criminal responsibility which links him to history, he’s a body in a chair wearing a headset, he is on trial in place of all those who held a weapon, he will be condemned to forty-five years in prison then to nine years on appeal and today he must be taking advantage of his early release near Kiseljak, not very far from the villages where the burnt bodies of civilians for whose deaths he was blamed lie, those people who are still waiting for a justice that will never come, in the very Dutch Hague there was such a procession of ex-Yugoslavs that it was a headache to arrange their court appearances without all those people meeting each other in the planes, trains, or cars before finding themselves all together in the luxurious cells of the detention building or the antechambers of the hearing rooms, the vanished country was reconstituted one last time by international law, Serbs Croats Bosnians of all kinds Montenegrins fell into each others’ arms or pretended they didn’t recognize each other, they were there to speak about their war to air their dirty linen in front of judges who of course could be neither Serbs nor Croats nor Bosnians nor Montenegrins nor even Macedonian or Albanian or Slovenian, only their defenders were, and this international community that judged them indirectly watched with a remote air all these barbarians with unpronounceable names, hundreds of thousands of pages of trials became a distressing ocean, a tidal wave of justice in which the victims who had come to testify floundered, the displaced the tortured the beaten the raped the plundered the widows usually cried behind closed doors in a room with lowered blinds and their stories didn’t leave the glassed-in cages of the interpreters, consigned to court reports in English or French for posterity, without the judges hearing the accents the dialects the expressions of their voices that traced a real map of pain—they all took the plane home afterwards with a taste of bile in their mouths for having returned seen their enemies their torturers or their memories without their hatred or their love or their loyalty or their suffering serving any purpose at all, characters in the Great Trial organized by international lawyers immersed in precedents and the jurisprudence of horror, charged with putting some order into the law of murder, with knowing at what instant a bullet in the head was legitimate 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
