Jean-Marie Blas De Robles - Where Tigers Are at Home

Pity, Mauro thought. He was beginning to enjoy the adventure and, despite their concern about Dietlev, felt on a high.

Not long afterward, once the mist had cleared, the little expedition set off again.

THEY’D BEEN WALKING for two hours, Petersen and Yurupig carrying the stretcher, when Mauro sank up to his knees in sticky mud hidden underneath the grass. He called to Yurupig to help him out of the marsh and came back with him to join the others.

“We’ve reached the swamp,” he announced gaily, “that’s worth a celebratory rest, isn’t it? What do you think Dietlev?” He turned toward him and suddenly his smile vanished. “Dietlev?”

Elaine, who had sat down on a stump behind the group, hurried over to the stretcher: eyes half-closed, a feverish glow on his face, Dietlev was having difficulty breathing. Far away from her, in another world, beyond suffering and language, he didn’t reply to her anxious questions.

“Get me some water, Yurupig.” She dissolved a large dose of aspirin in a cup and forced Dietlev to swallow it. Petersen came over as Elaine hurriedly uncovered the wound. It was crawling with maggots again, fewer than previously, but his leg had swollen even more and his thigh was mottled with dark patches.

“It’ll have to be amputated pronto,” Petersen said.

Elaine turned toward him as if he’d said something obscene, but he met her look with no show of emotion. His eyes were shining, his pupils abnormally dilated deep within his wizened face. “The gangrene’s rising. If we don’t cut off his leg, he’s fucked and that’s it. It’s up to you to decide.”

Elaine realized at once that he was right, even before she saw the sad look on Yurupig’s face; the tears immediately came to her eyes, not because of the amputation, which she accepted was imperative, but because she knew she was incapable of performing it.

“I can see to it, if you want,” Petersen said. “I’ve already done that on the Russian front.”

“You?!” Mauro exclaimed, taken aback. “And why would you do that, eh?” Falling into the familiar form to express his contempt, his voice hoarse with fury, he went on, “After all your scheming to get us to stay on the boat, you want us to believe that you’re … You bastard. You want to kill him, that’s it.”

Petersen thought of replying that you could very well kill someone in cold blood without being able to bring yourself to let him die like a dog, but it was too complicated, so he went back to the fire.

“It has to be amputated, don’t you see that?” Elaine said to Mauro gently. “Now look at me: would you do it? Would you?” Her eyes probed his expression as he struggled to find the words, a helpless look on his face.

“Don’t worry,” she said, putting her arms round him, “if he wanted to harm him, all he had to do was to hold his tongue. Now pull yourself together, Dietlev’s going to need us.”

She went back to Petersen. “Get on with it, then. I’ll take the responsibility.”

“So that’s it, is it? I’m not a murdering bastard anymore. You have to make up your minds one way or another.” She gave him a pleading look.

“OK, off we go. But I’m doing it for you, for you alone.”

THEY RETRACED THEIR steps until they found a more open space. At Petersen’s orders Yurupig made a fire big enough to boil the water and sterilize the blades. When everything was ready, Herman left them for a few minutes; he was sniffing when he came back. Dietlev was lying on the ground, half-unconscious because of the morphine injection Elaine had just given him.

“You, you little brat,” he said to Mauro, “you hold his shoulders. Yurupig, you see to his other leg.”

“What about me?” Elaine asked.

“You’ll do what I tell you as we go along. There’ll be just the tourniquet to hold and the arteries to ligature, if they’re visible.”

WHEN PETERSEN TACKLED Dietlev’s femur with the saw blade from the survival kit, Dietlev screamed, just once, a long scream from the depths of his coma. The retraction of the muscles around the exposed bone, Dietlev’s abrupt jerks … Elaine found that all less horrifying than the sight of his leg, detached, obscene, alongside his body while she was containing the hemorrhage.

“That’s it, done,” Herman said when he’d finished washing the flesh with boiling water. “The stump has to be left exposed to the air, so it’ll heal over; no Mercurochrome, nothing, just water and some gauze to protect it. I cut quite high up, I hope it’ll do.”

They were standing round Dietlev’s tortured body, pale, their faces pinched from weariness and the extreme strain the primitive surgery had put them under.

“Thank you,” Elaine said, taking Petersen’s hand. “I don’t know how, but I’ll repay you some day.”

Petersen muttered something, visibly embarrassed by this show of emotion. He straightened up, took a few steps, stuck his foot under the amputated leg and sent it flying into the thicket. “Put him back on his stretcher,” he said as he turned round, “we’ve been hanging around here for long enough already.”

IT IS NOT ONLY the musical theory of the Musurgia but the whole of Kircher’s work that is “infectious” or, rather, colonialist.

THE HERMENEUTIC MANIA … “A symbol,” Kircher writes, “is a mark signifying some more hidden mystery, that is to say, its nature is to lead our minds, thanks to some similarity, to understand something very different from those objects brought to us by our external senses whose property it is to be hidden or concealed beneath the veil of an obscure expression.” ( Obeliscus Pamphilius ) The dance of the seven veils, again and again … But why should things be a sign of something other than their own radiant nudity? What perverse eroticism does it take to compel us to skin them like rabbits?

LITTLE RED RIDING HOOD: How good you are, Father, at weaving mosquito nets!

Athanasius Kircher: All the better to lift them off, my child …

KIRCHER MISSED THE DAWN of the scientific spirit. His work remains a sterile accumulation of information. It is even astonishing, given the huge number of his books, that he had so few interesting insights. He was unworthy of his age.

MORE THAN THE IDEA OF GOD, it is the dogma that is unhealthy, like systematics in philosophy or any rule based on precepts lubricated with the Vaseline of the Absolute.

“IDEOLOGY,” Roland Barthes wrote, “is like a fryer: whatever idea you drop into it, it’s always a french fry that comes out.” Kircher smells of the rancid oil of the Counter-Reformation. He ought to be burned, not in effigy, but really, as an example, “for the survivors and those who haven’t committed a crime.” Why are we at liberty to condemn the dead? Pierre Ayrault asked: “Because otherwise we would not be able to absolve or praise them.” To be able to decorate a soldier killed while acting under orders, we have to be able to hang the corpse of one who showed cowardice under fire.

PUNISHING A PERSON’S MEMORY: After having razed his house to the ground, filled in his moat and his ponds, degraded his offspring and scratched out his name from the register of births, the guilty man’s forests were cut down to the height of a man.

MINOR CHINESE OFFICIALS:

Official in charge of the Confines

Official in charge of insignia made of feathers

Inspector of medicine tasters

Commissioner in charge of demanding submission from rebels

Head Clerk of the office for receiving subjugated rebels

Grand Master of reprimands

Officer of the tracks

Official in charge of the Entrance and the Inside