Moraće se naučiti tući lijevom, he’ll have to learn to jack off with his left hand, we stayed there with our mouths open, hung out to dry by all-powerful medical science that has just thrown our hopes into the trash where Vlaho’s limb is slumbering, his fingers of a driver, a shooter, a handler of bayonets and burrower in females, his fingers will decompose before he does, it’s strange to think that, like his baby teeth somewhere in a box with his grandmother’s jewelry, his forearm is planted in Bosnia, a tree with no fruit, should we set up a plaque to it, here lies the right forelimb of Vlaho Lozović, whose remaining body rests elsewhere, the way those traffickers of medieval relics scattered corpses from Byzantium to Barcelona, bones by the ton, a tibia here a femur there, ossicles for the poor skulls for the rich, a fragment of Saint Somebody for the devotions of peasants frightened of hell, a chunk of the deceased to take out on feast days, the bone will be on display in its gilded reliquary, to ward off plagues poxes wars curses nothing like parading a piece of a stiff, the all-powerful head of Saint Matthew Saint Luke or Saint John the Baptist, we should have preserved the arm of Vlaho Lozović the Unknown, Vlaho the Smiling, Vlaho who accepted, who left the violent acts of his right arm by the wayside, sins war and revenge, he didn’t close himself up in the circle of reprisals, Vlaho, he was still in the hospital in Mostar when I told him about Andi’s death, his round face was suddenly covered in tears, I almost said don’t worry, I avenged him, but he wouldn’t have understood, that wouldn’t have consoled him, Vlaho the magnanimous, he was just sad, immensely sad at the departure of his friend, without hatred, without rage, I hugged him, we’ll see each other soon, I lied, the day before I had gone to the headquarters of the HVO in Vitez to announce that I was pulling out, that I’d had it, and there in front of Vlaho facing his eyes shining with tears I didn’t have the courage to repeat it to him, two or three days later though he went back to his home in Split, I could have waited for him, but I didn’t have the strength, I had spent all my energy in revenge, in the fury and dangerous crossing of the Muslim lines, by the only road (a path, rather) that we still controlled, I was exhausted by that absurd war where the allies against the Serbs were killing each other fifty kilometers to the east, our positions paralyzed, Andi with no grave his corpse taken away to be probably exchanged later in a truck of dead bodies I couldn’t bear any more, I couldn’t bear any more militia highwaymen disguised as soldiers, I was emptied out, no more friends no more anything no more desire, I had the image of Andi in my head lying with his pants down to his knees and the vision of the living-dead arm in the grass, I thought I saw it digging into the earth like a crab trying to hide itself, I said goodbye Vlaho, out of habit I held out my hand to his stump, Vlaho the debonair caught my fingers in his left mitt, he gave me one last smile, and I left for the North — maybe I too should have cut off my criminal hand, I might not be in this train ten years later, on my way to Rome the Catholic great reservoir of remains, I wasn’t able to accept the hand held out by Marianne, or Stéphanie, Sashka doesn’t offer anything, lost in her colors and the faces of illuminated saints that she paints all day long, what I am is of no interest to her my past is of no interest to her my life is of no interest to her she lives in her pictures, Christ Pantocrators, praying Virgins, Saint Georges, Saint Michael the Archangels, Saint Innocents, Saints Cosmas and Damian, which she sells at a very high price to sincere believers who do not know that women can’t paint icons, the prudish angel doesn’t whisper into their ears, we have in common neither language nor passion nor history, she is so far away, I’m not going to rush over to her place after all I’ll wait, wait and see, maybe I’ll manage to detach myself, detach myself from the suitcase from Vlaho’s arm from Andrija’s corpse from Sashka and the whole works, in Venice I thought I’d succeeded, in Venice queen of fog everything almost ended in a canal, the way Leon Saltiel the Jew from Salonika is about to hang himself or throw himself out the window before finding peace in revenge, the way Globocnik the killer brings an end to his days by biting a pen full of arsenic when the Allies capture him, the way Hess the inexhaustible manages to strangle himself with a cable, the way Manos Hadjivassilis throws himself onto the electrified barbed wire in Mauthausen, the way my Islamists blow themselves up in Jerusalem and see the city from high up their eyelids blinking in the middle of the sky, but they fished me out, they gave me a second life which I lost in the Zone everything comes in threes what’s waiting for me before the end of the world, what’s waiting for me, the friendly hand was sliced off in Bosnia, Yvan Deroy the mad has been far away for years, Sashka the unreachable lives in the gilt world of images, my father never emerged from his silence — I picture him alone with the cries of his own ghosts, he the son of a Resistant and he tortured Algerians as ardently as the Gestapo did his old man, they had perfectly remembered the lesson of water-boarding and the bike wheel, for the good of the community, if those rats didn’t talk bombs would go off, Frenchmen would die, it was mostly Algerians who died, how many, 500,000, a million, we’ll never know, the ones who died in combat, died from torture, died in prison, died from a bullet in the head, died inside the barbed wire of the detention camps, the suitcase is full of them, names testimonies secret reports memos from generals repentant or proud of their work and pictures, hundreds of photos, what could possibly have motivated all those soldiers to document the horror, why did the armed forces take the trouble to photograph electrocuted Algerians, half-drowned Algerians, beaten up Algerians, maybe to refine their techniques or give an account of their activities to anxious Parisian authorities, you see we’re not idle, here we’re grinding away, we’re slaving away, we’re keeping busy, did they get a glimpse of the catastrophe, the exile of a million people repatriated in 1962, a million French Spanish Italian Jewish gypsy Maltese German refugees crossing the Mediterranean to scatter from Alicante to Bastia, the greatest maritime displacement since the expulsion of the Mudejars 400 years before, Bône and Oran emptied of half of their inhabitants, Algiers of a third, desertion desolation victimization the memory of the dead, plunge a country into hell, their executives in the FLN will turn into skillful executioners and torturers too, lost in the Zone where I counted the blows the throat-slittings the decapitations the massacres and the bombs, lulled by the exotic sound of the patronymics of the emirs of the GIA and the AIS, the rising generation confronted the old ones from the war of independence, some of whom had fought in regiments of mountain goumiers on the Italian slopes, the world turns, the great-great-great-grandchildren of immigrants from Minorca sent to colonize Algiers in 1830 would return to Ciutadella city of horses and of Saint John the Baptist 130 years later driven out by the valorous fighters of the FLN and the French torturers, murderers letting fall dark cloudbursts of victims, all those circles drawn on a golden shield, it’s the mothers who provide the weapons, Thetis the loving consoles Achilles her child by giving him the means to take revenge, a breastplate a sword a blinding shield in which the whole world is reflected, just as Marija Mirković my mother provided me with homeland history heredity Maks Luburić and Millán-Astray the one-eyed hawk, don’t cry Achilles, dry your tears and go avenge yourself, be reconciled with the remorseful son of Atreus and kill Hector with your fury, revenge, revenge, I feel revenge rumbling through this train hurtling through the hills, my innocent neighbor still has her eyes glued to her book, she doesn’t know who’s sitting opposite her, she can’t imagine that her fate has crossed mine, that soon the white pearls of her necklace will be in my possession, her bag, her wool sweater, I’ll dance on her body in the light of the Tuscan moon the bronze gleaming in my hand, ready to sack Rome with the wide walls, Rome conquered by the victorious Allies, Rome pillaged and burned by the swordsmen of the Hapsburg son of Joanna the Mad, Rome split open by the intrepid Normans, by the fierce Visigoths, by the Gauls with the short blades, Rome daughter of Aeneas with the swift spear, Rome descendant of Ilion in ruins, revenge, revenge for Patroclus son of Menoetius, for Antilochus son of Nestor, revenge, one more ransacking, more hecatombs, libations, smoking pyres for Andrija the Slavonic who begged me in a dream to find his body, to burn it, revenge, for the lost arm of Vlaho the magnanimous, seeding the land, vengeance, for everyone, the glaive heated by warm blood, the time is coming, I feel it the train is vibrating I’m almost there I’ve almost reached the end of the journey, in the black landscape my eyes closed skeletons spinning and rattling they’re the sparks of color of the inner world calm your breathing, Francis, try to breathe regularly and let the thoughts flow that are leading you towards revenge, let Dream, the messenger, incubate his oracles in you, in the Middle Ages they were afraid of sleeping for fear of being assailed by the terrible succubae that gave pleasure, a hidden and confused pleasure, squat men frightened by the universe woke up in a sweat with a cursed erection that they concealed poorly from their panic-stricken wives, I venture Queen Mab hath been with you, Mab the messenger, with her team of magic fireflies, no bigger than an agate-stone, what would she say to me, to me, the tiny fairy of the kingdoms of the night, nothing, last night all steeped in alcohol in cold caresses in a concierge’s lodge drowned in shadow, against the body marked by old age of the ugly woman with the bitter tongue, after the pleasureless ejaculation and the shame, once home ashamed and sad I collapsed on my sheetless bed in the empty apartment, my last night in Paris, Queen Mab has brought me to Sashka, to her tiny studio in Trastevere I see her pale hands stained with gold paint she is painting a pious picture of four crowned saints, four Dalmatian martyrs Severus, Severianus, Victorinus, and Carpophorus, handsome and brown-haired, she explains that they were skillful stone-carvers whom the Emperor Diocletian wanted to employ in his palace in Split to erect a pagan statue, of Jupiter the unyielding or Venus the temptress, the four artists had sworn their faith to Christ and refused to carve the idol, which enraged Caesar, he sentenced them to be whipped to death, the executioner belabored their bodies for days on end, with no noticeable effect, the four men resisted both the leather and the metal balls, the stripes on their skin disappeared as the torture went on, Diocletian the inflexible was scarcely moved by the miracle, he had them enclosed in four iron coffins that were thrown into the Adriatic where they sleep to this day, among pale blue jellyfish and wrecks of Venetian galleys, the four pious sculptors are reborn under the brushes of Sashka the iconographer, she has in front of her an illuminated book from which she draws her inspiration, a linden board hollowed out with a chisel and covered with