Compass Page 9
I wonder why I’m obsessing today over this question, I’ve never been drawn to drunkenness and I’ve smoked a grand total of five or six pipes in my life — years ago. Probably because of the text by Balzac that Sarah quotes in this yellowing article with its rusty staples, its dust that clings to your fingers:
They asked opium to make them see the golden domes of Constantinople, and to roll them on divans in the seraglio, in the midst of the women of Mahmoud: and then, drunk with pleasure, they would fear either the cold of the dagger, or the swish of a silk bodice; and, in the grip of the delights of love, they could feel a premonition of the pyre . . . Opium delivered the entire universe to them!
And, for 3 francs 25 centimes, they could travel to Cadiz or Seville, climb onto the walls, stay there lying under an awning, occupied with seeing two eyes of flame — an Andalusia sheltered by a red silk tent, whose shimmer communicated to that woman the ardor, the perfection, the poetry of the figures and fantastic objects of our young dreams . . . Then, all of a sudden, as they turned round, they found themselves face to face with the terrible face of a Spaniard armed with a well-loaded blunderbuss!
Sometimes they tried the rolling plank of the guillotine and woke up at the bottom of the trenches, in Clamart, plunging into all the sweetness of domestic life: a hearth, a winter evening, a young woman, charming children, who, kneeling, were praying to God, instructed by an old nurse . . . All that for three francs of opium. Yes, for three francs of opium, they rebuilt even the enormous concepts of Greek, Asian, and Roman Antiquity! . . . They conjured up the Anoplotherium lost and rediscovered here and there by M. Cuvier. They reconstructed Solomon’s stables, the Temple of Jerusalem, the wonders of Babylon, and the whole Middle Ages with tournaments, castles, knights, and monasteries! . . .
For three francs of opium! Balzac is jesting, that’s certain, but still, three francs, how much can that be in schillings? No, sorry, it would have been crowns at that time. I’ve always been bad at conversion. One has to give Sarah credit for having the wherewithal to come across the most incredible and forgotten stories. Balzac, who in theory felt passionate only about the French and their customs, writing a text on opium — one of his first published texts, at that. Balzac, the first French novelist to include a text in Arabic in one of his novels! Balzac the native of Tours who becomes friends with Hammer-Purgstall the great Austrian Orientalist, even dedicating one of his books to him, The Cabinet of Antiquities. There’s an article that could have made a sensation — but nothing makes a sensation, in the Academy, in the human sciences at least; articles are isolated, lost fruits that no one or almost no one bites into, I know a little about that. But, according to Sarah, the reader who opened his second edition of La Peau de chagrin in 1837 found this:
Whereas in the original 1831 edition, one found only the following text:
Abstract
Among the many relationships that European authors and artists of the first half of the nineteenth century had with the Orient, many have already been explored. We are quite familiar, for example, with the modalities of that encounter in Goethe or in Hugo. However, one of the most surprising relationships between scholarly Orientalism and literature is the one Honoré de Balzac had with the Austrian Orientalist Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall (1774–1856), which not only led to the first inclusion of a text directly in Arabic in a work destined for a French audience but also quite certainly explains the meaning, until now obscure, of the conversation Hugo von Hofmannsthal portrays the two men having in Vienna in 1842 [sic], “On Character in the Novel and the Drama” (1902). Here we witness the formation of an artistic network that irrigates, starting from the Orientalist Hammer-Purgstall, all of Western Europe, from Goethe to Hofmannsthal, including Hugo, Rückert, and Balzac himself.
This summary is impeccable, I had completely forgotten this article, it is indeed Viennese, as she said — she had asked me to find the engraving of the Hainfeld castle that Hammer sent to Balzac in a letter soon after his stay. Sarah adds a French element to the theory (defended also by Hofmannsthal) that Austria is the land of encounters, a frontier land much richer in contacts and fusions than Germany itself, which, on the contrary, seeks to extirpate the other from its culture, to plunge into the depths of the self, in Sarah-like terms, even if this quest is bound to result in the greatest violence. This idea deserves to be studied — I must have received this article in Istanbul, then, judging from the little note that asks me if I’d “come back to Vienna or to Tübingen”; she thanks me for the photos she had requested, but I’m the one who should have thanked her: she’d given me the opportunity to visit a magnificent neighborhood in Istanbul where I would never have gone otherwise, far from tourists and from the usual image of the Ottoman capital, Hasköy the inaccessible at the bottom of the Golden Horn — if I look carefully I should be able to find the letter where she asked me to go photograph for her (today no doubt the internet makes this sort of excursion pointless) the school of the Alliance Israélite Universelle, which her maternal great-grandfather had attended in the 1890s, and there was something very moving in going, without her, to discover these sites from which she came, so to speak, but which neither she nor her mother had ever seen. I have absolutely no idea how a Jew from Turkey had ended up in French Algeria before the First World War, and Sarah isn’t sure she knows herself — one of the many mysteries of the twentieth century, which often hide violence and pain.
It was raining over Hasköy, one of those Istanbul rains that swirl around in the wind and, even though it’s just a fine mist, can soak you to the bone in a second at a street corner; I carefully sheltered my camera in my raincoat, I had two rolls of 36-exposure color film, 400 ASA, a real archaeology these words are today — are the negatives still somewhere in my box of photos, it’s highly likely. I also had a map of the city, which I knew from experience was very incomplete when it came to street names, and an entirely Viennese umbrella with a wooden handle. Getting as far as Hasköy was quite something: you had to go around by the north via Shishli, or else follow the Golden Horn through Kasimpasha, a forty-five minute walk from Cihangir over the hills of Beyoglu. I cursed Sarah when a car spattered the bottom of my pants with mud as it rushed past me, and almost postponed indefinitely this expedition that was starting out in the most inauspicious way, already covered in filth, raincoat spotted, feet soaking, just ten minutes after emerging from the house where Faugier, observing the clouds darkening the Bosphorus, hung over from his raki from the night before, tea in hand, had kindly warned me: it’s not a fit day to put an Orientalist out of doors. I decided to take a taxi, which I had wanted to avoid, obviously not out of stinginess, but simply because I didn’t know how to explain to the driver where I was going: I settled for Hasköy eskelesi, lütfen, and after a good half hour of traffic jams I found myself by the water, on the Golden Horn, in front of a little, entirely charming harbor; behind me, one of those very steep colorful hills so peculiar to Istanbul, a precipitous street whose asphalt was covered in a fine layer of rain, a transparent stream that gently trickled down the slope to join the sea — this strange aquatic ascension reminded me of our amusements by the mountain waterfalls in Austria; I would leap from one side of the lane to the other according to the whims of this urban river, not too sure where to go; the inconvenience of having wet shoes was largely compensated for by the pleasure of the game. I imagine the passersby must have thought that a mad tourist afflicted with hydrophilia was mistaking himself for a trout in their neighborhood. After a few hundred meters and a fruitless attempt to unfold my map under my umbrella, a man of a certain age with a short white beard came up to me, looked me up and down from head to toe, and asked, in English: “Are you a Jew?”
Since obviously I didn’t understand, I replied What? or How’s that again?, before he explained his question, smiling: “I can do a good Jewish Tour for you.”
I had been approached by a prophet who had just saved me from the flood — Ilya Virano was
one of the pillars of the Jewish community in Hasköy, he had seen me lost and had guessed (as he himself acknowledged, the neighborhood wasn’t exactly overflowing with tourists) that I was probably looking for something that had to do with the Jewish history of the neighborhood, through which he guided us, my camera and me, for the rest of the day. Mr. Virano spoke perfect French, which he had learned at a bilingual school in Istanbul; his native language was Ladino, whose history he explained to me: the Jews who had been chased out of Spain and had settled in the Empire had brought their language with them, and this Renaissance Spanish had evolved with them in their exile. The Jews of Istanbul were either Byzantine or Sephardic or Ashkenazic or Karaite, by their order of arrival in the capital (the mysterious Karaites were more or less the last to arrive, most of them having moved there after the Crimean War) and it was absolutely miraculous to hear Ilya Virano recount the high points of this multiculturalism, through the buildings in the district: the Karaite synagogue was the most impressive, almost fortified, surrounded by high walls enclosing little wood-and-stone houses, some of which were inhabited, and others threatened with ruin — my naïveté made Ilya Virano smile when I asked him if their occupants were still Karaite: it’s been a long time since there were any Karaites here.
Most of the Jewish families of Istanbul have moved elsewhere, to more modern neighborhoods — Shishli or the other side of the Bosphorus — or else emigrated to Israel or the United States. Ilya Virano explained all that without any nostalgia, very simply, in the same way he initiated me into the theological and ritual differences between the many branches of Judaism during our tour, walking alertly through the steep streets, almost respectful of my ignorance; he asked the family name of this ancestor I was trying to trace: it’s too bad you don’t know, he said, there could still be some cousins here.
Mr. Virano must have been around sixty-five; he was tall, quite elegant, with an athletic build; his suit, short beard, and slicked-back hair gave him the look of a young film star on his way to pick up a girl at her parents’ to take her to the school dance, in a slightly grayer version of course. He talked a lot, happy that I understood French: most tourists on the Jewish Tours are Americans or Israelis, and he had little opportunity, he said, to practice this beautiful language.
The old temple of the Jews expelled from Majorca, the Mayor Synagogue, was occupied by a little workshop for mechanical things; it had preserved its wooden dome, columns, and Hebrew inscriptions; its outbuildings served as warehouses.
I had come to the end of my first roll of film, and we hadn’t yet reached the old lycée of the Alliance Israélite Universelle; it had stopped raining and, unlike my host, I felt an onset of slight melancholy, an inexplicable, vague sadness — all these sites were closed and looked abandoned; the sole synagogue still functioning, with its Byzantine marble pillars along the façade, was used only for special occasions; a quarter of the big cemetery had been removed by the construction of a motorway and had been taken over by weeds. The only mausoleum of importance, belonging to a great family, Virano explained — such a great family that it owned a palace on the Golden Horn, where some military institution is now housed — looked like an old Roman temple, a forgotten place of prayer, whose sole colors were the red and blue graffiti written on it; a temple of the dead that overlooked the hill where we had a bird’s-eye view of the end of the Golden Horn, when it stops being an estuary and becomes again a simple river, in the midst of cars, factory chimneys, and large blocks of buildings. The gravestones looked as if they were thrown here and there down the slope (laid flat, as custom dictates, my guide explained), sometimes broken, often illegible — he deciphered the family names for me, though: Hebrew resists the passage of time better than Latin characters, he said, and I had trouble understanding this theory, but the fact is that he managed to pronounce the names of these dead and sometime find their descendants or relatives, without any apparent emotion; he climbed up here often, he said; ever since the highway was built there are no more goats, no more goats so fewer goat droppings but grass galore, he said. Hands in my pockets, strolling between the graves, I searched for something to say; there was graffiti here and there, I said anti-Semitism? He replied no, love, what do you mean, love, yes, a boy who wrote the name of his beloved, To Hülya forever, or something along those lines, and I realized that there was nothing here to desecrate that time and the city hadn’t already desecrated, and that no doubt soon the graves, their remains and their slabs, would be moved and piled up elsewhere to give way to excavators; I thought of Sarah, I didn’t take any pictures of the cemetery, didn’t dare take out my camera, even if she had nothing to do with all this, even if no one had anything to do with this disaster that was all of ours, and I asked Ilya Virano to please show me where the Alliance Israélite school was, as a fine sun was beginning to shine on the waters of the promenade called the Eaux-Douces d’Europe and illuminate Istanbul all the way to the Bosphorus.
The lycée’s neoclassical façade was dark gray, punctuated by white pilasters; there was no inscription on the triangular pediment. It stopped being a school a long time ago, Ilya Virano explained; today it’s a retirement home — I conscientiously photographed the entrance and the courtyard; a few very old pensioners were taking the air on a bench under a covered porch; I thought, as Mr. Virano went to greet them, that they must have begun their lives within these walls, that they had studied Hebrew, Turkish, French here, that they had played on this patio, had loved here, copied poems, and argued over insurmountable trifles and that now, the circle closed, in the same slightly austere building with the immaculate tiled floor, they were gently ending their days, looking out the windows, from the top of their hill, watching Istanbul advance with great strides into modernity.
11:58 P.M.
Aside from this note found in the article on Balzac, I don’t remember Sarah ever talking to me again about those photos of Istanbul snatched from the rain and from oblivion — I returned depressed to Cihangir, I wanted to say to Bilger (who was having tea at our place when I arrived) that archaeology seemed to me the saddest of activities, that I saw no poetry in ruin, or any pleasure in rummaging through disappearance.
I still know very little about Sarah’s family, aside from the fact that her mother spent her childhood in Algiers, that she left and moved to Paris when Algeria became independent; I don’t know if the great-grandfather from Istanbul was on that journey. Sarah was born a few years later in Saint-Cloud, and grew up in Passy, in the 16th arrondissement, which she referred to as a very nice neighborhood, with its parks and playgrounds, its old patisseries and noble boulevards — what a strange coincidence that we both spent part of our childhoods near a house of Balzac’s: she on rue Raynouard, where the great man had lived for a long time, and I a few kilometers from Saché, the little Touraine château where he frequently stayed. It was almost an obligatory excursion every summer, during our vacation at Grandmother’s house, to visit Monsieur de Balzac; this château had the advantage of being much less visited than the other ones in the area (Azay-le-Rideau or Langeais) and was a cultural resource, in Mother’s words — I imagine that Grandmother would be happy to know that this Balzac whom she regarded a bit as her cousin (after all, they had both gone to school in Tours) had also come to Vienna, like her; she visited us once or twice, but, like Balzac, she didn’t like traveling, and complained that she couldn’t abandon her garden for long, any more than Honoré could his characters.
Balzac visited Vienna, where he met his great love, Mme Hanska, in May 1835. “On March 24, 1835,” notes Hammer-Purgstall, “while returning from an evening in pleasant company at the home of Comtesse Rzewuska [maiden name of Ewelina Hanska], I found a letter from Captain Hall [we should note here that Captain Hall is none other than Basil Hall (1788–1844), navy officer, friend of Walter Scott, author of many travel accounts and especially of Hainfeld’s Castle: A Winter in Lower Styria, which would inspire Sheridan Le Fanu to write his novel Carmilla]18 wh
ich informed me of the gravity of the state of health of my dear Baroness Purgstall, who was dying.”19
We know, then, that it was through the intermediary of Mme Hanska that the great Orientalist knew Balzac’s work, and that he had already been visiting the Countess and her friends for some time.20 It was only when he returned to Styria, in April, after the death of the Baroness, that Joseph von Hammer learned that Balzac was coming to spend a few weeks in Vienna.21 They visited each other, liked each other. Hammer even gives us some idea of the European fame of the novelist: one day, he writes, when he went to Balzac’s Viennese domicile, he was told that Balzac was absent, and had gone to visit Prince Metternich; Hammer decided to join him at the palace, since he was supposed to be going there himself. He found a crowd in the antechamber, and the chamberlain explained to him that all these gentlemen were waiting for their audience, but that the Prince had locked himself inside with Balzac for over two hours already, and forbade anyone to disturb him.22