Zone. Mathias Enard

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

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