Compass Read online

  He’s lucky I’m tired, is Gruber, since otherwise I’d happily put on another loud blast of tombak drumming, some exotic music for him and his dog. Tired out from this long day of remembering in order to escape — why hide from the truth — the prospect of illness, tired already this morning when I came back from the hospital and opened the mailbox, I thought the padded envelope contained those wretched medical exam results the lab is supposed to send me a copy of: before the postmark set me straight I hesitated to open it for several long minutes. I thought Sarah was somewhere between Darjeeling and Calcutta, and here she is in a verdant jungle on the northern part of the island of Borneo, in the former British possessions of that bulbous island. The monstrous subject of the article, the dry style, so different from her usual lyricism, is frightening; for weeks we haven’t exchanged any letters and at exactly the instant I’m going through the most difficult period in my life she reappears in this singular way — I spent the day rereading her texts, with her, which helped me avoid thinking too much, it took me out of myself, and even though I had promised myself I’d begin correcting a student’s dissertation, it’s time to go to sleep, I think I’ll wait till tomorrow morning to dive into this student’s observations, The Orient in Gluck’s Viennese Operas, because fatigue is making my eyes close, I have to abandon all reading and go to bed.

  The last time I saw Sarah, she was spending three days in Vienna for some academic reason or other. (I had obviously offered to put her up at my place, but she had refused, arguing that the organization that had invited her was offering her a magnificent, very Viennese hotel she didn’t want to pass up for my sagging sofa, which had, I admit, annoyed me no end.) She was in high spirits and had arranged to meet me at a café in the First District, in one of those sumptuous establishments where the abundance of tourists, lords of the place, confers a decadent air that she liked. She had quickly insisted we go for a walk, despite the drizzle, which had upset me, I had no desire to play at being holiday-makers on a cold, wet autumn afternoon, but she was bursting with energy and ended up persuading me. She wanted to take the D tram to its terminus, high up in Nussdorf, then walk a little along the Beethovengang; I retorted that we’d mostly be walking in the mud, that it was better to stay in the neighborhood — we strolled on the Graben up to the cathedral, and I told her a few anecdotes about Mozart’s bawdy songs that made her laugh.

  “You know, Franz,” she said as we were walking by the lines of horse-drawn carriages near St. Stephen’s Square, “there’s something very interesting about people who think that Vienna is the gateway to the East,” which made me laugh too.

  “No no, don’t laugh, I think I’m going to write about it, on the representations of Vienna as Porta Orientalis.”

  The horses’ nostrils were steaming from the cold and they were calmly defecating into leather bags hanging under their tails so as not to dirty the extremely noble Viennese cobblestones.

  “I can’t see it, even though I’m thinking hard,” I replied. “Hofmannsthal’s phrase, ‘Vienna, gateway to the Orient,’ seems to me very ideological, linked to Hofmannsthal’s desire about the place of the empire in Europe. The phrase is from 1917 . . . Of course, we have ćevapčići and paprika here, but aside from that, it’s more the city of Schubert, Richard Strauss, Schönberg, nothing very Oriental in that, in my opinion.” And even in representation, in Viennese imagery, aside from the croissant, I had trouble seeing anything evoking the Orient even a tiny bit.

  It’s a cliché. I had conveyed my scorn for this idea, so worn out it didn’t make sense anymore: “Just because the Ottomans have been at your gates twice doesn’t necessarily mean you become the gateway to the Orient.”

  “That’s not the question, the question isn’t in the reality of this idea, what interests me is understanding why and how so many travelers have seen Vienna and Budapest as the first ‘Oriental’ cities, and what that can teach us about the meaning they give to the word. And if Vienna is the gateway to the Orient, to what Orient does it lead?”

  Her search for the meaning of the Orient, endless, infinite — I confess I questioned my certainties and reconsidered them, and as I mull it over now, as I turn off the light, there may have been in the cosmopolitanism of Imperial Vienna something of Istanbul, something of the Öster Reich, the Empire of the East, but it seems remote, very remote today. It’s been a very long time since Vienna was the capital of the Balkans, and the Ottomans no longer exist. The Hapsburg Empire was indeed the empire of the Middle, and with the calm and regular breathing that precedes sleep, listening to the cars gliding over the wet road, the pillow still deliciously cool against my cheek, the resonance of the beating of the zarb still in my ears, I have to admit that Sarah probably knows Vienna better than I do, more profoundly, not stopping at Schubert or Mahler, the way foreigners know a city better than its inhabitants, who are lost in routine — long ago, before we left for Tehran, after I had settled here, she’d dragged me to the Josephinum, the former military hospital where there’s an absolutely atrocious museum: the exhibition of anatomical models from the end of the eighteenth century, conceived for the edification and training of army surgeons, without having to rely on cadavers or their smells — wax figures commissioned in Florence from one of the greatest sculpture studios; among the models exhibited in the glass cases framed in precious wood there was, on a pink cushion faded with time, a young blonde woman with fine features, lying with her face turned to the side, neck a little bent, hair down, a gold diadem on her forehead, her lips slightly open, two rows of beautiful pearls around her neck, one knee half-crooked, her eyes open in a gaze that was more or less inexpressive but that, if you looked at her for long enough, suggested abandon or at the least passivity: completely naked, her pubis darker than her hair and slightly rounded, she was very beautiful. The figure was opened up from chest to vagina: you could see her heart, her lungs, her liver, her intestines, her uterus, her veins, as if she had been carefully cut up by an incredibly skillful sexual criminal who had made an incision in her thorax and abdomen and exposed her like the inside of a sewing box or a very expensive clock or an automaton. Her long hair unfurled on the cushion, her calm gaze, her curled fingers suggested that she might even be taking pleasure from it, and the whole thing, in the glass cage with its mahogany posts, provoked both desire and terror, fascination and disgust: I imagined, almost two centuries earlier, the young doctors-in-training discovering this body of wax — why think about these things before falling asleep, much better to imagine a mother’s kiss on your forehead, that tenderness you wait for at night that never comes, rather than anatomical mannequins opened up from clavicle to abdomen — what did these budding medics contemplate facing this naked simulacrum, were they able to concentrate on the digestive or respiratory system when the first woman they saw thus, without clothes, from high up in their tiered seats and from the height of their twenty years, was an elegant blonde woman, a fake female corpse to whom the sculptor had ingeniously given all the aspects of life, for whom he had employed all of his talent, in the fold of the knee, the flesh tint of the thighs, the expression of the hands, the realism of the sex, in the blood in the spleen veined with yellow, the dark, alveolar red of the lungs. Sarah went into raptures over this perversion, look at the hair, it’s incredible, she said, they’ve carefully arranged it to suggest nonchalance, love, and I imagined an amphitheater full of military medics exclaiming with admiration when a coarse mustachioed professor, pointer in hand, unveiled this model to count the organs one by one and to tap, with a knowing air, on the centerpiece: the tiny fetus contained in the pinkish womb, a few centimeters from the pubis with its blonde, shimmering, delicate hairs, so fine one imagines they reflect a terrifying, forbidden softness. Sarah pointed it out to me, look, it’s crazy, she’s pregnant, and I wondered if this waxy pregnancy was a whim of the artist’s or stipulated by the commissioner, to show the eternal feminine from every angle, in all its possibilities; this fetus, once discov
ered, above the pale tuft of hair, added even more to the sexual tension the whole thing exuded, and an immense guilt gripped you, for you had found beauty in death, a spark of desire in a body so perfectly carved up — you couldn’t help but imagine the instant of conception of this embryo, a time lost in wax, and wonder what man, of flesh or resin, had penetrated these perfect innards to impregnate them, and immediately you turned aside your head: Sarah smiled at my shame, she always thought me a prude, probably because she couldn’t see that it wasn’t the scene in itself that made me turn away, but the one that was taking shape in my mind, much more disturbing, actually — I, someone who looked like me, penetrating this living-dead woman.

  The rest of the exhibit was similar: a body flayed alive rested calmly, his knee bent as if nothing were wrong, though he didn’t have a square centimeter of skin left, not a single one, to show the whole colorful complexity of his circulation of blood; feet, hands, various organs lay in glass boxes, details of bones, joints, nerves, in other words whatever the body contained of mysteries great and small, and obviously I have to think about that now, this evening, tonight, when this morning I read that horrible article by Sarah, when I myself have had my own illness proclaimed, and while I’m waiting for these stupid test results, let’s think of something else, let’s turn over — a man trying to fall asleep turns over and finds a new point of departure, a new beginning — let’s breathe deeply.

  A tram rattles past my window, another one going down the Porzellangasse. The trams heading up are quieter, or maybe there are simply fewer of them; who knows, maybe the municipality wants to bring consumers to the center and couldn’t care less about bringing them back home afterward. There’s something musical in this clattering, something of Alkan’s “Chemin de fer” but slower, Charles-Valentin Alkan the forgotten piano maestro, friend of Chopin, Liszt, Heinrich Heine, and Victor Hugo, Alkan who they say was crushed to death by his bookcase as he was grabbing a volume of the Talmud from a shelf — I read recently that it’s probably not true, one more myth about this legendary composer, so brilliant he was forgotten for over a century, apparently he died crushed by a coat rack or a heavy shelf on which hats were kept, the Talmud had nothing to do with it. In any case his “Chemin de fer” for piano is absolutely virtuosic, you hear the steam, the squeal of the first trains; the locomotive gallops along on the right hand, and its coupling rods roll along on the left, which produces a rather strange increase in movement, one that I think is atrociously difficult to play — kitsch, Sarah would have ruled, very kitsch, this train business, and she wouldn’t have been completely wrong, it’s true that there’s something outdated about “imitative” programmatic compositions, but there might be an idea for an article in that, “Train Sounds: The Railway in French Music,” adding to Alkan Arthur Honegger’s “Pacific 231,” “Essais de locomotives” by the Orientalist Florent Schmitt, and even Berlioz’s “Chant des chemins de fer”: I could even compose a little piece myself, “Porcelain Trams,” for bells, zarb, and Tibetan bowls. It’s very likely Sarah would think this was the epitome of kitsch, would she deem the evocation of a spinning wheel, a running horse or a floating boat just as kitsch, probably not, I think I remember she appreciated Schubert’s lieder, as I did, in any case we spoke of them often. Madrigalism is definitely a major question. I can’t get Sarah out of my head, in the coolness of the pillow, the cotton, the tenderness of the feathers, why had she dragged me to that incredible wax museum, it’s impossible to remember why — what was she working on at that point, when I moved here, when I felt as if I were Bruno Walter summoned to assist Mahler the Great at the Vienna Opera, a hundred years later: having returned victorious from a campaign in the Orient, in Damascus to be precise, I was sent for to assist my university professor and I had almost immediately found this lodging a stone’s throw from the magnificent campus where I was going to officiate, a small apartment, true, but pleasant, despite the scratchings of Herr Gruber’s pet, where the sofa bed, regardless of what Sarah said about it, was perfectly adequate, and as proof: when she had come for the first time, the time of that strange visit to the museum of cut-apart beauties, she had slept on it for at least a week without any complaints. Delighted at seeing Vienna, delighted that I was showing her Vienna, she said, even though she was the one who dragged me to the most bizarre places in the city. Of course I took her to see Schubert’s house and Beethoven’s many residences; of course I paid a fortune (without admitting it, by lying about the prices) so we could go to the opera — Verdi’s Simon Boccanegra full of swords and fury in Peter Stein the Great’s production, Sarah had emerged enchanted, amazed, astounded by the place, the orchestra, the singers, the spectacle, though God knows opera can be kitsch, but she had surrendered to Verdi and to the music, not without pointing out to me, as was her habit, an amusing coincidence: Did you notice that the character who is manipulated throughout the entire opera is named Adorno? The one who thinks he’s right, rebels, is mistaken, but ends up being proclaimed doge? What a funny coincidence. She was incapable of putting her mind to sleep, even at the Opera. What had we done afterward, probably taken a taxi to go up and dine in a Heuriger and enjoy the exceptionally warm spring air, when the Viennese hills smell of grilled meat, grass, and butterflies, that’s what would do me good, a little June sun, instead of this endless autumn, this constant rain striking my window — I forgot to draw the curtains shut, in a hurry to go to bed and put out the light, what an idiot, I’ll have to get up again, no, not now, not now that I’m in a Heuriger under a trellis drinking white wine with Sarah, discussing Istanbul perhaps, Syria, the desert, who knows, or talking about Vienna and music, Tibetan Buddhism, the trip to Iran that was looming on the horizon. Nights in Grinzing after nights in Palmyra, Grüner Veltliner after Lebanese wine, the coolness of a spring evening after the stifling nights of Damascus. A slightly awkward tension. Was she already talking about Vienna as the gateway to the Orient, she had shocked me by panning Claudio Magris’s Danube, one of my favorite books: Magris is a nostalgic Habsburger, she said, his Danube is terribly unfair to the Balkans; the further into it he gets, the less information he gives. The first thousand kilometers of the river’s course occupy over two thirds of the book; he devotes only a hundred or so pages to the next eighteen hundred: as soon as he leaves Budapest, he has almost nothing more to say, giving the impression (contrary to what he announces in his introduction) that southeastern Europe is much less interesting, that nothing important had occurred or was built there. It’s a terribly “Austro-centrist” vision of cultural geography, an almost absolute negation of the identity of the Balkans, of Bulgaria, of Moldavia, of Romania, and especially of their Ottoman heritage.

  Next to us a table of Japanese tourists was wolfing down some incredibly large Viennese schnitzel which hung over each side of the plates that were themselves huge, like floppy ears on a giant stuffed animal.

  She became flushed as she said this, her eyes had gotten darker, the corner of her mouth trembled a little; I couldn’t help but laugh: “Sorry, I don’t see the problem; Magris’s book seems scholarly, poetic, and even sometimes funny to me, a stroll, an erudite and subjective stroll, what harm is there in that, true, Magris is a specialist on Austria, he wrote a thesis on the vision of empire in nineteenth-century Austrian literature, but what do you want, you can’t snatch away from me the notion that Danube is a great book, and what’s more a worldwide bestseller.”

  “Magris is like you, he’s nostalgic. He’s a melancholy Trieste native who misses the empire.”

  She was exaggerating, of course, with the help of the wine, she was getting up on her high horse, speaking louder and louder, so much so that our Japanese neighbors sometimes turned to look at us; I was beginning to be a little ill at ease — and although the idea of an Austro-centrism at the end of the twentieth century seemed hysterically funny, entirely delightful, she had annoyed me by using the word “nostalgic.”

  “The Danube is the river that links Cathol
icism, Orthodoxy, and Islam,” she added. “That’s what’s important: it’s more than a hyphen, it’s . . . It’s . . . A means of transportation. The possibility of a passage.”

  I looked at her, she seemed to have entirely calmed down. Her hand was resting on the table, a little closer to me. Around us, in the inn’s lush garden, between the vines on the trellises and the trunks of black pines, waitresses in embroidered aprons were carrying heavy trays loaded with carafes that overflowed a little as the girls walked on the gravel, their white wine so freshly drawn from the cask that it was frothy and cloudy. I had wanted to discuss our memories of Syria but instead I found myself holding forth on Danube by Magris. Sarah . . .