Compass

by Mathias Enard

  “He has officially given us permission to set up here.”

  “Here” meant the small rocky parvis between the ancient drawbridge and the gate’s arch. The sun had disappeared behind our hill; its last rays spattered the colonnades with gold, turned the palm trees iridescent; the light breeze carried a smell of warm stones mingled, at times, with rubber and burnt household trash; down below, a tiny man was leading a camel on the oval track of the big stadium of dust where the dromedary races took place that attracted nomads from all over the country, those Bedouins Marga d’Andurain loved so.

  Our camp was much more Spartan than those of the explorers of old: they say that Lady Hester Stanhope, first queen of Tadmor, proud English adventuress with an iron will, whose wealth and health the Orient sucked away until her death in 1839 in a village in the Lebanese mountains, needed seven camels to carry her equipment, and that the tent where she received the emirs of the land was by far the most sumptuous in all of Syria; legend has it that, along with her chamber pot (the only indispensable accessory in the desert, she said), the niece of William Pitt transported a gala dinner to Palmyra, a royal dinner where the most refined china and place settings were taken out of the trunks, to the great surprise of the guests; all the sheikhs and emirs in the land were dazzled by Lady Hester Stanhope, they say. Our own meal was comprised exclusively of grilled lamb, forget about sauce anglaise and ortolans, just a few skewers, the first ones burned, the second raw, at the mercy of our capricious fire in Bilger’s manqal. Meat that we rolled up in delicious unleavened bread, that round of wheat cooked on a metal dome, which in the Middle East serves as starch, dish, and fork all at once. Our flames must have been visible for kilometers all around, like a lighthouse, and we expected the Syrian police to come kick us out, but Eshmun was watching over the Orientalists, and nothing disturbed us before dawn, aside from the freezing north wind: it was bone-numbingly cold.

  Clustered around the little barbecue whose warmth was as illusory as that of the millions of stars around us, wrapped up in Bilger’s sky-blue wool blankets, glasses in hand, we listened to Sarah tell stories; the little rocky cavity echoed slightly and gave resonance to her voice, depth to her timbre — even Bilger, who didn’t understand French well, gave up his perorations to listen to her recount the adventures of Lady Hester, who had preceded us on this rock, a woman with an exceptional fate, she said, and I can understand her passion for this lady whose motivations were as mysterious as the desert itself: what motivated the rich and powerful Lady Hester Stanhope, niece of one of the most brilliant politicians of the time, to leave everything behind and settle in the Ottoman Levant, where she never stopped governing, reigning over the little domain she had carved out for herself, in the Chouf, between the Druzes and the Christians, like a farm in Surrey? Sarah told an anecdote about the way she administered her villagers: “Her people had a singular respect for her,” Sarah said, “despite the fact that her Oriental justice was sometimes wrong. She knew the importance the Arabs attach to the respect for women, and pitilessly punished any infraction of the severe restraint she demanded of her servants. Her translator and secretary, son of an Englishman and a Syrian woman, whom she liked very much, came to tell her one day that another person she employed, named Michel Toutounji, had seduced a Syrian girl from the village, and that he had seen them both sitting under a cedar of Lebanon. Toutounji denied it. Lady Hester called the whole village together on the lawn in front of the castle; she sat on some cushions, with her governor to her right and Toutounji to her left, wrapped in their cloaks like us in our blankets, in a respectful attitude. The peasants formed a circle; ‘Toutounji,’ she said, taking from her lips the long amber stem of that pipe she’s always shown smoking in the engravings, ‘you are accused of a criminal liaison with Fattoum Aisha, Syrian girl, who is here before me. You deny it. You others,’ she went on, addressing the peasants, ‘if you know anything about this, speak up. I want justice to be done. Speak.’ The villagers replied that they had no knowledge of this fact. So she turned to her secretary, who, with his hands crossed over his chest, was waiting for the sentence. ‘You impute to this young man who is entering into the world, and whose sole wealth is his reputation, abominable things. Call your witnesses: where are they?’ ‘I don’t have any,’ he replied humbly, ‘but I saw him.’ ‘Your word is without value before the testimony of all the people in the village and the good renown of the young man’; then, taking the severe tone of a judge, she turned to the accused Michel Toutounji: ‘If your eyes and lips have committed the crime, if you have looked at this woman, if you have seduced and kissed her, then your eyes and lips will bear the punishment. Seize and hold him! You, barber, shave off the young man’s left eyebrow and right mustache.’ What was said was done: ‘sam’an wa tâ’atan, I hear and I obey,’ as in the fairy tales. Four years later, Lady Hester, who was pleased with a justice that did so little harm to the condemned man, received a letter in which Toutounji amusedly told her that the story of the seduction was indeed true, and that his mustache and eyebrow were doing well.”

  This Orientalist parody of judgment à la Harun al-Rashid fascinated Sarah; whether or not it was true (and, given Lady Hester’s habits, it probably was) didn’t matter as much as showing to what extent the Englishwoman had integrated the supposed customs of these Lebanese Druzes and Christians of the mountain where she lived and how her legend had spread these attitudes; Sarah passionately described the engraving where we see Lady Hester, already older, seated in a noble, hieratic posture, that of a prophet or a judge, her long pipe in hand, far, very far from the languid images of women in harems; she told us about her refusal to wear the veil and her decision to dress in the Turkish fashion, but as a man. She told us about the passion Lady Hester inspired in Lamartine, the orator-poet, friend of Liszt and Hammer-Purgstall, with whom he shared a passion for the history of the Ottoman Empire: for the French a poet without equal, but also a prose-writer of genius — like Nerval, but to a lesser degree, Lamartine revealed himself in his journey to the Orient, freed himself of his Parisian bonds, evolved in his writing style; faced with the beauty of the unknown, the politician threw off his dramatic gestures and his babbling lyricism. Perhaps — and this is sad to think — the loss of his daughter Julia, who died of tuberculosis in Beirut, was necessary, so that the Levant could crystallize pain and death in him; like the Revelation for others, it took the worst wound, the ultimate suffering for his eyes, without the nepenthe of Helen of Troy encumbered with tears, to draw the magnificent portrait, full of somber beauty, of an original Levant: a magic fountain that almost as soon as it was discovered began to spit out death. Lamartine came to the Orient to see the choir of a church that turned out to be walled up, to visit the cella of a temple that had been sealed off; he stood straight ahead facing the altar, without noticing the rays of the setting sun flooding the transept behind him. Lady Hester fascinated him, since she was beyond his interrogations; she was in the stars, said Sarah; she read the fate of men in the stars — scarcely had Lamartine arrived than she offered to reveal his future to him; the woman he called “the Circe of the deserts” then explained to him, in between flavored pipes, his Messianic syncretism. Lady Hester revealed to him that the Orient was his true country, the country of his fathers, and that he would return to it — she could divine it from his feet: “See,” she said, “your instep is very high, there’s enough space between your heel and toes, when your foot is on the ground, for water to pass under it without getting you wet — it’s the foot of an Arab; it’s the foot of the Orient; you are a son of these climates and we are approaching the day when everyone will return to the land of their fathers. We will see each other again.”

  This podiatrist anecdote had cracked us up; François-Marie couldn’t help but take off his shoes to check if he was destined to return to the Orient or not — to his great despair he had, he said, a “Bordeaux foot,” and he would return, at the end of days, not to the desert, but to a farmhouse in t
he Entre-Deux-Mers region, near Montaigne’s home, which, all things considered, was just as desirable.

  Now that I think about it, Sarah’s feet have a perfect arch, under which a small river could easily flow; she spoke through the night and she was our desert magician, her tales enchanted the gleaming metal of the stones and stars — the adventurers of the Orient had not all known the mystical evolution of Mrs. Stanhope, the English recluse of Mount Lebanon, her journey toward the shedding of her things, her progressive abandonment of her western rags, the gradual construction of her own monastery, a monastery of pride or humility; not every woman traveler had received the tragic illumination of Lady Hester or Isabelle Eberhardt in the desert, far from it — it was François-Marie who took the stand next, despite an interruption from Bilger not just to serve drinks but to try to tell a story too, to recount part of the adventures of Alois Musil, called Lawrence of Moravia or Alois of Arabia, Orientalist and spy of the Hapsburgs unknown to the French — it was mostly Bilger’s attempt to become the center of attention again: a disastrous attempt, which would have precipitated many guests into sleep, so incomprehensible was his French; out of self-importance or presumptuousness, he refused to speak English. Fortunately, and as I was beginning to feel ashamed for him and for Alois Musil, he was skillfully interrupted by François-Marie. This specialist in the history of the French mandate in the Levant used Lady Hester and Lawrence of Moravia to steer the conversation diplomatically back to Palmyra. The fate of Marguerite d’Andurain, known as Marga, represented for him the antithesis of Stanhope’s, Eberhardt’s, or Schwarzenbach’s: their dark, shadowy twin. We were warming up again thanks to François-Marie’s accent and especially to the Lebanese wine that Bilger had opened; my neighbor’s long russet curls were turning redder from the last coals that shaped her face with chiaroscuro. The life of Marga d’Andurain was for François-Marie the story of a tragic failure — the beautiful adventuress was born at the very end of the nineteenth century to a good family in Bayonne (this detail was obviously emphasized by the Gascon historian; he had put his shoes back on to protect his toes from the cold), then married young to her cousin, a minor Basque nobleman who promised a great future but turned out to be rather feeble, indecisive, and obsessed almost exclusively with horses. Marga, on the contrary, was endowed with exceptional force, vitality, and resourcefulness. After a brief attempt at raising horses in prewar Argentina, the couple arrived in Alexandria in November 1925 and settled in Cairo, opposite the Groppi tea house on the Soliman Pasha Square, the center of the “European” city. Marga planned to open a beauty salon there and a trade in artificial pearls. Very soon she was frequenting Cairo high society, notably the British aristocrats from the Gezira Sporting Club on the island of Zamalek. That was when the title of “Countess” was added to her family name: she became ennobled, so to speak, by contagion. Two years later, she decided to accompany a friend, an Englishwoman, on a trip to Palestine and Syria, a journey whose guide would be Major Sinclair, head of military intelligence in Haifa. It was in his company that Marga first visited Palmyra, after an exhausting journey from Damascus, where, tired and jealous, her British friend preferred to wait for them. The tense relations between France and Great Britain in the Levant, the recent Syrian rebellion and its bloody repression, caused the French soldiers to be more than a little suspicious about the activities of foreigners in the territory of their mandate — the garrison in Palmyra would take a close interest in the couple that was settling into the hotel built by Fernando de Aranda. It was very likely that Sinclair and Marga became lovers there; their liaison fed the reports of idle French officers, reports that reached Colonel Catroux, who was then in charge of intelligence in Beirut.

  The Palmyran adventure of the elegant Comtesse d’Andurain began with an accusation of espionage that was already poisoning her relations with the French authorities in the Levant — this reputation of spy would keep coming up throughout her life, whenever the press or the administration became interested in her.

  A few months later, Sinclair died, having killed himself out of love, according to rumor. In the meantime, Marga d’Andurain had settled in Palmyra with her husband. She had fallen in love — not with a British major now, but with the region, the Bedouins, and the desert; she had acquired some land and was thinking of devoting herself (as in Argentina) to horse breeding. She writes in her memoirs about her gazelle hunts in the company of nomads, her nights spent under a tent, the filial tenderness she feels for the sheikh who leads this tribe. Soon, the couple gives up agriculture and is entrusted by the authorities with managing the hotel (the only one in the city at the time) in Palmyra, the ownership of which had reverted to the state, a hotel that they would eventually be allowed to purchase (or so it seems, added François-Marie; there is often, as with any testimony, a slight difference between what Marga relates and all the rest of the sources): she decides to call the establishment the Hotel Zenobia, in homage to the third century CE queen vanquished by Aurelian. All the tourists of the time pass through the d’Andurains’s place; Marga looks after the hotel while her husband amuses himself however he can, horseback riding or visiting the officers at the Palmyran garrison who watch over the airfield and command a small troop of mounted soldiers, remnants of the Second Army of the Orient, decimated by the world war and the Syrian revolt.

  Five years later, Marga d’Andurain grows bored. Her children have grown up; the queen of Palmyra realizes that her kingdom is nothing but a pile of stones and dust, romantic indeed, but lacking adventure or glory. That’s when she thinks up a crazy plan, inspired by the female characters who people her imagination, Lady Hester, Jane Digby the lover, Lady Anne Blunt the granddaughter of Byron, or Gertrude Bell, who died a few years earlier and whose incredible story she learned from Sinclair and his British friends. She dreams of going farther than all these archetypes and of being the first European woman to make a pilgrimage to Mecca, then crossing the Hejaz and the Nejd to reach the Persian Gulf and fishing for (or simply buying) pearls. In the beginning of 1933, Marga finds a way to embark on this journey: she contracts a marriage of convenience with Suleyman Dikmari, a mounted soldier in Palmyra from Oneiza in the Nejd, from the tribe of the Mutayrs, who wants to go home but doesn’t have the financial means. He’s a simple, illiterate man; he has never left the desert. He agrees, in return for a steep sum, to accompany the so-called countess into Arabia, Mecca, and Medina, then onto the coast to Bahrain, and to bring her back to Syria. Before leaving she of course makes him swear in front of witnesses that he will not try to consummate the marriage and that he will obey her in everything. At the time (and now I have the feeling that François-Marie, in top form, gives us these details only for the pleasure of showing off his historical knowledge) the Nejd and the Hejaz had just been unified by Prince Ibn Saud, who defeated the Hashemites and chased them out his territory — all that’s left to the descendants of the sharifs of Mecca are Iraq and Jordan, where they are supported by the British. Saudi Arabia is born just at the time when Marga d’Andurain decides to undertake her pilgrimage. The country is distinguished by its Bedouin identity and by its Wahhabite, puritanical, fundamentalist majority. The kingdom is forbidden to non-Muslims; obviously, Ibn Saud is mistrustful of any possible British or French interventions in his newly unified country. All legations are confined to Jeddah, port to Mecca, on the Red Sea, a hole between two rocks, without any fresh water, infested with sharks and cockroaches, where you had a choice between dying of thirst, sunstroke, or boredom — except during pilgrimage: the point of arrival in the peninsula for Muslims from the Indian Ocean and Africa, the little town sees dozens of boats carrying thousands of pilgrims pass through, with all the risks (police, health, morals) that come with it. It’s in this setting that Marga d’Andurain and her “passport-husband,” as she calls him, arrive at the beginning of the pilgrimage, after an official conversion to Islam and a (complicated) marriage in Palestine. Now her name is Zeynab (in homage, still, to Zenobia, queen of
Palmyra). Unfortunately for her, things very quickly turn bad: the doctor in charge of immigration tells her that the law of the Hejaz requires a two-year waiting period between conversion and admission to the pilgrimage. Suleyman the Bedouin is thus sent to Mecca to solicit an exceptional permit from King Abdulaziz. Marga-Zeynab cannot accompany him, but, out of decency, she can’t stay alone at the hotel either — so she is entrusted to the guard of the harem of the governor of Jeddah, where she will remain shut up for some days, clearing away all humiliations, but managing to ingratiate herself with the wives and daughters of the governor. She hands down to us, said François-Marie, an interesting account about life in a provincial harem, one of the few we have for that region and period. Finally, Suleyman returns from Mecca without having obtained the exceptional permit for his wife; he must take her to his family, near Oneiza. In the meantime, Zeynab has become Marga again: she socializes with Jacques-Roger Maigret, a French consul (he will represent France in Jeddah for seventeen years, seventeen long years, without complaining too much, until 1945; I hope, said François-Marie, they at least made him a chevalier or a commander of some Republican order for that interminable reign), and especially his son, to whom she offers his first erotic excitement: for the very young man, the arrival of the beautiful Marga in the kingdom of Wahhabite puritanism is a ray of sunshine — despite the age difference, he takes her to swim secretly outside of the city; he parades Zeynab, in her long black veil, through the little streets of Jeddah. Marga pushes provocation to the point of secretly smuggling her young lover into the hotel room that the consul’s power (despite the fact she is no longer legally French) managed to find for her to get her out of the harem. Suleyman insists on continuing on a journey that the countess no longer wants to complete: she fears being held prisoner, far away in the desert, where Maigret’s influence would have no sway.