“That was the first time we had spoken of Lyautey. Usually Azra avoided the subject out of modesty; me out of jealousy. I have to admit it: I had no wish whatsoever to inquire into the fate of that madman. He had stolen the object of my passion from me. He could go to the devil, it was all the same to me. Azra was at my place, that was enough for my happiness. I was counting on taking advantage of this for as long as possible. So I told her it was very likely that Lyautey would call or come by my place without warning, as was his habit, which obviously was a lie.
“She stayed for most of the day. She reassured her parents on the phone, telling them she was safe at a girlfriend’s. We watched TV and listened to the BBC at the same time. We heard the shouts, the sirens in the street. Sometimes we thought we heard gunfire. We could see smoke rising up over the city. Both of us sitting on the sofa. I can even remember the color of that couch. That moment has been following me for years. The violence of that moment. The pain of that moment, the smell of Azra on my hands.”
Sarah dropped her cup; it bounced, rolled into the grass without breaking. She got up from her seat to pick it up. Morgan stared for a long time at her legs, then her hips, without attempting to hide it. Sarah didn’t sit back down; she remained standing in the garden, looking at the strange, irregular façade of the villa. Morgan again chased away the blue birds with the back of his hand and poured himself another glass, this time without ice. He muttered something in Persian, some lines from a poem probably, I thought I caught a rhyme. Sarah started pacing up and down the little property; she looked at each rose bush, each pomegranate tree, each Japanese cherry tree. I could imagine her thoughts, her embarrassment, her pain even at hearing her adviser’s confession. Morgan wasn’t speaking to anyone. The vodka was having its effect, I imagined that quite soon he’d start crying a drunkard’s tears, feeling sorry once and for all for his fate. I wasn’t sure I wanted to hear him out to the end, but before Sarah could come back and give me a chance to get up in turn, Morgan resumed his story, in a voice that was even lower and more breathless:
“I admit that the temptation was too strong. Being there next to her, almost touching her . . . I remember her frosty surprise when I revealed my passion to her. Unfortunately she was — how should I put it — indisposed. Like in Vis and Ramin, the novel of love. The memory of the ancient romance woke me up. I became afraid. I ended up accompanying her back at the end of the afternoon. We had to skirt round the ravaged center of the city, occupied by the army. Azra walked with her eyes on the ground. Then I went back home alone. I’ll never forget that evening. I felt both happy and sad.
“Lyautey ended up reappearing in a military hospital in the northern part of the city. He had gotten hit badly in the head, the authorities notified the Embassy which called the Institute. I immediately jumped into a car to visit his sickbed. In front of his door an officer from the army or the police was standing, his chest covered in medals; he apologized, with all Iranian politeness, for this mistake. But you know, he said, smiling ironically, it’s not easy to distinguish an Iranian from a Frenchman in the middle of a violent demonstration. Especially a Frenchman who’s shouting slogans in Persian. Lyautey was covered in bandages. He looked exhausted. He began by telling me that the Shah didn’t have much time left, I agreed. I then explained to him that Azra was looking for him, that she was worried to death; he asked me to call her to reassure her — I offered to deliver a letter to her in person that very evening if he liked. He thanked me warmly for this solicitude. He wrote a brief note in Persian while I watched. He had to stay under observation for three more days. I then went to the Embassy; I spent the rest of the day convincing our dear diplomats that, for his own good, they should send Lyautey back to France. That he was crazy. That he was calling himself Farid Lahouti, that he was assuming an Iranian identity, that he was agitating, that he was dangerous to himself. Then I went to Azra’s to give her Fred’s note. She didn’t let me in, didn’t even favor me with a glance; she stayed behind the half-open door, which she slammed as soon as the paper was in her hands. Four days later, discharged from the clinic, officially repatriated for reasons of health, Fred Lyautey was on the plane to Paris. Actually, expelled by the Iranians through the Embassy’s intervention, he was forbidden to return to Iran.
“So I had Azra all to myself. But I had to convince her to forgive my impulsiveness, which I bitterly regretted. She was very affected by the departure of Lyautey, who wrote to her from Paris, saying that he was the victim of a monarchist conspiracy and he would return ‘at the same time as freedom did to Iran.’ In these letters, he called me ‘his only French friend, the only Frenchman he trusted in Tehran.’ Because of the strikes that were paralyzing the mail, he wrote to me via the diplomatic pouch, asking me to pass them on. One or two letters a day, which I received in packets of eight or ten a week. I couldn’t help but read them, these letters, and they made me mad with jealousy. Long erotic poems in Persian, of extraordinary beauty. Desperate songs of love, somber odes illuminated by the winter sun of love which I was to carry to the mailbox of the interested party. Carrying these letters myself to Azra tore apart my heart every time with impotent rage. It was a real torture — Lyautey’s unconscious revenge. I acted as the postman only in the hope of meeting Azra on the ground floor of her building. Sometimes the pain was so strong that I burned some of those envelopes after opening them — when the poems were too beautiful, too erotic, too likely to reinforce Azra’s love for Lahouti, when they made me suffer too much, I destroyed them.
“In December, the Revolution gained the upper hand, grew even stronger. The Shah was secluded in his Niavaran palace, you sensed he’d only emerge feet first. The military government was obviously incapable of reforming the country, and the administrations were still paralyzed by the strikes. Despite the curfew and the ban on demonstrations, the opposition continued to organize; the role of the clergy, in Iran as well as in exile, became more and more prominent. The religious calendar was no help: December was the month of Muharram. The celebration of the martyrdom of Imam Husayn promised to give rise to massive demonstrations. Once again, it was the Shah himself who precipitated his own fall; faced with the pressure from the clerics, he authorized the peaceful religious marches on 10 Muharram, Ashura. Millions of people marched throughout the country. Tehran was taken over by the crowd. Strangely, there was no major incident. It felt as if the opposition had reached such a mass, such a power, that violence was now pointless. The Avenue Reza-Shah was a great human river that flowed into Shahyad Square, which had become a trembling lake overlooked by the monument to royalty that seemed to be changing its meaning — it was becoming a monument to the Revolution, to freedom and to the power of the people. I think all the foreigners present in Tehran in those days remember the impression of extraordinary force that emanated from that crowd. In the name of Imam Husayn forsaken by his own people, in the name of justice faced with tyranny, Iran was rising. We all knew that day that the regime would fall. We all believed that day that the era of democracy was beginning.
“In France, Frédéric Lyautey, with his mad determination, had offered his services to Khomeini in Neauphle-le-Château as an interpreter: for a few weeks he was one of the imam’s many secretaries; he answered the mail from French admirers on his behalf. The cleric’s entourage mistrusted him, they thought he was a spy, which upset him terribly — he telephoned me often, in a very friendly tone, commented on the latest news of the Revolution, told me how lucky I was to be on the ground during those ‘historic’ moments. He apparently was unaware of the scheming that had been done to get him expelled and of my passion for Azra. She hadn’t told him anything. In fact he was the one who urged her to come back to me. Azra’s father was arrested at his home on December 12 and sent to a place that was kept secret, probably the Evin Prison. Almost no one was being arrested at that time; the Shah was trying to negotiate with the opposition to bring an end to the military government and, in one last desire for re
form, to call for free elections afterward. The arrest of Azra’s father, a simple secondary school teacher and a recent member of the Toudeh Party, was a mystery. The Revolution seemed inevitable, but the repressive machine kept working bizarrely in the shadows, in an absurd way — no one understood why this particular man had been jailed, when the day before or the day before that, millions of others were shouting ‘death to the Shah’ openly in the streets. On December 14, there was a counterdemonstration in favor of the regime; a few thousand henchmen and soldiers in mufti marched in turn, holding up portraits of the Pahlavis. We obviously couldn’t foresee events, couldn’t guess that a month later the Shah would be forced to leave the country. The anguish of Azra’s family was all the stronger since the confusion and revolutionary energy were at its highest point. It was Lyautey who, by phone, convinced Azra of the necessity of contacting me. She called me not long before Christmas; I didn’t want to go back to France for the holidays; believe it or not, I didn’t want to go far away from her. Finally I would see her again. In that month and a half, my passion had only increased. I hated myself and desired Azra to the point of madness.”
Sarah had come close to the garden table; she was still standing, her hands on the back of her chair, watching, impartial. She was listening with a distant, almost scornful air. I made a movement with my head toward her, a sign that for me meant “shall we go?” to which she did not respond. I was torn (as she was too, probably) between the desire to learn the end of the story and a certain shame mingled with propriety that made me want to run away from this scholar lost in his passionate, revolutionary memories. Morgan didn’t seem aware of our hesitations; he seemed to find it entirely normal that Sarah was still standing; he would no doubt have continued his reminiscences all by himself if we had left. He interrupted himself only for a swig of vodka or a lustful gaze at Sarah’s body. The housekeeper hadn’t reappeared, she had taken refuge inside, no doubt she had other things to do besides watching her employer get drunk.
“Azra asked me to use my connections to get information about her father’s detention. Her mother, she told me, was imagining the craziest possibilities — that her father had actually been leading a double life, that he was a Soviet agent, things like that. Lyautey had seen me, from his hospital bed, having a lively conversation with an officer covered in medals; his madness had concluded that I personally knew all the chiefs of the SAVAK. I didn’t disabuse Azra. I asked her to come to my place to talk it over, which she refused. I suggested we meet at the Café Naderi, assuring her that in the meantime I’d have looked into her father’s situation. She agreed. My joy was boundless. It was the first day of the month of Dey, the winter solstice; I went to a poetry reading: a young woman was reading Let Us Believe in the Beginning of the Cold Season, by Forugh Farrokhzad, especially ‘I Feel Sorry for the Garden,’ whose simple and profound sorrow froze my soul, I don’t know why — I still know that poem half by heart, ‘kasi be fekr-e golha nist, kasi be fekr-e mahiha nist,’ ‘there is no one to think of the flowers, no one to think of the fish, no one wants to believe the garden is dying.’ I suppose the prospect of seeing Azra again had made me extremely sensitive to all the sorrows of others. Forugh’s poetry filled me with a snowy sadness; that abandoned garden with its empty basin and its weeds was the portrait of my own dereliction. After the reading, everyone gathered for drinks — unlike me, the company was quite cheerful, vibrant with revolutionary hope: all the talk was about the end of the military government and the possible nomination of Shahpur Bakhtiar, a moderate opponent, to the post of Prime Minister. Some even went so far as to predict the imminent abdication of the Shah. Many wondered about the army’s reactions — would the generals attempt a coup d’état, supported by the Americans? This ‘Chilean’ hypothesis frightened everyone. The stinging memory of the overthrow of Mossadegh in 1957 was more present than ever. I paced in circles that evening. I was asked many times for news of Lahouti, I evaded the question and quickly moved on to someone else. Most of those present — students, young professors, budding writers — knew Azra. I learned from one of the guests that ever since Lyautey had left she had stopped going out.
“I asked a friend at the Embassy about Azra’s father — he immediately sent me packing. If he’s an Iranian, nothing can be done. Even for someone with dual citizenship, it’s difficult. Plus everything’s a mess now in the administration, we wouldn’t even know who to ask. He was probably lying. So I myself was forced to lie. Azra sat opposite me at the Café Naderi; she was wearing a thick cabled wool jumper, over which her black hair shone; she didn’t look me in the eyes, or shake my hand; she greeted me in a tiny voice. I began by apologizing at length for my mistakes of the month before, for my abruptness, then I spoke to her of love, my passion for her, with all the gentleness I could muster. Then I mentioned my investigation into her father’s situation; I assured her I’d get results very soon, probably the next day. I told her that seeing her so worried and dejected made me very sad, and that I would do everything I could so long as she visited me again. I begged her. She kept looking elsewhere, at the waiters, the customers, the white tablecloth, the painted chairs. Her eyes shone. She remained silent. I was not ashamed. I’m still not ashamed. If you’ve never been overwhelmed by passion you can’t understand.”
As for us, we were ashamed — Morgan was slumping more and more over the table; I saw Sarah stunned, petrified by how the confession had developed; I had only one desire, to leave this burning garden — it was just seven o’clock. The birds were playing between the shadows and the setting sun. I stood up in turn.
I too had strolled a little in the garden. Morgan’s villa in Zafariniyeh was a magical place, a doll house, probably built for the guardian of a grand estate which had since disappeared, which would explain its strange location, almost on the edge of Avenue Vali-Asr. Morgan had rented it from one of his Iranian friends. The first time I went there, at Morgan’s invitation, in the winter, not long before our trip to Bandar Abbas, when the snow covered everything, the rose bushes shone with frost, there was a fire in the fireplace — an Oriental fireplace, whose rounded hood and pointed mantelpiece were reminiscent of the fireplaces in the Topkapi Palace in Istanbul. Everywhere, precious rugs with bright but subtle colors, purples, blues, oranges; on the walls, china from the Qajar dynasty and costly miniatures. The living room was small, with a low ceiling, suitable for winter; the professor would recite poems there by Hafez — for years he had been trying to learn all of the Divan by heart, like the scholars of long ago: he asserted that learning Hafez by heart was the only way to learn intimately what he called the space of the ghazal, the way the lines linked together, the structure of the poems, the reappearance of characters and themes; knowing Hafez was like having an intimate experience of love. “I’m afraid my tears will betray my sorrow and that this mystery will go round the world. Hafez, you who hold the musk of her hair in your hand, hold your breath, otherwise the zephyr will blow away your secret!” Penetrate the mystery, or mysteries — phonetic mysteries, metrical mysteries, mysteries of metaphors. Alas, the fourteenth-century poet rejected the old Orientalist: despite all his efforts, remembering all of the 480 ghazals that make up the Divan turned out to be impossible. He would mix up the order of the lines, forget some of them; the aesthetic rules of the collection, especially the unity of each of the distichs, perfect as pearls threaded one by one on the line of meter and rhyme to produce the necklace of the ghazal, made them easy to forget. Out of the four thousand lines the work contains, Morgan lamented, I know maybe thirty-five hundred. I still lack five hundred. Still. They’re never the same. Some appear, others go away. They compose a cloud of fragments that stands between Truth and me.
These mystical considerations by the fireside we had taken for the expression of a literary whim, the latest fad of a scholar — the revelations of that summer gave them an entirely different meaning. Secrecy, love, guilt, we could glimpse their source. And if I wrote this grave and sole
mn text when I got back to Vienna it’s probably to record them in turn, as much as to rediscover, through prose, the presence of Sarah who had gone — plunged into mourning, overwhelmed — to confront her sadness in Paris. What a strange sensation, rereading yourself. An aging mirror. I am attracted and repulsed by this former self as by another. A first souvenir, inserted between memory and me. A diaphanous leaf of paper that light passes through to outline other images on it. A stained-glass window. I is in the night. Being exists always in this distance, somewhere between an unfathomable self and the other in oneself. In the sensation of time. In love, which is the impossibility of fusion between self and other. In art, the experience of otherness.
We couldn’t manage to leave any more than Morgan could finish his story — he continued his confession, perhaps just as surprised by his ability to speak as by ours to listen. Despite all my signaling, Sarah, although revolted, remained clinging to her wrought iron garden chair.
“Azra finally agreed to come back to my place. Several times even. I told her lies about her father. On January 16, following the advice of his general staff, the Shah left Iran, supposedly ‘on vacation,’ and turned power over to a transitional government led by Shahpur Bakhtiar. Bakhtiar’s first measures were the dissolution of the SAVAK and the liberation of all political prisoners. Azra’s father did not reappear. I think no one ever found out what had become of him. The Revolution seemed over. An Air France Boeing brought Ayatollah Khomeini back to Tehran two weeks later, against the advice of the government. Hundreds of thousands of people welcomed him like the Mahdi. I had only one fear: that Lyautey was on the plane. But he wasn’t. He would come very soon, he told Azra in those letters that I read. He assured her of his love; just a few more days, he said, and soon we’ll be reunited, be brave. He did not understand the pain and shame she spoke to him about, he said, without giving him reasons for them.
Compass Page 34
