vault as they say where the dead man is supposed to find a little warmth near his relatives, accompanied by the tears of the living all the way up to the welcoming arms of the dead, beneath a tombstone freshened with a new inscription in the Ivry cemetery the entrance to which I am looking for on this spring morning of the new millennium, late, I see in the distance a group bustling about a grave with a verger in full uniform, I hurry over, I almost run in the lanes I narrowly miss sprawling onto a gravestone as I take a shortcut through the plots, obviously this isn’t the right funeral, I immediately realize the fatal error, I see an appropriately long-faced employee whom I ask for directions: section 43, he replies, is on the other side of the street, in the little cemetery and I can’t stop myself from laughing to myself thinking that this man has a voice from beyond the grave, somber and almost inaudible, here everyone whispers, of course, and in this nervous state that only the act of arriving late to the burial of your own father can produce, of having already missed the Mass and joining the family right at the cemetery, ashamed, with rings under my eyes, my breath no doubt fetid, my eyes crusted with sleep reddened not by tears but by alcohol and lack of sleep, ashamed and guilty for having forgotten where the family vault is in which my grandparents already lie, I go out through a little gate cross a wall-lined street panting I get ready to confront the stares of the weeping women mother and daughter on the arm of the brother-in-law he has to be moved too now I’m late I enter the other part of the Ivry cemetery and it’s there, I recognize it, the proportions, the lanes, to my right the Resistants of Mont-Valérien and then Manouchian and the bearded Resistants on the Affiche Rouge wanted poster, on my left I can see my family, my family’s friends, my sister in black, my inevitable brother-in-law, but no trace of my mother, they’re getting the casket out of the car, the body of Sarpedon, son of Zeus, carried towards his family, nicely washed, nicely combed, nicely embalmed, they strain to slide it into the hole—I arrive, my sister looks at me reprovingly, her husband looks away, the verger has a birthmark on his face, he officiates in a dignified manner, now you may bid him a final farewell, touch the coffin or else toss in a handful of earth, as you like, I’m late so I have trouble believing it’s my father in this gleaming oak, the man of the electric trains, of 1,500-piece jigsaw puzzles, my mother appears suddenly and yells Francis, Francis to me, then clings to my arm, she is defeated, done in she pulls herself together straightens up stares at me searches out my eyes which I lower like a child, say goodbye to your father, suddenly serious stiff and powerful, oprostite se od otsa, so I turn to the brand-new casket, how can I say goodbye to him, I mechanically recite our Father who art in heaven, and so on, where Hypnos and Thanatos are carrying you, washed in the Scamander, locked in the flesh-eating coffin, you too were a warrior, in your own way, Leda is weeping in the arms of her husband the Parisian banker, I apparently have no more tears, I said goodbye to my father yesterday during a solitary funeral banquet at my place in the dark I thought about the electric train about Algiers the white about my wild childhood I collapsed drunk fully dressed as the clock struck 5:00 in the morning and now in the midst of my family encumbered by their presence all I can do is stumble through a belabored Our Father, the sweat on my forehead disguised as tears—who is it in this sarcophagus, who is he, is he the draftee sent to Algeria, the Catholic engineer, the husband of my mother, the lover of puzzles, the son of the locksmith from Gardanne near Marseille, the father of my sister, is he the same one, in the Ivry cemetery a few hundred meters away from soldiers who died in military hospitals in the First World War, there are even a few slabs for Serbian poilus, how did they end up here, maybe they were treated in a military hospital nearby, their faces smashed in, suffering from tuberculosis, infections of all kinds, far from Niš or Belgrade, very far, beneath a suburban cross, in the same cemetery where the bodies of the guillotined lie, hidden in a corner, those bodies that between 1864 and 1972 no one sought to claim, did they carry their heads in their hands in their graves, like Saint Denis patron saint of Paris, or beside them, or between their legs to reduce the size of the coffin—maybe they were cremated, those outcasts victims of prosecution and punishment, murderers who have turned grotesque beneath their marble slabs, next to my father assistant interrogator in a villa in Algiers, the Christian engineer specialist in torture by immersion, along with the steel bar and electricity, he never spoke about it, of course, never, but he knew when he looked at me, he had seen, spotted in me symptoms that he knew, the stigmata, the burns that appear on the hands of torturers—my mother is still clinging to my shoulder in silence, my father descends into the tomb, my sister redoubles her crying and my hangover becomes phenomenal, the crosses, the angels on the mausoleums are dancing, the verger waves his aspergillum of despair, the sanctimonious ladies cross themselves something sounds like endless bells or bees it’s a bird that’s begun to sing a bus at the Porte de Choisy or a train in the Italian countryside scattered with farms and factories, infinitely flat, in the outskirts of beautiful bourgeois Reggio, once my father was in the ground friends family colleagues filed by us to offer us their condolences, the old ones who were in Algeria too, I recognize a few of them, weeping companions in arms, surprised and frightened by how young the dead man was, they shake my hand warmly, ah Francis, ah Francis, your father, and they don’t add anything else, they greet my mother in a dignified way, my sister, and then comes the turn of the Croats, my uncle traveled all the way from Canada to be by my mother’s side during this ordeal, he kisses me on both cheeks, the bear from Calgary, giving way to endless cousins, then to unknown people, whom my mother moved greets and thanks indistinctly in Croatian, understood only by the Serbian and Montenegrin soldiers buried a few yards away, I can’t stand still, I have a headache, my eyes are burning, I need to urinate, I’m thirsty, and the image of my father the abstemious, in the hospital, appears now on the train window with no other landscape than a few glimmers of light flickering in the dark, my neighbor the Pronto reader has a good torturer’s head on him, I can easily picture him inserting blunt objects into a Muslim girl’s vagina whose shaven sex made a whole company laugh, on the hills of Algiers the white where my father preceded me into the Zone, he landed on August 22, 1956, on a military transport from Marseille, a cadet in the Signals Corps, nothing that would predispose him to becoming a hero, student engineer then student officer radio specialist, sent after six months’ training to the “events”
