Zone by Mathias Enard Page A

straight path among passengers each one in his body pushed towards the same terminus if they don’t get off along the way, in Bologna or Florence, to meet one of those madmen who haunt the station platforms announcing the end of the world: my neighbor has turned on his Walkman, I hear sounds but can’t really tell what he’s listening to, I can make out a high-pitched rhythm superimposed over that of the train tracks, Sashka can’t live without music either, CDs galore Russian or Hebrew airs melodies ancient or modern when I met her the night was very dark, a glance is stronger than a ship’s mooring says a Dalmatian proverb one look and you’re pulled out to sea—in the little Roman streets painted with ivy, perfumed by rain, stricken too with the sickness of history and death like Jerusalem Alexandria Algiers or Venice, I cling to lies and to Sashka’s arm, I pretend to forget Paris the Boulevard Mortier violence and wars the way, when I was a child, a ray of light would always slip beneath the door to reassure me, the distant conversations of the adults lulled me with indistinct murmurs pushing me little by little into the world of dreams, Sashka is the nearby body of a distant being, surrounded as we are by all these ghosts my dead and hers whom we resist by putting our arms round each other’s shoulders near the sad Tiber great carrier of refuse, it’s over, I left Paris my civil servant’s studio apartment my books my souvenirs my habits my lunches with my parents I filled lots of trash bags threw it all out or almost all got loaded one last time by accident in my old neighborhood slipped into the skin of Yvan Deroy and farewell, on the road to the end of the world and a new life, they all float past the window in the darkened plain, Nathan Strasberg, Harmen Gerbens, and the ghosts of the suitcase, the torturers of Algeria, the executioners of Trieste, all that foam on the sea, a white slightly sickening froth made from the putrescence of a load of corpses, I needed patience to collect them, patience, time, intrigues, leads, not losing the thread, consulting thousands of archives, buying my sources, convincing them by following the rules of information-gathering I’d learned haphazardly through the years, sorting through the information, compiling it, organizing it into a file that can be consulted easily, by name, date, place, and so on, personal stories life stories worthy of the best Communist paranoid administrations, archives such as there are by the millions records traces—maybe it was in The Hague that I began, in 1998 before Jerusalem I take a few days’ leave to go to the International Court of Justice where the trial of General Blaškić was taking place, the commander in Vitez of the HVO the army of the Bosnian Croats, in his box at the beginning of the hearing Tihomir Blaškić recognizes me and nods to me, after becoming brigadier-general he is facing twenty major charges, among them six infractions of the Geneva conventions, eleven violations of the laws and customs of war, and three crimes against humanity, committed in the context of “grave violations of humanitarian international law against Bosnian Muslims” between May 1992 and January 1994, I left Bosnia on February 25, 1993, I had gotten there from Croatia in April 1992, and after a few months’ stay on the front near Mostar I joined Tihomir Blaškić in central Bosnia, his headquarters had since November 1992 been located in the Vitez Hotel, he was an efficient, respected officer, I felt bad when I saw him in the midst of that multilingual administrative circus of the ICJ where a large chunk of time was lost in arguments over procedure, in misunderstandings of the American prosecutor’s quibbles, in countless witnesses and hours and atrocities while I knew perfectly well who had committed them, I could see again the places, the flames, the battles, the punitive expeditions until my departure after Andrija’s death: at bottom I