Crouched by the window, you went on picking up the fragments of glass. Calm, resigned, unbearable in the tenderness of your silent presence, because of the madness of it, because of the injustice of fate that had assigned this house to you with its shattered windows, and this intimacy with death and the ghosts of those nine characters who had invaded your life.
My angry words remained unspoken. In our fragmented lives where the unforeseen was becoming the only logic, this table, wiped clean, that you were about to set, the way you did before the fighting began, this simple action made perfect sense. "I'll soon be finished," you said, standing up, and talked about the couple who were due to replace us. That, among other things, was our task: to prepare the ground for the colleagues who would take over the network after the end of the war. I noticed a slight cut on your left hand marked with blood. The sharp edge of a splinter, no doubt. Absurdly, amid all these deaths, this tiny wound pained me greatly.
That night I told you about the child who learned to walk around a block of granite stuck in the middle of the house built by his father.
The words I had held back when I saw you on the terrace welled up a year later. We were in the house belonging to a couple of doctors sent by a humanitarian organization, this being our identity at that rime. The villa next door was empty. Its owners had left as soon as the first skirmishes in the streets had begun. And now from their garden came the piercing cries of peacocks which the soldiers were amusing themselves by torturing. One of the birds, its neck broken, was writhing on the ground, the other lay there, spitted by an iron bar. Glancing occasionally at this massacre, I was stirring papers and photographs in a bucket, where they were slowly being consumed by smoky little flames. There was nothing left to steal in our house, it had already been ransacked. But after a week of looting such activities were becoming more and more unmotivated, almost an art form, like the torture inflicted on the peacocks. And I knew from experience that it was an unmotivated search that was often the most dangerous. The soldiers shot down the last of the birds, the most agile, spraying it with bullets-a maelstrom of feathers and blood-then made off toward the center of the city, guided by the bursts of gunfire. I crushed the ashes, mixed them up and threw them into the middle of a parched flower bed. And set about waiting for you, that is to say, rushing out regularly into the chaos of streets invaded by yelling surges of people, who seemed to be simultaneously pursuing one another and running away from those they were pursuing. I encountered a road block, allowed myself to be searched, tried to argue. And reflected that if they refrained from killing me it was because the infernal din prevailing in the city was such that the soldiers could not hear me, otherwise my very first word would have unleashed their fury. I returned home. I saw the empty house, with its window overlooking the garden next door, in the middle of which a peacock was pinned to the ground by a stake. You were somewhere in this city. In distress, I guessed at your presence, perhaps in the wealthy quarter, with its cluster of glass towers, two of which were currently surmounted by smoke, or else in the poor quarter, in the alleys near the canal encrusted with filth. I went out again, hurried toward each crowd gathering around a person who could be heard giving orders or whose execution was being prepared. In one courtyard, as if this square had been cut off from all the madness of the city, I came upon a seated woman leaning against a wall, who seemed far away, her eyes open wide, her cheek distorted by a ball of khat, which her tongue was slackly moving around. And in the street men were dragging a half-naked body along the ground, which passersby tried to trample on with roars of delight.
When you came home there was still enough daylight to see the fine tracery of cuts on your face. "The windshield…" you murmured, and you stood facing me for a few seconds, staring at me in silence. On your forehead the scratches you had wiped clean when you came in were once more filling with blood. I was silent, too, stunned by the words that had just come into my mind but could not be spoken, "In any event you wouldn't have died." Or rather, "Even if you'd died it would have changed nothing between us." I was particularly struck by the serenity, almost joy, that these strange, unspeakable, apparently cruel words had given me. I had tumbled into a dazzling light, far, far away from this city, somewhere beyond our life. I began speaking to you in harsh tones, harsher and harsher the more touching and vulnerable you became in your evening routines: you undressed, went into the bathroom, asked me to help. I poured out a stream of water, drawing more from time to time from our reservoirs, the vessels that stood along the wall, and I continued talking, almost shouting, working up my indignation as if to convince myself that my luminous tumble had been simply an illusion brought on by tension.
"Do you know what our lives remind me of? Those samurais from World War Two who lay low in the jungle and remained at war fifteen years after the fighting had ended! No, it's worse than that. At least they laid down their weapons when they learned the truth. While we… It's true, we're about as much use as those madmen who ended up shooting at ghosts. We're chasing ghosts, too! We spent six months getting close to that idiot of a military attaché. Three months in Rome at the height of summer to arrange an informal ten-minute interview. I loathe that city! When I'm in that tourist bazaar I become a fool. We had to spend all those hours in that moth-eaten archive because our man was fanatical about uncial script or whatever that stupid stuff was. Then we had to locate him here- pure chance, of course. A chance about as broad as a shotgun cartridge in the magazine of a pistol. Of course our little strategists at the Center need their spectacular, instant results to earn their promotions. So now, quick as a wink, we have to recruit some guy the service has had its eye on for years. And to crown it all, he's just leaving. Did you hear his perfectly pleasant laugh? 'Oh, what excellent timing! The fighting's breaking out just when, as it happens, I was planning to take my leave.' And off he goes. Six months of work and several good chances of being bumped off in this filthy tropical climate. And all for nothing. No, sorry, I nearly forgot. We've obtained one piece of information of the first importance. The mines that are going to blow up the people here are of Italian manufacture. I guess you'll get a citation for that. Why are you laughing?"
I could see your smile reflected in the mirror in front of which you were drying your hair, tilting your head first one way, then the other. You did not answer me, gathering up your hair behind your head. The corners of your eyes stretched toward your temples and gave you the look of an Asian woman. I was silent, suddenly realizing that my sense of tumbling into the light had not been imaginary. That vision of clarity and space, taking us far away from the world, had come from your face, from your look, from that procession of days that lost itself in your half-closed eyes. "Even if you'd died it would have changed nothing between us." You came over to me and for a long moment laid your brow against my shoulder. And that night when I got up to take over the watch from you and let you sleep, you told me you were not sleepy. You began to talk about a day in winter, a house on the shores of a frozen lake. In this house there was a clock driven by weights, the chain had been tied in a knot by some wretched joker. This knot obliged your mother to raise the weights quite frequently. She had to watch out lest the knot should jam the machinery. And this vague domestic uneasiness contrasted in the child's head with the calm that prevailed around the lake, in the snow-covered forest.