After these considerations of supernatural zoology we tried, Sarah and I (like Alois Musil, I imagined, with his own nomads), to get information about the archaeological sites in the environs, the temples, the castles, the forgotten cities that only the Bedouins could know — this tactic vexed King Bilger, convinced that generations of Orientalists had “exhausted the desert”; the Grabars, Ettinghausens, and Hillenbrands had spent years describing the Islamic ruins so that their colleagues, specialists in Antiquity, could reveal Roman or Byzantine forts and villages: there’s nothing left to discover, he thought — in fact, our hosts spoke to us about Qasr el-Heyr and Resafa, adding stories of hidden treasures that Bilger found moderately amusing, while he was still slightly upset by his mistake in direction. He explained to me, in German, that the natives observed the archaeologists’ excavations and dug themselves as soon as the archaeologists had gone: these crows of archaeology were an affliction well-known at archaeological sites, whose surroundings, Bilger exaggerated, ended up full of holes and piles of earth, as if ravaged by giant moles.
The women, in their long dark embroidered dresses, brought us dinner; round unleavened bread, honey, wild thyme mixed with sumac and sesame, cheese, milk, yogurt — if not for its terrible burnt taste, the cheese could easily have been mistaken for soap, dry and salty. All the milk products had that same burnt taste for that matter, which has remained for me the taste of the desert, the land of milk, honey, and campfire. The old man didn’t eat much, but kept urging us to take seconds of this or that; Sarah had engaged one of the women in conversation, one of the younger ones, I thought — out of a perhaps exaggerated modesty, I tried to avoid looking at them too much. We were still talking about mysteries and discoveries. The peddler got up and went out, probably to satisfy a natural need (I realized that unlike the camp sites in the Salzkammergut, this tent had no facilities nearby: Mother would not have appreciated this at all; she’d also have warned me against the food, even though the powerful burnt aroma seemed to indicate that the milk had been boiled), and the sheikh took advantage of the man’s absence (which confirmed that the peddler was suspected of being an informer) to confide in us, in a whisper, that there were in fact forgotten, mysterious ruins, far to the southwest, at the border between the desert and the basalt mountain that separates the badiya from the Hauran plain, an entire city, said the old man, covered in bones; I had the greatest difficulty understanding this word, bones, remains, and I had to ask Sarah, what does ‘adhm mean? According to the sheikh, it was the ruins of one of the cities destroyed by the wrath of God, as was written in the Koran — he spoke of it with fear, said the place was cursed and that the Bedouins would never camp near there, not in a million years: they were content to contemplate the mountains of bones and rubble, meditate on them, and continue on their way. Bilger lifted his eyes to the sky in an exasperated way that was extremely discourteous to our host: it’s easy to find, this city, he sneered, according to the Bible you just have to turn right at the crossroads of the woman turned into a pillar of salt. I tried to find out more, were they animal bones? A camel cemetery, perhaps? A volcanic eruption? My questions made the old man laugh, no, dromedaries don’t hide themselves to die in a secret place, they die wherever they’re standing, lie down and die like everyone else. Bilger assured me that volcanoes had been extinct in Syria for tens of thousands of years, which made the eruption theory not very likely; he seemed to consider all of it as so much nonsense from the superstitious imagination of natives. I pictured, on the slopes of a crater of lunar basalt, the remains of an ancient fortress and a vanished city, covered with the bones of their inhabitants, who had died in God knows what catastrophe — a nightmare vision, black, moon-mad. The peddler came back in, and I went out in turn; it was dark outside; the cold seemed to be rising from the stones straight into the sky, frozen with stars. I walked away from the tent to urinate, the dog accompanied me for a bit before abandoning me to sniff around further off in the darkness. Above me, high in the sky, indicating the west, was something we hadn’t seen the night before: Palestine and the Mediterranean shone, a sudden revelation, a comet with a long tail of glowing dust.
2:20 A.M.
Sarah is lying down naked next to me; her long tresses form a stream, slowed down by the rocks of the vertebrae. I am tormented by remorse; I observe her and am full of remorse. The boat is taking us to Beirut: last port of call on the Austrian Lloyd line, Trieste–Alexandria–Jaffa–Beirut. I sense confusedly that Sarah is not going to wake up before we arrive tomorrow in Beirut, where Nadim is waiting for us for the wedding. All the better. I scrutinize her svelte, muscular, almost skinny body; she doesn’t react when I play for a minute with her sex, she’s sleeping so deeply. I know I shouldn’t be there. Guilt is suffocating me. From the porthole, I can see the sea unfold its greenish, wintery infinity, covered in whitecaps; I leave the cabin, the long corridors are carpeted in red velvet, lit by bronze wall lamps, I wander in the damp heat of the ship, it’s unsettling to get lost like this in stifling corridors when I’m late; on the cabin doors, oval plaques indicate the names of the occupants, their birth and death dates — I consider knocking on Kathleen Ferrier’s door, then on Lou Andreas-Salomé’s, but I don’t dare disturb them, I’m too ashamed of getting lost, ashamed of having been forced to urinate in the corridor, into a magnificent umbrella stand, before the hostess (transparent evening gown, I gaze for a long time at her lingerie) takes me by the arm, “Franz, they’re waiting for you upstairs, come, we’ll go through the wings. Stefan Zweig is furious, he wants to disgrace you, challenge you to a duel; he knows you won’t have the courage to face him and you’ll be excluded from the Burschenschaft.”
I try to kiss her on the mouth, she lets me, her tongue is soft and warm, I slip one hand under her dress, a hand she withdraws affectionately, murmuring “nein, nein, nein, Liebchen,” I’m annoyed but I understand. There’s a large crowd in the big foyer, Dr. Kraus is leading a standing ovation, we applaud the end of Schumann’s Geistervariationen thunderously. I try to take advantage of the diversion to lift the hostess’ dress again, again she pushes me away just as tenderly. I’m eager for us to get down to business. The Colonel is deep in conversation with Dr. Kraus; he explains to me that Kraus can’t stand that his wife plays the piano better than he, and I agree, Lili Kraus is a wonderful pianist, in a different league than you, dear Doctor. I knock my glass of milk onto the Colonel’s grand uniform, all the eagles are spattered with it, fortunately, milk doesn’t stain uniforms, unlike evening gowns, which the hostess is forced to take off: she rolls it into a ball and hides it in a cupboard.
“What’s going to become of us? This country is so small and so old, Colonel, there’s no point in defending it. It would be better to change countries.”
“That in fact is the solution to the Syrian problem,” he says.
Outside the war is still raging on; we can’t go out, we’re going to have to stay locked up under this staircase.
“Isn’t this where you hid your wedding dress? The one I stained by accident?”
Let’s stay calm, calm. We’re closely intertwined in the dark, but the hostess is not interested in me, I know she has eyes only for Sarah. I have to do something, but what? The Irish Sea is wild, you certainly won’t get there for two or three days yet. Two or three days! Mr. Ritter, Kraus says gently, I think we can change your disease, now. It’s time, you’re right. It’s time. Franz, look how that young woman is caressing herself! Put your face between her legs, you’ll find it refreshing.
Kraus continues spouting his absurdities, I’m cold, I must at all costs find my cabin again and the sleeping Sarah, I reluctantly abandon the hostess to her masturbation. Soon it will be your turn, Mr. Ritter. Soon it will be your turn. The sea is very stormy, today. Play us something then, to pass the time! This lute isn’t mine, but I should be able to improvise something. What mode do you prefer? Nahawand? Hejazi? Hejazi! That suits every circumstance. Go on, dear Franz, pla
y us your waltz, you remember? Oh yes, the Waltz of Death, of course I remember, F, F-A, F-A#-B, B, B. My hands run over the neck of the oud with the sound of a violin. The bar on this boat, the opera foyer, opens onto the sea and the sea spray spatters the musicians and their instruments. Impossible to play in these conditions, dear audience. What a disappointment! We who so wanted to hear The Waltz of Death! Der Todeswalzer! We’re headed straight for shipwreck, rejoice. I am rejoicing, dear audience, dear friends. Dear friends, Dr. Zweig has a speech to make (again that old Zweig with the long face, what a bore). I leave the stage with my lute to make way for him, there’s a big puddle of water under the chair. Zweig scolds me, runs his hand through my hair and tells me to sit down. Ladies and gentlemen, he cries, this is war! Montjoie! Saint-Denis! It’s war! Rejoice!
Everyone applauds, the soldiers, the sailors, the women, the Kraus couple and even Sarah, I’m surprised she’s there, I rush over to her, you woke up? You woke up? I hide the lute behind my back, so she won’t see that I stole it from Nadim — I stole it? I know the police are looking for me for this terrible crime I committed long ago. Are we arriving soon? It’s war, I say. They’re all rejoicing at dying in combat. Vienna is going to become the new capital of Syria. We’ll all speak Arabic on the Graben.
Sarah mustn’t hear about the murder and the body. Dr. Kraus! Dr. Kraus! Your irises have grown on our corpses again! What a horrible Spring, with this endless rain, you wouldn’t think you were in the Orient. Everything is rotting. Everything is growing moldy. The bones keep decomposing. We’ll have a fine grape harvest this year, the wine of the dead will be abundant. Shhh, murmurs Sarah, don’t mention the wine of the dead, it’s a secret. A potion? Perhaps. Of love or death? You’ll see.
A sailor sings, in the distance, “Toward the east heads the ship, cool breathes the wind toward our homeland, my Irish child, toward where is your life heading?”
Which gives Sarah a good laugh. She looks like Molly Bloom, I think, the one who wheels her barrow through narrow streets to sell cockles and mussels. God how vast the sea is!
How many children will we have, Dr. Kraus?
How many?
It would be unthinkable for me to indulge in these sorts of predictions, I am a serious doctor, Mr. Ritter. Do not share that syringe, you’ll contaminate each other.
Franz, you have beautiful veins, you know that?
Mr. Ritter, I have warned you.
Franz, you have very beautiful veins, Sarah repeats.
Sweat, sweat, sweat.
Awful. How awful, my God. The light is still on, I’m still holding the switch. That image of Sarah holding a syringe, fortunately I awoke before the damage was done, Sarah injecting me with a repulsive liquid, her wine of the dead, under the depraved gaze of Dr. Kraus, what an atrocity, to think that some people find dreaming pleasant. Breathe, breathe. It’s so tiresome, this sensation of lacking air as if I’m drowning in my sleep. Fortunately I don’t remember my dreams aside from the last seconds, they’re almost immediately erased from my memory, fortunately. I escape the guilt of the unconscious, the brutality of desire. That strange emotion often grips me in dream. As if I actually committed an atrocious crime that is about to be discovered. The wine of the dead. Sarah’s article is haunting me, what an idea to send me this text from Sarawak, sick and fragile as I am now. I realize how much I miss her. How much she has missed me. How sick and fragile she might be too, in her lush jungle, with her ex-headhunters, great harvesters of corpses. What a trip. There’s some work here for the charlatan on the Berggasse, Mrs. Kafka’s neighbor. In the end it always amounts to the same thing. I think I remember that Jung, the first unconscious Orientalist, discovered that one of his patients was dreaming of the Tibetan Book of the Dead, which she had never heard of, and which put a germ in the disciple’s mind and launched him on the path of the collective unconscious and archetypes. Me, I am not dreaming of the Tibetan or Egyptian Book of the Dead but of the far recesses of Sarah’s brain. Tristan and Iseult. Potions of love and death. Dik el-Jinn the Mad. The old poet from Homs so mad with jealousy that he killed the woman he loved. But that’s nothing, said Sarah, Dik el-Jinn was so passionate, torn apart from the suffering of having destroyed the object of his passion, that with the ashes of his beloved’s corpse mixed with clay he modeled a cup, a deadly cup, magical and deadly, from which he drank wine, the first wine of Death, which inspired him to compose sublime love poems. He drank in the body of his beloved, he drank the body of his love, and this Dionysian madness became Apollonian by the play of the verses, of the regulated, codified meter where the energy of his necrophagic passion for the woman he had killed out of jealousy, giving in to rumors and hatred, became ordered: “I have returned you to the most complete nudity,” he sang, “I have mixed your face with earth and even, if I could have borne watching you rot, I would have left your dead face to the great sun.”
We know he drank heavily, this poet from Homs who lived for almost seventy years, did he still get drunk from his mortal cup in the twilight of his life, it’s possible, it’s likely. Why is Sarah interested in these atrocities, necrophagy, black magic, devouring passions? I can see her at the Crime Museum in Vienna, strolling with a smile on her lips through that cave on Leopoldstadt, in the midst of skulls pierced with bullets and truncheons by all kinds of killers, political, dissolute, in love, all the way to the high point of the exhibit, an old dusty wicker basket in which was found, at the beginning of the twentieth century, a woman’s body, arms and legs cut off, a woman-trunk, photographs of which were abundant at the time, naked and mutilated, pubis as black as the shoulders and thighs where the absent members had bled. A little further on there was also a disemboweled woman, raped before or after her evisceration. “You’re funny, you Austrians,” Sarah said, “you show images of women tortured to death, but you censor the only representation of pleasure in this whole museum.” She was referring to a painting, in the part of the exhibit devoted to Viennese brothels, showing, in an Orientalist décor, an odalisque caressing herself, legs spread; a contemporary censor had placed a big black square over her hand and private parts. The caption said soberly, “Decorative painting from a bordello.” Obviously I was embarrassed to find myself commenting on such an image with Sarah; I looked elsewhere, blushing, which she took for an avowal: a recognition of Viennese perversion — tortured women in the basement, censored eroticism and the most prudish chastity outside.
Compass Page 20
