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like a tide that gives victory by turns to Constantinople, Carthage, or Rome: on the beach of Megara you still find, washed up by the waves, tiles of mosaics torn from Punic palaces sleeping on the bottom of the sea, like the wrecks of the galleys of Lepanto, the breastplates sunk in the Dardanelles, the ashes thrown in bags of cement by the SS of La Risiera along Dock No. 7 in the port of Trieste, I collect these square multicolored stones, I put them in my pocket just as later on I will collect names and dates to file away in my suitcase, before reconstructing the entire mosaic, the full picture, the inventory of violent death begun by chance with Harmen Gerbens the SS-man from Cairo, locked up in the Qanatar Prison along with Egyptian Jews suspected of collaborating with Israel, which gave Nathan a good laugh at the bar of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, I wonder what those Egyptians could have been thinking, he said, how long did you say they held him? Eight years? They realized what he was, I guess, they didn’t know what to do with him, finally they freed him just before the war of ’67, the enemies of my enemies are my friends, and they granted him Egyptian citizenship, still under his real name, without anyone worrying if he’d be found one day, hidden under the dusty mango trees of Garden City, alcoholic prisoner of eternal Egypt, like the defeated Antony of Actium if he hadn’t preferred death to prison and said farewell with one thrust of the sword to Alexandria, Alexandria that was leaving him forever, in 1956 and 1967 the Jewish community in Egypt had been forced into exile, today it counts fewer than fifty members—the great synagogue on Nebi Daniel Street in Alexandria is nothing but an empty shell now, the old custodian you have to bribe to visit it apes the prayers and ceremonies, he pretends to get out the scrolls, to read them, chant them, making the absence even realer by his sham, no one prays anymore in the synagogues of Egypt, except for a few, come from France from Israel or from the United States, they organize ceremonies for the celebrations, in 1931 however Elia Mosseri director of the Bank of Egypt, one of the wealthiest bankers in Cairo, owner of a magnificent Art Deco palace in Garden City, invested with his brother and friends in Jerusalem on a site located on the ancient Julian Way and built an immense luxury hotel there that would become the King David: strange to think that Harmen Gerbens’s apartment is a few meters away from the former villa of the founder of the hotel where Nathan and I spoke about the Batavian SS-man relocated by the Egyptians at his release from prison to an apartment abandoned by a Jewish family, just as Nathan’s parents, who landed in 1949 in Haifa after many sufferings, would occupy the house of a Palestinian family driven away to Jordan or Lebanon, in a strange Wheel of Fortune where the gods give and take away what they gave—Isabella of Castile promulgated the Alhambra Decree in 1492 and expelled the Jews from Spain, a decree abolished by Manuel Fraga with the pale-faced Minister of Tourism under Franco the Iberian Duce in 1967 when he offered passports to the stateless Jews of Egypt citing the fact that they were Sephardic and thus of Spanish origin, allowing by a fanatical stroke of nationalism the resumption of diplomatic relations with Israel: in the fall of 1967 the Egyptian Jews who had no ties with the Powers, France, Great Britain, or Italy, got off the boat in Valencia in the orange-freighted port where their ancestors might have cast off 500 years before, leaving behind them houses, gold, jewels, and above all the myth of that Andalusian culture of the three religions of the book, to be scattered from Morocco to Istanbul, on the shores of that sea that I walk along with my Algerian Islamist gathering Carthaginian tesserae in 1996, Lebihan my superior at the time often sent me to meet the “sources,” you inspire confidence, he said, they’d hand over the good Lord to you without a confession, with that honest look you have, you’d better go yourself, also because he couldn’t stand Arab food, lover as he is of blanquette of veal oysters Muscadet and celery rémoulade, what’s more he couldn’t bear chili pepper, for him Tunisia was a digestive and circulatory disaster, the fire of Baal—food considerations aside, with information of human origin contact is essential, confidence, especially when the “source” doesn’t present himself first to collaborate, when you have to go to him circle round him stroke him the right way a game of fox and Little Prince, the animal knows it wants to be tamed, it lets itself be, it always steps back once or twice like a frightened virgin, you have to determine its motivations, whether they’re ideological familial venal crooked or vengeful and always keep something up your sleeve for the master stroke, “serving the homeland” still works with some Frenchmen, especially in the sciences or economics, where the risks are all in all negligible, “fighting against the Reds” doesn’t work anymore, people are suspicious of it, replaced by “fighting the rise of Islam,” which comes down to pretty much the same thing, but in my experience the motivations of informers are most of the time pecuniary, money sex power that’s the Holy Trinity of the case officer, it’s better to carry a money clip than a weapon, even if, for obvious psychological reasons, the sources prefer to believe they’re working “for the good cause,” more rewarding than “I sold out”: the nice bearded Islamic fundamentalist was serving the cause of God now by non-violence, as he said, I’ve seen too many massacres, too many horrors, it has to stop, he was a former member of the armed branch of the ISF, close to the Rome negotiators under the guidance of the Sant’ Egidio community, St. Giles of Trastevere a stone’s throw away from Sashka’s place—in the winter of 1995-1996, when I was still a novice spy, thanks to this Catholic intervention the different political parties of Algeria had signed an agreement in principle, a platform of demands supposed to put an end to civil war, they were all there, except the army of course, from the historic Ben Bella to the Islamists, including the Kabylians, the liberal democrats, and even Louisa Hanoune the Red from the Workers’ Party, the only woman in the meeting, they called for democracy for respect of the Constitution for the end of torture and of military machinations, all of that of course was doomed to failure but it offered a fine basis to negotiate a peace to come, at the same time in Algeria the ISA and the GIA were massacring infidels while soldiers were torturing and executing anything that fell into their hands, my source confided concrete information to me, my first source abroad, my first voyage into my Zone, names, organization rules, factions, internal tensions, which I tallied afterwards in my office with other files, other sources, to draw up a memo from it, a piece of paper included in a weekly report sent to the ministers concerned, to the office of the Prime Minister and the President of the Republic, weather forecasts of trouble, this week showers likely over North Africa, fair weather in the Balkans, threatening in the Middle East, storms in Russia, etc., a special service was in charge of compiling the information from the different sections for this secret regular publication, not counting the special memos or the precise requests from X or Y, economic, geopolitical, societal, or scientific anxieties are finished at last for me, the shadowy times are over, one last suitcase and I’ll join Sashka with the transparent gaze, lie down in silence next to her and bury my lips in her short hair, no more lists no more torturers’ victims investigations whether official or not I’m changing my life my body my memories my future my past I’m going to throw everything out of my sight out of the hermetically sealed window into the great black mass of landscape, purify myself, plunge, in Venice La Serenissima one December night I had been drinking, I was staggering home from the end of the Quay of Oblivion, north of Cannaregio I had 300 meters to cover to get back to my Old Ghetto, might as well be a hundred kilometers, or a thousand, I swayed from right to left, pitched forward, headed in the wrong direction, I turned onto the Square of Two Moors, I sprawled into the sculpted well in the middle of the little esplanade, then lifted my painful knees the way you extricate yourself from a trench in wartime, I saw myself again rifle in hand bent double I took three more steps towards the Madonna dell’Orto bridge, two to the left, one to the right, carried forward by my own weight, by the weight of my black cap or my memories in the frozen-mud smell of the Venetian fog, breathing hard as hard as possible to get my spirits up, my mouth wide open my lungs frozen, go forward, go straight ahead if you fall you won’t get up you’ll end up dead killed by the Chetniks behind you by the Turks by the Trojans with the swift mares I breathe I breathe I go forward I cling to the rail of the bridge it’s a tree in the Bosnian mountains I climb, I climb in the night I climb down I see the tall façade of bricks on the church what the hell am I doing here I live on the other side on the other side I make a U-turn stumble miss the bridge and plunge into the dark canal head first, a hand grips me, I’m drowning, it’s the conductor waking me up, he shakes me, asks me for my ticket I hand it to him mechanically, he smiles at me, he looks pleasant, outside it’s still just as dark, I glue my eyes to the window, open countryside, it’s stopped raining
VI
