Compass Read online

  What was fascinating about Sarah was how knowledgeable she was already, in Hainfeld, curious and erudite, greedy for knowledge: even before she arrived she had boned up (long before Google, in those already ancient times) on the life of Hammer-Purgstall the Orientalist, so much so that I suspected her of having read his memoirs, and thus of lying to me when she said she knew very little German; she had prepared her visit to Mogersdorf, knew everything about this forgotten battle and its circumstances: how the Turks, superior in number, had been surprised by the cavalry of the Holy Empire hurtling down the hill when they had just crossed the Raab and their lines weren’t yet formed; thousands of Janissaries stuck between the enemy and the river had attempted a desperate retreat, and many of them had drowned or been massacred from the shore, so many that an Ottoman poem, Sarah said, describes the mutilated body of a soldier floating all the way to Györ: he had promised his beloved to return and there he was, all bloated, his eyes pecked out by crows, relating the horrible outcome of the battle, before his head separated from his body and continued on its terrifying way at the Danube’s mercy, to Belgrade or even Istanbul, proof of the courage of the Janissaries and their tenacity — on the ride back, I tried to translate this story for our driver who, I could see his eyes in the rearview mirror, was looking at Sarah next to him with a slightly terrified air: it’s not very easy to murmur sweet nothings to a young lady who’s telling you about battles, rotting corpses, and torn-off heads, even though she was relating these stories with real compassion. Before you can begin to think about beauty, you have to plunge into the deepest horror and go completely through it, according to Sarah’s theory.

  Our young guide was, all things considered, very nice, he dropped us off in Graz in mid-afternoon, with bag and baggage, not without pointing out (even getting out of the car to introduce us to the owners) a restaurant he knew in the old town, a stone’s throw from the climb to the Schlossberg. Sarah thanked him warmly, as did I. (What was the name of that boy who had so kindly showed us around? As I remember he had a name usually belonging to a generation previous to his, like Rolf or Wolfgang — not Wolfgang, I’d remember that; Otto, maybe, or Gustav, or even Winfried, which had the effect of artificially aging him, creating in him a strange tension, accentuated by a mustache, wispy and juvenile, that sought to go beyond the corner of his lips just as vainly as the Turkish army did the fateful Raab.)

  I could have gone to the train station and caught the first train to Vienna, but this young woman, with her stories of monsters, Orientalists, and battles, fascinated me too much to leave her so quickly, when I had the possibility of spending the evening alone with her rather than with Mother — not an unpleasant thing in itself, just too habitual; I had chosen to live in Tübingen precisely to be away from Vienna (too stifling, too familiar), not to come back to dine with my mother every Sunday. Six weeks later I was to leave for Istanbul for the first time, and the Turkish stirrings of this stay in Styria delighted me — hadn’t the young dragoman Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall himself begun his career (albeit after eight years of interpreter’s school in Vienna) for the Austrian legation on the Bosphorus? Istanbul, the Bosphorus, there’s a happy place, a place I’d go back to right away if I weren’t kept on the Porzellangasse by the doctors, I’d settle in a tiny apartment on top of a narrow building in Arnavutköy or Bebek and I’d watch the boats go by, I’d count them, observing the eastern bank change colors with the seasons; sometimes I’d take a water taxi to Üsküdar or Kadiköy to see the winter lights on Bagdat Caddesi, and I’d come home freezing, with my eyes exhausted, regretting not having bought gloves in one of those well-lit shopping malls, hands in my pockets, gazing fondly at Leander’s Tower that looks so close in the night in the middle of the Strait, then back at home, high up, out of breath from climbing the stairs, I’d make myself a strong tea, very red, very sweet, I’d smoke an opium pipe, just one, and I’d gently doze off in my armchair, awakened from time to time by the foghorns of tankers coming from the Black Sea.

  The future was just as radiant as the Bosphorus on a fine autumn day, was promising to be just as auspicious as that evening in Graz alone with Sarah in the 1990s, our first dinner tête-à-tête, I was intimidated by the romanticism this procedure implied (even though there was no pewter candlestick on the Gasthaus table), but not her: she spoke in the same way, exactly, and about the same horrible things as if we were eating, for example, at a university cafeteria, neither more quietly nor more loudly, whereas for my part the muted atmosphere, the low lighting, and the chic aloofness of the waiters led me to whisper, in confidential tones — I didn’t quite see what secrets I could have confided in this young woman who was continuing her stories of Turkish battles, encouraged by our visit to Graz and the Landeszeughaus, the Styrian Arsenal, straight out of the seventeenth century. In that fine old house with decorated façades there were thousands of weapons in neat rows, carefully arranged, as if fifteen thousand men were about to line up tomorrow on the Herrengasse to take either a saber or a cuirass or an arquebus or a pistol and run to defend the region against an improbable Muslim attack: thousands of muskets, hundreds of pikes, halberds to stop horses, helmets to protect foot soldiers and cavalrymen, myriads of handguns, knives ready to be grasped, powder horns to be distributed, and it was rather frightening to see, in this orderly accumulation, that many of these objects had served their use: the armor bore traces of the bullets it had stopped, the blades were worn down by the blows they’d struck, and you could easily imagine the pain that all these inert things had caused, the death spread around them, bellies ripped open, bodies hacked to pieces in the fury of battle.

  You could hear in this arsenal, said Sarah, the great silence of these instruments of war, their eloquent silence, she added, so much did this accumulation of deadly weaponry, having survived its owners, illustrate their sufferings, their fates and, finally, their absence: that’s what she spoke about during our dinner, about the silence the Landeszeughaus represented, how she compared this silence to the many stories she had read, mainly Turkish ones, forgotten voices relating these battles — I must have spent the evening looking at her and listening to her, or at least I can picture myself, under her spell, bewitched by her talk, which mingled history, literature, and Buddhist philosophy; had I scrutinized her body, her eyes in her face as if I were at a museum, the two clouds of freckles on her cheeks, her chest which she often hid with her forearms by crossing her wrists under her chin, as if she were naked, in an unconscious gesture that has always seemed to me charming, discreet, and annoying at the same time, since it sent me back to the supposed concupiscence of my gaze upon her. Such a strange thing, memory; I’m incapable of rediscovering her face from yesterday, her body from yesterday, they vanish to make way for those of today, in the setting of the past — I had probably added a musical note to the conversation: there was indeed a musician in that battle of Mogersdorf, a forgotten Baroque composer, Prince Pál Esterházy, first of that name, the only great warrior-composer or great composer-warrior we know of, who fought countless times against the Turks, author of cantatas including the magnificent cycle Harmonia Caelestis and a great harpsichordist himself — it isn’t known if he was the first to be inspired by that Turkish military music he heard so often, but I doubt it: after so many battles and so many disasters on his lands, he must have wanted above all to forget violence and devote himself (with success) to Celestial Harmony.

  À propos military music: the stampede of Herr Gruber who’s getting ready for bed. So it’s eleven p.m. — incredible all the same that this gentleman runs to the bathroom, every night, every blessed night Herr Gruber rushes to his toilet at eleven o’clock sharp, making the floor creak and all my lights tremble.

  Coming back from Tehran, I’d stopped in Istanbul where I spent three splendid days, alone or almost alone, aside from one memorable jaunt with Michael Bilger to “celebrate my liberation,” since after ten months without leaving Tehran and an immense sadness I deserved a
hell of a party, in town, in smoke-filled bars, taverns where there were music, girls, and alcohol, and I think that’s the only time I’ve been drunk in all my life, really intoxicated, drunk with sound, drunk with women’s hair, drunk with colors, with freedom, drunk enough to forget the pain of Sarah’s departure — Bilger the Prussian archaeologist was an excellent guide, he took me from bar to bar through Beyoglu before finishing me off in a nightclub somewhere: I collapsed in the midst of whores and their colorful dresses, my nose buried in a little dish containing raw carrots and lemon juice. He told me the next day he’d had to carry me to my hotel room, according to him I was bellowing the Radetzky March at the top of my voice (how horrible!), but that I cannot bring myself to believe, why on earth (even if I was on my way to Vienna) would I sing that martial theme in the Istanbul night, I’m sure he was laughing at me, Bilger has always made fun of my Viennese accent — I don’t think I’ve ever sung Johann Strauss at the top of my lungs, or even whistled the Skaters’ Waltz, even back at school, waltz classes were real torture, plus the waltz is the curse of Vienna and should have been forbidden after the arrival of the Republic, at the same time as the use of titles of nobility: that would have spared us any number of frightful nostalgic balls and atrocious concerts for tourists. All waltzes, except of course for Sarah’s little waltz for flute and cello, “Sarah’s Theme,” which was one of those mysterious, childlike, fragile little phrases that made you wonder where she could possibly have unearthed it, and which is also a good place to go back to, music is a fine refuge against the imperfection of the world and the failings of the body.

  The next day in Istanbul I woke up in high spirits, as if nothing were wrong, so powerfully did the energy of the city and the pleasure of walking through it erase the effects of the alcohol I’d imbibed the night before, no headache, no nausea, nothing that didn’t disappear all of a sudden, Sarah amid my memories, cleaned by the wind from the Bosphorus.

  The little waltz is a powerful drug: the warm tone of the cello envelops the flute, there is something highly erotic in this duo of instruments intertwining each in its own theme, its own phrase, as if harmony were a calculated distance, a strong bond and an impassable space all at the same time, a rigidity that joins us to each other while preventing us from actually touching. A coitus of snakes, I think the image is from Stravinsky, but what was he talking about, certainly not a waltz. In Berlioz, in his Faust, in Les Troyens or Roméo et Juliette, love is always a dialogue between an alto and a flute or an oboe — it’s been a long time since I’ve listened to Roméo et Juliette, its striking passages of passion, of violence and passion.

  There are lights in the night, behind the curtains; I might as well go back to reading, I have to rest, I’ll be exhausted tomorrow.

  In Graz I must have slept poorly as well, after the tête-à-tête dinner, I felt just a bit depressed by the perfection of this girl, her beauty but especially her ease in holding forth, commenting, exposing with an extraordinary naturalness the most unlikely information. Was I already aware of our similar trajectories, did I have a premonition of what was about to start with this dinner, or did I let myself be guided by my desire, wishing her goodnight in a hallway that I can see again perfectly, walls covered in chestnut felt, furniture made of blond wood, lampshades dark green, as I can see myself lying afterward on the narrow bed with my arms crossed under my head, sighing and looking at the ceiling, disappointed at not lying beside her, not discovering her body after being charmed by her mind — my first letter will be to her, I said to myself thinking about my trip to Turkey; I was imagining a torrid correspondence, a mixture of lyricism, descriptions, and musical erudition (but mostly lyricism). I suppose I had told her in detail the goal of my Istanbul stay, European music in Istanbul from the nineteenth to the twentieth centuries, Liszt, Hindemith, and Bartók on the Bosphorus, from Abdülaziz to Atatürk, a project that earned me a research grant from a prestigious foundation I was not a little proud of, which would lead to my article on how Donizetti’s brother, Giuseppe, introduced European music to the Ottoman ruling classes — I wonder what that article is worth today, not much probably, aside from its reconstruction of the biography of that singular, almost-forgotten character, who lived for forty years in the shadow of sultans and was buried in the cathedral in Beyoglu to the sound of the military marches he had composed for the Empire. (Military music is decidedly a point of exchange between East and West, Sarah would have said: it’s extraordinary that this Mozartian music “rediscovered” in a way its point of origin, the Ottoman capital, fifty years after the Turkish March; after all it’s logical that the Turks were charmed by this transformation of their own rhythms and sonorities, since there was — to borrow Sarah’s vocabulary — the self in the other.)

  I’ll try to reduce my thoughts to silence, instead of abandoning myself to memory and to the sadness of this little waltz; I’ll use one of those meditation techniques Sarah is familiar with, which she explained to me, laughing a little all the same, here in Vienna: let’s try to breathe deeply, let our thoughts slide into an immense white space, eyelids closed, hands on stomach, let’s mimic death before it comes.

  11:10 P.M.

  Sarah half-naked in a room in Sarawak, scantily clad in a tank top and cotton shorts; a little sweat between her shoulder blades and in the hollows of her knees, a bunched-up sheet, pushed down, reaching halfway up her calves. Some insects are still clinging to the mosquito net, drawn by the pulsing of the sleeper’s blood, despite the sun that’s already piercing through the trees. The longhouse is waking up, the women are outside, under the porch roof, on the veranda; they’re preparing the meal; Sarah can vaguely make out the sound of the mixing bowls, muted as wooden gongs, and the foreign voices.

  It is seven hours later in Malaysia, the day is dawning.

  I managed what, ten minutes thinking of almost nothing?

  Sarah in the jungle of the Brookes, the white rajahs of Sarawak, the dynasty of those who wanted to be kings in the Orient and became them, holding sway over the country for almost a century, among the pirates and decapitators.

  Time has passed.

  Since the Hainfeld castle, Viennese strolls, Istanbul, Damascus, Tehran, we are each lying down on our own, separated by the world. My heart is beating too quickly, I can feel it; I’m breathing too frequently; fever can provoke a slight tachycardia, the doctor said. I’ll get up. Or get a book. Forget. Not think about these stupid exams, disease, solitude.

  Ah, I could write her a letter; that would occupy me — “Dearest Sarah, thank you for the article, but I confess its content worries me: are you well? What are you doing in Sarawak?” No, too anodyne. “Dear Sarah, you should know that I am dying.” A little premature. “Dear Sarah, I miss you,” too direct. “Dearest Sarah, could old sufferings one day become joys?” That’s good, old sufferings. Had I cribbed from the poets, in my letters from Istanbul? I hope she hasn’t kept them — a monument to boastfulness.

  Life is a Mahler symphony, it never goes back, never retraces its steps. This feeling of the passing of time is the definition of melancholy, an awareness of finitude from which there is no refuge, aside from opium and oblivion; Sarah’s thesis can be read (I’m just thinking of this now) as a catalog of melancholics, the strangest catalog of adventurers into melancholia, of different kinds and from different countries, Sadegh Hedayat, Annemarie Schwarzenbach, Fernando Pessoa, to mention only her favorites — to whom she also devoted the fewest pages, constrained as she was by Scholarship and the University to stick to her subject, to Visions of the Other Between East and West. I wonder if what she was looking for, in the course of that scholarly life that completely took over her own, her quest, was her own cure — to conquer the black bile through travel, first, then through knowledge, and then through mysticism, and probably me too, me too, if you think that music is time thought out, time circumscribed and transformed into sound, if I am thrashing about today in these sheets, odds are that I too am
stricken with this High Ailment that modern psychiatry, disgusted with art and philosophy, calls structural depression, even though the doctors, in my case, are interested only in the physical aspects of my illnesses, which no doubt are entirely real, but which I so wish were imaginary — I am going to die, I am going to die, that’s the message I should send Sarah, let’s breathe, breathe, turn on the light, let’s not get carried down that particular slope. I’ll put up a fight.