The Deserters E-Book

Mathias Enard

• Herausgeber: Fitzcarraldo Editions
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 295

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

Fleeing a nameless war, a soldier emerges from the Mediterranean scrubland, filthy, exhausted and seeking refuge. A chance meeting forces him to rethink his journey, and the price he puts on a life. On 11 September 2001, aboard a small cruise ship near Berlin, a scientific conference pays tribute to the late Paul Heudeber, an East German mathematician, Buchenwald survivor, communist and anti-fascist whose commitment to his side of the Wall was unshaken by its collapse. The oblique pull between these two narratives – a cipher in itself – brings to light everything that is at stake in times of conflict: truth and deception, loyalty and betrayal, hope and despair. Superbly translated by Charlotte Mandell and told in Mathias Enard's typically mesmerizing, inventive prose, The Deserters lays bare the ravages of war on the most intimate aspects of life – and asks what remains of our selves in its wreckage.

Leseprobe

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‘An engrossing study of the struggle to recover one’s humanity in the aftermath of extreme violence. Told through interwoven narratives, the novel plays artfully with time and space, gently zeroing in on its central themes and spanning a wide range of human experience. The Deserters is immediately reminiscent of Coetzee: it is sparse, intelligent and hungry for the big moral questions.’ — Arianne Shahvisi, author of Arguing for a Better World

‘A powerfully elusive meditation by one of Europe’s most challenging authors.’ — Kirkus

‘I don’t know anybody who has quite [Enard’s] range…. Exquisitely written.’ — John Mitchinson, Monocle on Culture

‘Mathias Enard is one of the best contemporary French writers, and his works – ambitious, erudite, multifaceted, surprising and unconventional – are always worth reading, because they always strike a perfect balance between the best that literature can offer: pleasure and knowledge.’ — Javier Cercas, author of The Impostor

‘All of Enard’s books share the hope of transposing prose into the empyrean of pure sound, where words can never correspond to stable meanings. He’s the composer of a discomposing age.’ — Joshua Cohen, New York Times

‘A novelist like Enard feels particularly necessary right now, though to say this may actually be to undersell his work. He is not a polemicist but an artist, one whose novels will always have something to say to us.’ — Christopher Beha, Harper’s 4

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THE DESERTERS

MATHIAS ENARD

Translated by

CHARLOTTE MANDELL

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‘And I pressed against their cool cheeks my cheek which now knew nothing but the kiss of the rifle butt’ — Francis Jammes, Five Prayers for Wartime8

CONTENTS

TITLE PAGEEPIGRAPHI.II.III.IV.V.VI.VII.VIII.IX.X.XI.XII.XIII.XIV.XV.XVI.XVII.XVIII.XIX.XX.XXI.XXII.XXIII.XXIV.XXV.XXVI.XXVII.XXVIII.ABOUT THE AUTHORSCOPYRIGHT

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I.

He sets down his weapon, then with difficulty takes off his boots, their smell (excrement, musty sweat) adds even more to his exhaustion. His fingers on the frayed laces are dry matchsticks, slightly burned in places; the nails are the same colour as the boots, he’ll have to scrape them with the tip of the knife to remove the filth, mud, dried blood, but later, he doesn’t have the strength now; two toes, flesh and earth, emerge from the sock, they’re fat spattered worms crawling out of a dark trunk, knotted at the ankle.

Suddenly he wonders, as he does every morning, as he does every evening, why these shoes stink of shit, it’s inexplicable,

you can rinse them all you like in the pools of water you pass, rub them on tufts of grass that squeak, nothing to be done,

there aren’t so many dogs or wild animals, not that many, in these rocky slopes sprinkled with holm oaks, pines and thorn bushes where the rain leaves a fine light mud and the smell of flint, not shit, and it would be easy for him to believe it’s the whole countryside that’s mucid, from the sea and the hills of orange and then olive trees to the far mountains, these mountains, even himself, his own smell, not the smell of shoes, but he can’t find an answer and throws the boots against the edge of the culvert that hides him from the path, a little higher up on the slope.

He lies down on his back on the gravel, sighs, the sky is purplish-blue, the gleams of the setting sun illumine the swift clouds from below, a canvas, a screen for a firework display. Spring is almost here and with it the often-torrential rains that transform the mountains into tin cans 10pierced by bullets, powerful springs spouting from the slightest hollows, when the air smells of thyme and fruit tree flowers, white flakes scattered between the low walls by the violence of the downpour. All hell would break loose if it started raining now. But then at least it would wash his boots. His clogs, his uniform, his socks, the two pairs he owns are just as stiff, rigid, tattered. Betrayal begins with the body,

how long has it been since you last washed yourself?

four days spent walking near the ridges to avoid villages,

the last water you sprinkled yourself with smelled of petrol and left your skin oily,

you’re a long way from purity, alone under the sky ogling the comets.

Hunger forces him to straighten up and swallow without pleasure three military biscuits, the last ones, hard brown slabs, no doubt a mixture of sawdust and horse glue; for an instant he curses the war and soldiers,

you’re still one of them, you still carry weapons, ammunition, and memories of war,

you could hide your gun and cartridges somewhere and become a beggar, leave the knife too, beggars have no daggers,

the boots that stink of shit and set off barefoot,

the jacket with its colour of misery and go bare-chested,

meal over he empties his flask and plays at pissing as far as possible towards the valley.

He lies down again, this time right up against the wall of the slope, the bottom part of his bag under his head; he is invisible in the shadow, never mind the critters (red spiders, tiny scorpions, centipedes with teeth as sharp as remorse) that will gambol on his chest, slide across his almost shaven skull, walk over his beard as rough as 11a bramble bush. The rifle leaning against him, the butt under his shoulder, muzzle towards his feet. Rolled up in the piece of oiled canvas that serves as blanket and roof.

The mountain rustles; a little wind overtakes the summits, descending into the combe and vibrating between the bushes; the cries of the stars are chilling. There are no more clouds, it won’t rain tonight.

Angel, my holy guardian, protector of my body and soul, forgive me for all the sins committed on this day and deliver me from the works of the enemy, despite the warmth of the prayer the night remains a beast fed on anguish, a beast with breath of blood, cities in ruins full of mothers brandishing the mutilated corpses of their children faced with scruffy hyenas that will torture them, then leave them naked, dirty, their nipples torn with teeth under the eyes of their brothers raped in turn with truncheons, terror stretched over the country, plague, hatred, and darkness, this darkness that always envelops you and urges you towards cowardice and treason. Flight and desertion. How much time is there left to walk? The border is a few days from here, beyond the mountains that will soon become hills of red earth, planted with olive trees. It will be difficult to hide. Many villages, towns, farmers, soldiers,

you know the region,

you are home here,

no one will help a deserter,

you’ll reach the house in the mountain tomorrow,

the cabin, the hovel, you’ll take refuge there for a little while,

the cabin will protect you with its childhood,

you’ll be caressed with its memories,

sometimes sleep comes by surprise like the bullet of a marksman lying in ambush.

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II.

I have to go back over what happened over twenty years ago, on 11 September 2001, near Potsdam on the Havel, on board the cruise boat, a little river liner christened with the fine pompous name Beethoven.

Summer seemed to be wavering. The willows were still green, the days still warm, but a freezing fog would rise from the river before dawn and immense clouds seemed to be gliding over us, from the distant Baltic.

Our floating hotel had left Köpenick east of Berlin very early in the morning, on Monday. Maja was always alert, spry. She would go up to the top deck to walk, a stroll between showers, deck chairs and deck games. The green domes and golden spire of the Berlin cathedral captivated her, from afar, when we arrived. She was imagining, she said, all the little gilt angels leaving their stone prison to fly off into a cloud of acanthus leaves blown by the sun.

The water of the Spree was sometimes a dull, dark blue, sometimes a glowing green. During the preceding weeks, all of Germany had been rocked by storms; their aftermaths swelled the Havel and the Spree, which usually were quite low at summer’s end.

We navigated through the swirling water.

I remember the confluence of the Spree, the little wooded islands, the salt light that dusted the tall dark poplars and the muddy stream of the canal that the ship’s wake mixed with the polished water of the river.

Maja and I were sitting in canvas chairs, in the sun on the aft deck, astern as one should say, and we were watching as everything fled: the landscape opened up as if the ship’s prow were spreading wide the green substance of leaves. 13

We were celebrating (a few months late) the tenth anniversary of Paul’s radical reform of the Institute, as well as paying homage to the founder himself. Or, more precisely, we were celebrating the tenth anniversary of the Institute’s ‘unification’, in spring 1991, and the fortieth anniversary of its creation in 1961. But mostly we were celebrating Paul’s work as a whole. I don’t think anyone was missing – among the historical ones, the ones from the East, they were all there; almost all of the new members, the colleagues from Berlin and elsewhere, were in attendance. Some, including Linden Pawley, Robert Kant and a few of the French scholars, even came from abroad. This floating conference was called the ‘Paul Heudeber Days’; two sessions a day were scheduled: number theory and algebraic topology, along with one discussion of the history of mathematics in which I was slated to take part.

The only person absent was Paul himself.

Maja had just celebrated her eighty-third birthday.

Maja drank litres of tea.

Maja was cheerful and sad and silent and talkative.

We all knew she had nothing to do there, on board the Beethoven for a mathematics conference; we all knew she was indispensable to it.

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Prof. Dr Paul Heudeber Elsa-Brändström-Strasse 32 1100 Berlin Pankow RDA

Maja Scharnhorst Heussallee 33 5300 Bonn 1

Sunday, 1 September 1968

Maja Maja Maja

Let’s take away the possessive: love stripped bare.

It grew in absence and night: the lack of you is a source. A body, a ring – you are the seal of all things, unique. Your distance brings the infinite close. You alone allow me to hide myself from time, from evil, from the tides of melancholy. I wonder what there was of my youth, when I hear its cries.

I block my ears with clever calculations.

I hurtle over surfaces over which no one has ever trod.

I remember September 1938. Fire smouldered in iron; our fire in irons.

We remained standing faced with the ruins to come.

We held on, connected to each other by the force of memory.

Just as we hold firm today, in fear and hope faced with the world in front of us.

Irina has just turned seventeen, barely the blink of an eye for a star.

I can’t wait for you to come back.

I’ll make some concessions; I’ll visit you in the West.

I’ve read your beautiful text, in that horrible journal, on the Prague affair.

I miss our clashes. 15

I leave Tuesday for Moscow, a conference.

I wonder how they can think during these dangerous times, over there.

Moscow of thick towers and comrades.

Write to me.

To say ‘love and kisses’ says very little.

Paul             

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Most people travelling on trains prefer to sit facing forward.

A historian is someone who has chosen not to sit facing forward.

A historian of the sciences is a historian who, facing backwards, towards the rear, unlike most historians does not look out the window.

A historian of mathematics is a historian of the sciences who, facing backwards, eyes closed, tries to demonstrate that Arabs invented trains.

No one laughed.

It should be said that I was the only historian in the conference. All the others were mathematicians, physicists or, worse, logicians. All facing forward. Looking towards innovation, invention, discovery. I was the only one who was less interested in the glorious demonstrations and inventions of tomorrow than in the sweet meanderings of the past. Meanderings of the past that project their light to the furthest limits of the future, and I felt, during this ‘Paul Heudeber Days’ colloquium on the Havel, that this audience of scholars would only listen to my talk on Nasir al-Din Tusi and irrational numbers with a suitable respect for the circumstances, full of consideration for me and my mother, who despite her age wouldn’t miss a second of the lectures, between her strolls on the deck. 

Maja was the source of the idea for this fluvial conference; I think I remember that Jürgen Thiele, the general secretary, had suggested ‘an afternoon walk on the Spree or the Havel’ at the end of the conference, which was initially supposed to take place at the Institute in Berlin; she’d made a face, the Spree or the Havel, it’s still Berlin at best, Brandenburg at worst, why not the Danube, and Jürgen Thiele had looked surprised, the Danube, but that’s very far away, and I imagine Maja had burst out 17laughing, OK, go with the Havel, but at least the whole conference should be on a boat, and Jürgen Thiele was very embarrassed (he told me later) since he didn’t want to refuse my mother anything for these days of homage, but he had limited funds – the business of the river conference continued to seem absurd to him, a whim of old age.

Nevertheless, Thiele had the surprise of receiving two letters on the same day, a few weeks before the call to participate in the ‘Days’ was published: one informed him that the mathematics faculty at the University of Potsdam was offering to co-organize the ‘Paul Heudeber Days’ with our Institute, and the other that the Georg Cantor Foundation was granting (without any solicitation on Thiele’s part) an enormous subsidy that made possible its river setting (aberrant though it was, he thought without speaking).

Paul’s tragic death a few years ago had deeply affected the scientific community; everyone was eager to participate, and even though most of the organizers (Jürgen Thiele especially) didn’t know the reason for Maja’s wish, no one wanted to disappoint her. These two letters arrived in the nick of time, and Jürgen could only suspect, rightly no doubt, that Maja had picked up her pen or telephone: although theoretically retired from politics ever since the 1998 federal elections, she still had the power to attract ‘benevolent attention’ to nascent projects. The money from the Georg Cantor Foundation was welcome; Jürgen Thiele, as co-organizer, got in touch with the University of Potsdam, which was celebrating its tenth anniversary, Paul having helped found it: many of its maths professors had been his students. 

The ‘Paul Heudeber Days’, then, would take place on the Havel, on board a cruise ship capable, in its 18conference room, of hosting the fifty or so attendees; participants from outside of Berlin were mostly put up at a hotel opposite Peacock Island, or Pfaueninsel, located technically in Wannsee – a hotel with a medieval or alpine inn name, The White Owl, an inn Maja assured me (I wondered how she could be so sure) had existed at least since the sixteenth century, but whose present building – Doric columns supporting a monumental balcony, windows with green shutters, climbing roses, like in a fairytale, softening the façade with their countless flowers, all dark red, veering to black – had been rebuilt by Karl Schinkel in the first third of the nineteenth century. The White Owl was lost in the middle of the forest on the edge of an immense lake crossed by the Havel. Only the keynote speakers and other conference VIPs were put up on board the Beethoven, since there weren’t many cabins; daytime ‘sailings’, however, were open to everyone: Potsdam-Elbe on Wednesday, a day of actual homage, centered on Paul’s work, then Peacock Island-Köpenick via Spandau on Thursday to close the festivities. Only a few prestigious guests had arrived on Sunday to take advantage of the boat’s ‘pre-sailing’ from Köpenick to Wannsee, and then enjoy an additional cruise day through Berlin on Monday.

Jürgen Thiele was full of empathy, confusion and goodwill. Even though he was still the Institute’s general secretary, Thiele took on this responsibility only out of loyalty to Paul, whose student he had been thirty years before; he was the first to admit that he was tired of organizing, getting things ready, giving orders – arranging a Christmas lunch throws me into a panic, he confessed. So a conference with fifty people, imagine! The University of Potsdam had assigned him a co-organizer, a young graduate student writing her doctoral thesis on number 19theory named Alma Sejdić, who was trying to demonstrate a corollary to Paul’s First Conjecture. This addition turned out to be as disastrous as it was hilarious: instead of adding to each other, these two forces seemed either to be pointlessly combining, or cancelling each other out. Things forgotten were forgotten twice, blunders doubled. It was like a drawing made by two ballpoint pens attached with a rubber band: parallel lines never joining, despite all their efforts, constrained by Euclid himself.

Jürgen Thiele must have mustered all his diplomacy to avoid vexing the University of Potsdam, which didn’t understand why it had to finance, a few kilometres from its campus, the rental of a luxury river boat – but Jürgen Thiele had pulled from his sleeve the grant from the Georg Cantor Foundation, and everyone found the idea of a floating conference thrilling.

And so, after a few months of this ballet in chaos, we landed, Maja and I, as planned, on Sunday 9 September, in Köpenick, in the company of Linden Pawley, whose flight from New York had set down in Tegel that very morning, the inevitable Robert Kant of Cambridge, and Jürgen Thiele – there were indeed five luxury cabins all prepared for us.

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III.

Every morning since he left, the cold has awakened him just before dawn. He is shivering. No sudden movements, so that the dew, dark pearls on the canvas, doesn’t stream down. Patiently, by folding his tent into a furrow, he manages to fill his flask with a few ounces of this icy dawn sweat to drink, which will be his only morning meal.

He sets off, once his reluctant feet are wrapped in the wretched green spongy knit, still wet, in the direction of destiny, North, for chaos and oblivion must be named. Once again he hesitates to leave the rifle behind, it’s heavy, and its strap is uncomfortable, too short ever since he cut it to make a belt from it, with the knife that’s still so sharp, yet another sign of a dangerous solitude, drunk with blood, he doesn’t think anymore, he’s already walking when the first rays of sun root out the shadows from the rocks. These needles of light animate the sparrows and warblers and titmice, and the movements of their wings follow the train of the song of morning.

If he’s thinking so much about birds, if he’s so caught up in their presence and song, it’s because they rouse hunger in him – it would be so easy to hide out, nose to the wind, with the rifle, to wait for one of those little feathered creatures to betray itself, to shoot and eat it, but the power of the weapon of war would leave nothing but feathers, the sound of gunfire would echo far into the hills, and even if a fat pheasant or partridge stumbled into his line of sight, it would have to be cooked, and he has no intention of interrupting his march for long or revealing himself with fire or smoke.

He has resolved to reach the house.

You could find it even on a moonless night,

the cabin, 21

feel it advancing in the daylight between the holm oaks, scattered by the dryness; a few lentisks are sheltering among the rocks, freeing as the walker passes their medicinal smell, from some far-off pharmacy; he looks out for the fresh wild basil that spring causes to proliferate in the mountains and chews for a long time on a sprig, bitter, acidic, peppery – arbutus berries still survive in winter like forgotten Christmas decorations, coarse and red, they taste like overripe strawberries, bland as oblivion.

These fruits are tiny stars, planets in arm’s reach,

little moons reddened by desire and cunning,

the sun, at each step, illumines the petals of the dogwood flowers, their bright yellow is dimmed by no leaf, on their still-bare branches the first fissure in winter opens up by magic.

He walks like the last man, in the restless rustling of the mountain.

He envies the black spots of aeroplanes or distant birds of prey.

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Overcome by remembering, arse on a rock – one of those stones veering to blue-grey, which warm up quickly in the sun and smell of metal and gun-flint, smooth as they are hard: was there an initial shudder, a harsh wind, premise of the logic of brutality, a bellow preceding the sovereign rutting of war, he thinks not,

it’s the surprise that sat you down there,

soon the black snakes will emerge from their holes and the males will set out in search of females, 

he unlaces his boots, undoes the knots and takes them off. The leather is gnawed away by wear, water and cold. The smell of shit hasn’t left him. His hands are rough; his white palm is starred with darker callouses, stiff from squeezing wooden handles for too long. His tobacco-stained fingers end in yellowing nails streaked with black filth, you can see the outline of veins, in his thumb and along his wrist; his cheeks are coarse with a patchy beard, his hair is greasy, in clumps, stuck together in darker strands with dried blood,

you’ll reach the house before nightfall,

the house, the cabin, the shack – it rests deep in his memories and hopes. Childhood country cairn. At the edge of the enemy lines. High enough in the mountain that no one will venture there. Concealed enough from the mountain people so that he can seclude himself there. For a while. The roof might be partly collapsed, the cypress pillars, round, still gleaming, will stand alone, without tiles, between the uneven stones. The very low door. The front porch, its wooden struts reminiscent of the arms of the Father, its two stone posts, unevenly squared, the columns of the temple of a brutal God. The façade of unplastered quarried stone. The roof made of old yellow clay tiles,

you can sculpt faces with the knife in the pillars like 23you used to,

you’re so hungry it’s frightening,

you’re hungry down to the roots of your hair,

imagining the little grill in the cabin’s porch and a fowl crackling on the embers makes him writhe in raging pain,

you are thirsty,

he drains his metal flask. The lovely March sun is tinted orange. A wind is blowing from the sea,

you walk forward,

you must move forward even if you stumble a little, clumsy with dizziness. He lets thoughts fly away as soon as they’re born. He chases them away with his feet, makes them flee by walking. He transmits his thoughts to his boots, scattering them in the pebbles. Then silence inside, until the return of the great fixed star of hunger.

The treachery of illusion, the perfume of spring returning.

The sea, its violet plains fringed with white.

So high up in the mountain the sea is nothing but a threatening line, a horizon of pain.

His feverishness distorts him: the more he walks, the further away the house recedes.

You’re making too much noise,

you shouldn’t trust the scree looming over the cabin,

lie down in the sunset and observe strange movements – abandoned dogs made feral by war, deserters, villagers, distant cousins, all of them, far from their relics, on the path to the hermitage, to escape suffering, to be done with the long Lent of blood,

Spring suddenly takes his breath away. A spring of the beating of wings, of flowers on rocks, of thorn bushes, of white and blue rosemary, of the buzzing of the beetles’ elytra – the track he was following sloped down a few dozen metres to the sea; he takes off his clothes stiff with 24filth, stained with grease and dried blood, finds himself bare-chested licked by the seabreeze and blinded by the power of the sun whose burning heat he feels on his shoulders, on the long scar streaking across his back, before the bag’s cloth covers it. Tired of the too-short gun strap, he takes his weapon in his arms like a hunter, his left hand on the stock, his right on the grip the way you grasp a fowl’s neck, firmly, casually; the breech is open, he sees the brass of a cartridge case in the cartridge, once again he wants to get rid of the object of misfortune,

it’s heavier than a child in your arms,

you should abandon it, hide it there in a bush, a few hours’ walk from the cabin,

he plays with the well-oiled breech, impossible to get rid of it,

Fate in front of you and all these things, the remains, the traces, and the great mourning of the future,

you’ll be what the Lord wants,

force or forgiveness, nothing, like this yellow spider under your boot, crushed despite its power for death, crushed despite its sting, all that we don’t know about ourselves, we bend beneath the world of yesterday, we bend beneath our sins, we bend beneath the prospect of the next day, our Father give us this day our daily oblivion, in the too-numerous steps that wear down our soul, metre after metre, path after path, track after track, this sudden emotion comes from nearby – one day walking – from the village below, halfway up the slope, where the orange trees are little by little invading the plains, where the olive trees make themselves scarce on the terraces with their stone walls, where a few towers appear among the houses with gentle arches, with their broken domes between the green medlar trees, lit up with orange fruit in June, among the noble fig trees bent with age whose figs 25hum with insects in autumn, just as the trellis shaded the terrace in front of the father’s house, a wine was pressed there that quickly stung the tongue, purple, troubling and intoxicating – the green demijohns, woven round with straw, piled up in the darkest, coolest recesses, until they were cleaned in September to receive the new vintage, and the red and black clouds of tannin clinging there inside their glass shoulders were scrubbed away with a metal bottle brush,

you’ll have to hide, they must be looking for you,

you mustn’t come across anyone, conceal yourself from men and beasts, from shepherds and dogs, swallow your own name,

the closer your footsteps bring you to the cabin, to the mountain house, the greater the danger grows, in the village everyone knows, no doubt, rumours swell like the war itself, everyone knows, or thinks they know,

the afternoon swells like thirst and reddens like hunger.

He pauses in the shade of a holm oak. He sits down on a root. The sun drenches the valley in front of him. He dreams of rain. He shakes his flask over his tongue one more time. He unties his shoes, hesitates to take them off, he’s so tired he won’t put them back on if he removes them. The smell seems to have disappeared for an instant but returns, even stronger, unexpectedly, 

you stink of blood and shit,

you stink of sleep and hunger,

a child could kill you with one punch,

he counts the days since he left the city. Since his flight from the barracks. Four days since he launched the vehicle into the ravine,

you’ve travelled almost a hundred kilometres on foot in the mountain, 26

the holm oak’s root is hard under your buttocks,

your bent knees hurt,

he leans against the black trunk, stretches out his legs, gazes into the valley (almond trees, hazelnut trees, prickly pear trees) he knows so well. He worked these terraces, weeded around the trees, removed countless stones. The sun that he knows. The fringe of sea beyond the hills that he knows. The fear that he carries with him. That black smoke on the horizon marks the beginning of enemy territory. There, only just. The remains of enemy territory as it’s reduced from shell to shell.

At the next turn in the path, when he passes the old retention basin for the stream, dried up now, he’ll be two hours’ walk from the house. He’ll reach it almost an hour before sunset,

you know where you’ll take cover, 

behind the big rock and make sure without being seen that no one’s hanging around the cabin. Behind the rock and observe. Observe the last insects in the twilight. Listen to the birds and stones in the twilight.

He takes out the knife. The blade is as grey as it is blue. He dreams of a hare, leaping out of a hollow, suddenly within reach of the dagger. He draws a cross on the tree root. A short thin cross. A sign. He would have been capable of drinking the warm blood of that hare if it had appeared, he’s so thirsty,

you’re feverish like those areas in your memory,

for hours he’s been searching for an orange tree or even a lemon tree on whose branches there might still be a few forgotten fruits. Opposite the cabin is an immense lemon tree planted by his grandfather that bears (or rather bore, it’s been a long time since he saw it last) dozens of juicy yellow fruits, with thick skins, which leave on your hands a scent of linen and flowers, a 27perfume of purity, purity pleases the Lord,

there’s also an orange tree, they used to weave crowns from its flowers for weddings,

you’re the least pure of creatures,

he finds the strength to start off again, with his painful knees, his thighs hard as rocks, his scratched feet; the further away the war gets the more his body falls to pieces, old mechanism that only habit kept functioning. He’s almost incapable of climbing the few kilometres still separating him from the cabin, from the house, from the purple mists and hollows of clouds. It’s his rifle that carries him and guides him, the immense needle of a magic compass, the wand of a douser of death,

you can hardly walk, you’re staggering, you’re making too much noise,

he chases away the tiny flies that pursue him and always catch up with him. The sun burns his skin that emerged fragile from the cold of war, he’s a lizard revived by warmth; everything in him is stretched between fear and exhaustion. 

His footsteps suddenly (rolling stones, quivering branches, the sound of wings) startle a pigeon a few metres away. He snaps the breech closed to arm the rifle and shoulders it – he doesn’t fire,

you’re too close to the villages, mustn’t attract the attention of a shepherd who might be passing by,

he watches the bird disappear behind a copse of holm oaks to find its companion,

these fowl always travel in pairs,

they’re the inseparable couple of the mountain, the inevitable ones of spring, along with the nightingales. He engages the gun’s safety. On top of the pass between those two hills dotted with rocks the cabin will come into sight. He observes the clouds amassing suddenly grey 28over the line of the sea. A cloud veils the sun. The wind transforms the drops of sweat on his shoulders and chest into as many frozen pins and needles. He had forgotten the dexterity of the cold – he forces himself to pause to put his jacket back on, with pain and dread, it has become stiff with all the fluids filling its fibres,

you stink of the slaughterhouse, that’s the stench you reek of, the stench of guts and the stream of water over blackened tiles,

a stench of meat,

he runs his left hand over his face, feels the roughness of his beard, like a kind of bark. The sun’s disappearance signifies the return of altitude as much as of shadow: he is shivering. Behind him, a little further down, a cottony mist is spreading between folds in the hills, a white fog on red earth, the sea has disappeared. Steel eats away at the horizon. He launches all his strength onto the rocks to cross them, onto the slopes to climb them. The pass is bellowing, the pass is freezing his face. The wind flattens his face and shoulders. He clings to his rifle and leans forward. Stumble by stumble he reaches the shelter of a rock, a few dozen metres lower down. He leans against it,

the house is down below on your right,

he observes, there is the roof of tiles more yellow than red, a single-sloping roof, leaning against the mountain in the back, he glimpses the porch, the short chimney, the partition wall made of quarried stone, the low walls around the abandoned garden, not an animal in sight, in the distance a raptor is spiralling, a tiny solitary spot in the now milky sky, the paddock on the right of the garden is empty, the tall almond tree in front of the house has no leaves yet, the lemon tree is green with that solemn green of citrus trees, eternal, a sepulchral green with yellow glints in the shifting light of the absent sun, no smoke is 29rising from the chimney, an odour of thyme and snow floats in the air,

if you had binoculars, you’d search for traces,

signs of someone’s presence, shepherds, farmers, refugees, creatures, angels, demons,

there’s just the brief hesitant plain that breaks as it nears the sea, only the wind crossing the walls can be heard, his back to the rock hands around his knees the rifle on his right bag at his feet like a motionless dog he waits, he waits for the time he planned for, the two hours left before the darkest part of the night, reassured by the presence of the cabin, by the lemons in the lemon tree, by the old orange tree invisible to him next to the hazelnut tree beyond the cabin to the right of the wall,

all urgency abolished by the sudden presence of childhood,

wingbeat by wingbeat,

wandering backwards,

you wait for the apparition, Lord thy invisible face, you wait for Sirius, you wait for Orion, you wait for thy face, Lord,

your arse is frozen by the scraps of winter the mountain always harbours,