si? as on the telephone, I say very loudly Dobar večer, gospon Runjas, kako ste? there is a long silence, has he changed his mind, I picture my old man hesitating in his bathrobe, a buzz suddenly comes through the gate, I push it, there is a man with his back to the light on the porch on top of the steps, I go up to him, I have in front of me Ljubo Runjas the little, 5’4” and shrunk by age, white hair, wrinkled face, prominent nose, large ears, his suspicious and even menacing gaze contrasts with the reedy voice that says to me I was expecting you much earlier, I’d gone to bed you know, I don’t reply, he signs to me to come in, I talk for a few minutes with Ljubomir Runjas the brutal whom the years have bent, Ljubo the underling, the little murderer will die in his bed, in Carcaixent, without anyone taking the trouble to find him, he asks me how my grandfather is doing, I tell him that Franjo Mirković died in 1982 in Paris, he says ah, we’re all leaving, the patriots are all dying one after the other, farewell first independent State of Croatia, the black NDH, savage great killer of Serbs, farewell, bon voyage, the false señor Köditz looks a little sad, the living room he receives me in is typically Spanish, full of knickknacks, colors, a Virgin with Child on a wall, a silver icon on the 1960s sideboard, here you’d think Barnabas Köditz was a retired German, I ask him why he came back to live in Carcaixent, he answers with a shrug, he looks nervous, in a hurry to get it over with — he slowly gets up, goes over to the sideboard, opens a drawer, takes out a square package wrapped in brown paper, hands it to me, my name is on the outside, written in a fine hand in blue ink, old-style, Mirković Francis, I take the package, thank him, Ljubo remains standing to convey to me that the interview is over, farewell, farewell, bog, bog he does not hold out his hand, nor do I, there is nothing in his eyes, he leads me to the steps, waits till I’ve gone through the gate to close the door, and voilà, I’m in the street with a package under my arm, the fireworks are lighting up the night again, sprays of sparkles followed by a muffled explosion, whistling rockets flying over the rooftops, in the package there are a hundred or so annotated photographs from Jasenovac, letters, a long list of numbers, the inventory of the dead, with no names or origin, just the daily tally of deaths, from 1941 to 1945, 1,500 days, 1,500 lines of calculation, all the shot the poisoned the gassed the clubbed the disemboweled the drowned the ones with their throats cut the burned alive all grouped into a number and a date, for each of the sub-camps around the Sava, teeming with storks and carp — in Carcaixent near Valencia the festival is in full swing, an orchestra has taken possession of the square, from time to time a rocket is set off, a firecracker, it is early still it’s the old people and the children who are dancing, to the paso doble from long ago, two by two they dance, I pause to watch them for a bit, the couples are elegant, the men stick out their chests and lightly swing their shoulders, the women let themselves be led from one end to the other, the ones who are too old or too young to dance are leaning on the bar or sitting on folding chairs, Ljubo Runjas alias Barnabas Köditz is perhaps already asleep, I think of Jasenovac, I think of Maks Luburić, of Dinko Sakić whom the new Croatia has just sentenced to twenty years in prison at seventy-eight years of age, extradited from Argentina Dinko had been the chief of Jasenovac along with Maks Luburić his brother-in-law: they danced on the shores of the Sava, they danced in this forgotten village in Spain, I clutch the package I’ll go to bed now, the paso doble is over more rockets light up the sky, blue and red flowers celebratory explosions for the dead of Jasenovac, I climb the stairs and curl up against Stéphanie, listening to the murmur of the music, in the dark, mixed with the racket of the fireworks and with the breathing of the woman lying there, despite everything she’s asleep, she’s asleep and I find it very difficult, who knows why, to convince myself that she’s not dead, despite the regular breath that lifts her chest as the orchestra strikes up “A Mi Manera,” the gentle Iberian version of “My Way”—the next morning, after a sleep full of storks flying over swampy mass graves, after a quick breakfast in the midst of the festival debris, after recovering the Citroën from the parking lot we went to the Carcaixent cemetery to see the grave of Luburić-Pérez, beautiful and well-kept, Stéphanie couldn’t believe her eyes, the people around here liked him she said I replied that’s right, his children even went to the local school without the tiniest stone being thrown at them, farewell Maks the butcher, we continued on towards Xàtiva not knowing that a few days later Barnabas Köditz would die from a heart attack, farewell Ljubo the bloodthirsty sergeant, your documents have joined the others in the suitcase, the meticulous photographs, the numbers, the administrative letters from Zagreb, farewell — about twenty kilometers away the little town of Xàtiva hovered between the plain and the mountain, the palm trees and the orange trees, the little streets in the center of town were pleasant and the Renaissance palaces were reminiscent of the great families of the area especially the Borgias, who knew power and glory in Rome: the palace where Pope Alexander VI Borgia was born was dark and sumptuous, like the pontificate of its owner, his many children and his passions for coitus, scandal, and politics make him eminently likeable, Stéphanie the Alsatian was offended by the pontiff’s lack of respect for the papal institution, o tempora, o mores, the popes today want to be prudish mystical vapid and well-washed, the ones from before smelled of depravity and conspiracy, the Borgias spoke Valencian among themselves even in the heart of Rome which makes them historical heroes for the local cause, despite the pleasantly unorthodox whiff of their saga: so Xàtiva was pleasant and we ate well there, a kind of paella cooked in the oven, usually washed down with a mean wine produced in the region of Alicante, this beverage had something medieval and unorthodox about it too, the Jasenovac package was still wrapped in its brown paper and what with the good food and the fornication I forgot the dead and the butchers — four days of vacation, Valencia Carcaixent Xàtiva Dènia Valencia, Stéphanie was happy, she had the enviable ability to be able to forget Paris and the Boulevard Mortier as soon as the plane doors had shut, she erased her reports her analyses as a young secret agent in the wink of an eye, I felt as if she were even more beautiful because of it, with her sunglasses that she used as a headband to hold back her dark hair, she was calm, completely present to the world, armed with Proust and Céline and her convictions supported by high culture, I have the feeling that I miss her all of a sudden sitting on my train throne cigarette in hand, I miss her sometimes, better not think about her, better not think about the catastrophe of the end of our relationship, where is she now, posted to Moscow which she dreamed about, if I met her in the street I wouldn’t speak, neither would she, we would ignore each other just as we ignored each other at the end in the hallways on the Boulevard, we weren’t supposed to meet each other I was promised another fate I was living on borrowed time Stéphanie was just an illusion,