Grant has had a headache since dawn. If he had his druthers, he’d drink the whole bottle until he collapsed on his bunk and forgot the entire day. But he can’t. He doesn’t leave his tent. The light hurts his eyes. But they are calling for him. A voice full of urgency. “General Lee’s reply, sir . . . ” So he leaps to his feet. There’s a man there, handing him an envelope. All the officers from his staff gather closely around the envoy and wait to hear the answer. He takes the envelope. Time stands still. Everything is slow. He hasn’t opened the letter yet. He wonders if he has the strength. The officers are looking at him. Four years of conflict are weighing upon him. Dead men from all sides are craning their necks to read over his shoulder. So finally he opens it, and somehow finds the strength to read without his vision blurring: Lee is surrendering. He says as much, in just a few words. It’s all over. Grant raises his head, impassive, hands the letter to those who are eager to read it. They take it from him—he doesn’t even know who, exactly. He says nothing. Around him men are beginning to weep. Not to sing, or shout for joy: to weep over their own victory.

 

Antiochus did not betray him, but Hannibal has had to flee. From now on life will seem like little else: flight. He left Tyre for Crete, then Crete for the kingdom of Prusias. Every time, his life is in the hands of his host. Every time, the sovereign who takes him in must contend with Rome’s displeasure. And he knows that someday he will be sold, or bartered in exchange for a peace treaty. He will be sacrificed as a pledge of goodwill, or surrendered as the final step in a long negotiation. What can he do about it? He is a fugitive along the eastern coast of the Mediterranean, from one country to the next, and until it ends his life will be nothing else.

 

There has been another coup d’état. Is it the same perpetrators? Have Mengistu and Germame come back from the dead to harass him again? No. They say it is something else this time. Not a man, but a sort of secret society: the Derg. He feels weary. So many years gone by . . . In his mind, the eras are beginning to overlap. The assaults on his throne are all superimposed. There have been so many conspiracies. Every two to four years. And now this one. They are firing at the palace and the people have not gone down into the street to protect him? Something has changed. Is he losing? He feels a sort of long-traveled fatigue take possession of him. It prevents him from leaping up, shouting orders, reacting vigorously. He senses that from now on his country looks on him with hatred, this man with his twenty-seven Rolls Royces, this man with his useless courtiers, this man with all his wealth in a country that is dying with its mouth open.

 

When Grant arrives at the McLean house in the village of Appomattox Court House, Lee is already there, wearing an impeccable uniform. Grant didn’t bother to change. His uniform is caked with mud. It wasn’t deliberate, to humiliate his adversary, he merely came as he was, covered in mud from the encampment. When he arrives, an air of solemnity overwhelms the place, crushing everyone there. In that moment Grant’s face is strange. What it expresses, more than anything, is despondency. As if he were devastated by this victory. As if by putting an end to four years of bloodletting and carnage this moment were immersing him in the deepest sadness. Lee remains dignified, exemplary. To exchange a few words before the signing of the surrender, Grant reminds Lee that they have already met. It was during the Mexican campaign. He remembers well the aura around the Confederate general, already present in those days. He has evoked this memory to signal his respect, but that was in another life, and Lee doesn’t remember. So many men have died since then. They shake hands. Lincoln has authorized Grant to give Lee generous conditions for the surrender. The Confederate soldiers will be disarmed and fed. The officers will be free to go. They must already look to reconciliation. When they leave the house in Appomattox the Union soldiers break into spontaneous shouts of joy, but Grant silences them with his hand. You do not celebrate victory when you have fought a civil war. Yesterday’s enemy is tomorrow’s neighbor. The ranks fall silent. And the men form a guard of honor for the Confederate delegation, who depart, jaws clenched, to inform their troops that they have lost the war, but there will be food to eat that night.

 

When he arrives in Libyssa, in Bithynia, Hannibal hears the news that Scipio has died. How strange . . . He has outlived the man who defeated him. Scipio was ten years his junior, but he has just died in Liternum, in his house overlooking the sea. Hannibal feels a peculiar sadness. As long as Scipio was alive he knew he could be sure nothing would happen to him. Scipio would not have wanted an unworthy fate for Hannibal. He had already protected him after the defeat at Zama, using his influence so that Hannibal could stay in Carthage. But now . . . When the time seems ripe nothing will stop them cutting his throat like a dog. He is no longer a warrior, for he has no more army. He is no longer a lord, because he is in exile, and he is not even an opponent because he no longer frightens anyone. He is a scarecrow, and someday they will kill him, waving their arms about to show how strong they are. He is a puppet, and his assassination will serve the other puppet who ordered it. Nothing more. That will be his life from now on, in this house by the sea, while he waits for the day of his death. And he no longer has any doubts that the world to which he belongs has begun to die.

 

What commanded respect yesterday is trampled underfoot today . . . Every morning the enemy comes to the door of his palace. Armed men in uniform climb the steps four at a time, with a list of names written on a scrap of paper. Every morning, the Derg comes and carries out its arrests: his ministers, his councilors, his courtiers, even his family. Bit by bit, day by day, he is being isolated, cut off. He says nothing, he looks at those who are led away, then he asks his valet to fetch him something to drink. He is less and less inclined to wander around the corridors. Everyone he meets wants something from him and he has nothing left to give. They beg him to react, to get organized or let his daughter do the maneuvering. He doesn’t answer, he hurries out of the rooms when they approach him, leave me alone, he doesn’t say it but his eyes express it whenever he runs into someone, leave me alone, he doesn’t want anything anymore, he just asks his valet to come and help him get dressed at 4:45 every morning the way he always has, nothing else matters. Leave me alone, so what if there are arrests, and summary executions, and people strangled in barrack basements, provided they wake him up every day at 4:45. He no longer knows whether it is Mengistu or someone else who is attacking him, that strange society with a name but no leader . . . Leave me alone, he takes mincing steps like an old man in his embroidered dressing gown, sensing that his palace is humming with anxiety from the moment he gets up, because they all know that every day a delegation of military men with a list of names comes and knocks on his door, weapons in hand, and that every day men are disappearing, leave me alone, they tell him there is famine in the north of the country, they tell him there is corruption, the lists of names are getting longer and longer, and every day the palace is a little bit emptier, leave me alone, until the day he is the one the men in battle fatigues have come for.

 

Did he believe the blood would stop flowing with Lee’s surrender? Did he believe he would luxuriate in peace one day, revert to his former innocence? There are too many corpses, and the dead are demanding their due. Grant saw the president this morning. He sat in on a cabinet meeting. Sat there listening to this man he admires, this man who has led them to victory, confident he is taking the right steps. Then he declined the invitation to the theater the president gave him, he took his leave and went back to Philadelphia. This evening they will bring him news. Initially he cannot understand why everyone is shouting, why people are weeping in the street, when it is already so late. The news travels by word of mouth, in the street, through the houses, throughout the country: Lincoln has just been shot, at Ford’ Theatre, during the very performance to which Grant had been invited. Five days after the South surrendered, Lincoln is dead. The men killed in battle are here, ever more numerous, pressing with all their weight upon the world of the living.

 

His valet has come to warn him: the men from the Derg are waiting outside the door. He goes down from his room. The corridors seem so big, now that they are empty. He walks without haste. He goes through salons where pedestals have been overturned, smashed plates are on the floor. Why has no one picked them up? Disaster has been gnawing away at the palace. He goes slowly down the staircase. When at last he comes face-to-face with the military men—young men, with rough manners, speaking loudly to hide the fact that they are impressed, or not to show too much scorn—he hears the repeated order to go with them at once. He consents but demands that his valet be allowed to accompany him. He also asks to ride in one of his Rolls and not that horrible gray Volkswagen that is waiting for him at the entrance, between two military jeeps. The men in fatigues don’t seem to understand. They categorically refuse, and drive him to the barracks. He says nothing more, does not protest. Now he knows the name of the leader of the insurrection: Mengistu Haile Mariam. He was right: perhaps it is, in a way, the spirit of the other Mengistu who has returned. It is all so confusing . . . It is said that this man’s mother had been a servant at the royal palace. The common folk have rushed to the entrance to the palace to watch as he climbs into the Volkswagen: there is no cheering. In the old days, the people would shout with joy, wherever he went. Is this the irrefutable sign that everything is about to end, that the world he once knew, the world he reigned over, has been submerged?

 

Everyone around him is worried. It’s not old age. It’s not calumny, it’s poverty. He is ruined. Julia is distraught. His friend Mark Twain has begged him to write his memoirs, and promises he’ll get a good price for them. A life undone. He has been president. But will anyone remember? Two terms in office. Both tainted by corruption. Then he went around the world, slept in the finest hotels in Paris, London, New Delhi. He was greeted as a hero wherever he went and now he’s ended up here, exhausted, with a blanket on his lap, with nothing to comfort him save the motion of the rocking chair, and his memories.

 

He gazes around his cell. This is where it all ends, in these four walls, in a soulless room, not really uncomfortable, but ugly. He won’t move again, he’ll stay here, in these barracks of the fourth division, the one that fomented the coup, the one that came and knocked on the door of the palace every day with a list of names, and that very evening led the dignitaries before the firing squad, within earshot of the palace. He is already familiar with exile, and flight, too; he has hidden in caves, walked through the night to escape his enemies in pursuit, but a tiny cell, never. He is learning. He has everything he needs. They feed him. They even took him to the Imperial Guard hospital to operate on his prostate. He does not think about anything, does not hope for any liberation. Oddly, he does not miss them, all those things he thought he could not do without—his valet, the grandeur of the court, his cook. He has been stripped of everything, does not own a single thing. There is no purpose to his days, not really. He talks to no one. He is just a body that goes on living, useless, isolated, invisible. And everything goes on, outside. The country is alive. Men go to work. He has departed from the world, he is undone, tiny, and no one is weeping for him.

 

Everyone is worried, but he is not. He’ll write his memoirs. To leave something behind for his children, but deep down it hardly matters to him. Who can understand what his life was? He is naked and tired. He thinks endlessly about Lincoln, Lee, and Sherman. The only individuals he would willingly allow to pass judgment over him. They too have seen man in his nakedness. They too have ordered murder and been congratulated for it. They too have always known they had an army of the dead walking behind them.

 

Are they poisoning him? Yes, surely. But he goes on eating. What else can he do? He is convinced they are poisoning him because that is what he would do if he were in their shoes. A gradual death, one that can be passed off as a defeat of the body. Not a crime. Not an execution. That is what he did with Iyasu, Menelik’s son and heir. He’s not sorry he did. Iyasu was mad. Truly demented. The Italians wanted him to be king of kings and make him their puppet. He ordered him arrested and held prisoner in a hidden place deep in Harar. Then he poisoned him. Slowly. So that may well be what they are doing to him. But he couldn’t care less.

 

One day—does the date have the slightest importance—death comes for him. It has the face of the son of one of the Libyssa fishermen. The young man comes in at a run, breathless, his face contorted by fear, and in an instant he knows that this is the last day of his life. “They’ve come . . . !” The boy says the words over and over, until he is gasping for breath. Hannibal tries to get him to speak. How many of them? Where are they? But the young man merely points behind him. And already he can hear the pounding on the door.

 

This is the time of disaster. Very often he feels cold. He can’t smoke anymore. He is no longer allowed his beloved cigars, with their taste of encampments and horses. He lets his mind wander, constantly reenacting the battle. So many faces inhabit his mind, so many men who passed before him to the rhythm of armies or in long columns of prisoners, with the limping distress of the wounded or at a panicked run, so many men, at Lincoln’s funeral, at the commemorations, a huge crowd filling his mind.

 

He senses instinctively that he won’t have time to run away. And yet he has imagined this day. There are seven ways out of the house. He knew that sooner or later he would be sold to the Romans. But it all happens so quickly, he has no time to do anything. The door has been broken down. The assassins are coming. He has only a few moments left. In his ring there is poison: he opens it and greedily swallows the contents.

 

He is learning to live in a room he cannot leave, preserving his old man’s impassivity, as if everything had abandoned him long ago—fear, joy, feelings of ambition or desires for revenge, as if there were nothing left but a dried-up husk of a man who has agreed to be rolled between the hands of History. Nothing matters to him. He is just that man, there, in a cell, a stone’s throw from the palace where he used to reign. History has decided it will end like this, and he is empty, has been drained of all the tumult that followed him everywhere during his lifetime, as if the only gift History could give him would be silence, the great, appeasing silence that comes before death.

 

It is the time of disaster now and that is fine. He would blush if he died in glory. The fact that he is ruined and suffering from the cold doesn’t matter. He lost the words with which to complain long ago, and he is slowly getting used to the idea of ending up on his patio, in those gentle hours when the light fades, before the damp takes hold of him. Men always end their lives in defeat. He takes with him his memories of fever, his nights of drink, his exhaustion from the war, he takes with him everything he has been and dies without regret because the rest is nothing.

 

He reaches for a sword, because he would like to die with his weapon in his hand and keep his enemies at bay long enough for the poison to take effect, but the weapon seems incredibly heavy and he cannot stop it from falling to the floor with a dull metallic clang. His head is spinning. The Roman soldiers enter the room, their faces heavy, their hands thick. How many are there? He’s not sure he’ll manage to count them. His vision blurs. A white foam oozes from his lips. He can just make out the surprise on his assailants’ faces before he falls to the floor: that surprise is a victory he holds close in his mind.

 

And then one day Mengistu Haile Mariam comes in to see him in his cell. He has come to kill him. He can no longer wait for old age or poison to finish him off, it’s too slow. Do they speak? What could they say to each other? Haile Selassie knows what his executioner has come for. He doesn’t want to plead. He doesn’t move. He remains impassive, the way he always has. He is nothing but a dried-up little man who will not take long to die. Mengistu comes closer, he will suffocate him between two mattresses. It will take only a few seconds, a few minutes at the most . . . He will squeeze hard, using all his weight, and a world will disappear. They do not speak. There is nothing to say. One man has come to kill the other. That’s all. The day outside is vast, but Haile Selassie will not see it. Mengistu comes even closer, leans over the bed, and already there is not enough air.

 

How long does he lie there on the floor, dying, yet conscious? How long before one of the killers, perhaps, annoyed that he has not been able to fulfill his mission as planned, stabs him with his own sword or cuts off his head? How long before he slips away? He reflects on his life—a long warrior’s gallop across a blazing land—and thinks again of the victory he is taking with him, in spite of death, the victory of having become a name his enemies cannot capture: “Hannibal,” and he smiles.

 

It’s all over.

 

Sheridan. Grant. Sherman. Lee. A generation of heroes, of butchers. Who might grieve when they are gone? There can be no sadness. More like relief. Too much blood. The blood spilled, which they walked in, and the blood that spread into the earth, nourishing the trees on the battlefield.

 

They have buried each other. The day of Sherman’s funeral the Confederate general Johnston, his enemy, carried his coffin. It was raining and they told him to put on his hat. He refused, saying that would be unworthy, and that if Sherman were carrying his coffin, he would certainly not put his hat on  . . . Johnston was obstinate. He ended up catching pneumonia and died of it several weeks later. They are bound by blood, and die together.

 

There are the remains. The ones that are hidden, and the ones that are glorified. The nation built a huge mausoleum for Grant, and it must seem quite empty to his poor skeleton. Perhaps he would have preferred a tree on the battlefield at Shiloh, but heroes are doomed to marble . . . 

 

For the bodies of the defeated, there is still hatred.

 

The secretary of war, Edwin Stanton, asked the quartermaster general to deal with it: find a place for all the bodies left by this huge fratricidal butchery. And Montgomery Meigs decided on Arlington, General Lee’s former estate. They built the nation’s military cemetery in the defeated man’s garden.

 

Hannibal’s body is hidden, buried in secret. It is hurriedly spirited away because, even lifeless, he still causes Rome to tremble.

 

One day at the bottom of a hole in the barracks basement in Addis Ababa they will find the Negus’s remains. A ceremony will be held at Saint George’s cathedral so that his bones, tarnished by thirty years of obscurity, can become relics, and so that the king of kings, the lion of the tribe of Judah, may rest in peace.

 

But can they, all these men, really rest in peace?