Compass

by Mathias Enard

  Where are my glasses? This bedside lamp is truly awful, I absolutely have to replace it. How many nights have I turned it on and then off again saying that? How slack. There are books everywhere. Objects, images, musical instruments I’ll never learn how to play. Where are those glasses? Impossible to get my hands on the proceedings of the Hainfeld conference where her text on ghouls, djinns, and other monsters appears alongside my speech on al-Farabi. I don’t throw anything out, and yet I lose everything. Time strips me bare. I realized that two volumes of my complete works of Karl May are missing. No matter, I’ll probably never reread them, I’ll die without having reread them, it’s an atrocious thought, that someday you’ll be too dead to reread Through Desert and Harem. That my “Panorama of Istanbul from Galata Tower” will end up in a Viennese antique dealer’s who will sell it explaining that it comes from the collection of an Orientalist who died recently. So what’s the use of changing the bedside lamp? “Panorama of Istanbul . . .” or that drawing by David Roberts lithographed by Louis Hague and carefully hand-colored for the Royal Subscription Edition, depicting the entrance to the mosque of Sultan Hassan in Cairo, he can’t sell it off, the antique dealer, I paid a fortune for that engraving. The fascinating thing about Sarah is that she owns nothing. Her books and pictures are in her head; in her head, in her countless notebooks. Me, though — objects reassure me. Especially books and scores. Or they worry me. Maybe they worry me as much as they reassure me. I can easily imagine her suitcase for Sarawak: seven pairs of knickers, three bras, the same number of T-shirts, shorts, and jeans, loads of half-filled notebooks, and that’s it. When I left for Istanbul the first time, Mother had forced me to take soap, laundry detergent, a first-aid kit, and an umbrella. My trunk weighed thirty-six kilos, which caused me trouble at the Schwechat airport; I had to leave some of the contents with Mother, who’d had the good taste to accompany me: I had halfheartedly left her Liszt’s correspondence and the articles by Heine (I missed those later), impossible to slip her the package of detergent, the shoehorn, or my hiking boots, she said “But that’s indispensable, you can’t leave without a shoehorn! Plus it weighs nothing,” why not a bootjack while I was at it, I was already bringing a whole assortment of ties and jackets “in case I get invited over by respectable people.” For a time she would have forced me to take a travel iron, but I had managed to convince her that, if it was in fact doubtful that one could find good Austrian detergent in these remote lands, electrical appliances were abundant, even omnipresent, given the proximity of China and its factories, which had only very mildly reassured her. So that suitcase became my cross, thirty kilos of cross dragged with difficulty (the overloaded wheels obviously exploded at the first bump) from lodging to lodging in the terrifyingly steep streets of Istanbul, from Yeniköy to Taksim, and earned me quite a few sarcastic remarks from my housemates, especially for the detergent and the first-aid kit. I wanted to present the image of an adventurer, an explorer, a condottiere, and I was nothing but a mama’s boy overloaded with diarrhea medicine, buttons, and sewing thread just in case. It’s a little depressing to admit that I haven’t changed, that journeys have not made an intrepid, brave, tanned man of me, but a pale monster with glasses who trembles today at the idea of crossing his neighborhood to go to the lazaretto.

  Look, the light from the lamp is highlighting the dust on the “Panorama of Istanbul from the Galata Tower,” you can hardly see the boats anymore, I should clean it and above all get my hands on those damn glasses. I bought this photochrome in a shop behind Istiqlal Caddesi, a lot of the filth must come from Istanbul itself, original dirt, when I was with Bilger the archaeologist — according to the latest news he’s still just as crazy and alternates stays in the hospital with periods of terrifying exaltation when he discovers tombs of Tutankhamen in the public gardens in Bonn, before collapsing again, conquered by drugs and depression, and one wonders in which of these phases he is the most unsettling. You have to hear him shout, gesticulating wildly, that he is the victim of the pharaoh’s curse and describe the scholarly conspiracy that keeps him from important positions to realize just how sick he really is. The last time, when I was invited to give a lecture at the Beethovenhaus, I tried to avoid him, but by ill luck he was not at the clinic — he was there in the audience, in the very first row if you please, and obviously asked an endless and incomprehensible question about an anti-Beethoven conspiracy in Imperial Vienna, in which everything was mixed up — resentment, paranoia, and the certainty of being a misunderstood genius — the audience was looking at him (rather than listening to him) with an absolutely appalled air, and the organizer kept giving me terrified looks. God knows, though, that we were close, once — he had a “promising future ahead of him” and had even directed, in an interim capacity for a few months, the office of the prestigious Deutsches Archäologisches Institut in Damascus. He was earning a lot of money, crisscrossing Syria in an impressive white SUV, going from international dig sites to untouched Hellenistic sites, lunching with the Director of Syrian National Antiquities, and associating with many high-ranking diplomats. We had gone with him once, on the Euphrates, to an inspection in the middle of the desert behind the atrocious city of Raqqa, and it was a wonder to see all those Europeans sweating blood in the middle of the desert sands to direct gangs of Syrian workers, real artists of the shovel, and show them where and how they should dig into the sand to make traces of the past come alive again. Starting in the freezing dawn, to avoid the midday heat, the natives in keffiehs would scrape the earth following the orders of French, German, Spanish, or Italian scholars many of whom weren’t even thirty yet and came, unpaid usually, to benefit from practical experience on one of the tells of the Syrian desert. Each nation had its sites all along the river reaching as far as the gloomy lands of Jezirah on the borders of Iraq: the Germans had Tell Halaf and Tell Bi’a, which covered a Mesopotamian city answering to the delicate name of Tuttul; the French had Dura Europos and Mari; the Spanish, Halabiya and Tell Halula, and so on, they fought each other for Syrian concessions the way oil companies fight for oil fields, and were as little inclined to share their patches of rock as children their marbles, except when they had to take advantage of the money from Brussels and banded together, since everyone was in agreement when it was a matter of scraping, not earth this time, but the coffers of the European Commission. Bilger was like a fish in water in this milieu; he looked to us like the Sargon of these needy masses; he would comment on the sites, the finds, the plans; he called the workers by their given names, Abu Hassan, Abu Mohammed: these “local” workmen earned a pittance, but a pittance that was much more than what a local construction job would have made them, not counting the entertainment of working for these Franks in safari jackets and cream-colored scarves. This was the big advantage of “Oriental” campaign excavations: whereas in Europe they were forced by their budgets to dig themselves, archaeologists in Syria, like their glorious predecessors, could delegate the lowly tasks. As Bilger said, quoting The Good, the Bad and the Ugly: “You see, in this world there’s two kinds of people, my friend: those with loaded guns and those who dig.” So the European archaeologists had acquired an extremely specialized and technical Arabic vocabulary: dig here, clear there, with a shovel, a pickax, a small pick, a trowel — the brush was the privilege of Westerners. Dig gently, clear quickly, and it was not rare to overhear the following dialogue:

  “Go one meter down here.”

  “Yes boss. With an excavation shovel?”

  “Um, big shovel . . . Big shovel no. Instead pickax.”

  “With the big pickax?”

  “Big pickax no. Little pick.”

  “So, we should dig down to one meter with the little pick?”

  “Na’am na’am. Shwia shwia, listen, don’t go smashing in the whole wall to finish more quickly, OK?”

  “OK boss.”

  In these circumstances, there were obviously misunderstandings that led to irreparable losses for scie
nce: a number of walls and stylobates fell victim to the perverse alliance of linguistics and capitalism, but on the whole the archaeologists were happy with their personnel, whom they trained, so to speak, season after season: some were archaeological workmen from father to son for several generations, who had known the great ancestors of Oriental archaeology and had figured in excavation photos since the 1930s. It is strange to wonder, for that matter, what their relationship may have been to that past they were helping to restore; obviously Sarah had asked the question:

  “I’m curious to know what these excavations represent, for these workers. Do they have the feeling that we’re stripping them of their history, that Europeans are stealing something from them, once again?”

  Bilger had a theory: he argued that for these workmen whatever came before Islam does not belong to them, is of another order, another world, which falls into the category of the qadim jiddan, the “very old”; Bilger asserted that for a Syrian, the history of the World is divided into three periods: jadid, recent; qadim, old; qadim jiddan, very old, without it being very clear if it was simply his own level of Arabic that was the cause for such a simplification: even if his workers talked to him about the succession of Mesopotamian dynasties, they would have had to resort, lacking a common language that he could understand, to the qadim jiddan.

  Europe sapped Antiquity under the Syrians, the Iraqis, the Egyptians. Our triumphant nations appropriated the universal with their monopoly on science and archaeology, dispossessing the colonized populations by means of this pillage of a past that, as a result, they readily experienced as alien: and so brainwashed Islamist wreckers drive tractors all the more easily through ancient cities since they combine their profoundly uncultivated stupidity with the more or less widespread feeling that this heritage is an alien, retroactive emanation of foreign powers.

  Raqqa is today one of the cities administered directly by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, which must not make it any more welcoming, the bearded cutthroats are having a great time slicing carotids here, chopping hands off there, burning down churches and raping infidels to their heart’s content, customs that are qadim jiddan, madness seems to have taken over the region, an insanity that may be just as incurable as Bilger’s.

  I’ve often wondered if there were warning signs predicting Bilger’s madness and, unlike the madness of Syria itself, aside from his extraordinary energy, his talent for handling people and his megalomania, I can’t see many, but that’s probably enough. He seemed remarkably stable and responsible; during our time together in Istanbul, before he left for Damascus, he was passionate and efficient — he’s the one who introduced me to Faugier: he was looking for a roommate, while I was searching in vain through all the German-speaking institutions to find a lodging for the two months I had left to spend on the Bosphorus, having exhausted the kindness of the Kulturforum at the palace of Yeniköy, magnificent headquarters of the embassy and then of the Consulate General of Austria, high up past Roumeli Hisar, a stone’s throw from the house of Büyükdere where my eminent compatriot Hammer-Purgstall had been housed. This palace was a sublime place whose sole inconvenience was being, in this city worn away by traffic jams, extraordinarily difficult of access: so my suitcase and I were very happy to find a room to rent in the apartment of a young French research fellow in the social sciences, who was working on prostitution at the end of the Ottoman Empire and at the beginning of the Turkish Republic, a subject that I obviously hid from Mother, fearing she’d picture me living in a brothel. It was a centrally located apartment, which brought me closer to my musical researches and to the ex-Italian Choral Society whose headquarters was a few hundred meters away. Faugier was indeed interested in prostitution, but in Istanbul he was “in exile”: his real field of study was Iran, and he had been welcomed by the French Institute for Anatolian Studies while waiting to obtain a visa to go to Tehran, where I would in fact find him years later: there is no such thing as chance in the world of Oriental Studies, Sarah would have said. He was giving his adoptive institute the benefit of his expertise and was preparing an article on “The Regulation of Prostitution in Istanbul at the Beginning of the Republic,” about which he spoke to me day and night — he was a strange erotomaniac; a Parisian rascal, rather elegant, from a good family but afflicted by a horrible outspokenness, which had nothing in common with Bilger’s subtle irony. How and why he hoped to obtain a visa to Iran was a mystery to everyone; when he was asked the question, he would limit himself to “Ah ah ah, Tehran is a very interesting city, lots of seedy parts, they have everything there,” without wanting to understand that our surprise stemmed not from the resources of the city connected with such research, but from any sympathy the Islamic Republic might grant to this rather bawdy branch of science. (Good Lord I’m thinking like my mother, bawdy, no one has used that word since 1975, Sarah is right, I’m an old-fashioned prude, hopeless, there’s nothing for it.) Contrary to what you might imagine, he was extraordinarily well-respected in his field and wrote columns from time to time in the big French papers — it’s funny he’s inviting himself into my dreams, specialist in Arabic coitus, that wouldn’t have displeased him, even though, so far as I know, he has no relationship with the Arabic world, only with Turkey and Iran, but there you go. Our dreams might be more knowledgeable than we.

  That madman Bilger laughed a lot at having “set me up” with such an individual. At the time he was taking advantage of one of his countless scholarships, he’d made friends with all possible and imaginable Prominenten — and had even used me to get in with the Austrians, very quickly becoming even closer than I to our diplomats.

  I was corresponding regularly with Sarah, postcards of the Hagia Sophia, seen from the Golden Horn: as Grillparzer said in his travel journal, “There may be nothing like it in the whole world.” He describes, enthralled, this succession of monuments, palaces, villages, the power of this site that struck me fully too and filled me with energy, so open is this city, a wound in the sea, a gash engulfed by beauty; to stroll through Istanbul was, whatever the goal of one’s expedition, a wrenching of beauty on the frontier — whether you regard Constantinople as the easternmost city in Europe or the westernmost city in Asia, as an end or a beginning, as a bridge or a border, this mixed nature is fractured by nature, and the place weighs on history as history itself weighs on humans. For me, it was the limit of European music, the most Oriental destination of the indefatigable Liszt, who had drawn its outlines; for Sarah it was the beginning of the land where her travelers had wandered, in both directions.

  It was extraordinary, leafing through the pages of the Journal of Constantinople — Echo of the Orient at the library, to realize to what extent the city had always attracted (thanks, among other things, to the largesse of a sultan who, however, by the second half of the nineteenth century, was mostly ruined) whatever Europe contained in the way of painters, musicians, men of letters, and adventurers — it was absolutely wonderful to discover that, ever since Michelangelo and Da Vinci, everyone had dreamed of the Bosphorus. What interested me in Istanbul, to use Sarah’s terms, was a variation of the “self,” the visits and travels of Europeans to the Ottoman capital, more, really, than Turkish “alterity”; aside from the local personnel of the various institutes and a few friends of Faugier or Bilger’s, I didn’t have much contact with the natives: once again language was an insurmountable obstacle, and unfortunately I was far from being like Hammer-Purgstall who could, he said, “translate from Turkish or Arabic into French, English, or Italian, and speak Turkish as well as German”; perhaps I lacked those pretty Greek or Armenian ladies who could stroll with me, as they did with him, every afternoon by the Strait to practice the language. On this subject Sarah had a horrified memory of her first Arabic course in Paris: an authority, a renowned Orientalist, Gilbert Delanoue, had, from high up in his rostrum, delivered the following truth: “To have a good knowledge of Arabic, you need twenty years. This period of time can be cut in half wi
th the help of a warm dictionary made of flesh and blood.” “A warm dictionary made of flesh and blood” is exactly what Hammer-Purgstall seemed to have, and even several of them; he didn’t hide that fact that what he knew of Modern Greek he owed to the young women of Constantinople to whom he whispered sweet nothings by the water’s edge. That’s how I pictured the “Faugier method”; he spoke Persian and Turkish fluently, a Turkish of the lower depths and a real gutter Persian, learned in the brothels of Istanbul and the parks of Tehran, on the job. His auditory memory was prodigious; he was able to remember and reuse entire conversations, but curiously he lacked an ear: all languages, in his mouth, sounded like an obscure Parisian dialect, so much so that you might wonder if he was doing it on purpose, convinced of the superiority of the French accent over native phonetics. The people of Istanbul or Tehran, perhaps because they’d never had the luck to hear Jean-Paul Belmondo jabber away in their idiom, were bewitched by the strange mixture of refinement and vulgarity that emerged from this monstrous association, a mixture of their worst, most down-and-out places and of a European scholar with the elegance of a diplomat. He employed the same coarseness in all languages, even English. The truth was that I was terribly jealous of his elegance, his knowledge, his outspokenness, as well as of his familiarity with the city — maybe too of his success with women. No, especially of his success with women: on this fifth floor, lost at the end of a back alley in Cihangir that we shared, whose view resembled that of the “Panorama,” there were often soirées, organized by him, to which many desirable young people came; I even danced (I blush to remember) one evening, to a hit by Sezen Aksu or Ibrahim Tatlıses, I forget now, with a pretty Turkish girl (longish hair, formfitting bright-red cotton sweater matching her lipstick, blue eye shadow accentuating the eyes of a houri) who’d then sat next to me on the sofa, while we talked in English; around us, other dancers, holding beers; behind her stretched the lights of the Asiatic shore of the Bosphorus as far as the Haydar Pasha train station; they framed her face with its prominent cheekbones. The questions were banal, what do you do, what are you doing in Istanbul, and as usual I was tongue-tied: