Compass

by Mathias Enard

  He was zigzagging on the motorway at top speed, passing people on the right, blowing his horn, all the while shaking his steering wheel like a damned soul; he turned around to look at me and the old Paykan took advantage of his distraction to veer dangerously to the left.

  “You are Muslim?”

  “No, Christian.”

  “I’m a Muslim, but I like whores a lot. The one yesterday, she wanted twenty dollars.”

  “Oh.”

  “You think that’s expensive too? Here, they’re whores because they need money. It’s sad. It’s not like in Europe.”

  “In Europe it’s not exactly a bed of roses either, you know.”

  “In Europe they take more pleasure from it. Here they don’t.”

  I weakly left him to his certainties. The old man interrupted himself for a minute to illegally pass a bus and a huge Japanese 4x4. On the flowerbeds bordering the motorway, some gardeners were pruning the roses.

  “‘Twenty dollars is too much.’ I said, ‘Make me a deal! I’m old enough to be your grandfather!’”

  “Oh.”

  “I know how to deal with whores.”

  When I got back to the Institute I told Sarah this extraordinary story, which didn’t make her laugh at all, but Faugier found it hilarious. That was not long before he was attacked by the Bassijis; he had taken a few cudgel blows, without the motive for the quarrel being very clear — a political attack aimed at France or a “simple matter of morals,” he never found out. Faugier dealt with his bruises with laughter and opium, and while he refused to go into the details of the confrontation, he repeated to anyone willing to listen that “sociology was really a combat sport.” He reminded me of Lyautey in Morgan’s story — he refused to take notice of the violence of which he was the object. We knew that Iran was a potentially dangerous country, where the henchmen of power, official or covert, didn’t exactly worry themselves with kid-glove treatment, but we all thought we were protected by our nationalities and our status as academics — we were wrong. The internal upheavals in Iranian power could indeed reach us, without our really knowing why. The main person concerned here was not wrong, though: his research was his lifestyle, his lifestyle was part of his research, and danger was one of the reasons these subjects attracted him. He argued that you were more likely to get stabbed in a shady bar in Istanbul than in Tehran, and he was probably right. In any case his stay in Iran was coming to an end (to the great relief of the French Embassy); this thrashing, this hiding, he said, was like a sinister song of farewell, and his bruises were a gift, a souvenir of the Islamic Republic. Faugier’s tastes, his passion for trouble, did not prevent him from being terribly lucid about his condition — he was his own object of study; he admitted that (like many Orientalists and diplomats who don’t easily confess it) he had chosen the East — Turkey and Iran — out of erotic desire for the Oriental body, an image of lasciviousness, permissiveness that had fascinated him since adolescence. He dreamed of the muscles of oiled men in traditional gymnasiums, of the veils of perfumed dancers, of eyes — both masculine and feminine — lined in kohl, of the mist of hammams where all fantasies became reality. He pictured himself as an explorer of desire, and he had become one. This Orientalist image of the almah and the ephebe, he had searched through reality for it, and this reality had impassioned him so much that he substituted himself for his initial dream; he loved his old dancer-prostitutes, his hostesses in the sinister cabarets of Istanbul; he loved his outrageously made-up Iranian transvestites, his furtive encounters in the back of a park in Tehran. Too bad if the Turkish baths were sometimes sordid and filthy, too bad if the badly shaven cheeks of ephebes scraped like currycombs, he’d always had a passion for exploration — for pleasure and for exploration, added Sarah, to whom he had shown his “field journal,” as he called it: the idea that Sarah could plunge into such a document was obviously odious to me, I was terribly jealous of this strange relationship forged through his diary. Even though I knew Sarah felt no attraction for Faugier, or Marc for her, imagining that Sarah could glimpse his intimate life in this way, the details of his scientific life, which in this precise case corresponded to those of his sexual life, was unbearable to me. I saw Sarah in the place of Louise Colet reading Flaubert’s Egypt diary.

  “Almahs — blue sky — the women are sitting in front of their doors — on palm mats or standing — the madams are with them — light-colored clothes, pieces layered over each other which float in the hot wind.”

  Or else much worse.

  “I go downstairs with Sophia Zoughaira — very corrupt, restless, pleasure-taking, little tigress. I stain the sofa.

  “Second fuck with Kuchuk — kissing her shoulder I could feel her round neck under my teeth — her cunt polluted me like rolls of velvet — I felt ferocious.”

  And so on, all the perversions of which Orientalists are capable. Thinking of Sarah in the process of savoring the (revolting, needless to say) prose of that foppish erotomaniac, who I was sure was capable of writing some ghastly thing like her cunt polluted me, was pure torture. How Flaubert was able to inflict this agony on Louise Colet is incomprehensible; the Norman must have been very convinced of his genius. Or perhaps he thought, like Faugier when it came down to it, that these notes were innocent, that the obscenity portrayed there didn’t belong to the realm of the real, but was of another order, science or travel, an investigation that distanced these pornographic considerations from his being, his own flesh; when Flaubert writes “fuck, refuck full of tenderness,” or “her pussy warmer than her belly warmed me like a hot iron,” when he says how, once Kuchuk has fallen asleep in his arms, he plays at crushing bedbugs on the wall, bedbugs whose smell mingles with the sandalwood of the young woman’s perfume (the black blood of the insects draws pretty lines on the whitewashed wall), Flaubert is convinced these observations arouse interest, and not disgust: he is surprised that Louise Colet is horrified by this passage through the city of Esna. He tries to justify himself in a letter that’s at least as atrocious: “Entering Jaffa,” he says, “I breathed in the smell of lemon trees at the same time as that of corpses.” For him, horror is everywhere; it is mixed with beauty; beauty and pleasure would be nothing without ugliness and pain, you have to feel them all together. (Louise Colet would be so struck by this manuscript that she would go to Egypt as well, eighteen years later, in 1869, for the inaugural ceremonies of the Suez Canal, when all of Europe was rushing to the shores of the Nile — she would see the almahs and their dances, which she would find vulgar; she would be shocked by two Germans so hypnotized by the bells on their necklaces that they would disappear, miss the boat, and reappear a few days later, “shamefully exhausted and smiling”; she too would stop at Esna, but to contemplate the ravages done by time on the body of that poor Kuchuk Hanim: she would have her revenge.)

  Desire for the Orient is also a carnal desire, a physical domination, an erasing of the other in pleasure: we know nothing of Kuchuk Hanim, that dancer-prostitute of the Nile, aside from her erotic power and the name of the dance she performed, “The Bee”; aside from her clothes, her movements, the matter of her cunt, we know nothing about her, neither her words nor her feelings — she was probably the most famous of the almahs of Esna, or perhaps the only one. We do however possess a second testimonial about Kuchuk, by an American this time, who visited the city two years before Flaubert and published his Nile Notes of a Howadji in New York — here, George William Curtis devotes two chapters to Kuchuk — he calls her Kushuk Arnem; two poetic chapters, full of mythological references and voluptuous metaphors (O Venus!), the dancer’s body writhing like the hose of a narghileh and the snake of original sin, a body that’s “profound, oriental, intense, and terrible.” Of Kuchuk we would know only her country of origin: Syria, Flaubert tells us, Palestine according to Curtis, and a single word, “buono” — according to Curtis, “one choice Italian word she knew.” Buono, all the sordid pleasure stripped of t
he weight of Western propriety that Kuchuk could arouse, the pages of Salammbô and of The Temptation of Saint Anthony that she inspired, and nothing more.

  Marc Faugier, in his “participatory observation,” is interested in life stories, in the voices of the almahs and khawals of the twenty-first century; he examines their personal itineraries, their sufferings, their joys; in this sense, he joins the original Orientalist passions to the aspirations of today’s social sciences, just as fascinated as Flaubert by the mixture of beauty and horror, by the blood of the crushed bug — and the sweetness of the body he is possessing.

  Before you can comprehend beauty, you have to dive into the deepest horror, and travel completely through it, said Sarah — Tehran was feeling more and more like violence and death, between the attack on Faugier, Morgan’s illness, the hangings, and the perpetual mourning for the Imam Husayn. Fortunately, there was Iranian music, tradition, the instrumentalists whom I met thanks to Jean During, worthy successor of the great Strasbourg Orientalist school — within strict and puritan Islam still shone the fires of music, literature, mysticism, humor, and life. For every hanged person, a thousand concerts, a thousand poems; for every head cut off, a thousand sessions of zikr and a thousand bursts of laughter. If only our journalists wanted to interest themselves in something besides pain and death — it’s five thirty a.m., the silence of night; the screen is a world in itself, a world where there’s neither time nor space. Ishq, hawa, hub, mahabba, the Arabic words for passion, for the love of humans and of God, which is the same. Sarah’s heart, divine; Sarah’s body, divine; Sarah’s words, divine. Iseult, Tristan. Tristan, Iseult. Iseult, Tristan. Potions. Unity. Azra and Farid with the tragic luck, beings crushed under the Wheel of Destiny. Where is the light of Suhrawardi, what Orient will the compass show, what archangel dressed in purple will come open our hearts to love? Eros, philia, or agapé, what drunken Greek in sandals will come again, accompanied by a flute player, forehead encircled with violets, to remind us of the madness of love? Khomeini wrote love poems. Poems about wine, drunkenness, the Lover mourning the Beloved, roses, nightingales transmitting messages of love. For him martyrdom was a message of love. Suffering a gentle breeze. Death a poppy. This is how it is. I feel as if these days only Khomeini talks about love. Farewell compassion, long live death.

  I was jealous of Faugier for no reason, I know he was suffering, that he was suffering martyrdom, that he was running away, that he had fled, that he had been fleeing from himself for a very long time, until he ended up in Tehran on a rug, curled up, knees under his chin, convulsing; his tattoos, said Sarah, mingled with the bruises to form mysterious drawings; he was half-naked, had difficulty breathing, she said, he kept his eyes open and staring, I lulled him like a child, added Sarah, terrified, I was forced to cradle him like a child, in the middle of the night in the garden of eternal spring whose red and blue flowers were becoming frightening in the twilight — Faugier was struggling between anguish and loss, anguish amplified the loss and the loss amplified the anguish, and these two monsters attacked him at night. Giants, fantastic creatures tortured him. Fear, distress in the absolute solitude of the body. Sarah consoled him. She said she stayed with him till dawn; at daybreak, he fell asleep, his hand in hers, still on the rug where the fit had thrown him. Faugier’s dependence (on opium and then, later, as he himself had predicted, heroin) was coupled with another addiction, at least as strong, with that other oblivion which is sex, carnal pleasure, and Oriental dream; his path to the East stopped there, on that rug, in Tehran, in his own impasse, in that aporia, between self and other, which is identity.

  “Sleep is good, death better,” says Heinrich Heine in his poem “Morphine,” “best never to have been born.” I wonder if someone was holding Heine’s hand in his long months of suffering, someone who wasn’t brother Sleep with the poppy crown, the one who gently strokes the sick man’s forehead and delivers his soul from all pain — and I, will I live my dying moments alone in my bedroom or at the hospital, don’t think about that, turn away from illness and death, like Goethe, who always avoided dying people, corpses, and funerals: the traveler from Weimar makes sure each time to avoid the spectacle of death, to avoid the contagion of death; he thought of himself as a ginkgo, that tree from the Far East, immortal, ancestor of all trees, whose bilobed leaf so magnificently represents Union in love that he sent one, dried, to Marianne Willemer — “Don’t you feel, in my songs, that I am One and double?” The pretty Viennese lady (round cheeks, ample figure) was thirty, Goethe sixty-five. For Goethe, the Orient is the opposite of death; looking to the East is turning your eyes away from the False. Fleeing. Into the poetry of Saadi and Hafez, into the Koran, into distant India; the Wanderer walks toward life. Toward the Orient, youth and Marianne, against old age and his wife Christiane. Goethe becomes Hatem, and Marianne Suleika. Christiane would die alone in Weimar, Goethe would not hold her hand, Goethe would not go to her funeral. Am I too turning away from the inevitable, in my obsession for Sarah, searching through the memory of this computer to find her letter from Weimar —

  Dearest François-Joseph,

  It’s rather strange to find myself in Germany, in this language, so close to you, without you here. I don’t know if you’ve ever traveled to Weimar; I suppose you have — I imagine Goethe, Liszt, and even Wagner must have drawn you. I remember you studied for a year in Tübingen — not very far from here it seems to me. I’ve been in Thuringia for two days: snow, snow, snow. And freezing cold. You wonder what I’m doing here — a conference, of course. A comparative conference on travel literature in the nineteenth century. Leading figures. Met Sarga Moussa, great specialist in visions of the Orient in the nineteenth century. Magnificent contribution on travel and memory. A little jealous of his knowledge, all the more so since he speaks German perfectly, like most of the attendees. I presented for the umpteenth time a paper on the travels of Faris al-Shidyaq in Europe, in a different version, of course, but I still feel as if I’m rehashing things. The price of glory.

  Of course we visited Goethe’s house — you feel as if the master is about to get up from his armchair to greet you, so well-preserved the place seems. A collector’s house — objects everywhere. Cabinets, filing cabinets for drawings, drawers for minerals, bird skeletons, Greek and Roman casts. His bedroom, tiny, next to his big office, under the peaked roof. The armchair in which he died. The portrait of his son August, who died two years before his father, in Rome. The portrait of his wife Christiane, who died fifteen years before him. Christiane’s bedroom, with its curios: a beautiful fan, a pack of cards, a few perfume flasks, a blue cup with a rather touching inscription in gilt letters, To the Faithful One. A feather. Two little portraits, one young and one less young. It’s a strange feeling to walk through that house where, they say, everything has remained as it was in 1832. A little like visiting a tomb, mummies included.

  The most surprising thing is Weimar’s relationship to the Orient — through Goethe, of course, but also Herder, Schiller, and India as well as Wieland and his Djinnistan collection. Not to mention the ginkgoes (unrecognizable in this season) that have populated the city for over a century, so much so that they’ve even devoted a museum to them. But I imagine you know all this — I didn’t. The Oriental side of German classicism. Once again, you realize how much Europe is a cosmopolitan construction . . . Herder, Wieland, Schiller, Goethe, Rudolf Steiner, Nietzsche . . . You feel as if all you have to do is lift a stone in Weimar for a link to the distant East to appear. But you remain firmly planted in Europe — destruction is never very far. The Buchenwald concentration camp is a few kilometers from here, I’ve heard the visit is terrifying. I don’t have the courage to go.