Compass Page 11

  Joseph Hammer doesn’t fall asleep, he’s a music lover; he appreciates fine society, good company, splendid gatherings — he’s a little over forty, and from years of experience of the Levant, he speaks six languages perfectly, has spent time with the Turks, the English and the French, and appreciates, though for different reasons, these three nations whose qualities he has been able to admire. He is an Austrian, son of a provincial civil servant, and all he lacks is a castle and a title to fulfill the Destiny he feels is his — he’ll have to wait for both twenty more years and a stroke of luck to inherit Hainfeld and the barony that accompanies it, to become von Hammer-Purgstall.

  Beethoven greets the audience. These years are much harder for him, he has just lost his brother Carl and has begun lengthy proceedings to gain custody of his nephew; the onset of his deafness is isolating him more and more. He’s forced to use those enormous, strangely shaped copper ear trumpets that you can see in Bonn, in a glass case in the Beethovenhaus, and that make him look like a centaur. He is in love, but with a love that he senses, either because of his illness or the young woman’s high birth, will produce nothing but music; like Harriet for Berlioz, the object of that love is there, in the room; Beethoven starts to play his twenty-seventh sonata, composed a few months earlier, with vivacity, feeling, and expression.

  The audience trembles a little; there’s a murmur that Beethoven can’t hear: Hammer relates that the piano, perhaps because of the heating, hasn’t kept its tune and sounds terribly off-key — Beethoven’s fingers play perfectly, and he can hear, internally, his music as it should sound; for the audience, it’s a sonorous catastrophe, and although Beethoven can see his beloved from time to time, he must perceive, little by little, that the faces are overcome by embarrassment — shame, even, at witnessing the great man’s humiliation in this way. Fortunately Countess Apponyi is a lady of tact, she applauds loudly, discreetly motions to shorten the recital, and we can picture Beethoven’s sadness, when he understands what a horrible farce he’s been victim of — this will be his last concert, Hammer tells us. I like to imagine that when Beethoven composes, a few weeks later, the lieder cycle An die ferne Geliebte, to the distant beloved, it’s that distance of deafness he’s thinking about, which is distancing him from the world more surely than exile, and even though we still don’t know, despite the passionate research of the specialists, who this young woman was, we can guess, in the final Nimm sie hin denn, diese Lieder, all the sadness of the artist who can no longer sing or play the melodies he writes for the woman he loves.

  For years, I collected all possible performances of the Beethoven piano sonatas, good and bad, predictable and surprising, dozens of records, CDs, tapes, and every time I hear the second movement of the twenty-seventh, although very cantabile, I can’t help but think of the shame and embarrassment, the shame and embarrassment of all declarations of love that fall flat, and I’ll blush with shame sitting in my bed with the light on if I think of that again, we play our sonata all alone without realizing the piano is out of tune, overcome by our emotions: others hear how off-key we sound, and at best feel sincere pity, at worst a terrible annoyance at being confronted with our humiliation that sullies them when they themselves had, usually, asked for nothing — Sarah had asked for nothing, that night in the Baron Hotel, or else she did, maybe, I don’t have a clue, I confess I’ve forgotten, today, after all this time, after Tehran, the years, tonight, as I’m plunging into illness like Beethoven and as, despite this morning’s mysterious article, Sarah is more distant than ever, ferne Geliebte, fortunately I don’t write poems, and I stopped writing music a long time ago.

  My last visit to the Beethovenhaus in Bonn for that lecture on “The Ruins of Athens and the Orient” was a few years back, and that too was marked by shame and humiliation, the humiliation of poor Bilger’s madness — I can see him again standing in the front row, saliva on his lips, beginning by ranting on about Kotzebue (the author of the libretto for The Ruins of Athens who’d asked nothing of anyone either and whose sole claim to fame is probably getting stabbed to death), and then Bilger went on to jumble everything together, archaeology and anti-Muslim racism, since the “Chorus of Dervishes” I had just spoken about mentions the Prophet and the Kaaba and that’s why it’s never performed these days, Bilger shouted, we respect al-Qaida too much, our world is in danger, no one is interested in Greek or Roman archaeology anymore, only al-Qaida, and Beethoven had realized you have to bring both sides together in music, the East and the West, to drive away the end of the world that’s approaching and you, Franz (this is when the lady from the Beethovenhaus turned to me with a concerned look which I answered with a cowardly, dubious look signifying “I have absolutely no idea who this crackpot is”) you know this but you don’t say it, you know that art is threatened, that it’s a symptom of the end of the world, all these people turning to Islam, to Hinduism and Buddhism, you just have to read Hermann Hesse to know this, archaeology is a science of the earth and everyone’s forgetting it, just as we forget that Beethoven is the only German prophet — I was overcome with a sudden and terrifying need to urinate, suddenly I stopped hearing what Bilger was jabbering on about, standing in the middle of the audience, I could listen to nothing but my body and my bladder, it felt as if it were about to explode, I said to myself “I drank tea, I drank too much tea,” I’m not going to make it, I have a formidable desire to piss, I’ll wet my pants and my socks, it’s terrible, in front of everyone, I won’t be able to hold it in much longer, I must have turned visibly paler and as Bilger was still stammering his inaudible curses against me I got up and ran, squirming, hand on my crotch, to take refuge in the toilet, while behind me a thunder of applause greeted my departure, interpreted as my repudiation of the mad orator. When I returned, Bilger was gone; he had left, the brave lady from the Beethovenhaus told me, soon after my disappearance, not without first calling me a coward and a traitor, for which, I have to admit, he was not wrong.

  This incident had saddened me profoundly; although I was delighted to see in detail the objects in the Bodmer collection, I spent scarcely ten minutes in the museum rooms; the curator accompanying me noticed my low spirits and tried to reassure me, you know, madmen, they’re everywhere, she said, and even though her intention was laudable, the idea that there could be insane people like Bilger everywhere only compounded my depression. Had his excessive stays in the Orient made a preexistent crack in his soul widen, had he contracted a spiritual disease over there, or might Turkey and Syria have nothing to do with any of it, might he have become just as mad without ever leaving Bonn, no one knows — a client for your neighbor, Sarah would have said, referring to Freud, and I confess I have absolutely no idea if the kind of paranoid delirium Bilger had might be beyond the help of psychoanalysis, more likely treatable by trepanation, despite all the sympathy good Dr. Sigmund and his acolytes aroused in me. “You are resisting,” Sarah would have said; she had explained to me the extraordinary concept of resistance in psychoanalysis, I forget why, and I had been outraged by the simplicity of the argument, anything that goes against psychoanalytic theory falls into the realm of resistance, referring to sick people who refuse to get better, refuse to see light in the words of the good doctor. That’s certainly my case, now that I think about it, I resist, I’ve resisted for years, I have never even entered the apartment of the cocaine-addicted specialist in the sexual lives of infants, I didn’t even go with Sarah when she went, whatever you like, I said, I have no problem going to see women cut open in an anatomy museum but I won’t visit that charlatan’s apartment, in any case nothing has changed, you know, the fraud continues: they’ll make you pay a fortune to see a completely empty apartment, since his possessions, his couch, his rug, his crystal ball, and his paintings of nude women are all in London. That was obviously bad faith, another way of trying to show off, I have nothing against Freud, of course, and she had guessed that, as usual. Maybe Freud could manage to make me fall asleep with his hypnotizer’
s pendulum, it’s been an hour now that I’ve been sitting in my bed with the light on, glasses on my nose, article in hand, staring stupidly at the shelves of my bookcase — “The times are so bad that I’ve decided to talk to myself,” said that Spanish essayist, Gómez de la Serna, and I understand him.

  I too am managing to talk to myself.

  To sing, even, sometimes.

  Everything is quiet at Gruber’s place. He must be sleeping, he’ll get up around four a.m. for his needs, his bladder doesn’t leave him alone, a little like mine in Bonn, how shameful, when I think about it, everyone thought I left the hall outraged by Bilger’s statements, I should have shouted to him “Remember Damascus! Remember the Palmyra desert!” and maybe he’d have started awake, like a patient of Freud’s who suddenly discovers, mid-session, that he has confused the “wee-wee maker” of his father with that of a horse and all of a sudden finds himself immensely relieved by this — that story of Little Hans is incredible all the same, I forget his real name but I know that afterward this man became an opera director, and that he agitated all his life for opera to be a popular spectacle, what became of his phobia of horses, did the good Dr. Freud cure him of it, I have no idea, one would hope he stopped using the expression “wee-wee maker” at least. Why opera? Probably because you come across a lot fewer “wee-wee makers” there than in, say, the cinema — and hardly any horses. I had refused to go with Sarah to Freud’s place, I had stood my ground (or resisted, according to the terminology). She’d returned delighted, overflowing with energy, her cheeks red from the cold (a fine freezing wind was blowing over Vienna that day), I was waiting for her in the Maximilian café at the corner of the Votivkirche square, reading the paper, well-hidden in a corner behind the Standard, which is barely big enough to hide you from the students and colleagues who frequent this establishment, but which had at the time brought out a series of DVDs of a hundred Austrian films and deserved to be rewarded for this interesting initiative, this celebration of Austrian cinema; obviously, one of the first of the series was The Piano Teacher, a terrifying movie adapted from the novel by the no less terrifying Elfriede Jelinek, and I was thinking about these slightly sad things sheltering behind my Standard when Sarah returned all bright and cheerful from Mr. Freud’s place: I immediately mixed up in my head little Hans with Jelinek’s agoraphobia and her desire to cut off all “wee-wee makers” — men’s as well as horses’.

  Sarah had made a discovery, she couldn’t get over it; she pushed back the newspaper and caught my hand, her fingers were freezing.

  SARAH (agitated, childlike). You know what? It’s incredible, can you guess what the name of Dr. Freud’s upstairs neighbor is?

  FRANZ (confused). What? What neighbor of Freud?

  SARAH (slightly irritated). On the mailbox. Freud’s apartment is on the first floor. And there are people who live in the building.

  FRANZ (Viennese humor). They must have to put up with the shouts of hysterical people — that must be even more annoying than my neighbor’s dog.

  SARAH (patient smile). No no, seriously, do you know what the name is of the lady who lives in the apartment above Freud’s?

  FRANZ (detached, slightly haughty). No idea.

  SARAH (victoriously). Well her name is Hannah Kafka.

  FRANZ (blasé). Kafka?

  SARAH (ecstatic smile). I swear. It’s a wonderful coincidence. Karmic. Everything is connected.

  FRANZ (shameless exaggeration). That’s a typical French reaction. There are lots of Kafkas in Vienna, it’s a very common family name. My plumber’s name is Kafka.

  SARAH (outraged by my failure to react, vexed). But you have to admit it’s still extraordinary!

  FRANZ (cowardly). I’m pulling your leg. Of course it’s extraordinary. It could be Franz’s distant cousin, who knows.

  SARAH (beaming, radiating beauty). Right? It’s . . . a fantastic discovery.

  Kafka was one of her passions, one of her favorite “characters,” and the fact that she could come across him in this way above Freud’s apartment in Vienna delighted her. She loves reading the world as a series of coincidences, fortuitous encounters that give meaning to the whole, that outline samsara, the wool skein of interdependent phenomena; she had obviously pointed out to me that my name was Franz, like Kafka: I’d had to explain to her that it was the first name of my paternal grandfather, whose name was Franz Josef, because he was born on the day the emperor of the same name died, on November 21, 1916; my parents had been good enough not to inflict the Josef on me, which had given her a good laugh — Can you believe it, you should be called François-Joseph! (She later called me François-Joseph many times in letters or phone messages. Fortunately Mother never realized she was making fun of her patronymic choices, she’d have been very grieved to know it.) By chance, my brother is named not Maximilian but Peter, I’m not sure why. Mother always felt, ever since she arrived in Vienna in 1963, as if she were a French princess whom a young Hapsburg nobleman had brought from the countryside to show her the glamour of his brilliant capital — she had kept a very strong French accent, as if from a film of that period, I was terribly ashamed of her intonation when I was little, her way of accenting every phrase and every word in every phrase on the last syllable, sprinkling it all with a few nasal vowels; of course the Austrians find this accent charmant, sehr charmant. For that matter, the Syrians outside the big cities were so surprised a foreigner could speak even a few words of Arabic that they would open their eyes wide and redouble their efforts to try to penetrate the mysteries of the exotic articulation of the Franks; Sarah speaks Arabic or Persian much better than German, it must be said, and it’s always been difficult for me to hear her speak our idiom, perhaps — what a horrible thought — because her pronunciation reminds me of my mother’s. We won’t venture out onto that slippery terrain, let’s leave that field to the good doctor, the downstairs neighbor of Mme Kafka. Sarah told me that in Prague, Kafka is a hero like Mozart, Beethoven, or Schubert in Vienna; he has his museum, his statues, his square; the tourist office organizes Kafka Tours and you can buy magnets with the writer’s portrait on them to stick on your huge fridge in Oklahoma City when you go home — no one knows why young Americans have become infatuated with Prague and Kafka; they hang out there in groups, lots of them, spend months in the Czech capital, years even, especially budding writers just out of universities where they majored in creative writing; they flock to Prague the way they used to gravitate to Paris, for inspiration; they keep blogs and fill notebooks or blacken virtual pages in cafés, drink liters and liters of Czech beer, and I’m sure you can still find some of them in the same spot ten years later, still putting the finishing touches on the first novel or short story collection that will propel them to fame — in Vienna fortunately we have mostly old Americans, couples of a respectable age who enjoy the excessive number of luxury hotels, wait in line to visit the Hofburg, eat Sachertorte, go to a concert where musicians play Mozart in wigs and costumes, and then walk home in the evening back to their hotel, arm in arm, with the sensation of traveling through the entire eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, pleasantly exhilarated by the fear that a cutthroat might emerge from one of the deserted, silent, baroque alleyways and rob them, they stay for two, three, four days and then go to Paris, Venice, Rome, or London before returning to their suburban houses in Dallas and showing their awestruck friends their photos and souvenirs. Ever since Chateaubriand people have been traveling to tell stories; they take pictures, the medium for memory and sharing; they tell how in Europe “the bedrooms are tiny,” how in Paris “the entire hotel room was smaller than our bathroom,” which provokes shivers among the audience — and also a glint of envy in their eyes, “Venice is magnificently decadent, the French are incredibly rude, in Europe there’s wine in all the grocery stores and supermarkets, everywhere,” and everyone is happy, and one dies having seen the world. Poor Stendhal, he didn’t know what he was doing when he published h
is Memoirs of a Tourist, he invented much more than a word, “thank Heaven,” he said, “the present voyage has no aspiration to statistics or science,” without realizing he was pushing generations of travelers toward futility, with the help of heaven, what’s more. Amusing that Stendhal is associated not only with the word “tourist,” but also with the traveler’s medical syndrome that bears his name; apparently the hospital in Florence has a separate psychiatric ward for foreigners swooning in front of the Uffizi or the Ponte Vecchio, a hundred of them every year, and I forget now who told me that in Jerusalem there was a special asylum for mystical madmen, that merely the sight of Jerusalem could provoke fevers, dizziness, appearances of the Virgin, Christ, and every prophet possible, in the midst of intifadas and Orthodox Jews who attack miniskirts and plunging necklines just as their Arabic peers attack the soldiers, with stones, in the old style, the qadim jiddan way, in the midst of all the planet holds in the way of secular scholars and religious men bent over venerable texts, Torahs, scriptures, and even Korans in all the ancient languages and all the European ones, depending on the schools, German, Dutch, British and American Protestants, French, Spanish, and Italian Papists, including Austrians, Croats, Czechs, not to mention the pack of autocephalous churches, Greek, Armenian, Russian, Ethiopian, Egyptian, Syriac, all with their Uniate versions, added to the infinity of possible variants of Judaism, reformed or not, rabbinical or not, and Muslim schisms, Muslims for whom Jerusalem is indeed less important than Mecca, yet remains a very holy place, even if only because they don’t want to abandon it to the other faiths: all these scholars, all these authorities were grouped into so many schools, scholarly journals, exegeses; Jerusalem was partitioned among translators, pilgrims, hermeneuts, and visionaries, in the midst of the whole caboodle of the mercantile circus, sellers of shawls, icons, oils (holy and culinary), olivewood crosses, jewelry more or less sacred, pious or profane images, and the song that rose to the ever-pure sky was an atrocious cacophony mixing polyphonies with cantilenas, pious monodies with the pagan lyres of soldiers. You had to see in Jerusalem the feet of this crowd and the diversity of its shoes: Christ-like sandals, with or without socks, caligae, leather boots, flip-flops, thong sandals, moccasins with the heels worn through; pilgrims, soldiers, or strolling merchants could recognize each other without lifting their eyes from the filthy ground of the old city of Jerusalem, where you also saw bare feet, blackened feet that had walked at least from the Ben Gurion airport, but sometimes farther, swollen, bandaged, bleeding, hairy or smooth, masculine or feminine extremities — you could spend days in Jerusalem just observing the feet of the multitude, head lowered, eyes down in a sign of fascinated humility.