Compass

by Mathias Enard

  She was picturing — much better than I could, I have to admit — the torments of those Portuguese adventurers who had braved the Cape of Storms and the giant Adamastor, “king of the deep” in Meyerbeer’s opera L’Africaine, to colonize this round rock, the pearls of the Gulf, the spices and silks of India. Afonso de Albuquerque was, Sarah told me, the architect of the policies of the King of Portugal Dom Manuel, policies that were much more ambitious than these small-scale ruins, which led one to believe: by establishing themselves in the Gulf, by taking on the Mamelukes of Egypt whose fleet on the Red Sea they had already defeated from the rear, the Portuguese intended not only to establish a cluster of commercial ports from Malacca to Egypt but also, in one final crusade, to liberate Jerusalem from the infidels. This Portuguese dream was still half-Mediterranean; it corresponded to that shifting moment when the Mediterranean little by little stopped being the sole political and economic stake of the maritime powers. The Portuguese at the end of the fifteenth century dreamed at the same time of the Indies and the Levant, they were (at least Dom Manuel and his adventurer Albuquerque) between two bodies of water, between two dreams and two eras. In the beginning of the sixteenth century, Hormuz was impossible to keep without a foothold on the continent, whether it was on the Persian side like today, or on the Omani side as it was at the time of that sultanate of Hormuz to which Afonso de Albuquerque, governor of the Indies, put an end, with his cannons and his twenty-five ships.

  As for me, I thought that the Portuguese word saudade — longing, melancholy — is, as its name indicates, a very Arabic and very Iranian sentiment, and that these young Pasdars on their island, unless they came from Shiraz or Tehran and went back home every night, must have recited poems around a campfire to stave off their sadness — not the poems of Luís de Camões, that’s for sure, unlike Sarah perched on the rusty cannon. We sat down in the sand in the shade of an old wall, facing the sea, each in our own saudade: my saudade for Sarah, too close for me not to wish to bury myself in her arms, and her saudade for the melancholy shadow of Badr Shakir Sayyab which was reflected on the Gulf, far to the north, between Kuwait and Basra. The poet with the long face had gone to Iran in 1952, probably to Abadan and Ahvaz, to flee the repression in Iraq, while no one knew anything about the repression in Iraq, or about his Iranian travels. “I cry to the Gulf / O Gulf, you offer pearls, shells and death / and the echo comes back, like a sob / You offer pearls, shells and death,” these lines that I too turn over in my mind, return to me like an echo, the “Song of the Rain” by the Iraqi chased from his childhood and the village of Jaykur by the death of his mother, launched into the world and into suffering, an infinite exile, like this island in the Persian Gulf strewn with dead shells. There were echoes in his work of T. S. Eliot, whom he had translated into Arabic; he had gone to England, where he had suffered terribly from solitude, according to his letters and texts — he had experienced the Unreal City, had become a shade among the shades on London Bridge. “Here, said she, is your card, the drowned Phoenician Sailor. (Those are pearls that were his eyes. Look!)” Birth, death, resurrection, the land lying fallow, as sterile as the oil plain of the Gulf. Sarah hummed my lied on the verses of the “Song of the Rain,” slowly and gravely, as funereal as they were pretentious, whereas Sayyab had been modest to the end. It’s a good thing I stopped composing songs, I lacked the humility of Gabriel Fabre, his compassion. His passion too, probably.

  We recited the poems of Sayyab and Eliot in front of the old Portuguese fort until two goats came to draw us out of our contemplation, goats with brownish red coats, accompanied by a little girl whose eyes shone with curiosity; the goats were gentle, smelled very strong, they began nuzzling us, gently but firmly: this Homeric attack put an end to our intimacy, the child and her animals had obviously decided to spend the afternoon with us. They were obsequious enough to accompany us back (without saying a word, or answering any of our questions) to the landing dock where the boats left for Bandar Abbas: Sarah found this little girl comical — she didn’t let anyone approach and, unlike the goats, fled as soon as you held out your hand to her, but returned to a distance of one or two meters a few seconds later; I however found her rather frightening, mostly because of her incomprehensible muteness.

  The Pasdars at the dock didn’t look the least bit bothered by this girl who stuck to us like glue with her goats. Sarah turned back to wave at the child without getting any reaction from her, not even a gesture. For a long time we discussed the reason for such wild behavior; I maintained that the girl (ten or twelve at most) must have been disturbed, or deaf, perhaps; Sarah just thought she was shy: that’s probably the first time she’s ever heard a foreign language, she said, which seemed unlikely to me. Whatever the case, this strange apparition, and those soldiers, were the only inhabitants we glimpsed on the island of Hormuz. The skipper on the way back wasn’t the same as the one going out, but his motorboat and nautical technique were identical — with the one exception that he dropped us off at the beach, lifting his motor and beaching his boat on the sandy bottom, a few meters from shore. So we were lucky enough to be able to dip our feet in the water of the Persian Gulf and verify two things: first, the Iranians are less strict than one might think, and no policeman hidden under a pebble rushed at Sarah to order her to conceal her ankles (an entirely erotic part of the female body, according to the censors) and roll down her trousers; and second, sadly, is that if I had doubted for a single instant the presence of hydrocarbons in the region, I could be entirely reassured: the sole of my foot was stained with thick, sticky spots that despite all my strenuous efforts in the hotel shower left me for a long time with a brownish ring on my skin and toes: I keenly missed Mother’s specialized detergents, the little bottles of Doktor something or other, whose efficacy I imagine, wrongly no doubt, is due to years of unmentionable experiments to remove stains from Nazi uniforms — so hard to clean, as Mother says about white tablecloths.

  While we’re on the subject of goats and cloth, I absolutely have to have this bathrobe shortened, I’ll end up tripping and and knocking myself out against a corner of the furniture, farewell Franz, farewell, finally the Middle East will have triumphed over you, but not with some terrifying parasite, worms that devour your eyes from inside or poison you through the soles of the feet, but just an overlong Bedouin cloak, the revenge of the desert — one can imagine the announcement in the press, “Killed by his terrible taste in clothing: the mad academic was disguised as Omar Sharif in Lawrence of Arabia.” As Omar Sharif or rather Anthony Quinn, the Auda Abu Tayya of the film — Auda the proud Bedouin of the Howeitats, a tribe of courageous warriors who took Akaba from the Ottomans with Lawrence in 1917, Auda the ferocious in the pleasures of war, obligatory guide for all Orientalists in the desert: he accompanied Alois Musil the Moravian as well as Lawrence the Englishman and Father Antonin Jaussen the man from the Ardèche. This Dominican priest who was trained in Jerusalem also met the other two, and they became the three musketeers of Orientalism, with Auda Abu Tayya as d’Artagnan. Two priests, one adventurer, and a Bedouin fighter, great decapitator of Turks — unfortunately the whims of international politics willed it so that Musil fought in the opposite camp to Jaussen and Lawrence’s; as for Auda, he began the Great War with one and ended allied to the other two, when Faysal, son of the sharif Hussein of Mecca, managed to convince him to place his valorous cavalrymen in the service of the Arab Revolt.

  It’s quite certain, moreover, that if Jaussen’s country had asked his advice, he’d rather have gone over to the side of the Austrian explorer-priest, with whom he’d have enjoyed conversing, during the long expeditions on camel-back through the scree of Al-Sham, about theology and Arab antiquities, instead of on the side of the lanky Brits, whose strange mysticism gave off the frightful stench of paganism, and whose government had the musty smell of secret treachery. Antonin Jaussen and Alois Musil were forced by events (relatively forced: both, while they were protected from soldiers by their priest�
��s clothes, volunteered for service) to fight against each other for domination of the Arabic Orient and more precisely for those warrior tribes between the Syrian badiya and the Hejaz, tribes that were familiar with raids and clan warfare. Auda alias Anthony Quinn was angry at neither; he was a pragmatic man who appreciated above all battles, weapons, and the bellicose poetry of ancient times. They say his body was covered in scars from his wounds, which excited the curiosity of the women in his region; according to legend he married a good twenty times, and had a large number of children.

  Look, I’ve forgotten to turn off the radio. I still haven’t bought myself one of those Bluetooth headsets that let you listen to music wirelessly. I could stroll into the kitchen with Reza Shajarian or Franz Schubert in my ears. When I switch on the electric kettle, the light bulb on the ceiling still flickers a little. Things are connected. The kettle is in communication with the ceiling light, even though, in theory, the two objects have nothing to do with each other. The laptop is yawning on the table, half-open, like a silver frog. Where did I put those teabags? I’d like to listen to a little Iranian music, some tar, tar and zarb. The radio, friend of insomniacs. Only insomniacs listen to Die Ö1 Klassiknacht in their kitchens. Schumann. I’d swear it was Schumann, string trio. Impossible to get that wrong.

  Oh, here we are. Samsara Chai or Red Love — we’re still stuck in it, that’s for sure. What came over me to buy these things. Samsara Chai must be caffeinated. OK fine, a little cup of Red Love. Rose petals, dried raspberries, hibiscus flowers, according to the box. Why don’t I have any chamomile in my cupboards? Or verbena, or even lemon balm? The herbalist on the corner of the street closed five or six years ago, a very nice lady, she liked me a lot, I was her sole customer apparently; it should be said that the age of her shop was not venerable enough to inspire confidence, it was just a horrible store from the 1970s, with no charm in its disrepair or anything special on its Formica shelves. Since then I’ve had to buy Samsara Love or God knows what at the supermarket.

  Ah yes, Schumann, I knew it. Good Lord it’s three a.m. The news is still depressing, despite the generally reassuring (thanks to its smoothness) voice of the speaker. A hostage decapitated in Syria, in the desert, by a killer with a London accent. One imagines a whole scenario set up to frighten the Western spectator, the sacrificer masked in black, the hostage kneeling, head lowered — these atrocious videos of beheadings have been fashionable for a dozen years, ever since the death of Daniel Pearl in Karachi in 2002, and even before possibly, in Bosnia and Chechnya, how many since then have been executed in the same way, dozens, hundreds of people, in Iraq and elsewhere: one wonders why this method of execution, throat-slitting with a kitchen knife till the head comes off, maybe they’re unaware of the power of the saber or the axe. At least the Saudis, who decapitate myriads of poor devils every year, do it with all the weight of tradition, so to speak — with a saber, which one pictures handled by a giant: the executioner comes down with a single blow of the weapon onto the condemned man’s neck, immediately breaking his spine and (but in the end it’s of secondary importance) separating the head from the shoulders, as in the time of the sultans. The Thousand and One Nights are full of decapitations, according to the same modus operandi, saber on neck; in the novels of chivalry too, one decapitates “with all one’s strength,” as the French say, with the sword or axe, head placed on a block like Milady, Athos’s wife in The Three Musketeers, as I remember that was a privilege of the nobility, to be decapitated instead of being quartered, burned, or strangled — the French Revolution would sort that out, by inventing the guillotine; in Austria we had our gibbet, like the Spanish garrotte, strangling that was entirely manual. Of course there was an example of this gibbet in the Museum of Crime, Sarah had been able to discover how it functioned as well as the personality of the most famous executioner in the history of Austria, Josef Lang, thanks to that extraordinary photograph dating back to around 1910 where you see him, bowler hat on his head, mustache, bowtie, big smile on his face, perched on his stepladder behind the corpse of a tidily executed man, hanging there dead, well-strangled, and around him the assistants, all smiling as well. Sarah looked at this photo and sighed, “The smile of the worker in front of a job well done,” showing she had understood perfectly the psychology of Josef Lang, a horrifically normal guy, a pathetic loser, good family man who boasted about making you die expertly, “with pleasant sensations.” “What a passion for death, all the same, your fellow citizens have,” Sarah said. For macabre memories. And even the heads of the dead — a few years ago all the Vienna papers were talking about the burial of a skull, the skull of Kara Mustafa, no less. The great vizier who had led the second siege of Vienna in 1683 and lost the battle had been strangled, by order of the sultan, in Belgrade where he had retreated — I can see myself telling the incredulous Sarah that after being strangled by the silk cord Kara Mustafa was decapitated postmortem, that the skin of his face was then removed to be sent to Istanbul as proof of his death, and his skull buried (with the rest of his bones, one supposes) in Belgrade. The Hapsburgs discovered him, in the corresponding grave, five years later, when they occupied the city. The skull of Kara Mustafa, Mustafa the Black, was given to some Viennese prelate, who donated it to the Arsenal, then to the Municipal Museum, where it was exhibited for years, until one scrupulous curator thought this morbid old thing no longer had a place among the illustrious collections of the history of Vienna, and decided to get rid of it. The skull of Kara Mustafa, whose tent was set up a stone’s throw away from here, a few hundred meters from the glacis, near the Danube, couldn’t go in the trash; they found a burial place for it in an anonymous niche. Did that Turkish relic have anything to do with the fashion for mustachioed Turks that adorn the pediments of our beautiful city? There’s a question for Sarah, I’m sure she is unbeatable on the subject of decapitation, the Turks, their heads, hostages and even the executioner’s dagger — over there in Sarawak she must hear the same headlines as we do, the same radio news, or maybe not, who knows. In Sarawak perhaps there’s more talk about the latest decisions of the Sultan of Brunei and nothing about masked killers of Islam, the macabre farce with the black flag. It’s such a European story, in the end. European victims, killers with London accents. A new and violent radical Islam, born in Europe and the United States, from Western bombs, and the only victims that count when it comes down to it are Europeans. Poor Syrians. Their fate interests our media much less, in reality. The terrifying nationalism of corpses. Auda Abu Tayya the proud warrior of Lawrence and Musil would probably fight today with the Islamic State, the new worldwide jihad following many others — who had the idea first, Napoleon in Egypt or Max von Oppenheim in 1914? Max von Oppenheim the archaeologist from Cologne was already old when the hostilities broke out, he had already discovered Tell Halaf; like many Orientalists and Arabic scholars of the time he joined the Nachrichtenstelle für den Orient, a Berlin office intended to gather information of military interest coming from the East. Oppenheim was an habitué of the corridors of power; he was the one who convinced Wilhelm II to carry out his official voyage to the Orient and the pilgrimage to Jerusalem; he believed in the power of pan-Islamism, which he discussed with Abdulhamid the Red Sultan himself. A hundred years later, German Orientalists were more au fait with Oriental realities than Bonaparte’s Arabic specialists, who were the first to try, without much success, to make the little Corsican pass as the liberator of the Arabs from the Turkish yoke. The first European colonial expedition to the Near East was a fine military fiasco. Napoleon Bonaparte did not experience the success he expected as saviour of Islam and conceded a very bitter defeat to the perfidious British — decimated by plague, vermin, and English cannonballs, the last fragments of the glorious army of Valmy must have been abandoned on site, with the only sciences benefiting even a tiny bit from the adventure being, in order of importance, military medicine, Egyptology, and Semitic linguistics. Did the Germans and Austrians think of Napoleon when they launche
d their appeal for global jihad in 1914? The idea (submitted by Oppenheim the archaeologist) was to call for the disobedience of the Muslims of the world, Moroccan troops, Algerian and Senegalese infantry corps, Indian Muslims, Caucasians, and Turkmens whom the Triple Entente sent to fight on the European Front and to use riots or guerrilla tactics to create disorder in the English, French, and Russian Muslim colonies. The idea delighted the Austrians and the Ottomans, and the jihad was proclaimed in Arabic in the name of the sultan-caliph in Istanbul on November 14, 1914, in the mosque of Mehmet the Conqueror, probably to give all the symbolic weight possible to this rather complex fatwa, since it didn’t call for holy war against all infidels, and excluded from the impious the Germans, the Austrians and the representatives of neutral countries. I can see the beginnings of a third volume to the work that will earn me glory: