L’Humanité and Regards, he photographs Zachariadis the general secretary of the communist party and spends some time in the mountains with the DSE partisans, before returning to Paris and dying there, in the meantime he had also gone to Algeria, where the same Speer Jr. would much later design a suburb that would, without him knowing it, house my GIA cutthroats, and Boix would follow the Tour de France, which delighted him, I haven’t seen his photos of Greece but I suppose he knew how to talk with the communist fighters, after all he had been one too: I left for the north, instead of taking the ferry to Igoumenitsa I still had time to kill so I went back up to Thessaly, maybe it was cooler there, I was pouring with sweat in the car with all the windows open, in Bosnia in 1993 there was a brigade of Greek volunteers who fought alongside the Serbs, a handful of fanatics who distinguished themselves around Sarajevo especially, I hadn’t met any of them, fortunately, the Arab mujahideen and the Russian auxiliaries were quite enough, even if they’d been in skirts and clogs with pompoms like Thomson and Thompson, great Orthodox solidarity on one side, Muslim fraternity and Catholic harmony on the other, in the train’s bar the Americans are talking loudly, they’re laughing, they’re happy, they seem to have been playing golf all their lives around Seattle, so pale are they, they’re drinking mineral water and Chianti, maybe their parents were soldiers in this region, in the company of Moroccan goumiers and Algerian infantry of the French Expeditionary Corps, in June 1944, around Lake Trasimeno, between Montepulciano and Perugia, after the victory of Monte Cassino, that famous victory that the Moroccans and Algerians had celebrated by robbing killing pillaging and raping anything that fell into their hands, including livestock according to the complaints lodged at the allied police station, great soldiers were also excellent bandits, they had gotten a fine reputation for themselves ever since they’d landed, their officers closed their eyes or preferred to take the law into their own hands, after all it was wartime, in Sicily things hadn’t been so easy, the civilians hid in the mountains and they say that more than one soldier “who had behaved badly” had been found cut into pieces by an offended father or husband, around Naples the French soldiers of the colonial troops had set off an avalanche of complaints about theft, theft and murder, not counting the various perversions related by the Neapolitan prostitutes, no matter the Moroccan mountain troops and the Algerian infantry corps were great soldiers, they had proven it many times, and they would prove it once again in Monte Cassino, their heroism was equaled only by their perfect savagery, they climbed the rocky slopes under fire of the Germans entrenched at the top, they died bravely, sent to the front with their mules, their donkeys, and when they were victorious had bled freely were quite dead chopped up cut up crushed by bombs and stones the survivors scattered into the countryside to take their share of honor, beautiful dark-haired virgin girls tanned from laboring in the fields, sheep, goats from which they made smoking hecatombs, the gods licked their lips, the soldiers in the colonial troops carried everything off on their mules, even mattresses, and when the farmer tried to resist, refused to hand over his wife his daughter his mother his sister his sheep and his wall clock they slit his neck with pleasure, weren’t they conquerors, they were applying the law of war, they could take everything down to the last stone if they wanted, magnanimous they usually consumed the women on site and only rarely carried them away, they weren’t any worse than the bombs that had razed the abbey of Saint Benedict at Monte Cassino, when there wasn’t a single German inside, tons of explosives dropped in vain from beautiful B-17s those angels of destruction, the same angels that wiped German cities off the map, the original Benedictine abbey lay in fragments, Pope Pius XII in Rome was furious and silent, he knew how things stood, humped peasants and a few atrociously violated goats were nothing compared to a building of that value, Italian civilians and the walls of Saint Benedict the ascetic gardener were chalked up to profit and loss, Rome fell, Pius XII rushed into the arms of his liberators mit brennender Sorge, with a keen anxiety, the Pope spoke German better than English, after ten years spent in Bavaria, Pius XII the clever had managed to keep the Vatican intact in the tempest, facing Mussolini then the Reich, with immense cowardliness and great courage, according to which version you heard, it is to be feared that Pius XII was neither exceptionally spineless nor particularly brave, that he feared the Reds more than all the others, he negotiated the Lateran Accords with Mussolini, congratulated General Franco for having delivered Spain so nicely to the Church, dared to chide the Führer for his attacks against Catholicism, asked the martyred Polish faithful to be patient for a while, hid a few Jews in his gardens, the Pope preferred to lower his Papal tiara over his eyes for a while so as not to be blinded by what he could have seen, there would always be time to forgive the killers and beatify the martyrs, and the list was long, the list was terribly long, like the Americans who were burying bodies with backhoes during the liberation of the camps, Dachau, Bergen-Belsen, Mauthausen, hundreds of women and men went into the ground, millions had already gone there, in flames and into the air, like the 60,000 Jews who were missing from Salonika when I went there, certainly in 1945 no one recognized the city anymore, almost half the inhabitants had disappeared, I found a hotel very close to the sea a stone’s throw away from Aristotle Square and the White Tower, in the new city that is so reminiscent of Alexandria in Egypt, the elegant whitewashed buildings burned in the evening sun setting from Mount Hortiatis to bring a little coolness to the avenues crushed by summer, people strolled along the seafront, their mouths open like asphyxiated fish, cooler air rose little by little from the sparkling gulf, the rigging of the Amerigo Vespucci began clinking in the warm breeze, the light faded and projected bluish shadows onto the glasses on the café terraces in the square, it was logical for Salonika to remind me of Alexandria founded by Alexander the conqueror of Asia, the one who had profited from the lessons of Aristotle quite close to this place, before spreading the fury of his armies to the ends of the earth, I felt immediately rested in Salonika, the last chapter in Drifting Cities, a story about survivors of the communist saga took place there, by a strange chance the book had caught up with me on my trip, the heroes drank Macedonian wine in a tavern on top of the ramparts, remembering their dead, a libation, the handsome Manos killed by a grenade his corpse attached to a mule’s tail and dragged over the rocks, Pandelis and Thanassis shot, the bony rheumatic women would take care of their memorials, was it the wind coming from the north, from the nearby Balkans, from Serbia possibly, was it the novel by Tsirkas or the Macedonian wine but once the last page was finished I was trembling as if I were about to collapse, where were they, Andrija the Slavonic, Vlaho the Dalmatian, lost in death or in their mountains, sing, goddess, their memorable names, the names of the ones who left me, whom I left, for the first time I felt as if I were locked up in the Zone, in a hazy shifting blue interspace where a long threnody rose up chanted by an ancient choir, and everything was spinning around me because I was a ghost locked up in the realm of the Dead, condemned to wander without ever making an image on photographic film or being reflected in a mirror until I shattered my fate, but how, how could I extricate myself from this empty shell that was my body, I paced Salonika top to bottom and bottom to top, the icons the saints the churches the ramparts over to the prison of Heptapyrghion on top of the Acropolis, Constantine the Philosopher, Cyril the apostle of the Slavs who left from Salonika for a long journey ended his life in Rome, you can see his tomb, beneath the narthex of the San Clemente Basilica, on the Lateran slopes, maybe when I get to Rome I’ll go lie down too in a humid basement, in a cave, a catacomb, and I’ll let Yvan Deroy the fortunate take his leave, let him walk to his fate and abandon me to decay, I’ve almost finished my beer, my Sans Souci with the proud ship, the tourists from the New World don’t seem in a hurry to go back to their car, me neither, above my seat is the little suitcase chained to the luggage rack, what does it really contain, why did I want to document the Zone from Harmen Gerbens the Cairo drunk, all those images, those names, down to my own, down to the terrible photos of Bosnia, including the souvenirs of Jasenovac, the throngs of massacred in Mauthausen, the documents from Globocnik and Stangl in Trieste, my father’s torture photos, the Ottoman telegrams in code addressed to Talaat Pasha, the Spanish lists of the mass graves in Valencia, the massacred of Shatila, the laughter of Alois Brunner the senile in Damascus, may they rest in peace, may I rest in peace, since everything’s going to be over soon, may the apocalypse come and the warming or the freezing the desert or the deluge I’ll entrust my personal ark to the eternity specialists and farewell, the madman on the platform in the Milan train station was right, one last handshake before the end of the world, one last contact one last exchange of information and goodbye