans with a fine weapon almost a medieval sledgehammer a cube of sharp metal attached to a thick steel cable with a comfortable wooden handle, who had invented this device, an engineer or a mechanic who knows, maybe his name is somewhere in my suitcase, somewhere, in the Trieste file, city of high winds and nightsticks, with the magnificent synagogue and two Orthodox churches, Serbian and Greek, Trieste port of the Habsburgs since the thirteenth century, through it the bodies of Franz Ferdinand and the beautiful Sophie passed on their way from Sarajevo, the city paid them one last homage, its farewell to the Empire, before sending them by train to Vienna via Klagenfurt, soon the Adriatic port would change hands and nations, would go over to Italy before rediscovering Germanness at the end of 1943, then being stormed by the new Slavs of the South for a few months in 1945: four countries in thirty years, an Austro-Hungarian Italian city annexed to the Reich then to the Yugoslav Republic of Slovenia finally governed by the Anglo-Americans before finding Italy again and falling asleep for a long time in the confines of democratic Europe, tired, deserted by the Jews the Greeks the Germans the Hungarians the Slovenians, cut off at the tip of the Julian Veneto, at the border of red Slavitude, at the edge of deadly Karst, near the gulf well-guarded by the ramshackle castle of Duino where Rilke took advantage in 1912 of the same hospitalities as, thirty years later, the officers of the German navy who set themselves up there, hiersein ist immer herrlich, Rilke received by Princess Marie von Thurn und Taxis mocked from afar the somber James Joyce, who at the time was being welcomed by the stiff professors of the Berlitz School and rebuked by his young wife every time he came home drunk, the little uncouth Irishman staggering in the wind, one of many visitors, many train cars that met there, on the endless jetties of a harbor that today is almost deserted, I went there for the first time on leave between two fronts with Andrija and Vlaho, I dragged them to Trieste then Zagreb going through Rijeka the grey and through Opatija the most respectable of Austro-Hungarian seaside resorts where we stayed for about an hour, just long enough to realize that the average age of those taking the curative waters was close to that in Vichy, Evian, or rather Karlovy Vary, it was the end of the winter of 1992, spring hadn’t yet arrived, Vlaho, ill, was treating himself with rakija, he was vexed because a prostitute had refused to go to bed with him with the excuse that he was sick to death with a cold, he had caused a scandal in the sordid bar in Novi Zagreb, provoking general hilarity, c’mon, it’s just my nose dripping, not the rest, I don’t have clap in my schnozzle—since then he was grumpy, we mischievously suggested he take advantage of the sulfurous waters of Opatija and of the old ladies, surely less demanding than the professionals so careful of their health, what’s more all these aged respectable German ladies were certainly there to take care of themselves too, they’d be understanding, Vlaho shrugged his shoulders saying oh, very funny, very funny, so, where are we going? and what with one thing leading to another we arrived in Italy, before leaving again for Herzegovina passing through Dalmatia, a two days’ rest at the home of the more or less cured Vlaho, insulted all day long by his grandfather the Partisan who raised every glass shouting smrt fašizmu, Vlaho answered heil Hitler as he emptied his own to enrage him, in the middle of the vines a few kilometers away from Split where the UNPROFOR soldiers were dancing, their helicopters flew over us and we, we had to hitchhike soldier-style to reach Mostar — today these memories are a kind of old Yugoslav movie, the images seem to have aged, grown out-of-date, they’re no longer mine, only the sensations remain: shame, fear, pleasure, danger remain, the smells too, the contacts, Andrija’s face, Vlaho’s hand, clutching his glass or his rifle, he was our dismantling and oiling champion, even the most exotic weapons, the most unlikely ones he could strip them bare almost with his eyes closed, arm a mine or a wire trap as easily as he scratched his ass or blew his nose, without ever realizing, we thought, what he was manipulating, with a dexterity of a rodent with a nut, rapid, precise, he ate in the same way, quickly, his fore-paws joined, his chummy face opened in an immense smile at the sight of drink or food or a new weapon: Vlaho is a field mouse, a dormouse or a rat, and above all a male child, war was his element, for it was simple, funny, and virile, in a world where becoming a man didn’t mean growing up but sharpening yourself, reducing yourself, pruning yourself like a vine or a tree from which you take away the branches little by little, the female part, or the human part, who knows, a classic garden hedge sculpted into the shape of a warrior, you could just as easily say into the shape of a phallus, a rifle, the male archetype we were all trying to resemble, strong, skillful, prehistoric hunter free of a brain, capable of all kinds of boasts, swaggering, proud but submissive to anyone stronger and to his hierarchical superior, scorning the weak, women and homos, anything that doesn’t look like him, in fact, Vlaho, Andrija, the others, and I little by little we were transformed into soldiers, into professionals, of course we squeezed out a tear from time to time, but it was soon hidden and erased disguised as sweat or smoke in the eye, an embrace and there you are, or at least that’s what we’d have liked, sometimes everything collapsed, Achilles’s shield pierced, the beautiful greaves torn off, the spear broken, and then he was just a naked child curled up calling for his mother or his brothers moaning crying in his sleeping bag or on his stretcher, I remember the day Andrija the invincible collapsed for the first time, the warrior of warriors whom we’d never seen without his shelclass="underline" around Vitez, one morning like all the others in a village like all the others, when tensions were at their height with the Muslims, a warm morning, a little misty, a munitions transport going north, a few kilometers from Travnik the deadly beauty one fine morning with a smell of spring, with Sergeant Mile and Vlaho the crazy driver at the steering wheel, I don’t remember why we stopped near that building, probably because there was a corpse on the threshold, an old man, an entire cartridge clip in his head and chest, machine-gunned from quite close up and his dog too, a Croatian house, the door was open, a smell of incense wafted out as from a church, a dark interior and wood furniture, shutters closed they must have been shot at night, the guy and his mutt, why had he opened his door, why had he gone out, Mile signed to us, a trembling orangey light was coming from a room in the back, a tiny fire, something’s burning, all three of us move towards it, Vlaho remains behind to watch the entrance, a big bedroom with candles everywhere, dozens of candles still lit and on the double bed an old lady stretched out her hands on her chest a black or dark-grey dress her eyes closed and I don’t understand, Andrija takes off his helmet as a sign of respect, he takes off his helmet sighs and mumbles something, Mile and I imitate him without understanding, all three of us are in the process of watching over an old woman who doesn’t know she’s a widow, that her husband who lit all these candles for her was shot with his dog on his doorstep by unknown men or neighbors, she has heard nothing, on her deathbed, not the machine-gun volleys outside, not the footsteps in her house, not the laughter of those who jammed that large crucifix straight upright into the middle of her stomach, its absurd shadow is dancing on the wall next to the lowered faces of Andrija and Mile, bare-headed, and it’s Vlaho’s voice that wakes us up,