Compass

by Mathias Enard

  Like Hedayat, I have always been intimidated by Paris; the strange violence you feel there, the lukewarm peanut-smell on the metro, the habit its inhabitants have of running instead of walking, eyes down, ready to knock over anything in their way to reach their destination; the filth, which seems to have been accumulating in the city unceasingly at least since Napoleon’s time; the river, so noble and so constrained in its paved banks, scattered with haughty, disparate monuments; the whole of it, under the soft, milky eye of the Sacré-Coeur, always seems to me of a Baudelairean, monstrous beauty. Paris, capital of the nineteenth century and of France. I was never able to rid myself, in Paris, of my tourist’s hesitations, and my French, despite the fact that I make it a point of honor for it to be polished, sober, perfect, is always in exile there — I feel as if I understand every other word, and even worse, the height of humiliation, they often make me repeat my sentences: ever since Villon and the end of the Middle Ages, in Paris they’ve been speaking nothing but slang. And I don’t know if these characteristics make Vienna or Berlin seem gentle and provincial or if, on the contrary, it’s Paris that remains stuck in its province, isolated in the heart of that Île-de-France whose name might be at the origin of the singularity of the city and its inhabitants. Sarah is a true Parisian, if that adjective really has any meaning: I have to admit that Sarah — even grown thin from overexertion, her eyes slightly lined, her hair shorter than usual, as if she had entered a monastery or prison, her hands pale and almost bony, her wedding band grown too big jiggling on her finger — remained the ideal of feminine beauty. What pretext had I found for that brief Parisian visit, I can’t remember; I stayed at a little hotel right next to the Place Saint-Georges, one of those miraculously-proportioned squares transformed into a kind of hell by the invention of the automobile — what I didn’t know was that “a stone’s throw from the Place Saint-Georges” (according to the brochure of the hotel that I must have chosen, unconsciously, because of the friendly sound of the name of that saint, much more familiar than, for example, Notre-Dame-de-Lorette or Saint-Germain-l’Auxerrois) unfortunately also meant a stone’s throw from the Place Pigalle, that gray monument raised to all sorts of visual atrocities where the hustlers for hostess bars grab you by the arm to tell you to come in for a drink and don’t let go of you until they have showered copious insults on you, sure of the leap in virility their invectives would cause, insults like “queer” and “impotent.” Curiously, the Place Pigalle (and the adjacent streets) lay between Sarah and me. Sarah and Nadim’s apartment was a little higher up, on the Place des Abbesses, halfway up the hill that takes you (O Paris!) from the whores of Pigalle to the young monks of the Sacré-Coeur and, beyond the Butte where the Communards rolled their cannons, to the last residence of Sadegh Hedayat. Nadim was in Syria when I visited, which suited me fine. The higher I climbed to reach Sarah, in those alleyways that lead without warning from the sordid to the touristy, then from the touristy to the bourgeois, the more I realized I still had hope, a mad hope that refused to say its name, and then, as I descended the big staircase on the rue du Mont-Cenis, after getting a little lost and passing a surprising vineyard stuck between two houses whose old vine stocks reminded me of Vienna and Nussdorf, step after step toward the town hall of the 18th arrondissement, toward the poverty and simplicity of the faubourgs that follow the ostentation of Montmartre, that hope was diluted in the gray that seemed to make even the trees on the rue Custine sad, cramped in their iron railings, this so-Parisian limitation on vegetal exuberance (nothing represents the modern mind more than that strange idea, the tree fence. It’s pointless to try to convince you that these imposing pieces of wrought iron are there to protect the chestnut or plane tree, for their own good, to prevent their roots from being harmed; there is, I think, no more terrible representation of the life and death struggle between the city and nature, and no more eloquent sign of the victory of the former over the latter) and when I finally reached, after more hesitations, a town hall, a church, and a loud traffic circle at the rue Championnet, Paris had vanquished my hope. The place could have been pleasant, charming even; some buildings were elegant, with their five floors and attic under zinc roofing, but most of the shops looked abandoned; the street was deserted, stiff, endless. Opposite the Hedayat residence was a curious ensemble, a low, old house, from the eighteenth century probably, side-by-side with a fat brick building marking the entrance to a parking lot for Parisian buses. As I waited for Sarah, I had plenty of time to observe the windows of 37 bis which, under the colorless, pale-gray sky, didn’t exactly inspire cheerfulness. I thought about that forty-eight-year-old man plugging his kitchen door with dishrags before turning on the gas, lying down on the floor on a blanket and falling asleep forever. The Orientalist Roger Lescot had more or less finished his translation of The Blind Owl, but Grasset either didn’t want to publish it anymore or no longer had the means. José Corti, bookseller and publisher of the Surrealists, would be fascinated by the text that would come out two years after the death of its author. The Blind Owl is a dream of death. A violent book, of a savage eroticism, where time is an abyss whose contents come gushing back in deadly vomit. A book of opium.

  Sarah was coming. She was walking quickly, her satchel slung over her shoulder, head slightly bent; she hadn’t noticed me. I recognized her, despite the distance, from the color of her hair, from the hope that insinuated itself again with an anguished pang into my heart. She’s in front of me, long skirt, ankle boots, immense sienna-colored scarf. She holds out her hands to me, smiles, says she’s very happy to see me again. Of course I should not have pointed out to her right away that she had lost a lot of weight, that she was pale, her eyes lined, that wasn’t very clever; but I was so surprised by these physical transformations, so pushed to futility by anguish, that I couldn’t help myself, and the day, that day I had brought about, worked on, waited for, imagined, started off on a lamentable footing. Sarah was annoyed — she tried not to show it, and once our tour of the Hedayat apartment was over (or rather just the staircase, the present renter of the studio having refused to open the door to us: he was, according to Sarah, who had spoken with him on the phone the day before, very superstitious and terrified by the idea that a mysterious stranger could have put an end to his days on his kitchen linoleum), as we were climbing back up the rue Championnet headed west, then the rue Damrémont toward the Montmartre Cemetery, before pausing for lunch in a Turkish restaurant, she kept a sticky silence, while I lurched into hysterical chatter — when you’re drowning you struggle, wave your arms and legs; I was trying to cheer her up, or at least interest her in something; I told her the latest news from Vienna, as far as there was any news from Vienna, and talked about the Oriental lieder of Schubert — my passion at the time — then about Berlioz, whose grave we were going to visit, and my very personal reading of Les Troyens — until she stopped right in the middle of the pavement and looked at me with a half smile:

  “Franz, you’re getting on my nerves. It’s incredible. You’ve been talking without interruption for two kilometers. Good Lord how talkative you can be!”

  I was very proud of having intoxicated her with my fine words and wasn’t about to stop while I was on a roll:

  “You’re right, I’m chattering, I’m chattering and I’m not letting you get a word in edgewise. So tell me, the thesis, how’s it going? Will you finish it soon?”

  This had an unexpected, if not unhoped-for, effect: Sarah let out a great sigh, there, on the sidewalk on the rue Damrémont, held her face in her hands, then shook her head, lifted her arms to the sky and let out a long cry: an exasperated shout, a call to the gods, a supplication full of rage that left me wordless, surprised, wounded, wide-eyed. Then she fell silent, turned to me and sighed again:

  “Come on then, let’s go have lunch.”

  There was a restaurant across the street; a restaurant with exotic décor, wall hangings, cushions, all sorts of bibelots, old things as dusty as the window, op
aque from filth, with no customers aside from us, since it was just barely noon and Parisians, priding themselves no doubt on more southern influences, on a greater freedom than the rest of their fellow citizens, had lunch late. If by chance they ever lunched in this spot. It seemed to me that we were the only customers all week, maybe all month, so surprised the owner (hunched over a table, trying to beat his personal Tetris record) looked when we walked in. An owner whose pale complexion, accent, bad humor, and prices proved he was entirely Parisian: forget about Oriental gentleness, we had fallen upon the only Turkish restaurant run by a Parisian native, who deigned to abandon his computer to welcome us only with many sighs and after finishing his game.

  It was my turn to fall silent, mortally wounded by Sarah’s ridiculous shouting. Who did she take herself for, then? I take an interest in her and what do I get? The screeching of one possessed. After several minutes of vengeful silence, my sulking hidden behind the menu, she offered an apology.

  “Franz, I’m sorry, forgive me, I don’t know what came over me. But you don’t exactly make things any easier.”

  (Mortally wounded, with pathetic accents) “It’s nothing, let’s drop it. Let’s see instead what sort of edible thing there is to eat in this sumptuous inn you’ve brought us to.”

  “We can go somewhere else if you like.”

  (Definitively, with a hint of hypocrisy) “You can’t leave a restaurant after you’ve sat down and read the menu. It isn’t done. As you say in France: When the wine is opened, you have to drink it.”

  “I could pretend to be sick. If you don’t change your attitude, I will be sick.”

  (Shiftily, still hidden behind the menu) “You are indisposed? That would explain your mood swings.”

  “Franz, you’re going to make me lose it. If you go on like this, I’m leaving, I’ll go back to work.”

  (Cowardly, frightened, confused, suddenly putting down the menu) “No, no, don’t leave, I was just saying that to annoy you, I’m sure it’s very good here. Delicious, even.”

  She began to laugh. I no longer remember what we ate, I only remember the little ding of the microwave oven that resounded throughout the deserted restaurant just before the dishes arrived. Sarah talked to me about her thesis, about Hedayat, Schwarzenbach, her beloved characters; about the mirrors between East and West that she wanted to break, she said, by making the promenade continue. Bring to light the rhizomes of that common construction of modernity. Show that “Orientals” were not excluded from it, but that, quite the contrary, they were often the inspiration behind it, the initiators, the active participants; to show that in the end Said’s theories had become, despite themselves, one of the most subtle instruments of domination there are: the question was not whether or not Said was right or wrong, in his vision of Orientalism; the problem was the breach, the ontological fissure his readers had allowed between a dominating West and a dominated East, a breach that, by opening up well beyond colonial studies, contributed to the realization of the model it created, that completed a posteriori the scenario of domination which Said’s thinking meant to oppose. Whereas history could be read in an entirely different way, she said, written in an entirely different way, in sharing and continuity. She spoke at length on the postcolonial holy trinity — Said, Bhabha, Spivak; on the question of imperialism, of difference, of the twenty-first century when, facing violence, we needed more than ever to rid ourselves of this absurd idea of the absolute otherness of Islam and to admit not only the terrifying violence of colonialism, but also all that Europe owed to the Orient — the impossibility of separating them from each other, the necessity of changing our perspective. We had to find, she said, beyond the stupid repentance of some or the colonial nostalgia of others, a new vision that includes the other in the self. On both sides.

  The décor was fitting: the fake Anatolian cloth on the “Made in China” curios and the very Parisian customs of the manager seemed the best example to support her theory.

  The Orient is an imaginal construction, an ensemble of representations from which everyone picks what they like, wherever they are. It is naïve to think, Sarah continued in a loud voice, that this repository full of Oriental images is specific to Europe today. No. These images, this treasure chest, are accessible to everyone and everyone adds to it, according to cultural productions, new sketches, new portraits, new music. Algerians, Syrians, Lebanese, Iranians, Indians, Chinese take turns drawing from this travel buffet, this imagination. I’ll take a very current, striking example: the veiled princesses and flying carpets of the Disney studios can be seen as “Orientalist” or “Orientalizing”; actually they amount to the latest expression of this recent construction of an imaginal reality. It’s not for nothing that these films are not only authorized in Saudi Arabia, but even omnipresent. All the didactic shorts copy them (to teach how to pray, to fast, to live like a good Muslim). Prudish contemporary Saudi society is like a film by Walt Disney. Wahhabism is like a Disney film. In doing this, the filmmakers who work for Saudi Arabia add images to the common pool. Another, shocking example: public decapitation, with the curved saber and the executioner dressed in white, or even more terrifying, throat-slitting till the head comes off. That’s also the product of a common construction based on Muslim sources transformed by all the images of modernity. These atrocities take their place in this imaginal world; they continue the common construction. We Europeans see them with the horror of otherness; but this otherness is just as terrifying for an Iraqi or a Yemenite. Even what we reject, what we hate emerges in this common imaginal world. What we identify in these atrocious decapitations as “other,” “different,” “Oriental,” is just as “other,” “different,” and “Oriental” for an Arab, a Turk, or an Iranian.

  I was half listening to her, absorbed as I was in contemplating her: despite the lines and thinness, her face was powerful, determined, and tender at the same time. Her gaze burned from the fire of her ideas; her chest seemed smaller than a few months before; the V-neck of her black cashmere sweater revealed scalloped lace of the same color, the edge of a camisole — a thin line under the wool in the middle of her shoulder hinted at a shoulder strap. The freckles on her breastbone followed the edge of the lace and went up to her collarbone; I could glimpse the top of the bone above which her earrings dangled, two imaginary heraldic coins engraved with unknown blazons. Her hair was pulled up, held in by a little silver comb. Her pale hands with long bluish veins fanned the air as she spoke. She had scarcely touched the contents of her dish. I was thinking again of Palmyra, of the contact with her body, I’d have liked to huddle against her until I disappeared. She had gone on to another subject, her difficulties with Gilbert de Morgan, her thesis advisor whom I had, she reminded me, met in Damascus; she was worried about his mood swings, his fits of alcoholism and despair — and especially his unfortunate propensity to look for salvation in the smiles of first- and second-year students. He would rub up against them as if youth were contagious. And these women weren’t all comfortable with being vampirized. This evocation elicited a lascivious sigh and a little snigger from me that earned me a fine scolding, Franz, it’s not funny, you’re as macho as he is. Women are not objects . . . and so on. Did she realize my own concealed desire, all disguised in consideration and respect? She changed the subject again. Her relationship with Nadim was becoming more and more complicated. They had gotten married, she confided, to make it easier for Nadim to come to Europe. After a few months in Paris, he missed Syria; in Damascus or Aleppo, he was a renowned soloist; in France, just another immigrant. Sarah was so absorbed in the work on her thesis that she unfortunately didn’t have much time to devote to him; Nadim had taken a strong dislike to his adopted country, saw racists and Islamophobes everywhere; he dreamed of going back to Syria, which his recently secured permanent resident ID had finally made possible for him. They were more or less separated, she said. She felt guilty. She was obviously exhausted; tears suddenly shone in her eyes. She
didn’t realize the selfish hopes these revelations aroused in me. She apologized, I tried to reassure her clumsily, after the thesis everything will be better. After the thesis she’d find herself without a job, without money, without any projects, she said. I was dying to shout to her that I loved her passionately. The phrase transformed in my mouth, became a bizarre suggestion, you could move to Vienna for a while. Stunned at first, she began to smile, thank you, that’s very kind. It’s kind of you to be concerned about me. Very. And since magic is a rare and fleeting phenomenon, that instant was quickly interrupted by the owner: he flung us a bill we hadn’t asked for in a frightful bamboo dish with a painted bird on it. “Bolboli khun jegar khorad o goli hasel kard, a suffering nightingale who was losing its blood gave birth to a rose,” I thought. I just said “Poor Hafez,” Sarah immediately understood what I was alluding to and laughed.

  Then we started out for the Montmartre Cemetery and the reassuring company of the dead.

  4:30 A.M.

  Strange, the dialogues that start up in the random geography of cemeteries, I thought as I meditated in front of Heinrich Heine the Orientalist (“Where will the final rest of the weary walker be, under the palm trees of the South or the lindens of the Rhine?” — none of the above: under the chestnut trees of Montmartre), a lyre, some roses, a marble butterfly, a thin face bent forward, between a family named Marchand and a lady named Beucher, two black tombstones framing Heine’s immaculate white, overlooking them like a sad guardian. An underground network joins the burial sites together, Heine with the musicians Hector Berlioz and Charles Valentin Alkan nearby or to Halévy the composer of La Juive, they’re all there, they keep each other company, rub elbows down below. Théophile Gautier the friend of the good Henri Heine a little further on, Maxime Du Camp who accompanied Flaubert to Egypt and experienced pleasure with Kuchuk Hanim and with the very Christian Ernest Renan, there must be many secret debates between these souls, at night, animated conversations transmitted by the roots of the maples and the will o’ the wisps, underground, silent concerts attended by the eager audience of the defunct. Berlioz shared his tomb with his poor Ophelia, Heine was apparently alone in his, and this thought, childlike as it was, made me feel a little sad.