Compass

by Mathias Enard

  Flash illuminating her upright torso, backlit, barred horizon of the white marble of her chest, under which the circles of her belly swim; flash of a thought, B major, I thought B major, and having lost myself for a moment far from the present, having seen myself, in B major, author of another’s gestures, witness, for a few seconds, of my own questionings, why B major, how to escape from B major, and this thought was so incongruous, so frightened, that I was paralyzed for a minute, far from everything, and Sarah perceived (slower rhythm, gentle caress on my chest) my hesitations before drawing me simply away from them, by the miracle of her tenderness.

  Flash of whisperings in the night, harmony increased by the friction of voices against bodies, vibrations of the tense air of Tehran, of sweet drunkenness prolonged by the music and by company — what did we say to each other that night that time has not erased, the dark brilliance of a smiling eye, the languor of a breast, the taste of skin slightly rough under the tongue, the smell of sweat, the provocative acidity of folds devoured, aqueous, sensitive, where the slow waves of pleasure overflow; the palp of beloved fingers in my hair, on my shoulders, on my penis, which I tried to hide from her caresses, before abandoning myself as well, offering myself up so that union could continue, as night advanced toward the inevitable dawn: each of us in profile, not knowing which liquids accompany which breaths, in a pose of intertwined statues, my hands clutched to her chest, knees in the hollows of knees, the riveted, twisted gazes of the caduceus, burning tongues made cold by bites, on the neck, on the shoulder, trying to maintain as much as possible this adhesion of our bodies that a murmured name loosens, unties into open syllables, spreads into phonemes, stifled by the power of the embrace.

  Until the red dawn of warriors from the Book of Kings descends on Damavand: in the breathless silence, while I am still stunned, amazed by Sarah’s presence beside me, the call to prayer — which you forget in Tehran, never hear, discreet, drowned as it usually is in the sounds of the city — resounds, a fragile miracle from an unknown source, a neighboring mosque or an apartment nearby, the adhan falls on us, envelopes us, judgment or blessing, sonorous ointment, “As my heart pounds up to my throat in excited love for this city and its sounds, I begin to feel that all my wanderings have always had but one meaning: to grasp the meaning of this call,” said Muhammad Asad, and finally I understand its meaning, a meaning, the one of the sweetness of sharing and love, and I know that Sarah, like me, is thinking of the verses of the troubadours, of the sad alba, the aubade; the call is mingled with the song of the first birds, urban sparrows, our nightingales of the poor (“Sahar bolbol hekayat ba Saba kard, At dawn the nightingale speaks to the breeze”), with the gliding automobiles, the smells of tar, rice, and saffron that are the odor of Iran, forever associated, for me, with the salty, rainy taste of Sarah’s skin: we remain motionless, bewildered, listening to the sonorous layers of this blind moment, knowing it signifies both love and separation in the light of day.

  6:00 A.M.

  No reply yet. Is there internet in Kuching, capital of Sarawak? Of course. There’s no place left on earth without internet. Even in the midst of the most terrible wars, fortunately or unfortunately, you can find a connection. Even in her monastery in Darjeeling, Sarah had an internet café nearby. Impossible to escape the screen. Even in catastrophe.

  In Tehran, at the end of the day after that incredibly sweet night, she hopped onto the first plane to Paris, the red-eye with Air France, trembling with suffering and guilt, after spending the day, without having closed her eyes for a minute, rushing from police station to police station to settle those sordid visa matters Iranians excel in, armed with a piece of paper sent urgently by the French Embassy, attesting to the extremely serious state of her brother’s health and begging the Iranian authorities to facilitate her departure, even though she had the intuitive sensation, at the sound of her mother’s voice, that Samuel had already died, regardless of what they told her, faced with this announcement she was destroyed by shock, distance, incomprehension, incredulity and, that very night, as she was fidgeting sleeplessly on her seat high up in the midst of the impassive stars, I rushed to go online and send her letters, letters and letters that she would read, I stupidly hoped, when she arrived. I too spent the night without closing my eyes in an enraged, incredulous state.

  Her mother had called her without success all evening and into the morning, desperate, had contacted the Institute, the consulate, moved heaven and earth and finally, when Sarah, throwing me a kiss from afar, had modestly closed the bathroom door for privacy, they had come to inform me — the accident had occurred on the previous afternoon, the accident, the event, the discovery, no one knew anything yet, Sarah had to call her mother back at home, and it was the words at home, rather than at the hospital, or God knows where, it was the words at home that had made her sense the worst. She had rushed to the phone, I can see the dial and her hands hesitating, getting the number wrong, I slipped away, I went out too, as much out of decorum as cowardliness.

  That last day, I wandered with her through the lower depths of the Iranian legal system, to the passport office, that kingdom of tears and injustice, where illegal Afghans, their clothes stained with cement and paint, handcuffed, defeated, filed in front of us surrounded by Pasdaran and looked for a little consolation in the gazes of those present; we waited for hours on the worn wooden bench, under the portraits of the first and second Guides of the Revolution, and every ten minutes Sarah would get up to go to the counter, always repeating the same question and the same argument, “bayad emshab beravam, I have to leave tonight, I have to leave tonight,” and each time the functionary would reply “tomorrow,” “tomorrow,” “you’ll leave tomorrow,” and in the selfishness of passion I hoped in fact she wouldn’t leave till the next day, that I could spend one more evening, one more night with her, consoling her, I imagined, for the catastrophe we had only just glimpsed, and the most terrible thing, in that dilapidated antechamber, under the wrathful gaze of Khomeini and the big myopic glasses of Khamenei, was that I could not take her in my arms, not even hold her hand or dry the tears of rage, anguish, and powerlessness on her face, fearing that this mark of indecency and offense to Islamic morality might diminish her chances of obtaining her exit visa even more. Finally, when all hope of a wave from the magic wand seemed lost, an officer (fifties, short gray beard, generous stomach in an impeccable uniform jacket) passed by us to go to his office; this kind family man listened to Sarah’s story, took pity on her, and, with that magnanimous grandeur that belongs only to powerful dictatorships, after initialing an obscure document, he summoned his subordinate to request him to kindly affix the theoretically inaccessible seal on the passport of the lady in question, upon which the subordinate — the same unwavering functionary who had unceremoniously kept us waiting all morning — complied immediately, with a slight smile of irony or compassion, and Sarah flew to Paris.

  B major — the dawn that brings an end to the love scene; death. Does Szymanowski’s Song of the Night, which so skillfully links the verses of Rumi the mystic to the long night of Tristan and Isolde, shift into B major? I don’t remember, but it’s likely. One of the most sublime symphonic compositions of the last century, without a doubt. The night of the Orient. The Orient of night. Death and separation. With those choruses as brilliant as clusters of stars.

  Szymanowski also set poems by Hafez to music, two song cycles composed in Vienna, not long before the First World War. Hafez. You feel as if the world spins around his mystery, like the mystical Firebird around the mountain. “Hafez, shh! No one knows the divine mysteries, be quiet! Whom will you ask what has happened in the cycle of days?” Around his mystery and his translators, from Hammer-Purgstall to Hans Bethge, whose adaptations of “Oriental” poetry are so often set to music. Szymanowski, Mahler, Schönberg, Viktor Ullmann — they all use Bethge’s versions. Bethge, an almost motionless traveler who knew no Arabic, no Persian, no Chinese. The original, the essence, rema
ins between the text and his translations, in a land between languages, between worlds, somewhere in the nakodjaabad, the nowhere-place, that imaginal world where music also takes its source. There is no original. Everything is in flux. Between languages. Between times, the time of Hafez and that of Hans Bethge. Translation as metaphysical practice. Translation as meditation. It’s very late to be thinking of these things. The memory of Sarah and music pushes me to these melancholies. These wide spaces of the vacuity of time. We didn’t know the pain the night was hiding; what sort of long, strange separation was opening up then, after those kisses — impossible now to go back to sleep, no bird yet or muezzin in the dark of Vienna, heart beating with memories, with a lack as powerful as lack of opium possibly, lack of whispers and caresses.

  Sarah has had a brilliant career; she’s constantly invited to the most prestigious conferences, while she’s still an academic nomad, has no “post,” as they say, unlike me, who has exactly the opposite: security, indeed, in a comfortable campus, with pleasant students, in the city where I grew up, but a reputation close to nil. At best I can count on a gathering from time to time at the University of Graz, or even Bratislava or Prague to stretch my legs. It’s been years since I’ve been to the Middle East, I haven’t even been to Istanbul recently. I could stay for hours in front of this screen skimming through Sarah’s articles and public appearances, reconstituting her travels, conferences in Madrid, Vienna, Berlin, Cairo, Aix-en-Provence, Boston, Berkeley, as far as Bombay, Kuala Lumpur, or Jakarta, that map of global scholarship.

  Sometimes I feel as if night has fallen, that Western darkness has invaded the Orient of enlightenment. That spirit and learning, the pleasures of the spirit and of learning, of Khayyam’s and Pessoa’s wine, have not been able to stand up to the twentieth century; I feel that the global construction of the world is no longer carried out by the interchange of love and ideas, but by violence and manufactured objects. Islamists fighting against Islam. The United States, Europe, at war against the other in the self. What’s the use of pulling Anton Rubinstein and his Persian Love Songs of Mirza Schaffy from oblivion. What’s the use of remembering Friedrich von Bodenstedt, his Thousand and One Days in the Orient and his descriptions of evenings around Mirza Schaffy the Azeri poet in Tiflis, getting plastered on Georgian wine, his wobbly praises of the Caucasian nights and Persian poetry, poems the German shouted out, dead drunk, in the streets of Tbilisi. Bodenstedt, one more forgotten translator. A traveler. A creator, especially. The book of the Lieder von Mirza Schaffy, though, was one of the great successes of “Oriental” literature in nineteenth-century Germany. As well as the musical adaptation by Anton Rubinstein in Russia. What’s the use of remembering the Russian Orientalists and their beautiful encounters with the music and literature of Central Asia? You have to have Sarah’s energy to constantly reconstruct yourself, always look mourning and illness in the face, have the perseverance to continue searching through the sadness of the world to draw beauty or knowledge from it.

  Dearest Franz,

  I know, I haven’t been writing to you these days, I don’t send much news, I’m drowning in travel. I’ve been in Vietnam for a little while, in Tonkin, Annam, and Cochin China. I’m in Hanoi in 1900. I can see your surprise: Vietnam? Yes, a project on the colonial imagination, can you believe it. Without leaving Paris, unfortunately. A project on opium. I’ve been diving into the stories of the addict Jules Boissière, the poor civil servant from Languedoc who died from his passion at the age of thirty-four after smoking many pipes and confronting the jungles of Tonkin, the cold, the rain, violence and illness, his sole companion the somber light of the opium lamp. The story of the imagery of opium in colonial literature is extraordinarily interesting. The process of the essentialization of opium as “Extreme-Oriental,” belonging to the Far East, all the mysticism and clarity, the “good, sweet drug” concentrates, as Boissière says, in the heart of colonial violence. For Boissière, opium is the link to the Vietnamese; they share not only pipes and cots, but also the suffering from lack of opium and the violence of the times. The smoker is a being apart, a wise man who belongs to the community of seers: a visionary and a fragile beggar. Opium is the luminous blackness that is the opposite of the cruelty of nature and the ferocity of men. You smoke after having fought, after having tortured, after having witnessed heads cut off by sabers, ears hacked off by machetes, bodies ravaged by dysentery or cholera. Opium is a common language, a shared world; only the pipe and the lamp have the power to make us penetrate “the soul of Asia.” The drug (precolonial scourge introduced by imperialist commerce and a formidable weapon of domination) becomes the key to a strange universe one must penetrate, so it becomes the image that best represents this world, that displays it most perfectly for the Western masses.

  Here for example are two postcards sent from Saigon in the 1920s. The youth of the models gives the impression that opium is a practice that is not only extraordinarily widespread, but also accepted, eternal, rural, natural; the black, padlocked box no doubt encloses all the secrets of those so exotic countries where people devote themselves to this childlike passion. Portrait of the native as a drug-addicted child.

  “There is always a need for intoxication: this country has opium, Islam has hashish, the West has women. Perhaps love is above all the means which the West uses to free itself from man’s fate,” writes Malraux in Man’s Fate; this phrase, which is curious to say the least, shows clearly how opium becomes the commodity of the Far East, the Extreme Orient, and how our representations are fabricated; it is not, of course,

  a question of denying the reality of the ravages of opium in China or Vietnam, but of seeing how this imagination is constructed, and how it serves colonial propaganda.

  I remember Marc lost in opium in Tehran and I wonder if he succumbed to a great dream, if all his scientific justifications are actually unconscious excuses to plunge, like all of us, into dreamlike territories where you can escape yourself.

  I explain all this to you, but actually I’d mostly like to stretch out on a mat, resting my head on a suitcase, to breathe in the vaporous oblivion, confide my soul to Nepenthes and forget all the pains of loss. My opium is these texts and images that I go to find every day in Parisian libraries, these butterflies of words that I collect, that I observe without thinking of anything else, this sea of old books in which I’m trying to drown — unfortunately, despite everything, I think of my brother, I feel as if I’m limping, as if I’m perpetually wobbly, and sometimes, when I come across a text that’s too violent or too moving, I have a lot of trouble holding back my tears, so I lock myself in my bedroom, take one of those modern pills that no doubt have neither the charm nor the power of opium, and I sleep for twenty-four hours straight.

  You who suffer, here is the treasure that is left to you:

  Smoke. And may you, indulgent gods, be blessed

  Who place happiness at the mercy of a gesture.

  That’s the epitaph that Albert de Pouvourville wrote for his friend Jules Boissière in Hanoi, in the Pagoda of the Lake. I would like happiness to be at the mercy of a gesture. I know you think of me; I read your letters every day, I try to answer without managing to, I’m afraid you’re mad at me, so I bury myself in my research like a child hiding under her blanket.

  Write to me all the same, with love,

  Sarah

  Sarah reconstructed herself by going further east, more profoundly into herself, advancing in that spiritual and scientific quest that allowed her to escape her own unhappiness — I prefer to stay in my Viennese apartment, even if it means suffering from insomnia, illness, and Gruber’s dog. I don’t have her courage. War has never been the best time for our congregation. Archaeologists transformed into spies, linguists into propaganda experts, ethnologists into disciplinarians. Sarah does well to exile herself into those mysterious, distant lands where they’re interested in the pepper trade and philosophical concepts, and very little in cutth
roats and bomb-makers. East of the East, as Pessoa says. What would I find, in distant China, in the kingdom of Siam, among the martyred peoples of Vietnam and Cambodia or in the Philippines, old islands conquered by the Spaniards who seem, on the map, indecisive as to which side of the world to pick, fixated on the immensity of the Pacific, the last barrier closing the Sea of China, or on Samoa, the point farthest east from the German language, or the westernmost, the peaceful colony of Bismarck’s empire buying from the Spaniards the last crumbs of their southern possessions — what will we find west of the West, where the planet’s belt is looped, a few trembling ethnologists administering sweating colonies who drown their melancholy in alcohol and violence under the despairing eye of the natives, import-export companies, offshore banks, tourists, or else in knowledge, music, love, encounters, exchanges — the last trace of German colonialism is a beer, as it should be, Tsingtao, a beer named for the capital of the trading post of Zhan Qiao, in the northeastern part of mysterious China; a few thousand Germans lived in that territory rented from the Celestial Empire for ninety-nine years, which the Japanese troops assisted by a British contingent eventually took by assault in the autumn of 1914, drawn perhaps by its great brick brewery that continues, even today, to export millions of bottles all over the world — one more circle closed, an ex-colonial beer that colonizes in turn, a century later, the capitalist planet. I imagine the machines and the master brewers arriving from Germany in 1900 and coming ashore on the magnificent bay between Shanghai and Peking that the German gunboats had just wrenched from a Manchu dynasty overwhelmed by Western powers like a wound by worms: the Russians gave themselves Port Arthur, the French Fort-Bayard, the Germans Tsing-Tao, not counting the concessions in the cities of Tientsin and Shanghai. Even our poor Austria-Hungary would obtain a piece of land in Tientsin that it would hurry, they say, to cover in Viennese-style buildings — a church, a few residential buildings, some shops. Tientsin, 160 kilometers from Peking, must have looked like a European World’s Fair, with its French, English, German, Russian, Austrian, Belgian, and even Italian neighborhoods, in a few kilometers you felt as if you’d traveled across haughty, colonizing Europe, that Europe of brigands and adventurers who’d pillaged and set fire to the Summer Palace of Peking in 1860, concentrating on the garden pavilions, the faience, the gold ornaments, the fountains, and even the trees, the English and French soldiers tore away the treasures of the palace like vulgar misers before setting fire to it, and imperial Chinese dishes and bronze receptacles would be found as far away as the markets of London or Paris, products of pillage and violence. Peter Fleming, brother of the creator of James Bond and traveling companion of Ella Maillart in Asia, writes in his book on the famous “55 Days at Peking,” when the representatives of eleven European nations withstood the Siege of the Legations by the Boxers and the Imperial Army, that an Orientalist would cry, inconsolable, when fire destroyed the only complete copy of the Yongle Dadian, the immense encyclopedia of the Ming Dynasty, compiled in the fifteenth century and encompassing all the knowledge in the world, eleven thousand volumes, twenty-three thousand chapters, millions and millions of handwritten ideograms gone up in smoke in the hissing of the flames of the Imperial library, which as bad luck would have it was situated right next to the British legation. An unknown Sinologist cried: one of the rare beings conscious, in the tumult of war, of what had just disappeared; he happened to be there, in the middle of the catastrophe, and his own death suddenly became a matter of indifference to him, he had seen knowledge go up in smoke, the legacy of ancient scholars being erased — did he pray, full of hatred, to an unknown god for the flames to annihilate the English as well as the Chinese or, stunned by pain and shame, did he merely watch the sparks and glowing paper butterflies invade the summer night, his eyes protected from the smoke by his tears of rage, we have no idea. The only thing that’s clear, Sarah would have said, is that the victory of the foreigners over the Chinese gave rise to massacres and pillages of unprecedented violence, the missionaries themselves, apparently, tasting the pleasure of blood and the joys of vengeance in the company of the soldiers of the glorious allied nations. Apart from the unknown Sinologist, no one sobbed over the destroyed encyclopedia, apparently; it was added to the list of war victims, victims of economic conquest and imperialism faced with a recalcitrant empire that obstinately refused to let itself be taken apart.