one day you’ll pay for your impiety she had said to me, you who had the luck to visit Jerusalem, and a great fear came over me, an infantile fear that she was right and that I’d end up stricken down by the wrath of the All-Powerful, before I came to my senses, pouring a little oil even holy onto some cotton was not the worst thing I’d done, far from it, does everything you do get paid for some day, maybe, Nathan Strasberg spoke to me of his parents survivors from Łódź city of Jews, now living by the blue sea, his father great fighter in the Resistance and his mother a Volksdeutsche from the city of three cultures, renamed Litzmannstadt by the Nazis, named for an obscure general who had won fame there in 1914, Łódź was a city of red brick, industrious, where Jews comprised over half of the population, Nathan’s mother a German whose family of Prussian stock had settled there in the 1880s, during the textile explosion, a militant communist who fought too for women’s rights, afterwards converted to Judaism and living in Palestine, land of the gods, in Łódź they spoke Yiddish, German, and Polish, in the spring of 1941 the ghetto is formed, 160,000 Jewish inhabitants under the orders of King Chaim Rumkowski the ambiguous, the first convoys of useless people are sent to Chełmno to die in the gas trucks — as in Belgrade that same year they use specially equipped vans to rid the Wartheland of Jews, SS drivers carry the naked corpses into the countryside to mass graves dug in the middle of the woods, revenge, revenge, that’s what Nathan Strasberg’s father has been shouting since 1942, miraculously escaped from imprisonment thanks to his German wife he joins the Polish Resistance and fights against the Nazis in the forests next to Lublin, without knowing that hundreds of thousands of his co-religionists are exterminated nearby between Sobibór and Majdanek, without knowing that the children of Łódź are gassed all together, thousands of kids emaciated and crying given to the Germans by Rumkowski the tragic, give me your children, he said, I need 20,000 children under ten, Rumkowski shouted into his microphone I am sacrificing the limbs to save the rest of the body, all the toddlers went that way, the German ogre knew how to twist the arms of the Jewish leaders convinced that work would save them, that productivity would save them, they hadn’t understood, they hadn’t understood that the monster was not rational, that its head was in other spheres, in the black clouds of destruction, and the Jews were destroyed, Strasberg the courageous wounded at the end of 1943 returns to Łódź in 1945 to realize the extent of the disaster, revenge, Nathan didn’t know exactly when his father joined the avengers of the Nakam group, after having settled his wife and sister in a safe place, the night was long, in 1946 the day has scarcely dawned, the Jewish Brigade of Palestine is billeted to Northern Italy, on the border with Austria, and secretly murders all the Nazis and fascists that fall into its clutches, with a bullet in the back of the head, Abba Kovner the partisan poet who organizes the secret emigration to Palestine wants more, he wants six million dead Germans, revenge, real revenge, with the craziest plans, he imagines poisoning the water supply of Nuremberg, he imagines killing the prisoners of war in the Langwasser camp: in the end they will manage to kill a few hundred German prisoners with arsenic, impossible to know how many, the Americans in charge of these captives being little inclined to acknowledge the massacre, before they went to Palestine for good to devote themselves to winning the independence of the State of Israel by fighting, this time, the British — revenge is sweet at the time, my fury after Andi’s death, the cataclysm I set off, we set off, in the villages around Vitez, the houses that burned, the screams, the unhappiness, and that group of civilians opposite me, no great warriors with weapons in hand but rather men in their forties in work clothes terrified by the rifle butts raining down on them their homes in flames humiliated tearful we threw them shovels to dig trenches in the middle of mines and bombardments I thought of Andi dead in his own shit his body lost taken away without our being able to fight to save it I thought of Vlaho with his arm cut off of Sergeant Mile killed with a bullet in the middle of his forehead, revenge, one of the prisoners was smiling, he was smiling the bastard, he thought we were funny, we were making him laugh with our rage, why was he smiling, why, he doesn’t have the right to smile I gave him a huge clout, he laughed, his face was dirty, his eyes half shut by bruises he kept laughing and stuck out his big black tongue at me, the other guys were looking at him, terrified, this madman was going to draw divine vengeance onto them, he was making fun of me, the retard was making fun of me, making fun of me of Andi of Vlaho of Mile of all our dead and even his own Athena breathed an immense strength into me, all the gods were behind my right arm when I took Andi’s bayonet out of its sheath, found behind his pallet, behind me as they had been behind Seyit Havranli the Turkish artilleryman and his 400-pound shell, behind Diomedes son of Tydeus when he wounds Ares himself, I let out a shout worthy of Andrija the furious I brought the long blade down on the laughing Muslim, with divine power, the power that comes from the belly, from your feet in the earth, a wave of pure wrath a perfect movement from right to left that doesn’t stop at obstacles of flesh a gesture that continues into the sky where my cry of rage rises along with the victim’s blood an inexplicable red column, his body gives a jump his shoulders stiffen his monstrous head is still laughing on the ground his eyes blinking before his torso collapses, accompanied by the incredulous murmuring of the spattered witnesses, I still have the strength to send the vile head rolling with a huge kick, not even surprised by my own power, beside myself, outside myself outside the world already in Hades paradise of warriors, for you Andi this bloody head rolling down the hill, this atrocious slicing through the soft flesh before brandishing my weapon at the sky, everyone moves away from the butchery, everyone moves away from the miracle, one of the prisoners faints and falls into the black blood of the village idiot, of the saint maybe whom I’ve just decapitated so cleanly that it’s a wonder, a medieval fresco, the martyr beheaded lies on the Bosnian soil without anyone hurrying over to recover his head on a golden platter, we go on to something else, another fire other rapes other pillages other carnages until dawn, until dawn we go back to our barracks exhausted despite the drugs our fingers a little numb because of the alcohol sitting on my pallet I bend over to take off my boots the laces are sticky with blood, the laces and the tongue, it’s disgusting, it’s disgusting my stomach contracts, that’s it, the gods have left me alone, alone in the blood and bile, to choke with disgust fatigue and remorse — I didn’t decapitate Medusa the terrifying like Caravaggio, just a poor madman, a simpleton, his thick blackish tongue pursues me, his surprised eyes, his laugh, the madman at the Milan train station had something of the same gaze, he held out his hand to me, I refused it, too bad for me, erbarme dich, mein Gott, Herz und Auge weint vor dir, bitterlich, I think of Leon Saltiel the man from Salonika, he took revenge too, he tortured the man who betrayed him to death and strangled the woman he loved, crying, he abandoned their bodies and went to a crowded cabaret to listen to Roza Eskenazi sing To Kanarini, Leon Saltiel ordered ouzo, to the sound of the rebetikas, the violin the lute the exciting voice of Roza the irreverent with her Constantinople accent, there were no more Greeks in Smyrna, almost none in Istanbul, there were no more Jews in Salonika, almost none, Agatha was dead, her eyes wide open were slowly clouding over in Stavros’s café, next to the corpse of her lover, farewell, the cabaret customers think stupidly that Leon is crying because of the music, bitterlich, the head of the Muslim madman is decomposing in my memory, next to that of the Baptist, and of the seven Tibhirine monks, erbarme dich mein Gott, erbarme dich, for death and despair are stretching around me like Ahmad’s brain on the wall in Beirut, who dragged me out of the canal in the Venice night, why, to what purpose, to go serve the forces of shadow and fill this suitcase that’s becoming heavier and heavier, the train accelerates, the train wants to arrive at its destination, like Achilles’s horses, like Achilles’s horses the train is whispering my fate into my ear, tataktatoom, tataktatoom, the train is predicting that my bloody karma will send me directly to dung beetle, directly to dung beetle without passing ape