st, 1945: on his thirtieth birthday Leon Saltiel is in Greece, he reaches Athens easily and from there gets to Salonika, he’s afraid of what’s waiting for him, in the meantime his hair has grown back, his poor civilian clothes provided by the Red Cross are in ruins, his clogs too, he has a wild beard, hollow eyes, he goes to the center of town, back up Egnatia Avenue, he’ll go back to where he started from, to Stavros’s café the place where he was arrested, he’ll drink a coffee with no sugar, calmly, watching the few post-war cars jolt by, he veers off to the left, to Santa Sophia Street, to the border of the upper town, it’s almost 6:00 P.M., he has a few drachmas in his pocket given to him by his coreligionists in Athens, they also suggested they let someone know of his arrival by phone, he refused, now he’s just a hundred meters away from Stavros’s place, Leon Saltiel hesitates, he could go back down and see the building where his mother lived, his brother-in-law’s shop, even though he knows there’s nothing left there, that they’re all dead, he knows it better than anyone for he has seen the piles of corpses, the summary executions, he has smelled the stench of burnt flesh, when the icy wind made the Danube ripple, he could go to the synagogue, the community has surely planned something for the returning ones, he must not be the only one to come back, he could also go to party headquarters, he doesn’t know if he wants to all that much, to talk, tell stories, explain, there were a few Greeks with him in Mauthausen, a dozen, no Jews, they all died, one of them hanged himself with the cord that was holding his pants up, Adonai, Adonai, Leon has never been religious, the last of his comrades died of pneumonia after the liberation, others had arrived after the evacuation of Auschwitz, some even from Salonika, but they had already left again when Leon got out of the infirmary, the Americans didn’t know how to repatriate him to Greece, he walked along the Danube as far as Vienna, the soldiers looked at him as if he were one of the walking dead and now at the corner of the street a hundred meters away from the café he hesitates, he is ashamed, Stavros is a good friend, was he captured by the Germans too, Leon Saltiel goes up to the café terrace, he glances inside, waits an instant, enters, walks up to the bar, Stavros is there, he hasn’t changed, he stands in front of him, without saying anything, Stavros glances at him absentmindedly without recognizing him, annoyed Leon sits down at a table, he waits, he doesn’t know what to say, he says Stavros a coffee with no sugar please, busy behind the counter the man repeats the order to the kitchen, one no sugar, Leon is at a loss he hesitates to shout Stavros it’s me he remains silent a woman emerges from the kitchen holding a little aluminum tray it’s Agatha, Leon lowers his head, she puts the coffee and the glass of cold water abruptly down on the table, Leon stares at the brown froth in the little cup, he has seen the wedding ring on her right hand, he suddenly thinks of Aris Andreanou who hanged himself in the showers with his belt, of his overlong twisted neck, his eyes looking up, his mouth open, he waits patiently for the coffee grounds to settle, he knows now that neither Agatha nor Stavros is going to recognize him, because he is a ghost, because for them he is dead, he suddenly understands why and how he was arrested, Leon Saltiel drinks his bitter coffee, then a little water, he throws down a coin that rattles on the metal tray, and goes out — I do the same, halfway through Saltiel’s Memoirs I pay for my drinks and I go out, I’ve been reading for a good two hours in English, something I haven’t done since the worthy Institute of Political Science in Paris, the afternoon is far advanced, I climb up to the old city sweating, I need air, I need to see the sea from high up, tomorrow I’ll leave I’m not really sure why but suddenly I want to take my car and go north, to go back to Paris by road, to go through Bulgaria and Serbia, after all I have a French passport, it’s August, there are tourists, I’ll go through the Iron Gates and follow the Danube to Budapest, to see the other side, what does the river look like in Voivodina, on the other shore, in 1997 the war had been over for two years, the region was catching its breath again, what a funny idea when I think about it, to go throw myself into the jaws of the mustachioed Chetnik wolf, without permission, I wasn’t supposed to go to that sort of country, in theory I was supposed to ask for special authorization for all movements abroad, which beats everything for a spy, but really, I didn’t think much could happen to me, aside from my car breaking down, I’d never seen either Belgrade the white, or Novi Sad the Austrian, maybe the Serb souls buried in the military cemetery in Salonika had put this idea in my head, they were trying to take revenge on my Austro-Hungarian ancestors who sent them to their graves, they wanted to lure me into a trap and drown me in the Danube, in October 1915 Kaiser William II backs up the Austrians in battle, on October 9th Belgrade is taken, the Serbs withdraw on all fronts, all the more so since Ferdinand of Bulgaria, to whom Macedonia and Kosovo have been promised, has just stabbed proud Serbia in the back, retreat is necessary, the army is destroyed and its scattered remains will be added to the Allied Front of Salonika, where they will fight until 1917, in all almost 300,000 Serbian soldiers would meet their death during the First World War, they say, while the Austrians would put their occupied country to fire and sword — the report by Rudolph Archibald Reiss in 1915, used for years as propaganda, came back to me, those nice men disemboweled, civilians enucleated, vaginas opened up by bayonet to let the semen of dozens of troops ooze in, noses cut off, ears torn off, all described with the coldness of the forensic police specialist: whether it was used by one side or the other didn’t take away any of the veracity from the testimony, attested by the force of the revenge, the hatred of whoever espouses that revenge, hatred he will purge, dozens of years later, using it against his enemies, out of fear, fear stemming from tradition, from the legend that impels him too to go towards the other with his blade leading the way, the way the stories of Serbian atrocities drove us, in fear, to cut their corpses up into pieces, terrified no doubt that such warriors had the power to come back to life, the series of Serbo-Croatian massacres always proved the previous story right, without any one ever being wrong, since everyone, like the Austrians in Serbia, could cite an atrocity committed by the other camp, the Other per se, you had to erase his humanity by tearing off his face, prevent him from procreating by cutting off his balls, contaminate him by raping his women, annihilate his descendants by slicing off breasts and pubic hair, return to zero, annul fear and suffering, history is a tale of fierce animals, a book with wolves on every page,