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Drama

The Seed of Evil: Sarajevo 1995

By Sonia Ristic
Translated from French by Paul Romano
In a story that spans more than two decades, scenes from armed conflicts in Beirut and Sarajevo are portrayed in a literary diptych as six diverse characters struggle for survival and self-definition from inside varying epicenters of chaos. Holiday Inn: Nights of Respite is the polyphonic account of six characters’ lives, which are extraordinarily intertwined. It is also a fearless inquiry into some of the darkest human impulses.

In this excerpt from Sonia Ristic’s moving and incisive drama, Anna, a Swiss photojournalist, has long been carrying with her a sepia-tinged snapshot that was taken in Beirut during the Lebanese Civil War. The mysterious photograph includes a group of gun-wielding Palestinian liberation fighters alongside a blurry interloping “man without a face.” The picture is accompanied by the journal of an American woman who went missing from Beirut in 1975. For years, Anna has tried without success to piece together these two artifacts. It is only when she has a chance encounter with a loquacious fellow war correspondent that she is given the final piece of the puzzle, which leads to a shocking yet inevitable personal discovery. The following scene is Anna’s account of that revelation and her reflection on the strange job to which she has devoted her life.

Sarajevo International Airport. Military cargo planes. Engines roaring. UN Blue Helmet forces. Rain. Anna seated on her duffle bag.

It’s a messed-up line of work. War correspondent. It turns my stomach when I think about it, but our job depends on there always being wars to cover, always being places, spots on the globe where the seed of evil germinates, where the tree of discord spreads its branches, backdrops for us to capture the horror on film or on paper, for the sake of posterity.

It’s a crazy and messed-up line of work we’re in. No, you don’t become a war correspondent by accident or by chance, by falling down some rabbit hole into a maze of bizarre life paths. You don’t become a war correspondent because, since you were little, you’ve dreamed of taking pictures of antelopes galloping through the Tanzanian savannah and, all of a sudden, you find yourself in the crossfire of a conflict. No, it’s something you carry inside, I don’t know what it is exactly—a tear in the fabric of your soul, an original war wrought in your childhood, a way of seeing things so clearly, too clearly, your roots inexorably intertwined with the roots of evil—it’s hard to say what it is, this thing that breathes inside of you and makes it so that, under the guise of pure chance, you become a war photographer.

We’re like a species that can recognize its own, almost more by scent than by the cargo vest and the camera slung around our neck. We recognize each other and jump right into conversation, in hotel bars around the world while muffled explosions go off outside, waiting in line at checkpoints—never in big groups, never with a crew, we’re lone wolves, solitary and on the lookout, the interpreter is the only companion for those who don’t collect foreign tongues like snapshots, those who haven’t learned how to pass. Sure, we drink sometimes in the company of another of our species. And no, we don’t regale each other with tales of our feats and exploits, or at least it takes us more than a few drinks before we do get on that subject. More often, it happens that we tip each other off to good stories in need of some old-fashioned digging up. One of us will say, “I have a lead that I’m not able to follow at the moment, but it might be of interest to you.” And these harmless words of introduction inevitably light a spark, ignite a raging fire in your gut, and make you believe in the promise of a scoop that will change the course of history . . . All the while, you know, deep down, that this job is anchored in the certainty that the world will not ever stray from its self-destructive path, that people will go on ripping each other to shreds, slitting each other’s throats, bombing, raping, exterminating each other through both chaotic and organized means, all over the world, and we’ll be there to capture, on paper or on film, the tank tracks in the snow and the corpses rotting in the sun . . . The first time I came here, almost three years ago, at the very beginning of the siege, I was in Split one Sunday evening, waiting for the next morning’s airlift, and I ran into a colleague, an Englishman or Irishman, don’t remember anymore. A seasoned veteran of armed conflicts who I knew from another evening at another bar, 1987, I think, Jerusalem, the First Intifada. We recognized each other more by instinct than by our faces. He asked if he could join me, I said yes, and we drank—a local spirit, too strong, the kind that slackens the tongue. He had already “done” Vukovar, Dubrovnik, the first weeks of the siege of Sarajevo. He said he was sure it was going to last, the bloodbath, that it was shaping up to be the next Lebanon. He started off strong, on account of the liquor and the one-too-many years he had spent, near death, getting tossed around in the breakers, “in the belly of the beast,” as he said.

He talked too much. Not a bad guy, but like most of them, patronizing when speaking to a woman. A little heavy on the advice and warning, as if I hadn’t “done” the same places he had, for fifteen years, kicked around in the worst spots, “in the belly of the beast.” They would never speak to one of the guys like that, not even to the rookies; the tone is reserved for us, the rare women, whatever our age or experience on the ground. Not a bad guy, no, I don’t think most of them are even conscious of it.

Anyway, he was talking way too much, and I wasn’t really listening, I was looking around at the handful of customers in the café, especially the women, beautiful, very done up, not many men, they must have been at the front, until two words that this English or Irishman came to pronounce grabbed my attention. Two words, weirdly juxtaposed: “Sniper Safari.” I’d never heard the expression before. He said it was another thing Lebanon and Yugoslavia had in common, that it started over there, no one was really talking about it at the time, there hadn’t been any major exposés on the topic. Now it was happening here and it was a good story. It took me a while to catch up with the conversation, to get what he was talking about. And when I did understand, what it was, this strange word association, of “sniper” and “safari,” the tear that I had always felt in the fabric of my soul split wide open, hollowing me out, the vile beast loosened its jowls and swallowed what was left of my humanity.

Men, “normal” men, family men, business men, rich men, they had to be rich because it cost a pretty penny, were paying for these weekend getaways, clandestine little holidays, to get themselves to Lebanon at the time, join this or that militia, one faction or another, they were paying a fortune for this, to get their adrenaline pumping, for the rush, they would go shooting, play at being snipers, in wars they had nothing to do with, just like that, for fun, for pleasure, to feel alive, because the racetrack and the floor of the stock exchange were boring by comparison, they’d go play hide-and-go-shoot, at people, civilians, because it was already made illegal to kill lions for pleasure, and big-game hunting or bungee jumping, that didn’t do it for them anymore, didn’t make them feel alive. Feel alive . . . Is that really how men live?

The monster’s face, the gaping jowls of the vile beast, I’ve already looked it in the eye, and more than once. One of my first big stories had been Cambodia and I thought then that I had seen the worst imaginable horror, that after that nothing but a glimpse of pure uncorrupted beauty could ever shock me again, could take my breath away, since the horridness, I’d already seen the worst it had to offer. I was so young in 1979, still so naïve, to think I’d seen the worst of it, to not yet know that evil never fails to reinvent itself, to imagine that its growth could be anything but exponential. And this Brit or Irishman—fuck, it’s so annoying that I can’t remember where this guy was actually from—he was detailing the leads he had followed, the buses leaving from Geneva, in Vukovar he actually met one of them, one of these monsters, he was talking and it was like the hiss of an artillery shell in my ear, like the dust that rises after an explosion, rips through your lungs and blinds you. In that moment, I knew I wanted to stay blind.

He pronounced the very words, he said: “They are men without faces.” The dust settled and I saw him. The true face of evil. No, the monster is not Pol Pot or Karadžić or Goebbels or Franco, even though they’re also fucking jack-o’-lanterns, no that would be too simple and too easy to remedy if the monster were none other than Hitler-Mladić-Stalin-Pinochet, that would be so simple, it would only take a sharp eye pressed against a scope and a steady finger on a trigger if that were all it took to stomp out the seed of evil. If it were only a seed! The tree of evil has roots that spread even farther than its branches, deeply anchored roots, tangled up in the hearts of men. The wind carries the evil seeds through space and time and sows them promiscuously.

I went back to my hotel room that night, the buzz from the alcohol had worn off. I took out the journal and photo that I never traveled without. I found the same words in the journal, “The man without a face,” Kate had written, and next to that, “Swiss, without a doubt, a banker, definitely not a Palestinian freedom fighter.” I looked at the photo, and all my natural skepticism instantly evaporated, it was definitely him, it was definitely my father. The face of the monster.

She gets up from her bag, crouches down, rummages, takes out the journal and photo, and pauses.

It’s a messed-up line of work we’re in. It pushes us deeper and deeper into the darkness, into the basement of the human soul. Maybe you just have to know when to hang it up, before it’s too late, before being completely swallowed up by the vile beast. Maybe you have to learn how to take pictures of flowers, or chubby little pink babies . . . No, maybe the best thing to do is to quit cold turkey, detox from the image. I don’t know. I don’t know what else to do with my eye, aside from holding it up against the viewfinder of a camera, what to do with my finger aside from resting it on the shutter release. And after that night at that café in Split, every time I point the camera and get ready to release the shutter, it’s his face that I see, my father’s face, the true face of the monster with countless faces. It’s him I see, and I see myself, I loathe the resemblance, and I know that one day, if I don’t ever just hang it up, I’ll do what Capa did, I’ll go off the trail, as many steps as it takes to get the best shot, and I’ll step on a land mine. No, no one will ever get me to believe that when he went off that path in those rice fields of Vietnam, that it was any kind of mistake. No, he didn’t take those steps to get a better angle, he took them because he had too many dark images burned into his retina and stepping on a land mine is as good a way as any to hang it up once and for all.

Anna puts the photo and journal back in her duffle bag and heads toward the cargo plane.

From Holiday Inn Nuits d’accalmie (Manage, Belgium: Lansman Editeur, 2016). © 2016 by Sonia Ristic. By arrangement with the author. Translation © 2016 by Paul Romano. All rights reserved.

English French (Original)

In this excerpt from Sonia Ristic’s moving and incisive drama, Anna, a Swiss photojournalist, has long been carrying with her a sepia-tinged snapshot that was taken in Beirut during the Lebanese Civil War. The mysterious photograph includes a group of gun-wielding Palestinian liberation fighters alongside a blurry interloping “man without a face.” The picture is accompanied by the journal of an American woman who went missing from Beirut in 1975. For years, Anna has tried without success to piece together these two artifacts. It is only when she has a chance encounter with a loquacious fellow war correspondent that she is given the final piece of the puzzle, which leads to a shocking yet inevitable personal discovery. The following scene is Anna’s account of that revelation and her reflection on the strange job to which she has devoted her life.

Sarajevo International Airport. Military cargo planes. Engines roaring. UN Blue Helmet forces. Rain. Anna seated on her duffle bag.

It’s a messed-up line of work. War correspondent. It turns my stomach when I think about it, but our job depends on there always being wars to cover, always being places, spots on the globe where the seed of evil germinates, where the tree of discord spreads its branches, backdrops for us to capture the horror on film or on paper, for the sake of posterity.

It’s a crazy and messed-up line of work we’re in. No, you don’t become a war correspondent by accident or by chance, by falling down some rabbit hole into a maze of bizarre life paths. You don’t become a war correspondent because, since you were little, you’ve dreamed of taking pictures of antelopes galloping through the Tanzanian savannah and, all of a sudden, you find yourself in the crossfire of a conflict. No, it’s something you carry inside, I don’t know what it is exactly—a tear in the fabric of your soul, an original war wrought in your childhood, a way of seeing things so clearly, too clearly, your roots inexorably intertwined with the roots of evil—it’s hard to say what it is, this thing that breathes inside of you and makes it so that, under the guise of pure chance, you become a war photographer.

We’re like a species that can recognize its own, almost more by scent than by the cargo vest and the camera slung around our neck. We recognize each other and jump right into conversation, in hotel bars around the world while muffled explosions go off outside, waiting in line at checkpoints—never in big groups, never with a crew, we’re lone wolves, solitary and on the lookout, the interpreter is the only companion for those who don’t collect foreign tongues like snapshots, those who haven’t learned how to pass. Sure, we drink sometimes in the company of another of our species. And no, we don’t regale each other with tales of our feats and exploits, or at least it takes us more than a few drinks before we do get on that subject. More often, it happens that we tip each other off to good stories in need of some old-fashioned digging up. One of us will say, “I have a lead that I’m not able to follow at the moment, but it might be of interest to you.” And these harmless words of introduction inevitably light a spark, ignite a raging fire in your gut, and make you believe in the promise of a scoop that will change the course of history . . . All the while, you know, deep down, that this job is anchored in the certainty that the world will not ever stray from its self-destructive path, that people will go on ripping each other to shreds, slitting each other’s throats, bombing, raping, exterminating each other through both chaotic and organized means, all over the world, and we’ll be there to capture, on paper or on film, the tank tracks in the snow and the corpses rotting in the sun . . . The first time I came here, almost three years ago, at the very beginning of the siege, I was in Split one Sunday evening, waiting for the next morning’s airlift, and I ran into a colleague, an Englishman or Irishman, don’t remember anymore. A seasoned veteran of armed conflicts who I knew from another evening at another bar, 1987, I think, Jerusalem, the First Intifada. We recognized each other more by instinct than by our faces. He asked if he could join me, I said yes, and we drank—a local spirit, too strong, the kind that slackens the tongue. He had already “done” Vukovar, Dubrovnik, the first weeks of the siege of Sarajevo. He said he was sure it was going to last, the bloodbath, that it was shaping up to be the next Lebanon. He started off strong, on account of the liquor and the one-too-many years he had spent, near death, getting tossed around in the breakers, “in the belly of the beast,” as he said.

He talked too much. Not a bad guy, but like most of them, patronizing when speaking to a woman. A little heavy on the advice and warning, as if I hadn’t “done” the same places he had, for fifteen years, kicked around in the worst spots, “in the belly of the beast.” They would never speak to one of the guys like that, not even to the rookies; the tone is reserved for us, the rare women, whatever our age or experience on the ground. Not a bad guy, no, I don’t think most of them are even conscious of it.

Anyway, he was talking way too much, and I wasn’t really listening, I was looking around at the handful of customers in the café, especially the women, beautiful, very done up, not many men, they must have been at the front, until two words that this English or Irishman came to pronounce grabbed my attention. Two words, weirdly juxtaposed: “Sniper Safari.” I’d never heard the expression before. He said it was another thing Lebanon and Yugoslavia had in common, that it started over there, no one was really talking about it at the time, there hadn’t been any major exposés on the topic. Now it was happening here and it was a good story. It took me a while to catch up with the conversation, to get what he was talking about. And when I did understand, what it was, this strange word association, of “sniper” and “safari,” the tear that I had always felt in the fabric of my soul split wide open, hollowing me out, the vile beast loosened its jowls and swallowed what was left of my humanity.

Men, “normal” men, family men, business men, rich men, they had to be rich because it cost a pretty penny, were paying for these weekend getaways, clandestine little holidays, to get themselves to Lebanon at the time, join this or that militia, one faction or another, they were paying a fortune for this, to get their adrenaline pumping, for the rush, they would go shooting, play at being snipers, in wars they had nothing to do with, just like that, for fun, for pleasure, to feel alive, because the racetrack and the floor of the stock exchange were boring by comparison, they’d go play hide-and-go-shoot, at people, civilians, because it was already made illegal to kill lions for pleasure, and big-game hunting or bungee jumping, that didn’t do it for them anymore, didn’t make them feel alive. Feel alive . . . Is that really how men live?

The monster’s face, the gaping jowls of the vile beast, I’ve already looked it in the eye, and more than once. One of my first big stories had been Cambodia and I thought then that I had seen the worst imaginable horror, that after that nothing but a glimpse of pure uncorrupted beauty could ever shock me again, could take my breath away, since the horridness, I’d already seen the worst it had to offer. I was so young in 1979, still so naïve, to think I’d seen the worst of it, to not yet know that evil never fails to reinvent itself, to imagine that its growth could be anything but exponential. And this Brit or Irishman—fuck, it’s so annoying that I can’t remember where this guy was actually from—he was detailing the leads he had followed, the buses leaving from Geneva, in Vukovar he actually met one of them, one of these monsters, he was talking and it was like the hiss of an artillery shell in my ear, like the dust that rises after an explosion, rips through your lungs and blinds you. In that moment, I knew I wanted to stay blind.

He pronounced the very words, he said: “They are men without faces.” The dust settled and I saw him. The true face of evil. No, the monster is not Pol Pot or Karadžić or Goebbels or Franco, even though they’re also fucking jack-o’-lanterns, no that would be too simple and too easy to remedy if the monster were none other than Hitler-Mladić-Stalin-Pinochet, that would be so simple, it would only take a sharp eye pressed against a scope and a steady finger on a trigger if that were all it took to stomp out the seed of evil. If it were only a seed! The tree of evil has roots that spread even farther than its branches, deeply anchored roots, tangled up in the hearts of men. The wind carries the evil seeds through space and time and sows them promiscuously.

I went back to my hotel room that night, the buzz from the alcohol had worn off. I took out the journal and photo that I never traveled without. I found the same words in the journal, “The man without a face,” Kate had written, and next to that, “Swiss, without a doubt, a banker, definitely not a Palestinian freedom fighter.” I looked at the photo, and all my natural skepticism instantly evaporated, it was definitely him, it was definitely my father. The face of the monster.

She gets up from her bag, crouches down, rummages, takes out the journal and photo, and pauses.

It’s a messed-up line of work we’re in. It pushes us deeper and deeper into the darkness, into the basement of the human soul. Maybe you just have to know when to hang it up, before it’s too late, before being completely swallowed up by the vile beast. Maybe you have to learn how to take pictures of flowers, or chubby little pink babies . . . No, maybe the best thing to do is to quit cold turkey, detox from the image. I don’t know. I don’t know what else to do with my eye, aside from holding it up against the viewfinder of a camera, what to do with my finger aside from resting it on the shutter release. And after that night at that café in Split, every time I point the camera and get ready to release the shutter, it’s his face that I see, my father’s face, the true face of the monster with countless faces. It’s him I see, and I see myself, I loathe the resemblance, and I know that one day, if I don’t ever just hang it up, I’ll do what Capa did, I’ll go off the trail, as many steps as it takes to get the best shot, and I’ll step on a land mine. No, no one will ever get me to believe that when he went off that path in those rice fields of Vietnam, that it was any kind of mistake. No, he didn’t take those steps to get a better angle, he took them because he had too many dark images burned into his retina and stepping on a land mine is as good a way as any to hang it up once and for all.

Anna puts the photo and journal back in her duffle bag and heads toward the cargo plane.

From Holiday Inn Nuits d’accalmie (Manage, Belgium: Lansman Editeur, 2016). © 2016 by Sonia Ristic. By arrangement with the author. Translation © 2016 by Paul Romano. All rights reserved.

Les racines du mal: Sarajevo 1995

L’aéroport de Sarajevo. Cargos militaires, boucan des moteurs, langues étrangères, Casques bleus. Pluie. Anna, assise sur son sac.

C’est un drôle de métier que nous faisons. Reporter de guerre. Jamais personne ne le dit, parce que c’est terrible, et également malsain quand on y pense, mais notre métier suppose qu’il y aura toujours des guerres à couvrir, qu’il y aura toujours des endroits au monde, des lieux où germera la graine du mal, où l’arbre de la discorde étendra ses branches, et où nous pourrons nous rendre afin de fixer l’horreur sur la pellicule ou la feuille, pour la postérité.

C’est un drôle et terrible métier que nous faisons là. Non, on ne devient pas reporter de guerre par hasard, en s’engouffrant dans le labyrinthe des étranges chemins de vie. On ne devient pas reporter de guerre parce qu’on rêve de photographier le galop des antilopes à travers la savane tanzanienne et qu’on se retrouve, sans l’avoir cherché, au milieu des tirs croisés d’un conflit. Non, on le porte en soi, ça, je ne sais pas ce que c’est exactement—un gouffre dans l’âme, une guerre originelle ancrée dans l’enfance, une trop grande lucidité qui ne s’avoue pas à voix haute, les racines de notre être entremêlées aux racines du mal—difficile à dire ce que c’est, cette chose qui nous habite depuis toujours et qui fait que sous le couvert du hasard, on devient reporter de guerre.

Nous sommes comme une espèce à part qui se reconnaît à l’odeur plus qu’à l’attirail, le gilet à poches multiples et la caméra autour du cou. Nous nous reconnaissons et entamons la conversation, dans des bars d’hôtels des villes du monde alors que les détonations sourdes se font entendre, dans les files d’attente des check-points, jamais de grands groupes, jamais de bandes, nous sommes des loups des steppes, solitaires et aux aguets, le traducteur est le seul compagnon de route dont ceux qui collectionnent les langues étrangères comme les clichés ont appris à se passer. Oui, nous buvons parfois en compagnie d’un autre de notre espèce, dans un de ces bars d’hôtels des villes du monde. Non, nous ne nous racontons pas nos exploits et nos coups d’éclat, ou alors rarement, il faut avoir beaucoup bu pour en arriver là. Parfois aussi, nous nous refilons des pistes, des indices, des débuts d’histoires, de bonnes histoires à creuser, à aller voir de plus près. Ça commence par : “Tiens, j’ai une piste que je ne peux pas couvrir pour l’instant mais qui pourrait t’intéresser, toi”, et ces quelques mots d’introduction, inévitablement, allument une étincelle, réveillent un fourmillement dans le ventre, font croire à la promesse du scoop qui changera le cours des choses . . . Alors que notre métier, dans le fond, il s’ancre dans la certitude que le monde ne changera pas de destin, les humains continueront à se déchirer, s’égorger, se bombarder, se violer, s’exterminer de façons anarchiques et organisées, sous toutes les latitudes, et nous serons là pour fixer sur la feuille et la pellicule les traces de chenilles des chars dans la neige et les corps pourrissant au soleil . . . La première fois que je suis venue ici, il y a presque trois ans, au tout début du siège, j’étais à Split le dimanche soir, en attendant le pont aérien du lundi matin, je suis tombée sur un collègue, britannique ou irlandais, je ne me souviens plus. Un vieux routard du conflit armé que je connaissais d’un autre soir dans un autre bar, 1987 je crois, Jérusalem, la première Intifada. Nous nous sommes reconnus, plus à l’odeur, à l’instinct, que par mémoire des visages. Il a demandé s’il pouvait se joindre à moi, j’ai dit oui, et nous avons bu, une eau-de-vie locale, trop forte, de celles qui délient les langues. Il avait déjà “fait” Vukovar, Dubrovnik, les premières semaines du siège de Sarajevo. Il disait que ça allait durer, ce foutoir, que c’était parti pour être le deuxième Liban. Il était bien entamé, par l’eau-de-vie locale et par trop d’années à courir se fourrer dans l’oeil du cyclone, “là où ça pète”.

Il parlait trop. Pas méchant, mais comme beaucoup d’entre eux, un poil condescendant face à une femme. Un peu trop de conseils et d’avertissements, comme si je ne les avais pas aussi “faits”, depuis quinze ans, les endroits “où ça pète”. Jamais ils ne se permettaient cela avec les autres hommes, même les tout jeunes, les nouveaux; ce ton nous était réservé, à nous les rares femmes, quels que soient notre âge et notre expérience du terrain. Pas méchants, non, je crois qu’ils ne s’en rendent même pas compte pour la plupart.

Il parlait donc, beaucoup trop, et je n’écoutais pas vraiment, j’observais la poignée de clients dans le café, des femmes surtout, belles, très apprêtées, peu d’hommes, ils devaient être au front, jusqu’à ce que deux mots que ce reporter britannique, ou irlandais, venaient de prononcer ne m’interpellent. Deux mots, étrangement accolés : “Sniper safari”. Je n’en avais jamais entendu parler auparavant. Il disait que c’était un autre point commun entre le Liban et la Yougoslavie, que ça avait commencé là-bas, peu de gens en ont parlé à l’époque, il n’y avait pas eu de grands reportages sur le sujet, et maintenant ça se passait ici, il travaillait dessus, c’était une bonne histoire. J’ai mis un temps à retrouver le chemin dans la conversation, à comprendre. Et quand j’ai compris ce que c’était, cette association bizarre des mots “sniper” et “safari”, le gouffre que je portais en moi depuis toujours s’est encore plus profondément ouvert, creusé, telle la bête immonde ouvrant sa gueule béante pour engloutir l’âme humaine tout entière.

Des hommes, des hommes très bien, pères de famille, hommes d’affaires, riches, il fallait être riche parce que ça coûtait cher en plus, se payaient des week-ends, de petites vacances secrètes, pour se rendre au Liban à l’époque, rejoindre telle ou telle milice, une fraction ou une autre, ils payaient cher pour cela, pour faire frémir l’adrénaline, pour le rush, ils allaient tirer, jouer au sniper, dans des guerres qui ne les concernaient en rien, juste comme ça, pour le fun, le plaisir, pour se sentir vivants, parce que les voitures de courses et les heures de pointe de la Bourse, c’était beaucoup moins bien en comparaison, ils s’en allaient en cachette tirer sur des gens, des civils bien évidemment, puisqu’il était désormais interdit de tuer des lions pour le plaisir, et que la chasse au sanglier ne leur suffisait plus, pour se sentir vivants. Se sentir vivants . . . Est-ce vraiment ainsi que les hommes vivent?

Le visage du monstre pourtant, la gueule béante de la bête immonde, je l’avais vue en face, et plus d’une fois hélas. Un de mes premiers grands reportages avait été le Cambodge et j’ai pensé alors que j’avais commencé par le summum de l’horreur, qu’après cela il n’y aurait plus que la beauté qui pourrait me surprendre, me couper le souffle, puisque du mal, j’avais vu le pire visage. Je devais être si jeune en 1979, tellement naïve encore, pour penser que j’avais vu le pire, pour ne pas encore savoir que le mal n’avait de cesse de se réinventer, que sa croissance ne pouvait être qu’exponentielle. Et ce collègue britannique, ou irlandais—c’est tout de même agaçant de ne pas réussir à me souvenir d’où il venait, ce type—il parlait, racontait les pistes qu’il avait suivies, les bus partant de Genève, à Vukovar il en avait même rencontré un, de ces hommes-là, de ces monstres-là, il parlait et c’était comme un sifflement d’obus dans mon oreille, comme la poussière d’après l’explosion qui déchire les poumons et empêche de voir. A cet instant, je savais que je voulais rester aveuglée par la poussière, que je ne voulais pas voir.

Il a prononcé les mots, il a dit : “ce sont des hommes sans visage.” La poussière est retombée et je l’ai vu. Le vrai visage du monstre. Non, le monstre n’est pas Pol Pot ni Karadzic ni Goebbels ni Franco, même si ce sont aussi ses grimages, non, ce serait trop simple et trop facile à éradiquer si le monstre n’était que Hitler Mladic Staline Pinochet, ce serait si simple, il suffirait à chaque fois d’un oeil précis dans la lunette, d’un doigt sûr sur la détente, s’il ne s’agissait que de cela pour éradiquer la graine du mal. S’il ne s’agissait que d’une graine. L’arbre de l’horreur a des racines encore plus étendues que ses branches, des racines ancrées, arrimées aux entrailles des hommes. Les vents portent la graine du mal par-delà l’espace et le temps et la sèment, inlassablement.

Je suis rentrée dans ma chambre d’hôtel cette nuit-là, l’ivresse de l’eau-de-vie s’était évanouie. J’ai sorti de mon sac le carnet et la photo qui ne me quittaient jamais. J’ai retrouvé les mêmes mots dans le carnet, “l’homme sans visage” avait écrit Kate, et à côté : “Suisse sans doute, banquier, certainement pas un combattant de la cause palestinienne.” J’ai regardé la photo, et plus aucun doute ne subsistait, c’était bien lui, c’était bien mon père. Le visage du monstre.

C’est un drôle de métier que nous faisons là. Qui nous pousse toujours plus profondément dans la nuit, dans les limbes de l’âme humaine. Peut-être qu’il faut savoir raccrocher, avant qu’il ne soit trop tard, avant d’être complètement englouti par la gueule béante de la bête immonde. Peut-être qu’il faut apprendre à photographier des fleurs, ou des bébés roses et dodus . . . Non, peut-être qu’il faut cesser tout cela, qu’il faut se désintoxiquer de l’image. Je ne sais pas. Je ne sais rien faire d’autre de mon oeil, à part le coller sur le viseur de l’appareil, de mon doigt, à part appuyer sur la détente. Et depuis cette nuit dans le café de Split, à chaque fois que je fais le point et que je m’apprête à appuyer sur le déclencheur, c’est son visage que je vois, le visage de mon père, le vrai visage du monstre aux visages innombrables. Je le vois lui, et je me vois moi, je n’aime pas la ressemblance que je vois, et je sais qu’un jour, si je n’arrive pas à raccrocher, je ferai comme Capa, je m’écarterai de la route, quelques pas à peine pour pouvoir mieux cadrer la photo, et je sauterai sur une mine. Personne ne me fera croire que lorsqu’il s’est écarté de cette route le long des rizières indochinoises, Capa, c’était une stupide erreur de débutant. Non, il n’a pas fait ces quelques pas pour mieux cadrer, il les a faits parce qu’il avait beaucoup trop d’images de la nuit imprimées sur sa rétine et que marcher sur une mine est une façon comme une autre de raccrocher.

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