Zone (8 page)

de jure
and at what instant it constituted a grave breach of the law and customs of war, referring endlessly to the rulings of Nuremberg, Jerusalem, Rwanda, historical precedents recognized as such by the status of the court, retracing
customary international law
in the interpretation of the Geneva conventions, peppering their verdicts with flowery, apposite Latin expressions, devoted, yes, all these people were very devoted to distinguishing the different modes of crimes against humanity before saying
gentlemen I think we’ll adjourn for lunch
or
because of repairs in Hall 2 the Chamber requests the parties to postpone the hearings planned for this afternoon until a later date, let’s say in two months
, the time of the law is like that of the Church, you work for eternity, at least all this palaver offered a distraction to the defendants, they listened for months on end to the story of their country and their war, interested as you’d be by a good film, or maybe bored by its repetitiveness, I stayed for three days in The Hague I wondered if someone was going to recognize me and shout
police! police!
when they saw me but no—my name must have appeared somewhere in an investigative report though, buried there with the others, lying black on white among the dead and the survivors of our brigade, maybe with the list of our civilian victims on the facing page, intentional or accidental, as accidental as a mortar shell can be when it buries a family under rubble, I feel as if I’m floating all of a sudden, the train is passing over a series of switches and is dancing, the lights of the countryside pirouette around us in a random ballet that makes me nauseous or is it the memory of the war, I took advantage of the trip to The Hague to go as far as Groningen, to see the multicolored houses lining the canal that surrounds the city center, the main square had a magnificent tower, the sea and the islands quite close, Germany a few kilometers to the east, an average quiet city with a glorious past, I strolled at random in the streets downtown before finding a very handsome hotel near the canal in a seventeenth-century building with the evocative name
Auberge du Corps de Garde
, Inn of the Guard Corps, just like that, in French, which led me to think that they spoke that language, the first thing I did after settling in was to rush to the phone book, there were two Gerbens, initials A.J. and T., one living a little outside the city and the other near the venerable university south of the center, according to the map, if Harmen Gerbens the old Cairo-dweller had had two daughters they had probably gotten married and taken the name of their husbands, the receptionist at the Guard Corps was nice but suspicious, what did I want with these Gerbens, I asked her if the name was common she replied no, not really, I decided to explain the story to her, in Cairo I had met an old man from Groningen named Harmen Gerbens who had asked me to say hello to his family for him, a white lie the old drunkard would rather have spat on the ground, she suddenly looked moved and decided to help me, to pick up the telephone and ask for me if the first Gerbens in the phone book knew a Harmen residing in Cairo, I couldn’t understand a scrap of the conversation but the young woman was smiling at me and nodding her head as she spoke, before putting her hand over the receiver and explaining to me—it was his nephew, he in fact did have an uncle named Harmen who left for Egypt after the war, she was all excited about it, ask him if I can meet him, please, she took up the telephone again and her Dutch conversation—this first Gerbens in the phone book was a doctor and received visits in the afternoon, I made an appointment for four o’clock and went to eat herring in a passable restaurant by the water, fortunately the weather was nice, a pale autumn light and a sea breeze perfumed the landscape, what questions was I going to ask this doctor, what attracted me in Harmen’s story, in the shadiness I thought I discerned in it, my head full of war memories rekindled by The Hague, pursued by the impenetrable face of Blaškić on the accused bench, heroes, fighters, the dead, feats of arms, it’s time I kill as I walk along the canal, a few moored canalboats remind me that from here you can reach the Rhine then the Rhone leading to the Mediterranean and thus reach Alexandria, the Venetian tradesmen brought back furs from Holland that they exchanged for spices and brocades, according to my illustrated guide Groningen was a prosperous trading city where they imported tobacco from the colonies, it’s almost time, the pleasant receptionist showed me how to reach the nephew’s office: as four o’clock strikes I’m facing a man in his fifties in a white lab coat, he knows English, he is polite, somewhat surprised to hear about a relative he’s never met, I thought he was dead, he says, if I remember right my aunt said he was dead, she died a few years ago, my cousins are married and they live in Amsterdam—my father is no longer in this world, carried off by tobacco and alcohol, so far as I know after the war he was never very close to his brother, they weren’t on the same side, you see, my father was a resistant and my uncle, hmm,
not so much
, I think they fell out with each other, at the Liberation my uncle was forced to flee to avoid the death penalty, he escaped from the military prison not long before his execution, what had he done to deserve such a sentence? I asked, I don’t know, the doctor stammers, I don’t know anything about it, he’d been a Nazi I guess, I confess I never tried much to find out, you understand, my parents never spoke about it, it’s strange to think he’s still alive, over there in Egypt, it’s just as strange that the British didn’t arrest him when he arrived in 1947, I thanked the doctor and left imagining Gerbens’s two daughters, they the daughters of a traitor and he the son of a hero, maybe they’re both murderers but for different causes, the two children of Harmen the Cairo Nazi probably bore the mark of the absence of a father despised by his homeland whom they had never tried to see again, just as they had never seen their father’s family again, they had changed cities, changed their name by marriage and left this gap in their genealogy to their descendants, when she returned to Holland Gerbens’s wife must have declared her husband in Egypt dead, and had condemned him to keel over alone and far away in the exile of Garden City and alcohol which was one of his many prisons, probably the strongest one, along with his past, Harmen Gerbens the old Nazi locked up so many times, in Holland, in Qanater, at his place in Garden City, in Metaxa, and in Egyptian brandy, condemned to watch himself die as he remembered perhaps the death’s head on his SS collar, which had not stopped accompanying him all throughout his existence like an invisible tattoo—did he remember the people he had loaded into trains headed east, the women he had raped in the Westerbork camp, how far back did memory go, Harmen Gerbens took his place in the list in the suitcase—I went back to the Guard Corps hotel, it started to rain, I thanked the receptionist warmly, I told her
mission accomplished
and she smiled at me as she handed me the key to my room, and tonight in the Plaza when the unknown man comes to take possession of the briefcase and hand over my cash I’ll toast the health of the receptionist and the doctor in Groningen, of Gerbens’s daughters, of Nathan Strasberg the Jew from Łódź who in Jerusalem translated the appendix to the Shin Bet report for me, he thought it rather ironic that Israeli intervention had the effect of sending a former Nazi to prison in Cairo, it was a kind of relief for him, Nathan was also compiling lists, endless lists of targets, of men to kill, of Palestinian personnel hostile to the Oslo agreements, PFLP, DFLP, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, the new “refusal movement” constituted a major risk for the Mossad, and Nathan was gathering information on their schemes, not knowing that very soon after the beginning of the second Intifada he was going to have to murder most of these people, according to the nice doctrine of preventative murder, with air-to-ground missiles over Gaza or Merkava tanks in the West Bank camps, Nathan was a little chubby smiled a lot and was full of good humor I wonder where he is today, a little closer to the end of the world, as the train is crossing the Po almost without slowing down, a factory slips by in white neon lights behind brick walls, a tall structure, metal girders lit here and there by red lamps like a boat—in Venice Ghassan Antoun worked in Porto Marghera in a similar petrochemical establishment, an immense jumble of tubes and storage tanks also lit at night by red lamps that appeared out of the fog, he went home in the early dawn by bus, over the bridge called the “Freedom Bridge” that joins Venice to terra firma and commemorates the end of Austrian domination, Ghassan always gave off a strange smell, like peanuts or grilled corn, washing didn’t do any good this strange chemical smell never left him, it only diminished a little according to his distance from the factory, without ever completely disappearing: the night shift stole his body from him without ever entirely returning it to him, contaminated by familiar and unsettling effluvia, the way a soldier on campaign smells of sweat and grease, I met him at dawn in a bar where daybreak freed me from my walking insomnia, we were both going home like exhausted frozen vampires, he with an anorak over his blue overalls I with my eternal hat shoved down to my eyebrows, he reminded me immediately of Andrija the Slavonic, go figure, there was nothing similar in their features, aside maybe from an unsuitability of the body for its clothes, Andrija always badly dressed the uniform never fit him, either too big or too small, his outfits were stained and his kit dangled oddly he always looked awkward, weighed down by the bag, the ammunition, the weapons and Ghassan in his blue worksuit crammed into the anorak had the same ungainly walk that went with his eternal smile and the little mustache he was so proud of, Andrija killed in central Bosnia near Vitez was reincarnated in the damp cold dawn of a café in Venice, a proletarian café by the lagoon not far from the romantic island cemetery of San Michele—Stravinsky, Diaghilev, Ezra Pound the old madman—which I hadn’t deemed it wise yet to visit, Andrija’s absence, I was probably looking for a replacement for him, a substitute in the great solitary boredom of La Serenissima: Ghassan lived a stone’s throw away in a damp dark apartment that he shared with his cousin head waiter at a luxury hotel Riva degli Schiavoni, that morning we had coffee side by side without exchanging a word, at least that’s what I remember, maybe our countless breakfasts at dawn in the course of the months that followed are superimposed over that first meeting, I forget at what instant exactly I spoke to Ghassan for the first time, I don’t think our friendship was immediate, as they say, in the yellowish lighting of the Piacenza station and the air-conditioning of the train that keeps me from smelling his factory odor, friendship or camaraderie needs time, experience, and if in love the union of bodies gives each the illusion of profound knowledge of the other, so the effluvia of fighters, their sweat and their blood, gives the illusion of intimacy, Ghassan and I observed each other for a long time without sharing anything, despite (or maybe because of) the similarity of our personal stories, the strange points in common that were immediately guessed, the empathy and the resemblance, real or imagined, with Andrija and his mustache, just as in this overheated train I don’t speak to my neighbor, despite the points of contact that could link our existences together, of which this motionless journey is an example, what is he going to discover, where will he get out, Bologna, Florence, or Rome, he looks like he’s bored stiff, his
Pronto
in his hand, he too is looking out the window Piacenza is fading away and the industrial zone is starting up its intermittent lights, which the night of this flat fertile countryside hides from us at the border of Emilia, crossed by the train—soon Ghassan will be forty, if he’s still alive despite the recent avalanche of corpses in Beirut: did he become one of the bodyguards for Elie Hobeika or some obscure Christian second-in-command, did he take up the weapons he had abandoned in 1991, fleeing the arrival of the Syrian Great Brother in his corner of the mountains, who knows, I left Ghassan when I left Venice, and afterwards, in Trieste or during one of my trips to Beirut on business as they say, I didn’t seek him out, he had told me though where his family lived, right in the middle of the hill of Achrafieh that overlooks the eastern side of the city, he had said that from the roof of his building you could see the sea, much bluer than in Venice, much more sea-like than that interminably flat lagoon: the eastern Mediterranean its colors marked by the seasons like a tree, from grey to turquoise, beneath the immense sky of Lebanon that the mountains make even vaster by limiting it, in the reflections of the summits, Ghassan vanished like Andrija, finally disappeared in his turn and maybe helped by age didn’t I try to replace him too, to fill the void left by the end of that cold friendship that began in a bar at dawn facing the island of San Michele the floating cemetery of Venice with its corner for foreigners, we saw each other every morning or almost at daybreak, Ghassan was emerging from his factory of fertilizers or God knows what putrid residue and I from my nocturnal wanderings, a way to escape the woman who had joined me in Venice whom I no longer wanted to see, I think, unless the opposite was true, she obstinately refused to go to bed with me arguing that Venice made her depressed, which was probably true, she was always cold, she didn’t eat much, but today I realize that she was my reflection, that I was the depressed one, most likely, motionless in Venice as I am now in this train, on my way to recovery, to oblivion, to two years of war I lost roaming through Croatia and Bosnia, I had wanted Marianne to join me but I preferred solitude and the company of Ghassan, Nayef, and the others, we didn’t meet often, she slept at night, whereas I slept during the day, exhausted by insomnia—maybe that was the consequence of two years of amphetamines, two years of cultivating the body, two years of fear of dying in the mud, huge hangovers two years of bullets bombs alcohol and drugs it was a miracle I thought that Marianne waited for me, that she came to join me in Venice which was not a romantic choice but a way of disappearing, an island outside of time and outside of space, a tomb for me and for Andrija who was rotting in my memories as he was decomposing in the earth, on weekends Ghassan and I got drunk—often he told me stories about the civil war in Lebanon, his own war, he was on the side of the Lebanese Forces, of course, on the side of the flag and the crucifix that was so similar to us Croats, he was sixteen at the fall of West Beirut, in 1982, when Intissar and the Palestinian fighters left Lebanon, Ghassan had thought the war was over, he had enlisted a few months later when the massacre had started up again, inspired by his elders who told him about the glorious years in the 1970s, when the other side was leftist, long-haired, and wore an upside-down Mercedes symbol for a badge, later the enemy was Druze, then Syrian, then Christian during the last great confrontation that put the mountain to fire and sword for nothing, the city was burning, he said, the bombings were more intense than ever, Geagea’s Lebanese Forces were fighting against General Aoun, in that mixture of pride, power and money that summarized his country so well: he might have fought against Marwan, Ahmad and Intissar, maybe even against Rafael Kahla the author of the story, who knows, every time I went to Beirut I thought about Ghassan’s stories, and the new contacts in my new profession told me more stories of war and espionage,