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  This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously.

  Copyright © 2016 by Editions Actes Sud

  First publication 2019 by Europa Editions

  Translation by Alison Anderson

  Original Title: Écoutez nos défaites

  Translation copyright © 2019 by Europa Editions

  All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

  Cover Art by Emanuele Ragnisco

  www.mekkanografici.com

  Cover photo © David et Myrtille /Arcangel images

  ISBN 9781609455026

  Laurent Gaudé

  HEAR OUR DEFEATS

  Translated from the French

  by Alison Anderson

  HEAR OUR DEFEATS

  For Alexandra

  At midnight, when suddenly you hear

  an invisible procession going by

  with exquisite music, voices,

  don’t mourn your luck that’s failing now,

  work gone wrong, your plans

  all proving deceptive—don’t mourn them uselessly:

  as one long prepared, and full of courage,

  say goodbye to her, to Alexandria who is leaving.

  Above all, don’t fool yourself, don’t say

  it was a dream, your ears deceived you:

  don’t degrade yourself with empty hopes like these.

  As one long prepared, and full of courage,

  as is right for you who were given this kind of city,

  go firmly to the window

  and listen with deep emotion,

  but not with the whining, the pleas of a coward:

  listen—your final pleasure—to the voices,

  to the exquisite music of that strange procession,

  to say goodbye to her, to the Alexandria you are losing.

  —CONSTANTINE CAVAFY

  The God Abandons Antony1

  1From C. P. Cavafy: Collected Poems translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard. Published by Princeton University Press. Copyright © 1972 by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard.

  I

  ZURICH

  Everything that accumulates inside us, year after year, without our noticing: the faces we thought we’d forgotten, sensations, ideas we were sure we had fixed so they would endure but which then disappear, return, disappear again, a sign that beyond our consciousness something is alive in us that escapes us but transforms us, everything that moves in that place, advancing darkly, year after year, subconsciously, until one day it surfaces and we are almost seized with fright, because it becomes clear that time has passed and we don’t know if it will be possible to live with all these words, all these moments we’ve experienced and endured, and which end up freighting us, in the way we might refer to a ship. Perhaps that is what we call wisdom: this collection of everything—the sky of Africa, children’s promises, car chases through the medina in Tangiers, the face of Shaveen the Kurdish fighter with her long black braids, all of that, the names that were used, the meetings that were arranged, the men who were killed and those who were protected; personally I cannot—wisdom about what? This living collection has not helped me to be more insightful, nor does it weigh upon me, no, it’s something else: it sucks me in. More and more often I feel as if my mind is being called upon to explore this inner landscape. The angry crowd on the road between Misrata and Sirte, the fear I try to master but which is welling up inside me, the café blanc in Beirut, that very particular sound of heavy weaponry in the outskirts of Benghazi amid a rebel army in full debacle, those moments, all too numerous, when I thought I was done for, and then the intoxication that comes afterwards, mine alone, of realizing I’m still alive, and there’s no one who knows or can share that joy, all of that, and the airplanes streaking the sky above Mali on their way to bomb the positions I have just passed on to them, the heat, the strange moments at airports, in transit between two war zones, where I wander around the duty free unable to buy a thing, as if that world, the one of cartons of tax-free cigarettes and pyramids of whisky bottles, was no longer mine. It has all become an entire world that lives and writhes and sometimes, in the middle of the night, brings forth an image: the kids playing at exploding the bullets they’ve found on the ground in the Shi’ite neighborhoods of Beirut, the softness of an evening in the garden at the ambassador’s residence in Bamako, it all calls to me as if from now on another world might be possible, a world to explore and understand, the world I carry inside me. And I feel it today as I walk along the lakefront toward Bellevueplatz: there’s something that has changed in me and that I cannot qualify, something growing and sucking me in. I know it cannot be seen yet. I know that a few hours from now, when I am face-to-face with Auguste, I will be the man I have always been: Assem Graieb. Once again I will use this name, it’s not mine but I’ve grown accustomed to it, Assem Graieb, I’ve been with the agency for over ten years. When I happen to meet the young recruits during an official ceremony at the boulevard Mortier in Paris, they look at me with respect, because although they don’t know exactly what I’ve done, they have seen the list of the territories I’ve covered: Afghanistan, the Sahel, Libya, Iraq—and that is enough to impress them. Among themselves they refer to me, to Assem Graieb, as “a hunter”—and they are right, I’ve headed so many operations over the years that I have become a hunter, a killer for the Republic, constantly on the hunt for new targets. I will always be that man to all of them, because in their eyes Assem Graieb lives on, identical to himself, but personally I know that something is growing inside me, and it is changing me, and someday it may open like a huge gaping internal mouth—and who knows what I will do then . . .

  When he asked me where I was from and I said Iraq, I could see in his eyes that he knew my country. Then he looked astonished, and came out with one of those stock phrases I hear when I tell people my nationality: “It’s not too hard . . . ?” But he said that just to make it seem innocuous. I could tell. In his gaze, just before that, he knew my country, and that simple word, Iraq, had been enough to take him there. Later on, in the evening, while we were still at the bar, he brought it up again and said, “Where in Iraq?” “Baghdad,” I said, and again I saw that merely evoking the name of my city was enough for him to go there in his mind. He made less of an effort to hide it. He remained silent for a long time. And I didn’t speak either. Then he gave a gentle smile and I knew we would go up to his room, I knew we would make love. Not just because of Baghdad, but because he had decided to stop acting the man who doesn’t know, because the second time he didn’t ask one of those questions I get so often: “And do you still go back there . . . ?” No. He just contented himself with the images of that city that were inside him, and he took his time. I immediately knew he was in the military. Or something like that. I told him so. There, in the bar. Before he took me gently by the hand, the way a boy in high school does when he wants to slip away from the classroom with his sweetheart to find somewhere more discreet. In that room where we could see the Limmat flowing past, and where we were now the last patrons, I said, “You’re in the military, aren’t you.” And he laughed. He didn’t deny it. He even said, “Is it that obvious . . . ?” Then what might have been a joke: “So I’ll have to change jobs.” I knew because he agreed, all evening, not to hide anything. And I didn’t ask any questions he couldn’t have answered. He smiled when I said “military.” He took some time to think about the landscapes of Iraq that he carried inside him when I said “Baghdad.” He didn’
t lie. So I followed him, and we went upstairs. I stumbled, I think, in the corridor on the fourth floor. The thick carpet muffled the sound but we laughed. I’d had a lot to drink. So had he. I had to put my hand in front of my mouth. I was carrying one of my shoes in the other hand. I was walking lopsidedly and he was laughing. That hand of his, holding me by the waist, I loved it right from the start. I don’t know how long I’ve been meeting men in hotel bars. In Paris. Geneva. New York. He wasn’t the first. I started after I split up with Marwan. Now and again one of them is surprised. That I’m an Iraqi woman. As if that should stop the body from desiring, should stop “the despair need to love.” Marwan liked to quote Éluard. That is one thing of his I have kept. And a liking for sex, too, perhaps . . . I remember how when we made love in Alexandria in that apartment he had rented, overlooking the sea, we were so eager to make the most of those hours he had stolen from his life, from his wife, from Cairo, from the museum . . . I would have Marwan all to myself, just a little, for a few hours a month, which might add up to a few days a year . . . I loved those moments. I thought I was free. Poetry, love, and meals at odd times, in the street, at a sidewalk café in the port, at a time when others are having their siesta or drinking a coffee. I loved all that. Then came solitude, always. And waiting. Until he left me. It took me by surprise. I was convinced I’d be the one to leave. I remember that day: he arrived late, frowning. I didn’t immediately notice that there’d be no holding one another, no lovers’ walks, that there would be only a quick, curt exchange, and that this time Marwan had come in order to go away for good. It was afterwards, yes, it must have been, that I began to say yes to men in hotels.

  The air is cool, invigorating. I should have walked briskly, the way I so often have on similar occasions. I am about to meet Auguste, my branch chief. He will be assigning a new mission. It’s all starting up again. I will be Assem Graieb, or someone else. I will be a Frenchman of Algerian, or Tunisian, or Libyan origin. So many lives, in succession, and danger, always, making them intense. But I am walking slowly, and at this moment my mind is filled with the little cries of excitement the chess player at the Lindenhof kept making. Why am I thinking about him again? I don’t know. I watched him yesterday for a long time. More than an hour. I sat there on a bench by these two huge chessboards the city of Zurich set up in a garden overlooking the town, and you can see the Limmat flowing from there, just as Roman soldiers would have seen it. I watched the man as he wiggled this way and that, suppressing his madness so that he could play and not lose the thread of the game. I stayed for a long time and eventually I heard the others say his name, his successive opponents, for there were many of them—students, notables, pensioners—and they all ended up handing on their place, vexed at having lost so quickly: Ferruccio der Verrückte. For hours, yes, as if I were hypnotized, I observed the twitching of his shoulders, the grimace of his mouth, the way he had of raising his eyebrows and suddenly leaning forward as if someone had punched him in the stomach. He was crazy, Ferruccio, and couldn’t sit still, he would take great strides along the ground on the chessboard or fiddle with the wooden pieces, which were knee high, as if he were commanding a living army. Ferruccio: he’s the one I can hear as I walk along. And I am also thinking about the hotel room I have just left behind me, bathed in a lovely morning light, with the bed and its rumpled sheets, the room she left before me. And it is only now, by the banks of the Limmat, as I am coming to the last bridge before the lake, that I remember I told her to meet me there, on the Bellevueplatz, the same place I am supposed to meet Auguste so he can introduce me to our American contact, but one hour earlier, and I cannot think why I did that, why I made that appointment with her. In my mind Ferruccio is still pacing back and forth, turning, swallowing his adversary’s pieces, making those shrill little cries, and there’s no way of knowing which he dreads more, defeat, or the solitude that will follow his victory, when the notable or the student, as vexed as all those who went before, will walk away, giving a wave of helplessness, conceding that yes, Ferruccio was better, and leaving him there, unvanquished but alone. He plays well, very well. He is lively and farsighted, but on his face there is always an anxiousness that contorts his features, as if he were sorry to be winning, as if he hoped someone would beat him at last so it would calm the tics that eat away at him and appease the inner commotion he tries so hard to contain. Unless what he is actually hoping for is a game that will never end, something that will absorb him utterly and wholly, then at last the world would be dismissed and he, the madman, will find relief. All that remains will be the chess pieces, the diagonals, the advances, the traps, the sacrifices, pure intelligence, and Ferruccio der Verrückte, the man who plays with his shirttail hanging out, or even bare-chested sometimes, the man who has a thick beard and talks to himself, even insulting himself, will no longer exist. There will be nothing but the intensity of this thing that is built by two players, something that no longer resembles combat but is, rather, the search for a form of perfection, like a scientific discovery: the never-ending chess match, the one for which the game was conceived. I think again of Mariam, whom I met yesterday, and the night we spent together, with the tacit agreement that we would not ask each other who we really are, our occupations, our lives; that our first names, Assem and Mariam, and our two bodies would suffice. Why did I arrange to meet her this morning? I still see her thick black hair, smooth and shining in the half-light. I see her lips, the eager, almost greedy way she spoke when we were in the bar, and then how they parted, later, with delight, in that room overlooking the calm waters of the river, to let out a sigh of rapture—a moment of a purity that makes up for everything: the wandering, the fatigue. Her parted lips, letting out the joyful, instantaneous breath of sexual pleasure, the bliss of oblivion. And above all I remember now how I felt and what I can only refer to as a strange, new shyness. How I hesitated when the moment came to get undressed: did she notice? I don’t think so. Or rather, she didn’t mind, she could see the cracks and tears on my body but it didn’t surprise her. She accepted it, as she accepted doubt, and a certain mental lassitude. We approached each other without embarrassment, with respect. And perhaps, in the end, that is what compelled me to make that appointment with her this morning. I can’t see any other explanation. So, Ferruccio, the madman of the Lindenplatz, is laughing at me, because he alone understands that something has been born that will take me far beyond the lands where for ten years France has been sending me to kill or protect, even when I could never be sure whether we were winning or losing, because I always had to start over, there were always new missions in the field and new enemies to slay, always new zones of influence to maintain or new strategic points to control, and Ferruccio is laughing because he knows, he knows, that when the darkness falls, when the last adversary has been crushed, that’s when the worst time begins, because that’s when you have to accept your return to your own tics and torments.

  From far away he can hear the sound of the helicopter, and he cannot tell whether it is coming from beyond the mountains or the depths of his memory. The sound of blades grows louder until it drowns out everything. The wind is whipping his face. At that moment he thinks of all the helicopters he has taken, all those flights, during the day, at night . . . He hears the approaching helicopter and never mind if he cannot open his eyes, he knows that its arrival will free him from threat, from blows, that the aircraft will cover him with a protective shadow. But what if it doesn’t reach him? Maybe it will come too late or will have to fly off again, unable to land in this hostile city, making a huge curve in the sky then moving off into space? It hardly matters. Just knowing that it came, that someone sent this aircraft to get him, is comfort enough and it fills him with peace. He thinks of all the helicopters he has left, jumping out onto the hills of faraway countries in the middle of the night, he thinks of how he approached the houses he was going to violate along with the men who came with him, breaking down doors, roughly shoving aside the drowsy women who screamed
in stupor, how they turned a deaf ear to everything around them, the faces, the shouts, the entreaties, searching in the night for a man who always gave himself up in the end, and all those times when it was his hands that did the beating. He remembers all those night flights when he was like a silent raptor with night vision, erupting in lives that didn’t expect him and vanishing before anyone could really react. He has taken so many helicopters. And he hears this one without being able to determine whether it really is getting closer, until he hears the voice, “Sullivan . . . ?” constantly saying his name, “Sullivan . . . ?” and adding a few words that he recognizes because he has said them himself in other countries, at other times, when it was his turn to go to the assistance of suffering bodies, the words you say to tell them to hang on, that everything will be all right, they’re going to take you home, the words to emphasize that need to hold on . . . What does he want to hold on to? “Sullivan . . . ?” And that name they throw at him, over and over, as if they didn’t want to let him close his eyes, as if he didn’t have the right to give up. “Sullivan . . . ?”, and so he eventually says “yes,” not with his lips—no, he can’t do that anymore—not in an audible, articulate way, he no longer has the strength, but he says “yes” in his mind and immediately wishes he hadn’t, as if he had yielded to convenience, as if he hasn’t been up to the gravity of the moment, when he could have stayed in the burning village and died there, but it’s too late, in his soul he has said “yes” and there are arms bearing him away, carrying him, dragging him to the helicopter and its promises, with the dull sound of its engine and the power of its blades, to get him out of that place that should have been his grave.