Juden from the Dodecanese to the transit camp of Haydari near Athens, then make them cross the Balkans by train, through Salonika Skopje Belgrade and Budapest, to hook the cars up to the endless freight cars that sent the Hungarian Jews to their death, the Teutonic functionaries knew their job, despite the allied bombings, the partisan attacks, the movements of troops that had to be brought back from the East, the reinforcements and supplies to be conveyed to the front they found a way, when the Red Army was already in Poland, to set up convoys going from Asia Minor to Galicia, to send a few thousand Jews to their deaths all the more docile since they knew nothing about the anti-Semitism, the ghettos, the extermination in progress, far, very far away, on an island with such imposing ramparts that it seems impregnable, protected, they thought, by the memory of the Knights Hospitaller of Jerusalem and of Suleiman the Magnificent, Rhodes looked more like the Middle East or Cyprus than like Patmos, there were mosques, fountains, Latin churches dating back to the Crusades, and the imposing palace of the Grand Master that looked vaguely like the Crusaders’ citadels in Syria and Palestine — so many dead things plunged me irremediably into nostalgia, my nightmares had ceased, replaced by insomnia, which I treated with huge swigs of undiluted ouzo until I was sunk in a dreamless blackness, at the price of deafening snores that earned me the unsympathetic reproofs of my Israeli neighbors, despite the medieval walls separating us, the Jews of Rhodes so far as I know were the ones who came from furthest away to be caught in the spiderweb of Auschwitz, the only ones along with the Jews from Corfu to begin their final journey on a boat, the solitude so pleasant at first was weighing on me, the Juderia of Rhodes stank of absence of deportation and sunscreen, I put the car back on a ferry headed for the Piraeus, I said to myself that vacations were extremely annoying things, and even though I thought the knights of Jerusalem were more or less agreeable, future masters of Arab Malta and employers of Caravaggio, I wanted to find a big city again, a capital, activity and not just idle tourists like me moving around in the midst of the ghosts of Crusaders and dead Jews: the bar on the train is full of Americans, they’re going to Rome, a group of tourists, a bunch of friends in their early sixties, blonde women, tall men, their teeth redone, nice people, Sans Souci beer in hand I listen to them commenting on their hotel in Florence, it wasn’t bad, they say, by European standards, I don’t know if this remark is supposed to be positive or negative, maybe we’ll see each other again at the Plaza, the most American, most decadent of the luxury hotels in Rome, why didn’t Yvan Deroy choose the Minerva Hotel in front of the Bernini elephant, the elephant with the long trunk, or the Grand Hotel on the Piazza Repubblica, the one belonging to Alfonso XIII of Spain the collector of slippers, so close to the train station, or another of the 100,000 luxury hotels in Rome, each one haunted by its famous visitors its corpses its ghosts, Yvan Deroy will be a phantom among others, the last beer of Francis Servain the secret agent, the last beer of Francis Servain offshoot of Hades, it had to be called Sans Souci and be a boat — after two days sweating in Athens in a dusty deserted city, after gathering my thoughts in the Temple of Zeus, after having revered the green-eyed goddess and her peerless beauty I had sweated so much and was so covered in dust that I dreamt of the Great North and the glacial cold, I thought of Lebihan and his scorn for anything south of Clermont-Ferrand, the old man was right, Athens was disemboweled, they were building a subway line the gods were not very happy to have their cellar drilled into like that and took revenge by sinking newspaper kiosks underground parking lots and inattentive foreigners into the abyss, Hephaestus the lame and Poseidon the earth-shaker caused quite a bit of trouble for the harried engineers, not counting the pompous archeologists from the Antiquities department who wanted to analyze each pebble taken out of the excavations, which made Athenians say that their subway wouldn’t be ready till the end of days, the Hellenes were a proud people but not without irony, in August obviously they were all on vacation, and around Omonia Square only somber Albanians and broke travelers walked, in the dust and the apocalyptic noise of pneumatic drills, under the maternal gaze of the goddess on top of her Acropolis, I thought of Albert Speer the Führer’s architect inventor of the theory of rubble, conceiver of buildings destined to become beautiful ruins a thousand years in the future, ruins like the Greeks and Romans had, which Germany was sadly lacking, Adolf the Determined didn’t back away from anything for the good of his people, so Speer sketched Doric temples with unheard-of proportions that once eaten away by time would have constituted a magnificent Forum, a sublime Parthenon in the middle of Nuremberg and Berlin, Speer was a strange architect, the planner of vestiges of the future, great builder of arms factories — at the Nuremberg trial Francesc Boix formally recognized him, he pointed him out, he saw him in photographs during his visit to Mauthausen, accompanied by Kaltenbrunner, head of security for the Reich, in the stairways of the death quarry, what is Speer the artist thinking at that instant, in the dock with the accused, singled out by a Spanish communist photographer, Speer who denied ever knowing anything, ever seeing anything, ever hearing anything, the Führer’s friend sitting in the midst of the rubble, where the American bombs had accelerated the work of time: in Athens slaves built the Acropolis, slaves would build the monuments of the Reich, many would die, true, but many had died building the pyramids and no one today thought of demolishing them or of damning their architect, that’s what Speer must have been thinking the little rich man in the dock between an SS officer and a Wehrmacht officer, he got out of Spandau Prison in 1966 and I imagine him a few months later, at the age of sixty-one, traveling through Greece in the company of his son Albert Jr., who at that time was planning the urban development of Tripoli in Libya, and who would go on to build in Iran and Saudi Arabia, does Albert Speer Sr. remember the stairway in Mauthausen as he climbs the steps to the Acropolis, or the young Spaniard who pointed him out in Nuremberg, not very likely — in 1947 Boix also goes to Greece, at the beginning of the civil war, on assignment for