XVI
a tunnel is blocking my eardrums, I’ll go back to the café car, that’s the best thing to do, I leave Rafael Kahla’s book on my tray-table and head for Antonio the bartender, the swaying makes me stagger in the middle of the car I almost sprawl onto an offended nun, she must have gotten on in Florence I hadn’t noticed her before, there always has to be a nun in an Italian train, a nun some Boy Scouts some bohemian musicians a Pronto reader a spy a pretty blonde and an illegal immigrant, all the characters needed for a play or a genre film, or even a canvas by Caravaggio, there are more people in the bar now, the passengers are beginning to get hungry and thirsty, it must be close to eight o’clock: Antonio recognizes me, he says ironically a gin? no, not a gin, a beer, the bubbles will do me good, the Holy Spirit of fermentation, the large bay windows of the restaurant car are bathed in moonlight, between Arezzo and Montepulciano, everywhere hills and vines, the beer is cold, the label is pretty, blue and white, with a picture of a big sailboat with the nice name Sans Souci, Carefree, that’s a good omen — in Thessalonica the Byzantine there was a similar boat moored outside the harbor, by Aristotle Square, a magnificent three-master with a black-and-white striped hull, elegant, low on the water, it wasn’t the Sans Souci but the Amerigo Vespucci a boat-school belonging to the Italian navy, in 1997 Salonika was the cultural capital of Europe, this exceptional event had to be celebrated with dignity, I passed through there by chance back from my first Greek vacation as a new spy, farewell Algerian cutthroats, make room for sun ouzo and shish kebab, I had brought Drifting Cities by Tsirkas, which talked about everything except Greece, Jerusalem Alexandria Cairo instead I had bought this novel as a good tourist to read native literature, as Marianne would have done who devoured Yasar Kemal by the shores of well-guarded Troy, I was wasting my time there, the Greek islands were disappointing, what was I looking for there, I have no idea, the Dodecanese were just a traffic jam of cars disembarking from rusty ferries, windswept treeless islands, the sea was turbulent and terribly blue, the clusters of vacationers come from all over Europe went round and round in circles from inlet to inlet from beach to beach from tavern to tavern, and of course solitude was just a pure illusion, given the size of the citadel and the number of French tourists who frequented the area — in Patmos, at the foot of the grotto of Saint John the Evangelist, all the traditional houses were repainted white so often that the white didn’t have time to dry, pilgrims and devotees were added to the tourists come for the scuba diving and the windsurfing, on an island of a disturbing beauty, mountainous, rocky, dry, perfect if it had been deserted, which was not the case, far from it, people were climbing over each other, by day the ferries discharged day-trippers like a cargo of wheat, thousands of round grains invaded the little streets headed for St. John’s monastery, in a giant humming noise, a murmur of muffled voices and flashes snapping despite the blinding summer light, for an hour or two at the very most, then the flood surged back to the boat immediately followed by another load, and so on from 9:00 in the morning to 7:00 at night, impossible to imagine that there were so many cruise boats in the Aegean Sea, an incalculable number, and only when darkness came, when the stars replaced the people and scattered the sea with equally countless glimmers could one, by an effort of the imagination, in the noise of the waves lapping against the rocks, in the shadow of the dark mountain, imagine the visionary presence of the herald of the Apocalypse and the end of the world, the Eagle of Patmos deported by the Romans to this inhospitable rock, coming from Ephesus the golden, I picture him at night, haunted by the cold and visions of the end of days, his eyes wide open onto the nothingness of the sea plain, certain that this cave would be his last home, peopled with animal cries with the neighing of horses with the sighs of the dying with body-less heads with sick people with terrifying abscesses with fallen angels with fornicating demons, in the pale rays from the kingdom of heaven that the friendly moon casts on the sea, John the Evangelist will survive the ordeal of the island, a magnanimous Caesar would send him back to Ephesus, he would die his fine death, after himself digging a ditch to lie down in, in the circular choir of his primitive chapel — in Patmos in my very rustic inn I had nightmares in which a stranger gave me cylindrical boxes like hatboxes and recommended I carry them with me to Paris as contraband, they were heavy, I ended up opening one, it contained a desiccated muddy human head with its eyes hanging out of its sockets, the head of one of the Tibhirine monks and I woke up with a start, impossible to rid myself of the images from glutinous Algeria, so I went to submerge myself in the icy water at the base of the rocks, I stayed until dawn rolled up in my towel on a flat rock, until daybreak transformed Poseidon’s realm with the azure plume into phosphorus, then I climbed back up to the village to have a coffee and eat a dense heavy roll stuffed with olives or an almond cake watching the landing of the first invaders of the day, and then I got tired of nightmares the evangelist had no miracle for me, I set off in turn on a ferry for Rhodes, island of the colossus, of knights and forgotten mosques, which was Ottoman from the beginning of the sixteenth century until 1912, when the Italians decided they wanted the crumbs of the dying Empire, they had conquered a piece of desert in North Africa and a string of stones in the Aegean, of which Rhodes was the mountainous steep-sloped pearl, the landscapes looked like Troy, pine groves rising high above the sea, twenty or so villages were dotted all around the tear-shaped island, whose shore was eaten away by hotels and seaside resorts — I soon abandoned my car to take refuge in the old city of the main town, in little streets behind the thick walls of the knights of Jerusalem, in the shade, in the Juderia, the old Jewish neighborhood, in a medieval building called the Hotel Cava-d’Oro: the Juderia smelled of absence, there was just a handful of Jews left in Rhodes, a dozen miles from the Turkish coast, there was nothing left of a community of 2,000, the only believers in the synagogue of Kahal Shalom were Israeli tourists, and in the pretty inner courtyard of the hotel, at breakfast-time, I heard them speaking Hebrew while the Jews of Rhodes spoke Ladino, Judeo-Spanish memory of the kingdom of Spain that had expelled them, the island had been a refuge for them, for a few centuries, before European punishment caught up with them and sent them to live in the clouds in the sky over Auschwitz, of all the Jews deported mid-1944 only a hundred or so would return, they’d settle elsewhere, Rome, France, the United States, deserting their native island touched by absence and nothingness, in the Jewish Museum in Rhodes I watched Nazi persistence charter three old rusty barges to transport the