don’t worry, don’t worry you’ll get your information, you’ll know everything you want to know, and even more, at the highest level, you can find out the color of Hafez al-Assad’s boxer shorts if that strikes your fancy, you’ll get special channels to negotiate with the Syrians if necessary and an attentive ear at the presidential palace, everything you want finally in Syria and Lebanon, but on one condition: that France officially recognize the genocide of the Armenians — I was stunned, I couldn’t believe my ears, this guy was definitely off his rocker, what could I do about recognition of the Armenian genocide, he smiled at me very calmly, I said to him listen, you should really speak with someone at the embassy, it’s diplomats you need I think, in any case I’ll see what I can do, Harout interrupted me and said don’t worry, there’s no hurry you know, it was already so long ago that it can wait a few more years, Harout was in fact only the representative of “honorable correspondents” whose services and information would possibly turn out to be so useful to France that despite the damages produced in Franco-Turkish relations the National Assembly on January 18, 2001 finally adopted the bill recognizing the Armenian genocide whereas in 1998 a similar initiative had not fared so well, the text having been “lost” in the Senate, where it was never placed on the agenda, and I don’t know to this day if the man or rather men that Harout represented had something to do with that business or not, in Aleppo in 1997 in any case official recognition of the genocide by France seemed entirely unlikely, and one year later the Assembly voted unanimously for the act the first time, what’s more a big historic conference was organized at the Sorbonne, the Turks were seething with rage and burned the tricolor in Ankara, the French presented themselves once again as the Just and France as the homeland of human rights, the deputies all embraced each other as they left the chamber, some had difficulty holding back their tears as if they themselves had just saved thousands of men from the massacre, forgetting that the bodies had been sleeping for almost a hundred years already in Deir ez-Zor in the Syrian desert, around Aleppo or in Eastern Anatolia, that little historic Armenia where the best proof of the destruction is the absence of Armenians today, where have they all gone, they disappeared, disappeared from Van, from Diyarbakir, from Erzurum — in May 1915 the prefect of Jezireh complained about the corpses carried along by the Euphrates, linked two by two, killed with a bullet in the back or by the long knives of the Circassians or the Chechens whom the Ottomans recruited as stalwart executioners, Harout told me all this in Aleppo, at the bar of the Baron Hotel where the Young Turks had slept, come from Stamboul to supervise the butchery, the caravans of deportees coming from the north spent some time in the concentration camp of Bab a few kilometers away from the city, everyone has forgotten, said Harout, everyone has forgotten that the death camps were here, around Aleppo, in Rakka on the Euphrates, in Deir ez-Zor, in Hama, in Homs, as far as the Djebel Druze, almost a million Armenians passed through here on their long march to death and those who survived in the camps were always sent further away, on foot or by wagon, until their numbers were so reduced that it became feasible to kill them by hand, to burn them alive, to blow them up with dynamite or drown them in the river, the witnesses talk about cannibalism caused by famine, children feeding on animal excrement, Arab Bedouins who raided the columns of deportees, kidnapping the nubile young women, a brief apocalypse, a few months, between 1915 and 1916, at a time when the British and French soldiers were falling like flies on the hills of the well-guarded Dardanelles facing the soldiers commanded by Mustafa Kemal who wasn’t called Atatürk yet, Harout told me, over a glass of arak in the shiny old leather armchairs in the Baron Hotel, about the killing of the Armenians and how the community of Aleppo, present in the city since the Crusades, had been ransomed but more or less spared, he told me about the end of the most brilliant Ottoman Empire, the most beautiful empire in the Mediterranean and the Balkans as far as Libya, which still had protected its Christian minorities for centuries, in exchange for a tribute — Harout Bedrossian born in 1931 showed me photos of his family around 1900, the men in tarbooshes and the women in black dresses, he took me to taste the best soujouk and basturma in Aleppo, his French was impeccable and distinguished, colonial, with a beautiful strange accent, we did not speak about work, of course, he was just an intermediary, like me, we were two suitcase-carriers, shady businessmen, on good terms and nothing more, the man or men he represented were businessmen close to government ministers whose palms they greased to get the right to deal with foreign countries, clients of Alaouite bigwig apparatchiks ruling over a country of countless varieties of police and information services in the country of cages and prisons with no exit, its desert littered with Armenian bones that the government glorified mostly to annoy the Turks their hereditary enemies, the Turks spearhead in the fight against the Axis of Evil, with whom military cooperation was in full swing, France was training Turkish officers in military schools, French officers left to train in Turkey, materiel was exchanged for expertise as well as information mainly about Iran and the Russian Caucasus, despite appearances our bilateral relations were entirely cordial and a few hundred thousand dead and forgotten Armenians were not going to jeopardize the geo-strategic equilibrium of the post-Cold War, we would go on working together, nothing stops, even when the deputies legislated for Turkey’s own good, to bring it, they said, to look its past in the face or something like that, which made the ex-Ottomans in the wings laugh out loud, France would do better to set its own corpses in order, the France that in 1939 evacuated the last Armenians during the Alexandretta affair, with the cynicism proper to the Republic, after having put down the Syrian revolts it sold part of the Syrian territory to the enemy, France enraged and violent bombed the civilians of Damascus furiously in 1945 as it was leaving, a farewell gift, policy of scorched earth, I’ll withdraw my guns but I’ll use them one last time, leaving a few hundred unknown dead on the ground, nothing really serious, some Arabs, some treacherous and incomprehensible Orientals for General Oliva-Roget the one responsible for the gunfire, convinced that British agent-provocateurs were behind the riots that he suppressed before heading off with weapons and baggage for Paris to report to De Gaulle the great shepherd of warriors, France embarrassed Turkey in 1998 by throwing thousands of Armenian bones in its face, to which the Turks retorted with thousands of Algerian corpses, and this same Parliament of the Fifth Republic which had voted for the law of amnesty for war crimes in Algeria officially recognized the Armenian genocide, moved to tears, in 2001—the massacres of others are always less awkward, memory is always selective and history always official, I remember with Marianne in the Dardanelles the Turkish guide sang the praises of Atatürk father of the nation great organizer of the resistance on the peninsula, destined for a noble fate: that destroyer of the Empire had rehabilitated the Young Turks as soon as he came to power in 1923, after they had been tried in Istanbul in 1919 and condemned for the massacres of 1915–1916, to recognize the genocide today would be to betray the Sacred Memory of the mustachioed Father of the Turks, just as repealing the 1968 law of amnesty for Algeria is impossible and pointless, a betrayal of the Memory of the victorious Generaclass="underline" Memory, that mortuary of texts and monuments, of miscellaneous engraved tombs, of textbooks, laws, cemeteries, handfuls of ex-soldiers, or dead soldiers rotting beneath rich gravestones, no paltry almost anonymous crosses in a cemetery of multitudes, but a marble vault, solitary like that of Charles Montagu Doughty-Wylie in Kilitbahir in the Dardanelles: the British officer fallen in April 1915 was probably the only one of his contingent who could speak Turkish fluently, who knew the Empire he was fighting against intimately, where he had resided as consul between 1906 and 1911, in Konya and Cilicia, Charles Doughty also mustached had then been a military attaché to the Ottoman troops during the Balkan war, in charge of organizing aid for the wounded, he even won a decoration for his bravery and his selflessness, the sultan pinned a crystal rose onto his jacket lapel, ironic medal, Charles Doughty would get a Turkish bullet full in the face on top of a remote hill in the Mediterranean, without being able to enjoy the sublime view over the Aegean, the Trojan hills he knew so well, torn apart by naval cannons — and he certainly did not know, at the moment of death, that the Armenians that he had saved in 1909 in Cilicia were in the process of being massacred yet again, this time without anyone being able to intervene, neither the American consul nor the few witnesses to the massacres, in 1909 in Konya Charles Doughty-Wylie and his wife receive a visit from a British traveling archeologist, Gertrude Bell, who photographs them in their garden, in the company of their servant and their huge black poodle, Mrs. Doughty-Wylie in a white dress, wearing a hat, with an unattractive face, hard features, jealous, perhaps, of the adventuress’ success with her husband, with reason — Gertrude is in love with the handsome Charles, the first female “intelligence officer” in Her Majesty’s government is taken with the elegant soldier diplomat, she will go pay her respects in secret to his grave, in the Dardanelles, a few years later, when she is plotting the formation of modern Iraq and offers the throne to Faysal King of the Arabs, Gertrude Bell the archeologist spy is surely responsible for many of the woes of the region, I thought of her in Baghdad in front of the museum she founded that had just been pillaged, they would find Mesopotamian cylinder seals as far away as America, everyone offered you ancient relics, the people from the UN left with their pockets full of ancient coins, statuettes and medieval manuscripts, the disemboweled country was losing its riches from its bowels and Gertrude Bell’s grave, green and silent, was still there in Baghdad where no one remembered her anymore or her role in the birth of the country, her intrigues or her friendship with T. E. Lawrence of Arabia, or her mysterious death, suicide or accident, of an overdose of sleeping pills on July 12, 1926: I slept in Gertrude Bell’s room at the Baron Hotel in Aleppo, thinking about Charles Doughty-Wylie and the Armenians, before going on with my tour, as a good carnival tourist, I went to Latakiyah, by train, from the Aleppo station where the Istanbul Express used to arrive after having made the tour of the Taurus Mountains — the Syrian train that crossed the mountains had no windows, I was absolutely frozen in the compartment, now I’m suffocating, I have a terrible hangover, I’m all shaky, blurry, sticky, in Latakiyah the sky was purple after the rain, the immense sea an unsettling grey I booked a room in a hotel with the absurd name of “The Gondola,” I had dinner in a restaurant run by Greeks, the fish was quite good as I remember it with a sesame sauce, there was nothing to do in Latakiayah aside from drinking in a pretty sordid bar where Russian pilots were on a binge, drunk as only Slavs can be, two giants from the Urals with uniforms and caps were dancing a grotesque, monstrous waltz, tenderly clasping each other their huge paws placed on their shoulders, they swayed from one foot to the other as they sang some Russian song, they were drinking undiluted arak straight from the bottle to the great disgust of the owner, a tanned slightly overwhelmed Syrian, the two ex-Soviet bears tumbled over a table provoking the hilarity of their comrades who offered me a drink, the boss wanted very much to throw them out but didn’t dare — I went back drunk to my not very cheerful hotel room, on the wall photos of Venice plunged me into depression I felt more alone than ever Marianne had left me Stéphanie was about to leave me my shadowy profession was one of the most sordid there is I looked at the ceiling or the reproductions of gondolas as I thought about Harout Bedrossian’s dead Armenians, about the Kurds and Arabs duped by Gertrude Bell, about the Dardanelles about Troy the well-guarded about the secret lagoon in the winter fog about death everywhere around me I thought about the Syrian prisons the hanged men the tortured Islamists about all those wasted existences thrown into the sea like the rain that was pelting hard on the window and now a fine Italian drizzle streaks the night horizontally in the outskirts of Bologna, and despite the suitcase the decision the new life before me I am in no better shape than in that hotel room in Latakiyah on the Syrian coast the profession of solitude despite the contact of bodies despite Sashka’s caresses I feel as if I’m unreachable as if I’m already gone already far away locked up in the bottom of my briefcase full of torturers and the dead with no hope of ever emerging into the light of day, my skin insensitive to the sun will remain forever white, smooth as the marble gravestones in Vukovar