Compass Page 12

  Stendhal would look like a beginner with his Florentine swoon compared to the mystic drunkenness of the tourists in Jerusalem. I wonder what Dr. Freud would make of these distresses; I should ask Sarah, specialist in oceanic feeling and loss of self in all its forms — how to interpret my own spiritual emotions, this force, for instance, that pushes me to tears when I go to a concert, at certain times, moments that are so strong and so brief, when I feel as if my soul were touching the ineffable in art and then missing, afterward, in sadness, that foretaste of paradise it had just experienced? What to think of my absences in certain places charged with spirituality, like Süleymaniye or the little monastery of dervishes in Damascus? So many mysteries for the next life, as Sarah would say — I want to go find her terrifying article on Sarawak, to reread it, check if it contains subtle allusions to our story, to God, transcendence, beyond the horror. To Love. To that relationship between the Lover and the Beloved. Perhaps the most mystical text by Sarah is this simple and edifying article, “Orientalism is a Humanism,” devoted to Ignác Goldziher and Gershom Scholem, which happens to be published in a journal of the University of Jerusalem; I must have it somewhere, should I get up, getting up would mean giving up on sleep until dawn, I know myself.

  I could attempt to go back to sleep, I’ll put down my glasses and the Balzac offprint, look, my fingers have left traces on the yellowing cover, one forgets that sweat is acidic and leaves marks on paper; maybe it’s fever that’s making me sweat from my fingers, I do in fact have clammy hands, but the heat is off and I don’t feel hot, there are a few drops of sweat on my forehead too, like blood — hunters call their quarry’s blood sweat, in the hunt in Austria there is no blood but sweat, the only time I accompanied my hunter uncle I saw a deer hit in the breast, the dogs yapped in front of the animal without going near it, the deer shivered and dug into the dirt with its hooves, one of the hunters stuck a knife into its chest, as in a Grimm fairy tale, but it wasn’t a Grimm fairy tale it was a fat gruff guy with a cap, I whispered to my uncle “We could have treated the poor thing,” a strange naïve reflex that got me a good clout on the back of the head. The dogs were licking the dead leaves. “They’re lapping up the blood,” I noted, nauseated; my uncle gave me a black look and grumbled “It’s not blood. There’s no blood. It’s sweat.” The dogs were too well trained to go near the dying deer; they contented themselves, sneakily, with the fallen drops, those traces they had followed so well, the sweat the beast had lost running to its death. I thought I was going to vomit, but I didn’t; the dead deer’s head rolled right and left as they carried it to the car, I looked at the ground the whole time, eyes on the twigs, chestnuts and dried acorns, to avoid walking in that sweat that I pictured dropping from the animal’s pierced heart, and the other day, at the lab, when the nurse tied her elastic tourniquet around my biceps, I averted my eyes saying out loud “It’s not blood. There’s no blood. It’s sweat,” the young woman must have taken me for a madman, that’s for sure, and my phone began ringing at that precise instant, the moment she was about to stick her instrument into my vein, my phone was in my jacket near the desk, “Avec la garde montante, comme de petits soldats” resounded with its horrible digital twang throughout the doctor’s office; the device that absolutely never rings chose precisely that instant to blare a chorus from Carmen at full volume, while that lady was getting ready to sweat me. The phone was five meters away, I was attached by a tourniquet, ready to be stuck by a needle, I’ve never been so embarrassed in my life — the nurse hesitated, syringe in the air; the music kept mounting guard like little soldiers, Bizet was becoming an accomplice in my humiliation, the extravasating functionary asked if I wanted to answer, I shook my head, she stuck me before I could look elsewhere; I saw the metal plunging into the prominent blue vein, felt the tourniquet snap, the blood looked to me as if it were boiling in the container, “Avec la garde montante,” how many times can a phone ring, my sweat was black as the ink of those transparent red pens I use to correct student papers, “comme de petits soldats,” none of that would ever end, sometimes life is long, says T. S. Eliot, life is very long, “Avec la garde montante,” the nurse took out her plastic tube, the phone finally fell silent and she pitilessly put a second tube in place of the first, letting the abandoned cannula dangle for a few seconds on my arm.

  It’s not blood, there’s no blood, it’s sweat.

  Fortunately I’m not bleeding but it’s worrisome all the same, these nighttime sweats, this fever.

  Kafka spat blood, which must have been far more unpleasant, those red spots on his handkerchief, how horrible; in 1900 one Viennese out of four died of tuberculosis, apparently, was it that disease that made Kafka so popular, was it that disease that was at the origin of the “misunderstanding” about his personality, perhaps it was. In one of his last, terrifying letters, Kafka wrote to Max Brod from the Kierling sanatorium, in Klosterneuburg near the Danube: “Tonight I cried many times for no reason, my neighbor died tonight,” and two days later Franz Kafka died in turn.

  Chopin, Kafka, a filthy disease to which we do owe The Magic Mountain, let’s not forget — there is no chance, the great Thomas Mann was Bruno Walter’s neighbor in Munich, their children played together, writes his son Klaus Mann in his memoirs, what a family great men make. Sarah had obviously noted down all the little links that united her “characters”: Kafka appears in her thesis with two of his stories, “In the Penal Colony” and “Jackals and Arabs”; for Sarah, Kafkaesque displacement is closely linked to his border-identity, to his critique of an Austrian Empire that is coming to an end and, beyond that, to the necessity of accepting alterity as an integral part of oneself, as a fertile contradiction. On the other hand colonial injustice (and here lies all the originality of her thesis) is maintained with “Orientalist” knowledge, the same type of relationship the jackals have with the Arabs in Kafka’s story; they may be inseparable, but the violence of one party can in no case be blamed on the other. For Sarah, regarding Kafka as a sickly, dreary Romantic lost in a Stalinist administration is an absolute aberration — that would mean forgetting the laughter, the mockery, and the jubilation that are born from the womb of his lucidity. Transformed into a product for tourists, poor Franz is nothing more than a mask for the triumph of capitalism, and this truth saddened her so much that, just when Kafka had turned up in conversation in the Café Maximilian at the corner of the Votivkirche square thanks to Dr. Freud’s neighbor, she had refused to go to Klosterneuburg to see what remained of the sanatorium where the man from Prague had died in 1924. The idea of taking the S-Bahn didn’t really appeal to me, so I didn’t insist, even if, to make her happy, I’d have been ready to freeze my balls off in the wind of that noble suburb, which I suspected was perfectly glacial.

  It’s not blood, there is no blood, it’s sweat.

  Maybe I should have insisted, because the alternative turned out to be just as painful; I knew Sarah’s passion for monstrosities, even if at the time this interest in death and the bodies of the dead didn’t manifest as acutely as it does today. I’d already had to put up with the sinister exhibit of anatomical models and now she was taking me to the other side of the canal, to Leopoldstadt, to a museum “that Magris mentioned in Danube” and that had always intrigued her — the Museum of Crime, no less, which I’d heard of but had never set foot in: the official museum of the Vienna Police, more horror and more monsters, if it’s bashed-in skulls and photos of mutilated corpses you want you can have your fill here, I wonder why she’s interested in the entrails of my city when I could show her so many beautiful things, Mozart’s apartment, the Belvedere and the paintings of Leopold Carl Müller nicknamed the Egyptian or Orient-Müller, with Rudolf Ernst and Johann Viktor Krämer one of the best Austrian Orientalist painters, and so many things having to do with me, the neighborhood where I grew up, my school, my grandfather’s watch shop, etc. What could Balzac have visited in Vienna, aside from the battlefields and bookstores to find engravings
of German uniforms, we know he took his footman to Hammer to accompany him on his walks, but we know nothing or almost nothing about his impressions; someday I’ll have to read his Letters to Madame Hanska in their entirety, finally a love story that ends well, over fifteen years of patience, fifteen years of patience.

  Lying on my back in the dark I’ll need some of that, patience, let’s breathe calmly, lying on my back in the profound silence of midnight. Let’s not think about the threshold to that room in the Baron Hotel in Aleppo, let’s not think about Syria, about the intimacy of travelers, about Sarah’s body lying on the other side of the wall in her room in the Baron Hotel in Aleppo, an immense room on the second floor with a balcony overlooking Baron Street, ex-Général-Gouraud Street, the noisy artery a stone’s throw from Bab el-Faraj and the old city by alleyways stained with waste oil and lamb’s blood, peopled with mechanics, restaurant owners, strolling merchants, and fruit juice sellers; the clamor of Aleppo filtering through the shutters at dawn; it was accompanied by the effluvia of charcoal, diesel, and animals. For someone arriving from Damascus, Aleppo was exotic; more cosmopolitan perhaps, closer to Istanbul; Arabic, Turkish, Armenian, Kurdish, not far from Antioch, homeland of saints and crusaders, between the Orontes and Euphrates rivers. Aleppo was a city of stone, with endless labyrinths of covered souks leading to the glacis of an impregnable fortress, and a modern city, with parks and gardens, built around the train station, the southern branch of the Baghdad Bahn, which put Aleppo a week away from Vienna via Istanbul and Konya as early as January 1913; all the passengers who arrived by train stayed at the Baron Hotel, the Aleppo equivalent of the Pera Palace in Istanbul — the Armenian who owned the hotel when we stayed there for the first time in 1996 was the grandson of the founder, he hadn’t known the illustrious guests who made the establishment famous: Lawrence of Arabia, Agatha Christie, and King Faisal had all slept in this building with its Ottoman ogival windows and its monumental staircase, with its old, worn-out rugs and shabby rooms where there were still useless bakelite telephones and metal clawfoot bathtubs whose pipes sounded like a heavy machine gun whenever you turned on the faucet, in the midst of faded wallpaper and rust-stained bedspreads. The charm of decadence, said Sarah; she was happy to find the shade of Annemarie Schwarzenbach there, her wandering Swiss woman, who had vented her melancholy there during the winter of 1933–1934 — the last vestiges of the Weimar Republic had collapsed, ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer was resounding throughout all Germany and the young Annemarie was traveling madly to escape the European sadness that was invading even Zurich. On December 6, 1933, Annemarie arrived at Aleppo, at the Baron Hotel; Sarah was beside herself with joy when she discovered, on a dusty yellowing page, the delicate, cramped handwriting of the traveler, who had filled out the registration form in French — she was waving the register around in the hotel lobby to the amused looks of the manager and the employees, who were as used to the famous names their establishment’s archives spat out as a locomotive was to smoke; the manager hadn’t had the good fortune to know the dead Swiss woman who’d earned him such a demonstration of affection (no one was ever insensitive to Sarah’s charms) but he seemed sincerely happy for the discovery responsible for these transports of joy, so much so that he joined us to celebrate the findings at the hotel bar: to the left of the reception desk there was a little room cluttered with old club chairs and dark wood furniture, a bar with a brass rail and leather-covered stools, in a neo-British style equal in ugliness to the Orientalist salons of the Second Empire; behind the bar, a large ogival niche with dark shelves overflowed with promotional kitsch advertising liquor brands from the 1950s and 1960s, ceramic Johnnie Walkers, cats made of the same material, old bottles of Jägermeister, and on each side of this gloomy, dusty museum there hung, for no apparent reason, two empty cartridge belts, as if they had just been used to hunt the imaginary pheasants and porcelain dwarves they listlessly framed. In the evening, as the day faded, this bar filled up not only with hotel clients, but also with tourists staying elsewhere coming to soak in the nostalgia drinking a beer or an arak whose smell of anise, mixed with that of peanuts and cigarettes, was the only Oriental touch in the décor. The round tables overflowed with tourist guidebooks and cameras and you could just catch, in passing, in the conversations of the clients, the names T. E. Lawrence, Agatha Christie, and Charles de Gaulle — I can see Sarah again at the bar, black-stockinged legs crossed, on a stool, staring into the distance, and I know she’s thinking of Annemarie, the Swiss journalist and archaeologist: she’s picturing her in the same spot sixty years earlier, sipping an arak, after a good bath to rid herself of the dust from the road; she was arriving from a dig between Antioch and Alexandretta. Late at night, she writes a letter to Klaus Mann, which I had helped Sarah translate; a letter with the letterhead of this Baron Hotel that still reeked of nostalgia and decadence, just as today it reeks of bombs and death — I picture the closed shutters, riddled with shrapnel; the street with soldiers rushing down it, the civilians hiding, as well as they can, from the snipers and torturers; Bab el-Faraj in ruins, the square littered with debris; the souks burned down, their beautiful khans blackened and collapsing in places; the mosque of the Omayyads without its minaret, its stones lying scattered in the courtyard with the broken marble, and the stench — the stench of stupidity and sadness, everywhere. Impossible at the time, at the bar of the Baron Hotel, to foresee that civil war was about to seize hold of Syria, even if the violence of dictatorship was omnipresent, so present you’d rather forget it, for there was a certain comfort that foreigners found in police regimes, a muffled, silent peace from Deraa to Qamishli, from Kassab to Quneytra, a peace humming with suppressed hatred and fates bending under a yoke which all the foreign scholars willingly accommodated, the archaeologists, the linguists, the historians, the geographers, the political scientists, they all enjoyed the leaden calm of Damascus or Aleppo, and we did too, Sarah and I, reading the letters from Annemarie Schwarzenbach the inconsolable angel in the bar of the Baron Hotel, eating white-coated pumpkin seeds and long, narrow pistachios with light-brown shells, we were enjoying the calm of the Syria of Hafez el-Assad, the father of the Nation — how long had we been in Damascus? I must have arrived in early autumn; Sarah had already been there a few weeks, she welcomed me warmly and even put me up for two nights in her little apartment in Sha’alan when I arrived. The Damascus airport was an inhospitable place with sinister guys with mustaches and pleated trousers hiked up to their navels who we quickly learned were the henchmen of the regime, the famous mukhabarat, countless informers and secret police: these men in wing-collared shirts drove Peugeot 504 estate cars or Range Rovers decorated with portraits of President Assad and his whole family — one joke tells how, at the time, the best Syrian spy in Tel-Aviv had finally, after years, fallen into the hands of the Israelis because he had stuck a photo of Netanyahu and his children on his rear window — this story made us all die laughing, we Orientalists in Damascus, representing all disciplines, history, linguistics, ethnology, political sciences, art history, archaeology, and even musicology. You found all kinds in Syria, from Swedish specialists in female Arabic writers to Catalan exegetes of Avicenna, most were connected in some way to one of the Western research centers housed in Damascus. Sarah had received a scholarship for a few months of research at the French Institute of Arabic Studies, a huge institution gathering together dozens of Europeans, French of course, but also Spaniards, Italians, Brits, Germans, and this little world, when it wasn’t engaged in doctoral or postdoctoral research, devoted itself to studying the language. All were trained together, in the purest Orientalist tradition: future scholars, diplomats, and spies sat side by side and immersed themselves together in the joys of Arabic grammar and rhetoric. There was even a young Roman Catholic priest who had left his parish behind to devote himself to study, a modern version of the missionaries from long ago — in all, fifty or so students and about twenty researchers made the most of the facilities of this institution a
nd especially its huge library, founded at the time of the French mandate in Syria, over which the colonial shades of Robert Montagne and Henri Laoust still floated. Sarah was very happy to find herself among all these Orientalists, to observe them; sometimes she sounded as if she were describing a zoo, a caged world, where many people gave in to paranoia and lost all common sense, nurturing magnificent hatreds toward each other, madnesses, pathologies of all kinds, diseases of the skin, mystical deliriums, obsessions, “scholar’s block” that drove them to work, work, to polish their desks with their elbows for hours on end without producing a thing, not a thing, aside from the brain-steam that escaped through the windows of the venerable institution to dissolve into the Damascus air. Some of them haunted the library at night; they would walk up and down between the shelves for hours, hoping the printed matter would seep out and impregnate them with science, and they would end up in the early hours of the day, despairing of everything, collapsed in a corner until the librarians scolded them at opening time. Others were more subversive; Sarah told me how a young Romanian researcher hid some perishable item (a lemon usually, but also sometimes an entire watermelon) behind a particularly inaccessible or forgotten shelf of books to see if, from the smell, the personnel could manage to locate the rotting object, which ended up provoking an energetic reaction from the authorities: they posted signs forbidding “the introduction of any organic matter into the building under penalty of permanent exclusion.”