Compass

by Mathias Enard

  We were able to breathe in blood, fill our lungs with blood and enjoy death to the fullest extent. For centuries we transmuted death into beauty, blood into flowers, into fountains of blood, filled the museum cases with blood-stained uniforms and eyeglasses smashed in by martyrdom and we are proud of it, for each martyr is a poppy that is red, that is a little bit of beauty that is this world. We have produced a liquid, red people, it lives in death and is happy in Paradise. We have stretched a black canvas over Paradise to protect it from the sun. We have washed our corpses in the rivers of Paradise. Paradise is a Persian word. We give passersby the water of death, to drink from it under the black tents of mourning. Paradise is the name of our country, the cemeteries where we live, the name of sacrifice.

  Parviz didn’t know how to speak in prose; not in French, in any case. In Persian he saved his darkness and pessimism for his poems, he was much less serious, full of humor; those who, like Faugier or Sarah, knew the language well enough to appreciate it often burst out laughing — he would happily tell funny, salacious stories — anywhere else in the world, you’d be surprised a great poet knew those sorts of stories. Parviz also often spoke about his childhood in Qom in the 1950s. His father was a religious man, a scholar, whom he always calls “the man in black” in his texts, if I remember correctly. It was thanks to “the man in black” that he read the philosophers of Persian tradition, from Avicenna to Ali Shariati — and the mystical poets. Parviz knew by heart a number of extraordinary classical poems, by Rumi, Hafez, Khadjou, Nezami, Bidel, as well as modern ones, by Nima, Shamlou, Sepehri and Akhavan-Sales. A walking library — Rilke, Yesenin, Lorca, Char, he knew (in Persian and in the original version) thousands of poems by heart. The day we met, when he found out I was Viennese, he searched through his memory, the way you leaf through an anthology, and returned from that brief internal voyage with a poem by Lorca, in Spanish, “En Viena hay diez muchachas, un hombro donde solloza la muerte y un bosque de palomas disecadas,” which I obviously didn’t understand a word of, so he had to translate: “In Vienna there are ten young girls, a shoulder on which death is sobbing, and a forest of stuffed pigeons,” then he looked at me very seriously and asked me, “Is that true? I’ve never been.”

  It was Sarah who replied for me, “Oh it’s true, yes, especially about the stuffed pigeons.”

  “How interesting, a taxidermist city.”

  I wasn’t sure the conversation was going in a direction that was very favorable to me, so I looked reprovingly at Sarah, which immediately delighted her, Oh look the Austrian is upset, nothing makes her happier than publicly exposing my faults — Parviz’s apartment was small but comfortable, full of books and rugs; strangely, it was located on an avenue with a poet’s name, Nezami or Attar, I can’t remember. One so easily forgets important things. I have to stop thinking out loud, if anyone ever recorded me, how shameful that would be. I’m afraid of being taken for a madman. Not a madman like the one at the Abguineh museum or like my friend Bilger but a madman all the same. The guy who talks to his radio and his laptop. Who has conversations with Mendelssohn and his cup of acidic Red Love. Hmm, I could have brought back a samovar from Iran too. I wonder what Sarah has done with hers. Bringing back a samovar instead of CDs, musical instruments, and books by poets that I’ll never understand. Did I talk out loud to myself, before? Did I invent roles, voices, characters? My old Mendelssohn, I have to confess to you that when it comes down to it I don’t know your oeuvre very well. What can I say, you can’t listen to everything, you’re not angry I hope. I know your house, though, in Leipzig. The little bust of Goethe on your desk. Goethe your godfather, your first master. Goethe who heard two child prodigies, the little Mozart and you. I have seen your watercolors, your beautiful Swiss landscapes. Your living room. Your kitchen. I have seen the portrait of the woman you loved and the souvenirs from your trips to England. Your children. I pictured a visit from Clara and Robert Schumann, you would hurriedly emerge from your study to welcome them. Clara was radiant; she wore a little cap, her hair pinned back, a few ringlets fell onto her temples and framed her face. Robert had some scores under his arm and a little ink on his right sleeve, you laughed. You’re all sitting in the living room. That same morning you had received a letter from Ignaz Moscheles from London agreeing to come teach in Leipzig in the brand-new conservatoire you’ve just founded. Moscheles your piano teacher. You tell this excellent news to Schumann. You’re all going to work together, then. If Schumann accepts, of course. And he accepts. Then you have lunch. Then you all go out for a walk, and I’ve always pictured you great walkers, Schumann and you. You have four years left to live. In four years Moscheles and Schumann will be carrying your coffin.

  Seven years later, it will be Schumann who will plunge into the Rhine and madness, in Düsseldorf.

  I wonder, my old Mendel, which will take me first, death or madness.

  “Dr. Kraus! Dr. Kraus! Please answer this question. Apparently, after the latest investigations by those physicians of the soul that are post mortem psychiatrists, Schumann was no more mad than you or I. He was simply sad, profoundly sad from the difficulties of his relationship with Clara, the end of his passion, a sadness he drowned in alcohol. Clara left him to die, abandoned him for two long years in the depths of his asylum, that’s the truth, Dr. Kraus. The only person (along with Brahms, but you’ll agree, Brahms doesn’t count) who visited him, Bettina von Arnim, Brentano’s sister, confirmed this. According to her, Schumann was unfairly locked up. He wasn’t Hölderlin in his tower. What’s more, the last great cycle for piano by Schumann, Songs of Dawn, composed barely six months before his internment, is inspired by Hölderlin and dedicated to Bettina Brentano von Arnim. Was Schumann thinking about Hölderlin’s tower by the shores of the Neckar, was he afraid of that, Kraus, what do you think?”

  “Love can devastate us, I am profoundly convinced of that, Dr. Ritter. But one can’t swear to anything for sure. In any case I recommend you take this medicine to help you rest a little, my friend. You need calm and rest. And no, I will not prescribe opium to slow down your metabolism, as you say. One does not delay the instant of death by slowing down one’s metabolism, by stretching out time, Dr. Ritter, that’s an entirely childish idea.”

  “But really, dear Kraus, what did they give Schumann for two years in his asylum in Bonn? Chicken soup?”

  “I do not know, Dr. Ritter, I have absolutely no idea. I just know that the doctors at the time diagnosed a melancholia psychotica that required his internment.”

  “Ah, doctors are terrible, you would never contradict a colleague! Charlatans, Kraus! Charlatans! Sell-outs! Melancholia psychotica, my ass! He was behaving like a charm, that’s what Brentano says! He just had a little episode. A little episode, the Rhine woke him up, even revived him like a good German, the Rhine resuscitated him, the Rhine maidens caressed his privates and there you go! Just think, Kraus, that already before la Brentano’s visit he was asking for music paper, an edition of Paganini’s Caprices, and an atlas. An atlas, Kraus! Schumann wanted to see the world, leave Endenich and his torturer Dr. Richarz. See the world! There was no reason to bury him in that house of madmen. It’s his wife who was responsible for his unhappiness. Clara who, despite all the reports she received from Endenich, never went to get him. Clara who followed to the letter Richarz’s criminal recommendations. It was already Clara who was responsible for the attack that medicine transformed into one long burial. It was passion, the end of passion, the anguish of love that made him sick.”

  “What do you mean by that, Dr. Ritter, as you finish your horrible potion of artificial petals, do you think that you yourself, perhaps, are not so seriously afflicted? That you too just have ‘a little episode’ due to a matter of love and not a chronic and terrifying illness?”

  “Dr. Kraus I’d so like for you to be right. I’d so like for me to be right about Schumann too. The Songs of Dawn are so . . . so unique. Outside of Schumann’s time, outside
of his writing. Schumann was outside of himself when he wrote the Songs of Dawn, a few weeks before the fatal night, just before the final Ghost Variations, which have always frightened me, composed around the time of (during) his dive into the Rhine. E-flat major. A theme born from an auditory hallucination, melodic tinnitus or divine revelation, poor Schumann. E-flat major, the key of Beethoven’s sonata ‘Les Adieux.’ Phantoms and farewells. Dawn, farewells. Poor Eusebius. Poor Florestan, poor Davidsbündler, brotherhood of David. Poor us.”

  3:45 A.M.

  Sometimes I wonder if I’m hallucinating. Just as I mention Beethoven’s “Les Adieux,” Die Ö1 Klassiknacht announces the Opus 111 sonata by that same Beethoven. Maybe they program music backward, late Schumann, then Mendelssohn, Beethoven; Schubert’s missing — if I listen for long enough I’m sure they’ll play a symphony by Schubert, chamber music first, piano next, the orchestra’s all that’s missing. No sooner do I think of “Les Adieux” than it’s the 32nd Sonata, which Thomas Mann calls, in Doctor Faustus, “the farewell to the sonata.” Is the world really conforming to my desires? Now it’s that magician Mann who appears in my kitchen; when I talk about my youth to Sarah, I always lie, I tell her “my vocation as a musicologist comes from Doctor Faustus, it was when I read Doctor Faustus at the age of fourteen that I had the revelation of music,” what a huge lie. My vocation as a musicologist does not exist. At best I am the learned Serenus Zeitblom, a creature of pure invention; at worst Franz Ritter, who dreamed, as a child, of becoming a clockmaker. An unmentionable vocation. How to explain to the world, dear Thomas Mann, dear Magician, that, as a child, my passion was for watches and grandfather clocks? They’ll immediately take me for a constipated conservative (which I am, actually), they won’t see the dreamer in me, the creator obsessed with time. From time to music it’s just a small step, my dear Mann. That’s what I say to myself when I’m sad. True, you haven’t progressed in the world of wonderful mechanisms, cuckoos, and clepsydras, but you have conquered time by music. Music is time domesticated, reproducible time, time shaped. And as for watches and clocks, you want time to be perfect, not to deviate by a microsecond, you see where I’m heading, Dr. Mann, dear Nobel Prize-winner, beacon for European literature. My calling as a clockmaker comes to me from my grandfather, who taught me, very tenderly, very gently, love for beautiful mechanisms, for gears calibrated under a loupe, for correct springs (the difficulty of the circular spring, he said, unlike the vertical weight, is that it uses more energy at the beginning than at the end of the movement; so you have to compensate for its expansion via subtle limitations, without overusing it). My watchmaking fervor predestined me to study music, where it’s also a matter of springs and counterweights, archaic springs, beats, and clicks and so, here’s the ultimate goal of this digression, I’m not lying to Sarah, not really, when I tell her that I had a calling for musicology, which is to music what watchmaking is to time, mutatis mutandis. Ah Dr. Mann I see you furrowing your brow, you’ve never been a poet. You wrote the novel of music, Faustus, everyone agrees about that, except poor Schoenberg who, they say, was very jealous about it. Ah, those musicians. Never content. Huge egos. You say that Schoenberg is Nietzsche plus Mahler, an inimitable genius, and he complains. He complains that you called him Adrian Leverkühn and not Arnold Schoenberg, probably. Maybe he’d have been very happy that you devoted six hundred pages of a novel to him, four years of your genius, calling him by his name, Schoenberg, even though when it comes down to it, it wasn’t him, but a Nietzsche who reads Adorno, father of a dead child. A syphilitic Nietzsche, of course, like Schubert, like Hugo Wolf. Dr. Mann, without meaning to upset you, that story of the brothel seems a tiny bit exaggerated to me. You see my point, you can catch entirely exotic illnesses without being forced to fall in love with a low-class prostitute because of an occupational disease. What a terrifying story, that man who follows the object of his love beyond the brothel and sleeps with her knowing all the while he’s going to contract her terrible spirochetes. Maybe that’s why Schoenberg was mad at you, incidentally, because you implied offhandedly that he was syphilitic. Imagine his sex life after the publication of Doctor Faustus, poor guy. His partners’ doubts. Of course I’m exaggerating and no one ever thought about that. For you the disease contrasted with Nazi health. To be unapologetic about a sick body and mind was to confront directly those who decided to kill all mental patients in the first gas chambers. You’re right. You could possibly have chosen another disease, tuberculosis, for example. Excuse me, sorry, obviously that was impossible. And tuberculosis, even if you hadn’t written The Magic Mountain, implies isolation from society, a gathering together of sick people among themselves in glamourous sanatoriums, whereas syphilis is a curse that you keep to yourself, one of those diseases of solitude that eat away at you in private. Tuberculars and syphilitics, there’s the history of art in Europe — the public, the social, tuberculosis, or the private, the shameful, syphilis. Instead of Dionysian or Apollonian, I propose these two categorisations for European art. Rimbaud: tubercular. Nerval: syphilitic. Van Gogh? Syphilitic. Gauguin? Tubercular. Rückert? Syphilitic. Goethe? A great tubercular, of course! Michelangelo? Terribly tubercular. Brahms? Tubercular. Proust? Syphilitic. Picasso? Tubercular. Hesse? Became tubercular after syphilitic beginnings. Roth? Syphilitic. The Austrians in general are syphilitic, except Stefan Zweig, who is of course the model of the tubercular. Look at Bernhard: absolutely, terribly syphilitic, despite his diseased lungs. Musil: syphilitic. Beethoven? Ah, Beethoven. People have wondered if Beethoven’s deafness was due to syphilis, poor Beethoven, they found all ills in him a posteriori. Hepatitis, alcoholism, cirrhosis of the liver, syphilis, medicine persecutes great men, that’s for sure. Schumann, Beethoven. Do you know what killed him, Herr Mann? We know now, more or less definitively: it was lead. Lead poisoning. Yes sir. No more syphilis than butter in a branch, as they say in France. And where did this lead come from, you wonder? From doctors. It’s the odious absurd treatments of those charlatans that killed Beethoven and that probably made him deaf as well. Terrifying, don’t you think? I’ve been to Bonn twice. First when I was a student in Germany, and then again more recently to give a lecture on Beethoven’s Orient and The Ruins of Athens, during which I found the ghost of my friend Bilger. But that’s another story. Have you seen Beethoven’s hearing aids at the Beethovenhaus in Bonn? There’s nothing more terrifying. Heavy ear trumpets, cans fitted together, they look like you need both hands to hold them up. Ah here’s Opus 111. In the beginning, we’re still in the sonata. No adieu yet. The whole first movement is built on surprises and shifts: that majestic introduction, for example. You feel as if you’re catching a train already underway, as if you’ve missed something; you enter a world that had already begun turning before you were born, a little disoriented by the diminished seventh — the columns of an ancient temple, those forti. The portico of a new universe, a portico of ten measures, under which we pass to C minor, power and fragility together. Courage, cheerfulness, grandiloquence. Are the manuscripts of the 32nd Sonata also in the Bodmer rooms in Bonn? Dr. Mann, I know you met the famous Hans Conrad Bodmer. The great Beethoven collector. He patiently gathered everything together, bought it all, between 1920 and 1950 — scores, letters, furniture, the most diverse objects; he filled his Zurich villa with them, and showed these relics to the great performers passing through, Backhaus, Cortot, Casals. Drawing on his fortune, Bodmer reconstituted Beethoven as one reconstitutes a broken ancient vase. Glued back together what had been scattered for almost a hundred years. You know the one that moves me the most, among all the objects, Dr. Mann? Beethoven’s desk? The one that Stefan Zweig owned, on which he wrote most of his books, and which he finally sold along with his manuscript collection to his friend Bodmer? No. His traveling writing case? His miniature hearing aids? Not those either. His compass. Beethoven owned a compass. A little metal compass, made of copper or brass, that you can see in a case next to his cane. A pocket compass, round, with a cover, very similar to
today’s models it seems to me. A beautiful colorful face with a magnificent wind rose. We know that Beethoven was a great walker. But he walked around Vienna, in town in the winter, and in the countryside in the summer. No need for a compass to leave Grinzing or find the Augarten — but did he carry this compass during his excursions in the Vienna woods, or when he crossed the vineyards to reach the Danube in Klosterneuburg? Was he planning a great journey? Italy, perhaps? Greece? Had Hammer-Purgstall convinced him to see the Orient? Hammer-Purgstall had suggested to Beethoven that he set to music some “Oriental” texts, his own, but also some translations. Apparently the master never agreed to this. There are no “Oriental” lieder by Beethoven aside from the Ruins of Athens by the horrible Kotzebue. There is just the compass. I own a replica of it — or at least a similar model. I don’t have much occasion to use it. I think it has never left this apartment. So it always shows the same direction, ad infinitum, on its shelf, its cover closed. Pulled unremittingly by magnetism, on its drop of water, the double red and blue needle points east. I have always wondered where Sarah found this bizarre artifact. My Beethoven compass points east. Oh it’s not just the face, no no, as soon as you try to orient yourself, you notice that this compass points to the east and not to the north. A joke compass. I’ve played with it for a long time, incredulous, I’ve made dozens of attempts, at the kitchen window, the living room window, the bedroom window — and it always indicates east. Sarah could hardly contain her laughter, seeing me turn this damn compass in every direction. She would say “So, have you found your bearings yet?” And it was absolutely impossible to orient yourself with this instrument. I would point toward the Votivkirche, the needle would quickly stabilize itself, become quite motionless, I’d turn the wheel to place the N under the needle, but then the azimuth would affirm that the Votivkirche was to the east instead of to the south. It is quite simply wrong, it doesn’t work. Sarah would titter, very happy with her joke, you don’t even know how to use a compass! I’m telling you it points east! And in fact, miraculously, if you placed the E under the needle instead of the N, then everything, as if by magic, found its right place again: north became north, south became south, the Votivkirche by the edge of the Ring. I didn’t understand how that was possible, by what magic a compass could exist that points east and not north. The magnetism of the earth rises up against this heresy, this object possesses black magic! Sarah was laughing so hard at seeing me so disconcerted that she had tears in her eyes. She refused to explain the thing to me; I was terribly upset; I turned and turned again the damn compass in every direction. The witch responsible for the enchantment (or, at least, for its purchase: even the greatest magicians buy their tricks) finally took pity on my lack of imagination and confided to me that actually there were two needles separated by a card; the magnetized needle was below, invisible, and the second, subjected to the first, formed a ninety-degree angle with the magnet, thus always indicating an east-west axis. To what purpose? Aside from immediately having under your eyes the direction of Bratislava or Stalingrad without having to make any calculations, I didn’t see the point.