Compass Page 18

  Fortunately, reality puts your ideas back into place; a sterile formalism seemed to me to reign over all faiths in Syria, and my spiritual impetus soon shattered against the simpering airs of my co-disciples who went to roll on the ground, foaming at the mouth, in zikr sessions twice a week the way you go to the gym, a gym where the trances seemed to come a little too quickly to be genuine: repeating ad infinitum “la ilaha illa Allah, there is no god but Allah” while shaking your head in a monastery of dervishes no doubt by its very nature placed you in odd states, but that stemmed more from psychological illusion than the miracle of faith, at least as my compatriot Leopold Weiss described it in his beautiful sobriety. Sharing my doubts with Sigrid was no easy thing: my thoughts were so confused that she didn’t understand anything, which was not surprising; her own world, Slavic languages, was very far from my own. We came together around Russian or Polish music, around Rimsky, Borodine, Szymanowski, of course, but for me it was Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade or Szymanowski’s Songs of an Infatuated Muezzin, the Orient in them, and not the banks of the Volga or the Vistula that I was passionate about — the discovery of Karol Szymanowski’s Songs of an Infatuated Muezzin, his “Allah akhbar” right in the middle of Polish verses, this insane love (“If I didn’t love you, would I be the madman who sings? And my hot prayers that fly up to Allah, aren’t they to tell you that I love you?”) diffused by melismata and coloratura seemed to me a beautiful European variation on an Oriental theme: Szymanowski had been very impressed by his trip to Algeria and Tunisia in 1914, by the celebrations on the nights of Ramadan, impassioned even, and it was this passion that showed through in these Songs of an Infatuated Muezzin, songs that were nonetheless not very Arab: Szymanowski was content to use augmented seconds and the minor keys typical of imitations of Arab music, without concerning himself with the quarter tones introduced by Félicien David — but that wasn’t his aim; Szymanowski didn’t need, in this evocation, to rid himself of harmony or break with tonality. But he had heard these quarter tones; he would use them in his Myths, and I’m convinced that Arab music is at the origin of these pieces that radically transformed the violin repertoire of the twentieth century. An assimilated Arabic music, this time, not an exogenous element put into play to obtain an exotic effect, but a real possibility for renewal: a force of evolution, not a revolution, as he so justly stated himself. I forget if in Tübingen I was already familiar with the poems of Hafez or with Szymanowski’s masterpiece, The Song of the Night, on the verses of Rumi — I don’t think so.

  It was hard for me to share my new passions with Sigrid; Karol Szymanowski to her was a part of the Polish soul, and meant nothing Oriental; she preferred the Mazurkas to the Muezzin, the dances of the Tatra Mountains to those of the Atlas. Her vision of his work was also entirely justified.

  Perhaps freed from the correspondences of the soul, our bodies gave themselves to each other with abandon: I left my dogmatic armchair only to leap onto the bed and join the torso, legs, and lips I found there. The images of Sigrid’s nakedness still excite me today, they’ve lost nothing of their power, her thin whiteness, lying on her stomach, legs slightly apart, when only a pink line, surrounded by crimson and blondness, emerged from the white sheets, I can see again with perfect clarity her firm buttocks, two low hills that came to meet her hips, and again the bones of her spine as it rose gently just before the furrow where the pages come together of that half-open book, her thighs, thighs whose skin, never exposed to daylight, were like rich cream slipping beneath the tongue when my hand lingeringly stroked the downy slope of her calf before I got to play in the parallel hollows of her knees — it makes me want to turn the light off again, to bring these visions into focus under my duvet, to find again in my imagination the clouds of Tübingen, so favoring the exploration of femininity, over twenty years ago: today the prospect of having to get used to the presence of another body, of someone else getting used to mine, exhausts me in advance — I feel an immense laziness, a lethargy close to despair; I should try to be seductive, forget the shame of my entirely disgraceful physique, so thin, marked by anguish and illness, forget the humiliation of being exposed, forget shame and age, making you slow and stiff, it seems impossible to me, this forgetting, except with Sarah, of course, whose name invites itself always into the depths of my most secret thoughts, her name, her face, her mouth, her breasts, her hands, and with that charge of eroticism go back to sleep now, in these feminine whirlwinds above me, angels, angels of lust and beauty — it’s been what, two weeks since that dinner with Katharina Fuchs, obviously I haven’t called her back, or seen her at the university, she’ll think I’m avoiding her, and it’s true, I am avoiding her, despite the undeniable charm of her conversation, her undeniable charm, I’m not going to call her back, let’s be honest, the closer the dinner got to ending the more frightened I was of what could happen next, God knows though that I tried to be handsome, I had knotted over my white shirt that little wine-red silk scarf that makes me look so artistic and chic, I had combed my hair, spritzed myself with eau de cologne, so I was hoping for something from that tête-à-tête dinner, of course, I was hoping to go to bed with Katharina Fuchs, but I couldn’t stop myself from watching the candle melt in its pewter holder like the announcement of a catastrophe, Katharina Fuchs is an excellent colleague, a precious colleague, it’s definitely better to have dinner with her than to fondle female students like others do. Katharina Fuchs is a woman of my age and my status, a funny, cultivated Viennese woman who eats properly and doesn’t cause any scandals in public. Katharina Fuchs is a specialist in the relationship between music and cinema, she can speak for hours about Friedrich Feher’s The Robber Symphony and the films of Robert Wiene; Katharina Fuchs has a pleasant face, red cheeks, light-colored eyes, very discreet glasses, chestnut hair, and long hands with well-manicured nails; Katharina Fuchs wears two diamond rings — what came over me to arrange that dinner with her, to dream of sleeping with her, solitude and melancholy, no doubt, how pitiful. In that elegant Italian restaurant Katharina Fuchs asked me questions about Syria, Iran, she took an interest in my work, the candle consumed itself, casting an orange shadow on the white tablecloth, little balls of wax hung from the edge of the gray candlestick: I hadn’t seen The Robber Symphony — you should, she said, I’m sure you’d love that film, I imagined myself undressing in front of Katharina Fuchs, oh I’m sure it’s a masterpiece, and her stripping naked in front of me, that red lace lingerie — I had caught a glimpse of her bra strap — I can lend it to you if you like, I have it on DVD, she had interesting breasts of respectable size, the tiramisu is excellent here, and me, what underwear was I wearing? The plaid pink one that keeps falling down because of its broken elastic? Poor us, poor us, how wretched the body is, it’s out of the question that I would get undressed in front of anyone today, not with that horrible rag on my hips, oh yes, a tiramisu, it’s a little — how should I say — soft, yes, that’s the word, tiramisu is often too soft for me, no thanks.

  Did she get a dessert in the end? I had to flee my inability to find the courage of intimacy, flee and forget, what a humiliation I made Katharina Fuchs undergo, she must hate me today, what’s more I must have prevented her from enjoying her soft tiramisu without meaning to — you have to be Italian to have the idea of softening ladyfingers in coffee, everyone knows it’s impossible to soak them in anything, they seem hard but as soon as you soak them they begin to droop lamentably, droop and fall into the cup. What a bizarre idea to fabricate softness. Katharina Fuchs is angry at me that’s for sure, she had no desire to sleep with me, she’s angry at me for having left her standing there at the restaurant’s doorway as if I were in a hurry to leave her, as if her company had bored me terribly, good night good night, there’s a taxi, I’ll take it good night, what an insult, I imagine that Sarah would find this story very funny, I’ll never dare tell her this story, the guy who slips away because he’s afraid of having put on his pink-and-white boxers with the loose elastic that
morning.

  Sarah has always found me funny. It was a little annoying in the beginning that she would laugh as soon as I confided my innermost thoughts to her. If I had dared to kiss her under that improvised Palmyran tent instead of turning over scared stiff everything would have been different, everything would have been different, or not, in any case we would not have avoided the Baron Hotel catastrophe or the Tehran catastrophe, the Orient of passions makes me do strange things, today we’re an old couple, Sarah and I. The dream from just before is still floating in the air, Sarah languid in that mysterious crypt. Sarawak, Sarawak. She’s the one I should take an interest in, selfish old man that I am, an old coward, she’s suffering too. That article I received this morning is like a bottle from the sea, a terrifying sign of anguish. I’ve just realized that the name “Sarah” is in Sarawak. Another coincidence. A sign of fate, karma, she would say. I’m probably the one becoming delirious. Her obsession with death and perversion, crime, torture, suicide, cannibalism, taboos — all of that is nothing but a scientific interest. Like Faugier’s interest in prostitution and the lower depths. Like my interest in Iranian music and Orientalist operas. What malady of despair have we come down with? Sarah despite her years of Buddhism, meditation, wisdom, and travel. Kraus was probably right in the end to send me to a specialist in exotic diseases, God knows what rot of the soul I could have caught in those distant lands. The way the crusaders, the first Orientalists, returned to their somber villages in the West loaded with gold, bacilli, and sorrow, aware of having, in the name of Christ, destroyed the greatest wonders they had ever seen, pillaging the churches of Constantinople, burning Antioch and Jerusalem. What truth has burned us, Sarah and me, what beauty have we glimpsed before it eludes us, what suffering, like Lamartine in Lebanon, has secretly ravaged us, suffering of the vision of the Origin or the End I have no idea, the answer was not in the desert, not for me in any case, my Road to Mecca was of another kind — unlike Muhammad Asad alias Leopold Weiss, the Syrian badiya was more erotic for me than spiritual: after our Palmyran night, having emerged from our blanket, we separated from Julie and François-Marie to continue our expedition with Bilger the Mad, toward the northeast and the Euphrates, via an old Omayyad castle lost in time among the rocks and a phantom Byzantine city, Resafa with the high walls, where the new Commander of the Faithful might have his headquarters today, Shadow of God on Earth, caliph of cutthroats and pillagers of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, may God protect him, it must not be easy to be a caliph these days, especially caliph of a band of brutes worthy of the lansquenets of Charles sacking Rome. Maybe someday they’ll ransack Mecca and Medina, who knows, with their black flags worthy of the flags of the Abbasid revolution in the eighth century, that would be a change in the geopolitical equilibrium of the region, the kingdom of Ibn Saud the friend of Leopold Weiss might collapse under the saber blows of the bearded ones, great slitters of infidels’ throats. If I had the strength, I’d like to write a long article on Julien Jalaleddin Weiss homonymous with Leopold, another convert, who has just died of cancer, a cancer that coincides so much with the destruction of Aleppo and Syria that one could wonder if the two events are linked — Weiss lived between worlds; he had become the greatest qanun player in the East and West, and an immense scholar as well. The Al-Kindi ensemble he founded accompanied the greatest singers in the Arab world, Sabri Mudallal, Hamzi Shakkur, Lotfi Buchnaq. Sarah had introduced him to me in Aleppo, she had met him thanks to Nadim, who sometimes played with him — he was living in a Mameluke palace lost in the labyrinth of the old city, a stone’s throw away from the mounds of soap and sheep’s heads of the souks, an austere stone façade behind which an enchanting courtyard opened up; the winter rooms were overflowing with musical instruments, lutes, zithers, reed flutes, percussion. I took an immediate dislike to that handsome blond man — I didn’t like his pretentiousness, or his knowledge, or his grand Oriental sultan airs, or, above all, the childlike admiration Nadim and Sarah had for him, and this jealous mistrustfulness kept me for a long time ignorant of the beauty of his work, marked as it is by encounter, exchange, and a questioning of tradition, by the transmission of scholarly, mainly religious music. Perhaps my stay in Iran and my work with Jean During were both necessary for this questioning to take on all its meaning in me. I should write about the homage that Weiss and Al-Kindi made to Usama Ibn Munqidh, prince of Shaizar, the fortress town on the edge of the Orontes in Syria, a knight, hunter, and man of letters, witness and participant, over the course of his very long life that coincided almost entirely with our twelfth century, in the crusades and the establishment of Frankish kingdoms in the Levant. I imagine that prince, lover of spears and falcons, bows and horses, poems and singers, facing the heavy Frankish weapons, and the violent sobriety of those enemies from so far away that it took a lot of time and many battles to domesticate them, to sand down a thin layer of the barbarism on their armor — the Franks ended up learning Arabic, tasting apricots and jasmine, and nourishing a certain respect for these lands they had just delivered from the infidels; the prince of Shaizar, after a life of battles and lion-hunting, experienced exile — it was in this exile, in the fortress of Hosn Kayfa, on the edge of the Tigris, far from battles, aged almost eighty, that he composed treatises as diverse and magnificent as a Praise of Women; an Epistle on Wands devoted to miraculous staffs, from Moses’s staff to the cane that Prince Usama himself used in his old days and that took, he said, by bending beneath his weight, the shape of the powerful bow of his bold youth; a Treatise on Sleep and Dreams; and that extraordinary autobiography, The Book of Instruction by Example, which is at once a history manual, a treatise on hunting, and a florilegium of literature. Usama Ibn Munqidh also found the time to gather together his poetic oeuvre, some extracts of which the Al-Kindi ensemble set to music.