Compass Read online

  “You’re forgetting Judaism,” I said.

  She smiled, a bit surprised; her gaze cleared up for an instant: “Yes, of course, Judaism too.”

  Was this before or after she brought me to the Jewish Museum on the Dorotheergasse, I forget, she had been outraged, absolutely shocked, by the “poverty” of this museum — she had even penned a Supplementary Commentary on the Official Guide to the Jewish Museum of Vienna, very ironic, rather hilarious. I should go back there one of these days, to see if things have changed; at the time the exhibit was organized by floor — temporary exhibits first, then permanent collections. The holograms displaying the eminent Jewish personalities of the capital had struck her as unutterably vulgar, holograms for a vanished community, for phantoms, what horrible obviousness, not to speak of the ugliness of those images. And she was still only at the beginning of her indignation. The top floor made her do nothing short of bursting out laughing, a laughter that changed little by little into a sad rage: dozens of glass cases overflowing with every kind of object, hundreds of goblets, menorahs, tefillins, shawls, thousands of pieces of Judaica piled up in no order whatsoever, with a summary and terrifying explanation: articles despoiled between 1938 and 1945, whose owners never came forward, or something like that, war trophies discovered among the debris of the Third Reich and piled up under the roof of the Jewish Museum of Vienna as if in the attic of a slightly chaotic grandparent, a stockpile, a heap of old stuff for an unscrupulous antique dealer. And there’s no doubt, said Sarah, that it was done with the best intentions in the world, before the dust took over and the meaning of this hoard became totally lost and gave way to a shambles, or what the French call a capharnaüm, or Capernaum, which is the name of a town in Galilee, remember, she said. She kept alternating between laughter and anger: what a bizarre image of the Jewish community, what an image, I swear, imagine the schoolchildren visiting this museum, they’ll think these vanished Jews were candlestick-collecting silversmiths, and she was probably right, it was depressing and made me feel a little guilty.

  The question that haunted Sarah after our visit to the Jewish Museum was that of alterity, of how this exhibit eluded the question of difference to focus instead on “eminent personalities” who stood out from those who constituted the “same” and an accumulation of objects stripped of meaning that “watered down,” she said, religious, cultural, social, and even linguistic differences to present the material culture of a brilliant and vanished civilization. It looks like the heaps of scarab fetishes in the wooden exhibit cases at the Cairo Museum, or the hundreds of arrowheads and bone scrapers in a museum of prehistory, she said. The object fills the void.

  Great, I was happily in a Heuriger taking advantage of a magnificent spring evening and now I have Mahler and his Kindertotenlieder in my head, songs for dead children, composed by a man who held his own dead daughter in his arms in Maiernigg in Carinthia three years after composing them, songs whose horrible dimension wouldn’t be understood until long after his own death in 1911: sometimes the meaning of a work is atrociously amplified by history, multiplied, increased in horror. There is no such thing as chance, Sarah would say steeped in Buddhism, Mahler’s grave is in the cemetery in Grinzing, a stone’s throw from that famous Heuriger where we spent such a beautiful evening despite our Danube “dispute,” and these Kindertotenlieder are set to poems by Rückert, the first great German Orientalist poet along with Goethe, the Orient, always the Orient.

  There is no such thing as chance, but I haven’t closed the curtains yet and the streetlight on the corner of Porzellan is bothering me. Take heart; it’s annoying for someone who’s just gone to bed to have to get up again, whether you’ve omitted a natural need that your body suddenly reminds you of or whether you’ve forgotten your alarm clock far away from you, it’s a bitch, speaking vulgarly, to have to push back the duvet, search for your slippers — which shouldn’t be far away — with your toes, decide fuck the slippers for such a short trip, then leap over to the curtain cords, resolve on a rapid detour to the bathroom, urinate sitting down, feet in the air, to avoid prolonged contact with the freezing tiles, carry out the reverse journey as quickly as possible to finally rejoin the dreams you should never have left, still the same melody in the head that you rest, relieved, on the pillow — as a teenager, it was the only piece by Mahler I could bear, and even more, it was one of the rare pieces that was capable of moving me to tears, the cry of the oboe, that terrifying song, I hid this passion like a slightly shameful defect and today it’s very sad to see Mahler so debased, swallowed up by cinema and advertising, his handsome thin face so overused to sell God knows what, you have to keep from detesting this music that encumbers orchestra programs, the bins of record dealers, radio stations, and last year, during the centenary of his death, you had to block your ears because Vienna oozed Mahler even through the most unsuspected cracks, there were tourists wearing T-shirts with Gustav’s effigy, buying posters, magnets for their fridges, and of course in Klagenfurt there was a crowd to visit his cabin by the Wörthersee — I never went, that’s an excursion I could have suggested to Sarah, to go journey through mysterious Carinthia: there is no such thing as chance, Austria is between us in the middle of Europe, we met there, I ended up returning, and she never stopped visiting me here. Karma, Fate, whatever name you want to give these forces in which she believes: the first time we saw each other was in Styria, on the occasion of a conference, one of those High Masses of Orientalism organized at regular intervals by the leading figures of our field who, as is the custom, had accepted the presence of a few “young research fellows” — for her, for me, a baptism of fire. I made the journey from Tübingen by train, via Stuttgart, Nuremberg, and Vienna, taking advantage of the magnificent journey to put the finishing touches on my talk (“Modes and Intervals in the Musical Theory of al-Farabi,” an entirely pretentious title, given the lack of certainties contained in this summary of my research) and especially reading Small World, a hilarious book by David Lodge that comprised, in my opinion, the best possible introduction to the world of academia (it’s been a long time since I reread it, hmm, that’s something that could enhance a long winter evening). Sarah was presenting a much more original and polished paper than mine, “The Marvelous in The Meadows of Gold by Masudi,” drawn from her doctoral thesis. As the only “musician,” I found myself placed on a panel of philosophers; she, strangely, was taking part in a round table on “Arabic Literature and Occult Sciences.” The conference took place in Hainfeld, the home of Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall, first great Austrian Orientalist, translator of the Thousand and One Nights and of Hafez’s Divan, historian of the Ottoman Empire, friend of Silvestre de Sacy and of anyone that the little band of Orientalists counted as members at the time, designated sole heir of a very aged Styrian aristocrat who had bequeathed him her title and this castle in 1835, the largest Wasserschloss in the region; Hammer-Purgstall, teacher of Friedrich Rückert, to whom he taught Persian in Vienna, and with whom he translated extracts from Rumi’s Divan-e Shams, a link between a forgotten château in Styria and the Kindertotenlieder, which joins Mahler to the poetry of Hafez and the Orientalists of the nineteenth century.

  According to the conference program, the University of Graz, our host in this illustrious palace, had done things right: we would be housed in the nearby little towns of Feldbach or Gleisdorf; a specially chartered bus would take us every morning to Hainfeld and bring us back in the evening after dinner, served in the castle inn; three rooms in the building had been prepared for the discussions, one of them being Hammer-Purgstall’s own splendid library, whose shelves were still stocked with his collections and — the cherry on the cake — the Tourist Office of Styria would constantly offer on-site tastings and sales of local products: it all seemed particularly “auspicious,” as Sarah would say nowadays.

  The place was entirely surprising.

  Surrounded by ornamental moats, it was a two-story building with dark-tiled, gabled roofs
, nestled between a modern farm, a forest and a marsh. The building enclosed a square courtyard fifty meters long on each side — so strangely proportioned that, from the outside, and despite the wide corner towers, this castle seemed much too low for such broad dimensions, as if crushed into the plain by a giant’s palm. The austere external walls were losing their gray plaster, which had flaked off in large sections, revealing the brick, and only the vast entry porch — a long, dark tunnel with low ogival vaulting — had preserved all its baroque splendor and especially, to the great surprise of all the Orientalists who crossed this threshold, an inscription in Arabic, in bold relief on stone in beautiful calligraphy, which protected the house and its inhabitants with its blessings: without the shadow of a doubt it was the only Schloss in all of Europe that brandished the name of all-powerful Allah in this way on its frontispiece. I had wondered, as I got off the bus, what this herd of academics could possibly be contemplating, noses in the air, before I was astounded in turn by the little triangle of arabesques lost in Catholic territory, a few kilometers away from the Hungarian and Slovenian borders: had Hammer-Purgstall brought this inscription back from one of his many trips, or did he have it painstakingly copied by a local stonemason? This Arabic welcome message was only the first of many surprises, the second was just as great: after passing through the entry tunnel, you suddenly felt as if you were in a Spanish monastery, or even an Italian cloister; all around the immense courtyard, and on its two floors, ran an endless series of arcades, arches the color of Siennese earth, interrupted only by a white baroque chapel whose bulbous dome bell tower stood out against the southern aspect of the whole. Any movement through the castle, then, had to be done through this immense balcony onto which, with a monastic regularity, the many rooms communicated, which was quite surprising in a corner of Austria whose climate was not known to be among the warmest in Europe in the winter but which was explained, I later learned, by the fact that the architect, an Italian, had visited the region only in the summer. So the valley of the Raab took on, provided you remained within this oversized cortile, a Tuscan air. It was early October and it wasn’t very nice out the day after our arrival in the Styrian Marches, at the home of the late Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall; a little dazed by my train journey, I had slept like a log in a neat little inn in the heart of a village that had seemed to me (maybe because of the fatigue of the journey or the dense fog on the roads snaking between the hills coming from Graz) much more remote than the organizers had said, slept like a log, now’s the time to think of that, maybe now I should also find a way to tire myself out, a long train trip, a hike in the mountains, or a visit to seedy bars to try to get my hands on a ball of opium, but in the Alsergrund it’s not very likely I’ll fall upon a band of Iranian teriyakis, opium smokers: unfortunately these days Afghanistan, victim of the markets, exports mostly heroin, an even more terrifying substance than the pills prescribed by Dr. Kraus, but I have high hopes, high hopes of finding sleep, and if not in time the sun will certainly get around to rising. Still this feeling of unhappiness in my head. Seventeen years ago (let’s try with a flip of the pillow to chase away Rückert, Mahler, and all the dead children) Sarah was much less radical in her positions, or maybe just as radical, but more timid; I’m trying to picture her getting off that bus in front of the Hainfeld castle, her long, red, curly hair; her plump cheeks and freckles gave her a childlike look that contrasted with her profound, almost harsh gaze; there was already something indefinably Oriental in her face, in her complexion and in the shape of her eyes, which has become accentuated with age, it seems to me, I must have the photos somewhere, probably not from Hainfeld but many forgotten pictures of Syria and Iran, pages in an album, I feel very calm now, lethargic, lulled by the memory of this Austrian conference, of the Hammer-Purgstall castle, and of Sarah, standing in its forecourt, scrutinizing the Arabic inscription with a nod of her head and a dazzled look, that same head I have observed wavering so often between wonder, perplexity, and indifferent coldness, the coldness she shows when I greet her for the first time, after her lecture, drawn by the quality of her text and, of course, her great beauty, the auburn curls that hide her face when, a little moved during the first few minutes, she reads her paper on monsters and miracles in The Meadows of Gold: terrifying ghouls, djinns, hinn, nisnas, hawatif, strange and dangerous creatures, magical and divinatory practices, half-human beings and fantastic animals. I walk over to her by forging my way through the crowd of scholars swarming around the coffee-break buffet, on one of those arcaded balconies opening onto the very Italian courtyard of this Styrian castle. She is alone, leaning on the balustrade, empty cup in hand; she is looking at the white façade of the chapel, where the autumn sun is reflected, and I say excuse me, wonderful talk on Masudi, how incredible all those monsters are, and she smiles kindly at me without saying anything, watching me struggle between her silence and my shyness: right away I realize she’s waiting to see if I’m going to bury myself in banalities. I make do with offering to refill her cup, she smiles again, and five minutes later we are in full conversation, talking about ghouls and djinns; the fascinating thing, she tells me, is how Masudi distinguishes between pure inventions of popular imagination and creatures that are attested and authentic: djinns and ghouls are very real for him, he collects testimonies that are acceptable according to his criteria for proof, whereas nisnas, for example, or griffons and phoenixes are mythical. Masudi teaches us a lot of details about the life of ghouls: since their form and instincts isolate them from all beings, he says, they seek the wildest solitudes and are happy only in deserts. In their bodies, they take after both man and the most brutal animal. What interests Masudi the “naturalist” is to understand how ghouls are born and reproduce, if they are indeed animals: carnal relations with humans, in the middle of the desert, are entertained as a possibility. But the thesis he privileges is that of the Indian scholars, who think that ghouls are a manifestation of the energy of certain stars at their rising.

  Another conference-goer joins our conversation, he seems very interested by the possibilities of coupling between humans and ghouls; he’s a pleasant enough Frenchman named Marc Faugier who presents himself humorously as a “specialist in Arabic coupling” — Sarah launches into somewhat terrifying explanations of these monsters’ charms: in Yemen, she says, if a man was raped by a ghoul in his sleep, which can be detected by a high fever and troublesome pustules, a theriac is used composed of opium and plants that flowered when the Dog Star rose, along with talismans and incantations; if death ensues, the body has to be burned the night after death to prevent the birth of the ghoul. If the sick man survives, which is rare, a magic drawing is tattooed on his chest — on the other hand, no author, apparently, has ever described the birth of the monster . . . Ghouls, wearing rags and old blankets, sought to disconcert travelers by singing them songs, they are like the Sirens of the desert: while their actual faces and smells are indeed those of a decomposing corpse, they still have the power to transform themselves to charm a lost man. A pre-Islamic Arab poet nicknamed Ta’abbata Sharran, “The One Who Carries Unhappiness under His Arm,” speaks of his amorous relationship with a female ghoul: “When dawn appeared,” he says, “she presented herself to me to be my companion; I asked her for her favors and she knelt down. If you question me about my love, I will say it is hidden in the folds of the dunes.”

  The Frenchman seems to find this delightfully base; this passion of the poet and the monster seems rather touching to me. Sarah is unstoppable; she goes on talking, on this balcony, while most of the scholars return to their panels and studies. Soon we’re left alone, outside, all three of us, in the evening that’s descending; the light is orange from the last remnants of the sun or the first electric lights in the courtyard. Sarah’s hair shines.

  “Did you know that Hainfeld castle also houses monsters and wonders? Of course it’s the home of Hammer-Purgstall the Orientalist, but it’s also the place that inspired Sheridan Le Fanu to write his novel
Carmilla, the first vampire story that would make British high society tremble, decades before Dracula. In literature, the first vampire is a woman. Did you see the exhibit on the ground floor? It’s absolutely incredible.”

  Sarah’s energy is extraordinary; she fascinates me; I set off to follow her through the hallways of the immense building. The Frenchman has stayed behind to devote himself to his scholarly activities while Sarah and I play hooky, searching, in the night of shadows and forgotten chapels, for traces of the vampires of mysterious Styria — the exhibit is actually in the basement rather than the ground floor, in vaulted caves decorated for the occasion; we are the only visitors; in the first room, several large painted wooden crucifixes alternate with old halberds and representations of burning pyres — women in rags burning at the stake, “The Witches of Feldbach,” explains the accompanying text; the curator hasn’t spared us sound effects — distant shouts drowned in fierce crackling. I am disturbed by the great beauty of these beings who are paying for their commerce with the Devil and whom the medieval artists show half-naked, flesh undulating in the flames, cursed undines. Sarah observes and comments, her erudition is extraordinary, how can she know all these stories so well, all these histories of Styria, when she too has just arrived at Hainfeld, it’s almost unnerving. I begin to be frightened, I’m suffocating a little in this damp cellar. The second room is devoted to love potions and magical concoctions; a granite basin engraved with runes contains a black liquid, not very appetizing, and when you approach it a piano melody plays, in which I think I recognize a theme by George Gurdjieff, one of his esoteric compositions; on the wall to the right is a representation of Tristan and Iseult on a boat playing chess; Tristan is drinking from a large cup he holds in his right hand while a turbaned page pours love potion from a wineskin for Iseult, who is looking at the chess board and holding a piece between her thumb and forefinger — behind them, the maidservant Brangien is watching, and the infinite sea unfurls its waves. I suddenly have the feeling that we’re in the dark forest near the granite fountain in Pelléas et Mélisande; Sarah amuses herself by throwing a ring into the black liquid, which has the effect of increasing the volume of the swelling, mysterious melody by Gurdjieff; I look at her, sitting on the rim of the stone basin; her long curls caress the runes as her hand plunges into the dark water.