my father has money, my father has money, if you let me go he’ll give you a lot of money, he was too afraid to lie, we had picked them up when they were trying to desert, I was tempted to let them run, I was about to hand them over to a grunt so he could take them to Osijek, but Andrija arrived, are you out of your mind? You forgot Vukovar already? Not one of them should escape, and he machinegunned them at length, right away, without hesitating, looking them in the eyes, fifteen cartridges each in the chest, on my bed in the Hotel Danube a toast for Andi great shepherd of warriors, a toast for the stupefied gaze of the two little Serbs when the brass pierced them, a toast for the Vukovar cemetery in the falling night, for the Ivry cemetery one spring morning, for the soldiers of ’14, the Resistants the ones condemned to death and a toast for my pater probably a murderer neither a Resistant nor a man condemned to death who is keeping them company today, as the train slows down to enter Reggio in gentle and beautiful Emilia, luminous for those coming from the darkness, an Italian city where the churches the squares and the arcades have not been demolished with mortar fire, the train station is small, all length and no width, streaked with white neon lights, a few travelers are waiting on the platform muffled in coats, scarves, on the opposite track a train is passing, a freight train, headed for Modena, loaded with tanks of milk — there was probably no need for a train for the ten Jews rounded up in Reggio at the end of 1943, they must have transported them by truck, right nearby, twenty kilometers away, to the Fossoli camp antechamber of Poland, but there is a plaque, in town, near the big synagogue in the heart of the former ghetto, which lists the names of these ten people who were eliminated 2,000 kilometers away from their home, whereas just ten Carabinieri bullets would have sufficed to spare them the torments of the journey, and would have earned them a burial, secret no doubt, but a place in the earth where, like the massacred ones in Vukovar, they would wait for someone to find them again, they didn’t have that luck, they were offered a piece of cloud in the heavy sky of Galicia — Fossoli transit camp through which passed, from autumn 1943 to August 1944, most of the Jews deported from Italy, before the camp was moved to Bolzano near the Austrian border, strange perseverance, the war was mostly lost, Mussolini’s Italian Social Republic in Salò was taking on water everywhere and yet the German administration went to the trouble of organizing convoys, transports for the partisans and the last Jews from Bologna or Milan, to Fossoli then Bolzano and finally to Birkenau, one final effort to make Italy Judenrein or Judenfrei, according to the nuances of the time, the ten Jews from Reggio who hadn’t gone into exile were perhaps caught at home, near the synagogue on the Via dell’Aquila, maybe denounced, maybe not, and went to join the Resistants behind the barbed wire, before being shoved into one more train, towards the Polish terminus, where there arrived, that year of 1944, the Jews from Hungary and the 60,000 last inhabitants of the Łódź ghetto, among them the relatives and grandparents of Nathan Strasberg the Mossad officer, at least the ones that hadn’t already been gassed in Chełmno in 1942—Birkenau, where all the tracks join, from Thessalonica to Marseille, including Milan, Reggio, and Rome, before going up in smoke, my train has windows, some were deported in passenger cars, the Jews from Prague, the Greek Jews who even paid for their ticket to Poland, they sold them a ticket for death, and the community leaders negotiated bitterly over the price of the journey with the German authorities, strange cynicism of the Nazi bureaucrats, Eichmann, Höss, Stangl, calm men, quiet family men, whose tranquility contrasted with the virile belligerent hysteria of Himmler or Heydrich, Franz Stangl loved flowers and well-ordered gardens, animals, during his trip to Italy in Udine and Trieste he loved the gentle landscapes of the Veneto, and the sea, then he loved the old city of Damascus and its odors of cardamom, and his wife, and his children, the little Austrian cop who wasn’t very smart the murderer of several hundred thousand Jews denied having beaten a single one, he even convinced himself that their death was easy, piled up between four concrete walls asphyxiated with the exhaust gas of a diesel engine it took twenty minutes to die, when everything goes right, when everything went right he said in twenty minutes it was in the bag, but of course Bełzec, Sobibór, or Treblinka were amateurish compared to Auschwitz, his colleague Höss had set up his business well, his compartmentalized factories of pain functioned to perfection, until the end they worked on bettering the machine, they were even planning to make it bigger, big enough to welcome all of Europe if necessary, all the Slavic vermin and all the subversives, without hatred, without anger, just solutions to problems, for a problem requires solutions just as a question calls for a response — my father son of a Resistant participated actively in the resolution to the Algerian problem, submachine gun in hand, and lies today in the Ivry cemetery, beside the gunned-down men of Mont Valérien, a torturer despite himself, a rapist too probably despite himself, executioner despite himself, of course nothing to do with Höss, Stangl, and the others, my father born in 1934 near Marseille believed in God in technology in progress in mankind in education in morality, the train gets underway again, slowly leaves Reggio Emilia with a grinding noise, how slow it is, how ominously slow, I suddenly feel as if the names in the briefcase are dripping onto me like the putrefying fluids of a corpse forgotten in a train car, I’m tempted to open it but it contains nothing visible, digitalized documents on shiny disks, five years of voracious obsession ever since Harmen Gerbens the Dutch camp guard, five years playing a historian of shadows or a spy of memory, now it’s over, in a manner of speaking, I could just as well have gone on for ten more years, but there’s Rome that’s waiting for me and the new life, the money from the Vatican, beginning again, beginning everything again under the name Yvan Deroy, goodbye Francis ex-warrior Defense Delegate, after my father’s death my mother shut herself up in widowhood, she’s a very dignified widow, she’s a professional at mourning, accompanied by her friends and my sister at Mass twice a week and at the cemetery Sunday morning after service, she lives for her dead husband in the same way she lived for him when he was alive, and when she isn’t at the church or at Ivry she plays Beethoven and Schumann on her piano until she has cramps in her fingers, how well you play, Mama, Leda spends her days at home listening to her, she goes back to her place just in time to prepare dinner for her husband, she lives 200 meters away, she badgers my mother from dawn to dusk so she’ll take on students again, at my age, she replies, at my age, my mother however is barely sixty years old, I forget when exactly she stopped teaching, when those well-mannered teenagers stopped coming to the house who, for me, were an unattainable dream, I remember one more precisely, she must have been three years older than me and came twice a week at around five or six o’clock, I was just getting back from school — she always wore a skirt, she was a little plump, with a round face, long blond hair tied back, she greeted me nicely when I hurried to open the door to her, I took her duffel coat as I observed her breasts, they seemed giant to me, I breathed in the smell of her coat as I hung it up, and I watched her walk into the study, the piano room which we called the study, her music scores and notebooks in hand, I spied, with the door ajar, on the girl approaching my mother to see how she settled down by the piano and lifted her skirt sometimes to position herself on the stool, a mechanical gesture, a terribly erotic second for me, I thought I could glimpse her underwear through her wool stockings, I felt the friction of her buttocks against the burgundy felt, the movement of her thigh when she leaned on the pedal, and I got a terrible erection, an immense desire that drove me to the bathroom as a Liszt etude or a Chopin Polonaise (she was gifted) resounded, the rhythm of her fingers on the keyboard must have been, I imagine, my own on my personal instrument, in desire and in music, while I hated Liszt, Chopin and all those horrible maternal notes I came terribly, too quickly, the desired student was made to start again because of her tempo and it was my mother’s voice more than once that interrupted my pleasure, with her no, no, no, not so fast, not so fast, from the neighboring room she seemed to be directing my masturbation herself, start over, start over, with that martial tone that had the gift of making me enraged beyond belief, with a rage mixed with shame, as if she had surprised me with my thing in my hand, as if she couldn’t leave me alone with this student, she took her away from me and the girl left once the lesson was over I gave her back her coat, usually my mother called me immediately, your homework, stop gaping, your homework, your father will be home soon, obviously my sister had already settled down pen in hand, so I took a malicious pleasure in shoving her elbow to cause a nice blot on her impeccable page, which could provoke tears of sadness or, according to her humor, a frustrated anger similar to my own and we’d start fighting until my teenage strength got the better of her, she ended up on the bottom I immobilized her with my knees on her arms and tortured her as I threatened to let my saliva fall onto her face, she twisted around in horror, I caught the thread of spit at the last instant, she sobbed, conquered, that was my vengeance over those women of the family who prevented me from having pretty women from outside and usually at that exact moment my father arrived, alerted by Leda’s shouts as soon as he crossed the threshold into the apartment he said to me you’re a savage, leave your sister alone, which provoked the immediate intervention of my mother, no, your son is not a savage, etc., I belonged by rights to my mother, I was her kid she defended me against the male’s intervention, I then had to apologize to the little tattletale pest erase the ink stain on her notebook and start my homework dreaming about the breasts the buttocks of the young pianist until dinner — in our family alchemy my father ruled from his silence and his reserve my mother was an authoritarian regent who saw the world like a music score, hard to interpret, but able to be deciphered with order effort and application and that’s how she brought us up, order, effort, work, she the exile who hadn’t known her own country had constructed herself in exercises, in Scriabin’s etudes which are the hardest thing in the world, and even though she had given up her career as a concert pianist when she met her husband she preserved that power, that arid ability to rule over, to direct, to make an effort, in the same way she made an effort to control her fingers on the piano by an iron discipline, my mother would have made an excellent soldier, like Intissar the Palestinian, enduring, obedient, giving herself the means to fulfill her mission, at least as much as my father: his sober, even austere, nature predisposed him to the barracks as much as to the monastery, as at ease in the Port-Royal Abbey as at the École Militaire, Catholic, respectful of the Law more than he was a lover of order, with an idea of the homeland and the Republic that came to him from his modest family where no one ever studied beyond high school, for him my mother represented culture, culture and the bourgeoisie, a bourgeoisie brought down by exile of course, but for that very reason accessible, on the other hand I wonder how my mother, for whom social origin and even race are so important, could have fallen in love to the point of defying the prejudices of her family to marry him — maybe she had seen in him his Christian virtues, guessed his patience, his resignation, maybe also glimpsed that crack behind the silence, the wound from fierce Algeria, which so resembled that of her own father, nonsense after all an engineer with a promising career wasn’t such a bad catch and, even if he had the immense drawback of not being Croatian, this son-in-law was altogether suitable, fear not, they’d teach him to dance the kolo, provided he’s neither Orthodox nor Jewish nor communist, that’s what counted, besides hadn’t my uncle the bear from Calgary married a girl from Zagreb of an excellent family, they could allow this eccentricity for the youngest girl — that’s what I imagine, but I suppose my mother didn’t leave them the choice, tired of her tours as a child prodigy, a teenage prodigy then an average concert performer, she chose her existence with the same determination she had at the age of seven when she learned the sonatas of Scarlatti by heart to play them blindfolded to audiences of old people, the greatest Yugoslav pianist of all time was the France-Soir headline, which made my grandfather mad with rage, Yugoslav, they said Yugoslav, why not make it Serbian while they’re at it, my mother decided, she didn’t make Achilles’s wager, she preferred a home to a hypothetical glory, she carried out the destiny for which she had been prepared for years, to be a wife, a mother, and even a mother of one of the fighters who would liberate the homeland from the Titoist yoke, and her piano was a gentle pastime for a lady, giving concerts was perfect but it wasn’t an accomplishment, it wasn’t her place, her place was with us at home, my mother made that choice, without regret, weighing the pros and the cons, she chose my father and great silence — how much I too would have liked to decide, to have been offered Achilles’s choice, instead of letting myself be carried into the darkness from cellar to cellar, from shelter to shelter, from zone to zone, up to this train that’s crawling in the infinite straight line of the Po plain, between Reggio and Modena, with the thousands of names in my suitcase and an Italian Adonis lover of gossip as my sole company, is it really my own doing, this departure, it could be some kind of machination of the Boulevard, of the Agency, a conspiracy hatched with my already suspicious recruitment, now I’m becoming paranoid, it’s the effect of the drug and of years of espionage, let’s call a spade a spade, in 1995 I swapped the Kalashnikov for deadly weapons that were much more subtle but just as effective, chases, hideouts, interrogations, denunciations, deportations, blackmail, haggling, manipulations, lies, which ended up in assassinations wrecked lives men dragged in the mud twisted fates secrets brought to light, could I leave all that behind me, leave behind me the war and the Boulevard the way you forget a hat in a bar, where could I take refuge, in the hard resolution of my mother, in the silence of my father, in the bodyless grave of Andrija, in my own suitcase, in the briefcase of the Vatican light of the world, a little place for my father the lover of electric trains, a little place in the suitcase for my bitter silent pater