Saint Matthew, a plaque to summarize the thousands of names in French cemeteries scattered throughout Italian soil between Naples and Lake Trasimeno: in Salonika, once Drifting Cities was shut, between taverns and bottles of Macedonian wine, thanks to a travel guide bought by chance in a newspaper kiosk I went to see the Zeitenlick necropolis, the cemetery for the Balkan campaign, where there are 9,000 French graves and the bones of 8,000 Serbs from the years 1915–1917, forgotten next to a large avenue, in the middle of town, the survivors of the Dardanelles, landed in 1915 to support the retreating Serbs, in the necropolis there is a well-kept British plot, a Russian section, an Italian monument, a giant Serb ossuary, a corner for the Algerian Muslims, for the Jewish French, for the Buddhists from Indochina, the Madagascans and Senegalese the whole world had come to get murdered by the savage Bulgarians the Germans and their Austrian allies, and the whole world was resting now between the cypresses on the Avenue Langada two kilometers away from the sea, in the August sun, I thought back to my visit to the Dardanelles with Marianne six years earlier, hundreds of pages earlier, now by chance on my own I saw the next episode, the names of those who were still alive when we were discovering the tormented landscapes along the peninsula, the forts of Kilitbahir, Cape Helles, now I could follow their journey, 9,000 more had keeled over a little further away, in the meantime I had waged war myself, I had stopped over in Venice, Marianne had left, I had become a civil servant of the shadows and I found myself alone by chance in Thessalonica before all these graves that so to speak belonged to me, the way Atatürk’s native house belonged to me climbing the little streets of the high city, a restored Ottoman residence, ocher-pink, Mustafa Kemal whose museum I had visited in the Dardanelles, his path was opposite, eastwards, to glorious Anatolia, when he was born in 1881 Salonika was the second-largest city in the Ottoman Empire, peopled half with Sephardic Jews and half with Turks, Greeks, Slavs, and Europeans, Pabst’s Spies from Salonika, that film fascinated me when I was little, why in 1912 after the Balkan Wars did Mustafa Kemal continue his military career, until he sent the British and the French back to the sea in Gallipoli, then sent the Greeks from Asia Minor in 1923, as for the Jews they pursued their studies, until the Germans caught them in 1941, so that by mid-1943 only a handful remained, scattered among the mountains with the Resistance — the transit camp in Salonika was next to the train station, the trains began leaving in March 1943, for Treblinka, Sobibór, and Birkenau, by August 50,000 people had been deported, and almost 40,000 gassed, I learned all that in the Jewish Museum, before the communities of Athens and Rhodes the community of Thessalonica was destroyed by Alois Brunner the furious specialist, who had arrived in Greece in February 1943, until then anti-Jewish measures had been limited to prohibiting bicycles and radios, Brunner took things in hand, the bull by the horns, he organized a Jewish police of hoodlums to help him in his task, and six months later not a single Jew was officially left in Salonika, the last Prominenten including Grand Rabbi Zevi Koretz were put onto a train headed for one of the camps of Bergen-Belsen, not a question of extermination for him, the Germans feel they owe him something, as well as the 300 Jews of Spanish nationality whom Franco’s consul is calling for, the surprising Spaniards insist on recovering their Jews, so a convoy leaves for Bergen-Belsen, whence a transport is organized for the south, and the Sephardim take the return route to the lands of Isabella of Castille that they left 400 years earlier, through Vichy France, do they meet one another in the stations of Narbonne or Bordeaux, the ones heading for destruction and the ones escaping it, I have no idea, after arriving in Spain they were confined in military buildings in Barcelona: in January 1944 those inhabitants of the Aegean coasts found themselves on the other side of the Mediterranean, after weeks of trains, transit camps, negotiations, privations, and illness, from Macedonia to Saxony from Saxony to France from France to Catalonia before finally being sent to Spanish Morocco, undesirable on the homeland’s soil, and undertaking, for themselves this time, a new exile that would lead some as far as Palestine, luckier in the end than Grand Rabbi Zevi Koretz: he died of typhus just after the liberation of the camps, Zevi Koretz the German-speaking Ashkenazi had understood Alois Brunner’s orders very well and had scrupulously carried them out, he thought he was acting for the best, maybe he was afraid of German violence, maybe he didn’t know what was awaiting his fellow-citizens around Krakow, we’ll never know — leaving the Museum of Jewish Presence my solitude is beginning to feel more and more weighty, I’m hot, I’m thirsty, the long summer afternoon still has time ahead of it so I’ll go eat and drink in an air-conditioned place, thinking about the journeys of the children of Israel, and trying to imagine Salonika speaking Judeo-Spanish, French, and Turkish, between a hammam, a mosque, and two Byzantine churches, that year the city is the cultural capital of Europe, sad recompense for the few survivors of the former Jerusalem of the Balkans, like Leon Saltiel, whose Memoirs I bought in the museum, Leon Saltiel is Jewish and a communist and after the first measures of the SS in the beginning of 1943, roundups, branding, he joins ELAS, the Greek partisans, in the mountains, where he takes part in some heroic actions, until civil war broke out between the Resistant factions in the beginning of 1944, then Leon Saltiel left the Resistance to return secretly to Salonika accompanied by a comrade from Ioannina, Agatha, with whom he is hopelessly in love, he realizes that his entire family has been deported and that the collaborators are selling off Jewish property, he conceals himself with his fellow fighter and lover at the house of a friend, Stavros, but he is denounced, arrested, tortured and sent to Mauthausen, he arrives after an atrocious journey, in the company of Yugoslav partisans and another Greek Resistant, Manos Hadjivassilis from Macedonia, he too crossed the Balkans on foot rifle in hand before being arrested in Slovenia, Manos kills himself as soon as they arrive in the camp, he throws himself onto the barbed wire, the SS guards finish him off, Leon Saltiel speaks many languages, he makes friends with the Spanish communists who organize resistance in the camp, did he meet Francesc Boix the photographer, it’s likely, Leon Saltiel is sick during the liberation, he stays for two months in an American infirmary, between life and death, he is up and about in June 1945, 3,000 kilometers away from his country, he learns that there has been a civil war, that there has been fighting in Athens, that the communists are opposing the British and the royalists, Leon wants to see Agatha and Salonika again, he gets a passport from the Red Cross and starts out on the long journey, on foot through Austria and Hungary, he reaches Belgrade where he is arrested for reasons he doesn’t understand, ends up being released and sent back to Italy by way of Zagreb with a contingent of prisoners of war, in Venice after two weeks of medical quarantine in a humid transit camp they put him on a train for Ancona, in Ancona he meets some Greeks, they find him a spot on a freighter that finally berths in Patras on December 1