draining the water to catch the fish, before Mao Zedong had codified revolutionary guerilla warfare, in the same way that the French in Algeria fifty years later would “round up” Muslim civilians inside barbed wire in order the better to control them, always camps, more camps, Spanish camps for the people of the Rif Italian camps for the Libyans Turkish camps for the Armenians French camps for the Algerians British camps for the Greeks Croatian camps for the Serbs German camps for the Italians French camps for the Spanish it’s like a nursery rhyme or a marching song, look, here’s some black pudding, here’s some black pudding, for the Armenians the Greeks and the Libyans, for the Belgians there’s none left, for the Belgians there’s none left,1 etc., monument to the poetry of war, in Croatia we sang to the tune of “Lili Marleen” words from who knows where, i znaj da čekam te, know that I’m waiting for you, Andi had even composed a version of his own, which involved cutting off the balls of the Serbs and defending the homeland, poor Lili, by the barrack gate, she has to wait some more — it was in Libya that Rommel’s soldiers voted in the song written by Hans Leip during the First World War, the Afrikakorps soldiers in the Cyrenaic liked the melody of the woman waiting across from the barracks, in front of the big gate, beneath the lamp post, they wrote hundreds of letters to implore the radio to broadcast it more often, curiously the German station that transmitted to North Africa was in Belgrade, it was from Belgrade that every day at 21:55 precisely there rang out wie einst Lili Marleen, wie einst Lili Marleen, and the sweat-covered soldiers wept their last drops of water somewhere between Tobruk and Benghazi in front of their lamplit encampments, Rommel himself wept, Rommel telegraphed to Belgrade to ask for more, more, more Lili, always Lili, the British sang it in German until the propaganda provided them with an English version that the BBC also repeated several times a day, Tito and the partisans whistled it in Bosnia, the Greeks of ELAS in Gorgopotamos, the surviving Italians in El Alamein sighed con te Lili Marleen and even we, forty-five years later, sang it by the Drava, i znaj da čekam te, it will be impossible to get this tune out of my head now, it’s going to accompany me to Rome with Andi’s voice and his obscene words, in Cyrene in Libya visiting the Greek ruins a dozen kilometers from the sea I whistled “Lili Marleen” and thought of Rommel’s soldiers and of Montgomery, before the storm broke and almost drowned me in the middle of the immense temple of Zeus, I found refuge under the awning of a soda and souvenir stand run by a nice Lebanese a Phoenician lost in Libya who was bored stiff, he told me in flawless French, fortunately there are a few tourists, he added, I drank a local Coke, the racket of the rain on the sheet metal prevented us from continuing the conversation, the air smelled of wet dust and salt, lightning tried to knock down the cypress trees and the Greek columns the water transformed the whole site into a pool of mud that the beating rain struck with the rumbling thunder in a purplish-blue light streaked with thick lines of rain that ricocheted off the earth like bullets so hard that there was no shelter to be found, the Lebanese man laughed, he guffawed with a nervous laugh drowned out by the hammering of the storm, he tried as well as he could to protect his makeshift counter and the interior of his stall, I was sheltered but still soaked to the waist, Zeus finally took pity, he put the lightning back in its box, the sky opened suddenly in a great white light, I said goodbye to the Phoenician from Sidon lost among the cans of Pepsi and the Doric columns, and I resumed my journey to Benghazi — in a rented car, the exchange rate and standard of living let you buy all the seats in a shared taxi and escape suffocation or thrombosis, Lebihan wasn’t very happy I was going to sightsee in Cyrenaica, even though he loved the movie A Taxi for Tobruk, from which he had taken one of his favorite phrases, an intellectual sitting down doesn’t go as far as a brute who walks, that’s what he said to me when I spoke to him about Cyrene, you remember Ventura in “A Taxi for Tobruk”? of course, I remembered Lino Ventura and Charles Aznavour, I replied as for me I prefer Ventura in “The Army of Shadows,” that gave him a good laugh, and set him scratching his scalp with a grin, The Army of Shadows, oh, that’s good, Libya’s main disadvantage was the dryness, a dry dry dry country not a drop of alcohol from Egypt to Tunisia, tea, coffee gallons of fizzy drinks but not a beer not a drop of wine nothing nothing nothing aside from bootleg in Tripoli, if that, Tripoli the sinister Italian capital of the Immense Republic of the Masses and of its leader the sly dictator whose personal bodyguards made all the heads of state in the world pale with envy, a real company of guards made up of sublime and dangerous amazons, muscle-bound women armed to the teeth real fighters for the Guide of the Revolution champion of the cause of African Unity writer poet great protector of his people, builder of the artificial Great River that leads fossil water from the Sahara to the coast for irrigation, blue oil after black gold, the September Conqueror’s dream to govern a green country, green like Islam, a green Africa, he gave Libya the permanent river that it lacked to rival Egypt, now they grow lettuce in Tripolitana, lettuce and tomatoes, my storm must have been an unheard-of piece of luck for everyone maintains that it never rains in Libya and that the climate change isn’t going to make things any better, far from it, hard to picture the Sahara flowering, barely 3,000 years ago there were gazelles monkeys wild horses eucalyptus baobabs breadfruit trees everything was scorched in a giant heatwave, everything, all that remains are cave paintings by the inhabitants of that era and skeletons buried beneath tons of silica, they say that in 1944 the Bedouins of eastern Libya all became military archeologists, they dismantled burnt tanks and abandoned cannons, recovered empty ammunition crates, objects left behind in fortifications, the merchants of Benghazi sold tons of hole-filled blankets, pierced cans, rolls of barbed wire, and even a music box, the only souvenir I bought in Libya, a little varnished music box with a woman’s face painted in lacquer on the lid, the shopkeeper in the old city near the Al-Jarid souk told me its story, the little object, about four centimeters by two, had been made near Vienna and given to a soldier on leave, the looters had found it on his corpse buried by the collapse of a sand trench, along with letters, two photographs a broken watch and other personal effects that the nomads had no use for but which they sold at a good price in town, along with six antitank mines that the sands had vomited up a stone’s throw away from the body, nice fat yellow mines all round and new and heavy, the merchant who bought the lot didn’t know what use antitank mines could be in peacetime but, aware of the danger, he stashed them away in a corner in the back of his shop where no one could handle them by mistake and forgot them, he forgot them so completely that they didn’t explode until November 1977 during the People’s Revolution, when the Revolutionary Committee wanted to get hold of the hidden goods of this imperialist collaborator, the chief of the Equality Squad had never seen a German mine, he thought he’d discovered gold or precious metal, so yellow, so heavy, so well-hidden in a suitcase at the very back of a depot, the