Compass Page 13

  The librarian, a warm, pleasant man with an adventurer’s tanned face, was a specialist in the poems that Arabic sailors used to use to jog their memory for navigation, and he often dreamed of sailing expeditions between Yemen and Zanzibar on board a dhow loaded with khat and incense, beneath the stars of the Indian Ocean, dreams he liked to share with all the readers who visited his institution, regardless of whether or not they knew the basics of sailing: he would talk about storms he had faced and shipwrecks from which he had escaped, in Damascus (where traditionally people were much more concerned with caravan camels and the entirely earth-bound piracy of Bedouins in the desert) all this was magnificently exotic.

  The directors were university professors, usually unprepared to find themselves at the helm of such an imposing structure; often they would make do with barricading the doors to their offices and waiting, immersed in the complete works of Jahiz or Ibn Taymiyya, for time to pass, leaving the bother of organizing production in this factory of knowledge to their underlings.

  The Syrians looked with an amused eye at these budding scholars drifting around in their capital and, unlike in Iran where the Islamic Republic was very fussy about research activities, the regime of Hafez el-Assad let a royal peace reign over these scientists, archaeologists included. The Germans had their archaeology institute in Damascus, where Bilger, my landlord, officiated (Sarah’s apartment, to my great sadness, was too small for me to stay there), and in Beirut the famous Orient Institut of the venerable Deutsche Morgenländische Gesellschaft led by the Koranic and no less venerable Angelika Neuwirth. Bilger had found a comrade from Bonn in Damascus, a specialist in Ottoman art and urbanism, Stefan Weber, whom I haven’t seen in a very long time; I wonder if he still heads the department of Islamic art in the Pergamon Museum in Berlin — Weber was renting a beautiful Arabic house in the heart of the old city, on a little street in the Christian quarter, in Bab Tuma; this traditional Damascus home, with its big courtyard, black and white stone fountain, its iwan, and its covered passageway on the upper floor, aroused the jealousy of the entire Orientalist community. Sarah — like everyone else — adored Stefan Weber, who spoke Arabic perfectly, whose knowledge of Ottoman architecture was dazzling, two qualities that earned him the envy and repressed hostility of Bilger — when it came to competence and brilliance he could bear none but his own. Bilger’s apartment was like him: flashy and huge. He lived in Jisr el-Abyad, “the white bridge”: this luxurious neighborhood on the edge of the slopes of Mount Qasioun, close to the presidential palace and the homes of the important figures of the regime, owed its name to a bridge over a branch of the Barada River which was usually used more to get rid of household trash than for boating, but whose narrow banks were planted with trees, which could have made for a pleasant stroll if it had been provided with sidewalks worthy of the name. The “Bilger Residence” was entirely decorated in the Saudi or Kuwaiti style: everything, from the doorknobs to the taps, was covered in gold leaf; the ceilings were weighed down with neo-rococo moldings; the sofas were upholstered in black and gold. The bedrooms were equipped with pious alarm clocks: these models of the Mosque of the Prophet in Medina shouted the call to prayer at dawn in a nasal twang if you forgot to turn them off. There were two living rooms, a dining room with a table (also black and gold, with shiny palmetto feet) for twenty guests, and five bedrooms. At night, if by chance you used the wrong switch, dozens of neon wall lamps bathed the apartment in a pale green light and filled the walls with the ninety-nine names of Allah, a perfectly terrifying miracle to me but one that delighted Bilger: “There’s nothing more beautiful than seeing technology in the service of kitsch.” The two terraces offered a magnificent panorama of the city and the oasis of Damascus, to breakfast or dine there in the cool air was a delight. Aside from the apartment and the car, Bilger’s household consisted of a cook and an odd-job man; the cook came at least three times a week to prepare the gala dinners and receptions that King Bilger offered his guests; the odd-job man (twenty years old, amusing, lively and pleasant, a Kurd from Qamishli, where Bilger had hired him for a dig) was named Hassan, slept in a little room behind the kitchen, and took care of household tasks, shopping, cleaning, washing, which, given the fact that his master (it’s hard for me to think of him as “his employer”) was often absent, left him with a lot of time off; he studied German at the Goethe Institut and archaeology at the University of Damascus and had explained to me that Bilger, whom he venerated like a demi-god, offered him this situation to allow him to pursue his studies in the capital. In the summer, during the big archaeological digs, this agreeable student factotum would resume his job as an excavator and accompany his mentor on the digs in Jazirah, where he was assigned to the shovel, of course, but also to sorting through and sketching pottery, a mission that delighted him and at which he excelled: at first glance he could recognize sigillates, coarse ceramics or Islamic glazes, working just from tiny shards. For prospecting work on untouched tells, Bilger always brought him along, and this closeness caused tongues to wag, of course — I remember suggestive winks whenever the pair was mentioned, expressions like “Bilger and his student” or, worse, “the great Fritz and his boy-toy,” no doubt because Hassan was objectively young and very handsome, and because Orientalism has a certain relationship not only with homosexuality, but more generally with the sexual domination of the powerful over the weak, the rich over the poor. It seems to me today that for Bilger, unlike others, it was not the pleasure of Hassan’s body that interested him, but the image of the nabob, the all-powerful benefactor that his own generosity reflected back to him — over the course of the three months I spent at his place in Damascus, never did I witness any sort of physical familiarity between them, quite the contrary; so whenever I had the opportunity I would refute the rumors running around about them. Bilger wanted to resemble the archaeologists of long ago, the Schliemanns, the Oppenheims, the Dieulafoys; no one saw, no one could see, how these dreams were becoming a form of madness, still mild, compared to the way he is today, that’s for sure, Bilger the prince of archaeologists was mildly nutty and now he’s a raging lunatic; on second thought everything was already obvious in Damascus, in his generosity and excessiveness: I know that despite his stupendous salary he returned to Bonn riddled with debts, of which he was proud, proud of having blown everything, he said, squandered everything in luxurious receptions, salaries for his acolytes, fabulous slippers, Oriental rugs, and even contraband antiques, especially Hellenistic and Byzantine coins, which he bought in antique shops in Aleppo mainly. This was the icing on the cake, for an archaeologist; like Schliemann, he would show his treasures to his guests, but he didn’t steal them on the sites he excavated — he was content, he said, to recover objects that were on the market to keep them from disappearing. He would do the honors of his numismata to his guests, explain the lives of the emperors who had minted them, Phocas, the Comneni, give the likely provenance of these coins, usually from the Dead Cities of the North; the young Hassan was in charge of looking after these gleaming wonders; he would polish them, arrange them harmoniously on black felt display cases, not realizing the extraordinary danger they could represent: Bilger might risk only scandal, or expulsion and confiscation of his costly playthings, but Hassan could bid farewell, if he was caught, to his studies, and even to an eye, a few fingers and his innocence.

  There was something obscene about Bilger’s grand speeches: he was like an ecology activist draped in a golden fox or ermine cloak explaining why and how animal lives must be saved, gesturing grandly like an ancient soothsayer. It was during one particularly alcohol-heavy and embarrassing evening, when all present (young researchers, small-time diplomats) felt a terrifying shame, in the midst of the black sofas and green neon lights, when Bilger, his elocution slowed down by alcohol, standing in the center of the half circle of his guests, began to declaim his ten commandments of archaeology, the absolutely objective reasons why he was the most competent of all the foreign scholars present in
Syria and how, thanks to him, science was going to leap toward the future — the young Hassan, sitting on the floor next to him, kept looking at him admiringly; the empty glass of whisky in Bilger’s hand, shaken by his clumsy gestures, at times poured a few drops of melted ice onto the Syrian’s brown hair, a horrible pagan baptism the young man, lost in contemplating his master’s face, concentrating to understand an English so refined it bordered on pedantry, did not seem to notice. I related this biblical scene to Sarah, who hadn’t been there, and she didn’t believe me; as always she thought I was exaggerating, and I had all the difficulty in the world convincing her this episode did indeed take place.

  Still, we owed to Bilger some magnificent expeditions into the desert, especially one night in a Bedouin tent between Palmyra and Rusafa, a night when the sky was so pure and the stars so numerous that they came down all the way to the ground, lower than you could see, a night such as only, I imagine, sailors can see, in the summer, when the sea is as calm and dark as the Syrian badiya. Sarah was delighted to be able to experience, more or less identically, the adventures of Annemarie Schwarzenbach or Marga d’Andurain sixty years earlier in the Levant under French mandate; that’s what she was there for; Sarah felt, she confided in me in that bar in the Baron Hotel in Aleppo, what Annemarie wrote in the same place on December 6, 1933, to Klaus Mann:

  Often, in the course of this strange journey, because of fatigue, or when I’ve drunk a lot, everything becomes vague: nothing is left of yesterday; there isn’t a single face there. It’s a great fright and, also, a sadness.

  Annemarie then mentions the inflexible face of Erika Mann, which remains in the midst of this desolation, she imagines Erika’s brother knows the role Erika plays in this sorrow — she has no other choice than to continue her journey, where would she go in Europe? The Mann family will also have to begin its exile, which will lead it to the United States in 1941 and probably, if she had been able to make up her mind to flee Swiss illusion and her mother’s grip for once and for all, Annemarie Schwarzenbach would never have had that stupid bicycle accident that cost her life in 1942 and froze her forever in youth, at the age of thirty-four — she was twenty-five during that first trip to the Middle East, like Sarah more or less. That first evening in Aleppo, after we had settled into the Baron and celebrated the discovery of Annemarie’s entry in the hotel register, we went out to dinner in Jdayde, a Christian neighborhood in the old city, where traditional homes were little by little being restored to be transformed into luxury hotels and restaurants — the oldest and most famous of them, at the beginning of a narrow alleyway overlooking a little square, was named Sissi House, which had cracked Sarah up, she said to me “poor thing, you’re pursued by Vienna and Franz Josef, there’s no escape” and had insisted that we eat there: I have to admit that, even though I am not what could be called a hedonist or a gourmet, the setting, the food, and the excellent Lebanese wine they served there (and especially the company of Sarah, whose beauty was brought out by the Ottoman cortile, the jewels, the cloth, the wooden mashrabiyas) have fixed that evening in my memory; we were princes, princes from the West that the Orient was welcoming and treating as such, with refinement, obsequiousness, suave languor, and all of this, conforming to the image our youth had constructed of the Oriental myth, gave us the impression of finally living in the lost lands of the Thousand and One Nights, which had reappeared for us alone: no foreigner, in that early spring, to spoil its exclusivity; our fellow diners were a rich family from Aleppo celebrating a patriarch’s birthday, whose women, bejeweled, wearing white lace blouses with strict black wool vests, kept smiling at Sarah.

  The hummus, the mutabbal, and the grilled meat seemed better to us than in Damascus, transcendent, sublime; the sujuk was spicier, the basturma more fragrant, and the Nectar de Kefraya more intoxicating than usual.

  We went back to the hotel the long way round, in the half shadow of alleyways and closed bazaars — today all these places are prey to war, burning or burned, the metal shutters of shops deformed by the heat of fire, the little square of the Maronite Diocese invaded by collapsed buildings, its surprising Latin church with its twin red-tiled bell towers devastated by explosions: will Aleppo ever regain its splendor, maybe, you never know, but that evening our stay was a dream twice over, at once lost in time and recaptured by destruction. A dream with Annemarie Schwarzenbach, T. E. Lawrence, and all the clients of the Baron Hotel, the famous and forgotten dead, whom we were joining at the bar, on the round leather-upholstered stools, next to brand-name ashtrays and the two bizarre hunter’s cartridge belts; a dream of Aleppo music, song, lute, zither — better think about something else, turn over, fall asleep to erase things, erase the Baron, Aleppo, the bombs, the war, and Sarah, let’s try rather, with a movement of the pillow, to find her again in mysterious Sarawak, wedged between the Borneo jungle and the pirates on the China Seas.

  God knows what association led me to have this melody in my head now; even with my eyes closed as I try to breathe deeply the brain still has to keep whirring, my own private music box starts playing at the most inopportune time, is this a sign of madness, I don’t know, I’m not hearing voices, I’m hearing orchestras, lutes, songs; they’re cluttering up my ears and my memory, they start up all by themselves as if, when one agitation goes away, another, pressed down beneath the first, overflows the consciousness — I know it’s a phrase from Le Désert by Félicien David, or I think so, I seem to recognize old Félicien, the foremost Orientalist musician, forgotten like all those who have devoted themselves body and soul to the ties between East and West, without lingering over the fights between Ministers of War or Colonial Secretaries, his music rarely played today, hardly ever recorded, and yet adored by the composers of his time as having broken new ground, as having given birth to a new roar, a new sonority, Félicien David, native of the South of France, from the Vaucluse or Roussillon, died (this I’m sure of, it’s idiotic enough to remember) in Saint-Germain-en-Laye, a frightful district outside of Paris organized around a château filled up to its mullioned windows with carved flint and very Gaulish stones, Félicien David also died of tuberculosis in 1876, a holy man, because all Saint-Simonians were holy men, madmen, madmen and saints, like Ismaÿl Urbain the first Algerian Frenchman, or the first Algerian from France, it’s about time the French remembered him, the first man, the first Orientalist to have worked for an Algeria for Algerians in the 1860s, against the Maltese, the Sicilians, the Spaniards, and the Marseillais who made up the embryonic colonists crawling through the ruts gouged by soldiers’ boots: Ismaÿl Urbain had the ear of Napoleon III and with only a little urging, the fate of the Arab world could have been changed, but French and English politicians are crafty cowards who gaze mostly at their wee-wee makers in the mirror, and Ismaÿl Urbain friend of Abd el-Kader died, and there was nothing else to do, the politics of France and Great Britain were seized by stupidity, bogged down in injustice, violence, and spinelessness.

  In the meantime, there had been Félicien David, Delacroix, Nerval, all those who visited the façade of the Orient, from Algeciras to Istanbul, or its backyard, from India to Cochin China; in the meantime, this Orient had revolutionized art, literature, and music, especially music: after Félicien David, nothing would be the same. This way of thinking is perhaps a pious wish, you’re exaggerating, Sarah would say, but good Lord, I’ve demonstrated all that, I’ve written all that, I’ve shown that the revolution in music in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries owed everything to the Orient, that it was not a matter of “exotic procedures,” as was thought before, this exoticism had a meaning, that it made external elements, alterity, enter, it was a large movement, and gathered together, among others, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Liszt, Berlioz, Bizet, Rimsky-Korsakov, Debussy, Bartók, Hindemith, Schönberg, Szymanowski, hundreds of composers throughout all of Europe, over all of Europe the wind of alterity blows, all these great men use what comes to them from the Other to modify the Self, to bastardize it, for g
enius wants bastardy, the use of external procedures to undermine the dictatorship of church chant and harmony, why am I getting worked up all alone on my pillow now, probably because I’m a poor unsuccessful academic with a revolutionary thesis no one cares about. Today no one is interested anymore in Félicien David who became extraordinarily famous on December 8, 1844 after the premiere of Le Désert at the Paris Conservatoire, an ode-symphony in three parts for narrator, solo tenor, male chorus, and orchestra, based on the composer’s memories of his journey to the Orient, between Cairo and Beirut; in the hall there is Berlioz, Théophile Gautier, and all the Saint-Simonians, including Enfantin, the great master of the new religion, who left for Egypt to find a wife to bear a child for him, a female messiah, and thus to reconcile Orient and Occident, join them in flesh, Barthélemy Enfantin would plan the Suez Canal and the railways of Lyon, he would try to interest Austria and an aging Metternich in his Oriental projects without success, the statesman refused to see him, after a Catholic cabal and despite the advice of Hammer-Purgstall who had seen them as a superb way to make the Empire enter the Orient. Barthélemy Enfantin great mystical fornicator, first modern guru and brilliant entrepreneur, is seated in the hall next to Berlioz who doesn’t conceal his sympathies for the social aspect of the Saint-Simonian doctrine.