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the papal nuncio ambassador from the Holy See to Syria was a charming cultivated man from a good Italian family, it was Harout Bedrossian the Armenian Catholic who introduced me to him — curious the detours Fate often uses to land on its feet, once the suitcase was full I had to sell it, empty those thousands of documents of names and stories patiently gathered all around my Zone starting with Harmen Gerbens the Dutch torturer, documents collected over five years of endless investigations, of thefts of secret archival papers of cross-checking of testimonies, why those thousands of hours patiently creating this list, to fill the terribly empty life of the Boulevard Mortier and Paris, to give a sense to my existence perhaps, who knows, to end with a flourish, to win forgiveness for my dead, but from whom, to obtain the Holy Father’s blessing, or simply the money that’s worth any number of pardons, to settle down somewhere under the name Yvan Deroy my double shut up in his madness and violence, my papers are legal, real, like the ones I used to use to move around in the Zone, the Pierre Martins, the Bertrand Dupuis so simple that they immediately became real, I think little by little I left my identity behind in those pseudonyms, I split myself up, little by little Francis Servain Mirković dissolved into the real false papers to reconstitute himself like an atom in the thousands of names in the suitcase, regrouped into a single one, Yvan Deroy poor lunatic who has probably never seen the sea or caressed a woman, locked up forever, it’s so easy to appropriate an identity, to put your face in place of another’s, to take his life, born the same year as me, he had the same adolescence fascinated by violent ideologies, oscillating between the extreme right and the extreme left with a disconcerting ease, without any opinions, in fact, aside from his friends’, Yvan Deroy if he had gotten out of his hospital would have put up neo-Nazi posters, seduced by martial order and hatred, piling military training on top of military training and enlisting before being called up finally to become a man, a real man, as they say, eliciting admiration from his parents and fated for a splendid destiny, military service training in weapons, humbling oneself to the esprit de corps, the same esprit de corps that so fascinated Millán-Astray the founder of the Spanish Legion during his visit to the French in Sidi Bel Abbès in Algeria, the fortified village on the Oran plain deeply inspired the one-eyed general, the legionaries from all over Europe remade themselves in the barracks, they found a family a country in the Legion and more than France they served the Legion itself, my military service was instructive, slogging along while singing, my kit, my rifle and my comrades, camps, night marches, I liked that rhythm, that full life, the illusion of importance and responsibility a rank gives you, a Velcro patch on your chest, a command, a power, in the Joffre camp in Rivesaltes we bivouacked in pretty sordid barracks, having come down from the Larzac plateau in Corbières or somewhere with weapons and gear — target exercises, maneuvers, I of course didn’t know where we were camping, what these run-down buildings were, and who had been harbored in February 1939, then in 1942, then in 1963, in short all the possible uses of a well-situated military camp, close to the road, to the railroad and to the sea, a camp whose archival images I saw much later, I slept in a khaki sleeping bag where Spanish Republican refugees had slept, soldiers or civilians, Red or Black, who so frightened Daladier’s France that the French deemed it preferable to intern them then exploit their labor in weapons factories and hilltop fortifications until the Germans deported them to Mauthausen, most of them, among them Francesc Boix the photographer, born in Barcelona in the neighborhood of Poble Sec on August 31, 1920, interned in Rivesaltes then in Septfonds, enrolled in the Foreign Workers’ Companies and captured by the Germans he arrived in Mauthausen on January 27, 1941, stayed there four years, the blue triangle fastened onto his chest: his photos, stolen from the SS, document camp life, death everywhere, Francesc Boix testified at Nuremberg and at Dachau, he died in Paris on July 4, 1951, two months before his thirty-first birthday Francesc Boix dies of illness at the Rothschild Hospital without having seen Barcelona again, in Paris he lived in an attic room on Rue Duc on the corner of the Rue du Mont-Cenis, five minutes by foot from my place, we passed each other at the Rivesaltes camp, we passed each other on the slopes of Montmartre, he worked as a photographer at the paper