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By Root 825 0

sense that you seem to give the word. I’ll even let you in on a secret: I’m not sure that I’m any braver than you are. It’s possible that violence, the real violence I saw in Sarajevo, Africa, Southern Asia, Afghanistan, frightens me just as much as you, precisely because I know it, because I can smell its usual packaging from miles away. You can’t imagine my state of panic in 1998, for example, when I was reporting for Le Monde in Panjshir and had to stay close to Massoud, who didn’t bat an eyelid as shells from 155s fell a few feet away from us, whereas I … As for these men of war, like Massoud for example, whom I have spoken of so highly, as for the ones I ended up becoming an adviser and friend to, like the Bosnian Izetbegović,‡ would like to point out that it wasn’t so much their heroism that fascinated me but their way, as Malraux said, of making war without loving it. There too, we are more or less in agreement. And it’s my turn to reassure (or disappoint?) you, by telling you that you are not less “ridiculous” but less of a coward than you think.

But there are two other things in your letter that are unacceptable or that I, in any case, cannot accept. The anecdote about your father and that ugly line of Goethe’s about injustice and disorder.

First, the anecdote.

It’s certainly a pity that you did not have the time or inclination to ask him more about it.

Of course, that’s often the way.

You don’t think about it when your parents are there.

When you do think about it, it’s because they’re no longer entirely there and you don’t dare.

And when, like myself two weeks ago—perhaps because of our correspondence, who knows!—you summon up the courage to phone a ninety-four-year-old aunt, your mother’s elder sister, the last witness to so many things (and also the first witness, incidentally, to my existence, since she was the midwife in Béni Saf, the Algerian village to which my mother returned to give birth to me), when you cross the line and think, “It’s too silly to leave all these unanswered questions, these shadows that remain, this suspended family saga, I’ve made up my mind, I’m going to phone,” then the devil gets in the way … She died, just a few days before we were to meet, on March 9 at Melun. So sad …

But in your case it’s almost worse.

I imagine you realize that this story of the German officer taken out by two members of the Resistance, this image of your father, and the fact that, after hearing this story, you never thought of digging deeper than his laconic comment you say you remember of “not interesting” to really go to the heart of the matter and what they say about it is rather odious.

Your story states your refusal ultimately to take the side either of those young people or of the officer.

It puts on the same “uninteresting” level the Nazi idea of the one and the Free France to which the others aspired.

It excludes the idea that some wars are more just than others or that, when faced with extreme filth, when it’s the very idea of being human that is at stake and there is no other way of saving it, violence must be espoused, with a heavy heart if you choose, dragging your heels if you say so, but all the same it must be taken up and it must triumph.

In other words, your story puts on an equal footing the absolute evil that is Nazism and the violence of reaction, that last-ditch resistance, which is not its own end but is just trying to stave off the worst. In passing, it should also be noted that it confuses, by gathering under the same dubious banner (I’m quoting you) the warmongers, those who “take up arms for any cause whatsoever,” the Basque separatists (who are, as I’m sure you’re aware, unscrupulous terrorists, killers of civilians, wreckers of a real democracy), and the Chechnyans (and I’m sure you’re also aware that they have only rarely succumbed to the temptation of terrorism, while they are the target of a total war, up to extermination, instigated by a KGB president who has sworn—Putin, this time in his own words—to “finish them off” right down to the last one, if necessary hunting