“Azra was so sad, during our meetings, that little by little I ended up being disgusted with myself. I loved her passionately and wanted her to be happy, joyful, passionate as well. My caresses drew only cold tears from her. I might possess her beauty, but she escaped me. The winter was endless, freezing and dark. Around us, Iran was veering into chaos. For an instant we’d thought the Revolution was over, but it was only beginning. Khomeini’s clerics and supporters fought against the moderate democrats. A few days after he returned to Iran, Khomeini had appointed his own parallel Prime Minister, Mehdi Bazargan. Bakhtiar had become an enemy of the people, the last representative of the Shah. We began hearing slogans shouted in favor of an ‘Islamic Republic.’ In every neighborhood, a revolutionary committee was organized. ‘Organized’ is a bit of an overstatement. Weapons abounded. Cudgels, truncheons, then, after a meeting with part of the army on February 11, assault rifles: Khomeini’s supporters occupied all the administrative buildings and even the emperor’s palace. Bazargan became the first government leader appointed not by the Shah, but by the Revolution — actually by Khomeini. You could sense danger, imminent catastrophe. The revolutionary forces were so disparate that it was impossible to guess what form the new regime might take. Communists from the Toudeh Party, Marxist-Muslims, the Mujahedeen of the People, Khomeinyite clerics who supported the velayat-e faqih, pro-Bakhtiar liberals, and even Kurdish autonomists struggled more or less directly for power. There was complete freedom of speech and publications appeared left and right — newspapers, pamphlets, poetry collections. The economy was in a catastrophic state; the country was so disorganized that basic products started to go missing. The opulence of Tehran seemed to have disappeared overnight. Despite everything, we found ourselves among friends; we ate tin after tin of smuggled caviar with big greenish grains, with sangak bread and Soviet vodka — we bought all that in dollars. Some people were beginning to fear a total collapse of the country and were looking for foreign currency.
“I had known for some time why Lyautey hadn’t returned to Iran: he was hospitalized in a clinic in the Parisian suburbs. Serious depression, hallucinations, delirium. He spoke only Persian and was convinced his actual name was Farid Lahouti. The doctors thought it was linked to overexertion and shock connected with the Iranian Revolution. His letters to Azra became even more numerous; more numerous and darker every time. He didn’t tell her about his hospitalization, only his torments of love, of exile, of his suffering. Images kept reoccurring, glowing embers that turned into charcoal, hard and friable, in absence; a tree with branches of ice killed by the winter sun; a foreigner faced with the mystery of a flower that never opens. Since he himself didn’t mention it, I didn’t reveal Lyautey’s state of health to Azra. My blackmail and my lies weighed on me. I wanted Azra to be mine completely; possessing her body was only a foretaste of an even more complete pleasure. I tried to be attentive, to charm her, not to force her anymore. More than once I was about to reveal the truth to her, the whole truth — my ignorance about her father’s situation, Lyautey’s state in Paris, my scheming to get him expelled. My mystifications were actually proofs of love. I had only lied out of passion, and I hoped she would understand.
“Azra realized that her father would probably never come back. All the Shah’s prisoners had already been freed, quickly replaced in the prisons by the supporters and soldiers of the old regime. Blood flowed — they hastily executed soldiers and high-ranking civil servants. Khomeini’s Revolutionary Council now saw Mehdi Bazargan, its own Prime Minister, as an obstacle to the establishment of the Islamic Republic. These first confrontations, and later the transformation of the Committees into ‘Guardians of the Revolution’ and ‘Volunteers for the Oppressed,’ prepared the ground for the confiscation of power. Given over entirely to revolutionary exuberance, the middle classes and the most powerful political groups (the Toudeh Party, the Democratic Front, the Mujahedeen of the People) didn’t seem to realize the rising danger. The itinerant revolutionary tribunal headed by Sadegh Khalkhali aka The Butcher, both judge and executioner, was already underway. Despite all that, at the end of March, after a referendum advocated among others by the Communists and the Mujahedeen, the Empire of Iran became the Islamic Republic of Iran, and launched into the redrafting of its Constitution.
“Azra had apparently abandoned the theories of Shariati and had grown closer to the Communist Toudeh. She continued to agitate, took part in demonstrations and published feminist articles in the papers close to the Party. She had also gathered some of Farid Lahouti’s poems, the most political ones, into a little collection that she had entrusted to no less than Ahmad Shamlou himself — already the most visible poet of the time, the most innovative, the most powerful — who had found it (even while he was not generous to the poetry of his contemporaries) magnificent: he was astounded to learn that this Lahouti was actually a French Orientalist, and had some of these texts published in influential journals. This success made me mad with jealousy. Even interned thousands of kilometers away, Lyautey managed to make my life impossible. I should have destroyed all those cursed letters instead of being content to throw just a few into the flames. In March, when Spring was returning, when the Iranian New Year was consecrating Year 1 of the Revolution, when the hope of an entire people was growing with the roses, a hope that would burn as surely as the roses, when I was making plans to marry the object of my passion, this stupid collection, because of the esteem of four intellectuals, was reinforcing the bond between Azra and Fred. She could talk of nothing but that. How much so-and-so had appreciated these poems. How such-or-such an actor would read these verses at a soirée organized by such-and-such a fashionable magazine. This triumph gave Azra the strength to despise me. I could feel her scorn in her gestures, in her gaze. Her guilt had transformed into a scornful hatred of me and all I represented — France, the University. I was in the process of scheming to get her a scholarship fund, so that, after my stay in Iran, we could move back to Paris together. I wanted to marry her. She contemptuously rejected all my ideas. Even worse: she refused herself to me. She just came to my apartment to taunt me, to talk to me about these poems and the Revolution, and pushed me away. Two months earlier I’d held her to me and now I was nothing but an abject wretch she rejected with horror.”
Gilbert knocked over his glass while gesticulating too broadly at the birds who had gotten bold enough to peck at the candy crumbs on the table. He immediately poured himself another, and emptied his little goblet in one gulp. He had tears in his eyes, tears that didn’t seem to come from the power of the alcohol. Sarah had sat back down. She was watching the two birds flitting to the shelter of the shrubbery. I knew she was wavering between compassion and anger; she looked away from him, but didn’t leave. Morgan remained silent, as if the story were over. Nassim Khanom suddenly reappeared. She took away the glasses, the saucers, the dishes of candied fruit. She was wearing a dark-blue roopoosh knotted firmly under her chin and a gray blouse with a brown pattern; she didn’t look once at her employer. Sarah smiled at her; she returned her smile, offering her tea or lemonade. Sarah thanked her kindly for her efforts, in the Iranian style. I realized I was dying of thirst, so I conquered my timidity and asked Nassim Khanom for a little more lemonade: my Persian pronunciation was so atrocious that she didn’t understand me. Sarah came to my aid, as usual. I had the impression — oh how vexing — that she repeated exactly what I had just said, but this time, Nassim Khanom understood right away. I immediately imagined a conspiracy, by which this respectable lady ranked me on the side of men, on the side of her terrifying boss, who still remained silent, his eyes red with vodka and memory. Sarah noticed my vexed confusion and misinterpreted it; she stared at me for a bit, as if she were taking my hand to extract us from the lukewarm mud of this late afternoon, and her sudden tenderness pulled the bonds between us so taut that a child could play with them like rubber bands, in the middle of this sinister garden burned by summer.
Morgan had
nothing more to add. He was revolving his glass in his hand, over and over, eyes on the past. It was time to go. I pulled on those famous invisible strings and Sarah got up at the same time as me.
Thank you, Gilbert, for this wonderful afternoon. Thank you. Thank you.
I swallowed the glass of lemonade that Nassim Khanom had just brought. Gilbert didn’t get up, muttered some Persian verses I couldn’t hear a word of. Sarah was standing; she put her purple silk veil over her hair. I absentmindedly counted the freckles on her face. I thought about Azra, Sarah, almost the same sounds, the same letters. The same passion. Morgan too was looking at Sarah. Seated, his eyes were fixed on her hips hidden by the Islamic cloak that she had just put on despite the heat.
“What became of Azra?” I asked the question to shift his gaze from Sarah’s body, stupidly, jealously, the way you remind a man of his wife’s first name so her phonemes will whip him, along with the good Lord and moral Law.
Morgan turned to me, a look of suffering on his face:
“I don’t know. They told me she had been executed by the regime. It’s likely. Thousands of activists disappeared in the early 1980s. Men and women alike. The Homeland in danger. Iraqi aggression, instead of weakening the regime as planned, reinforced it, gave it an excuse to rid itself of all internal opposition. The young Iranians who’d lived between the Shah and the Islamic Republic, that middle class (a terrible expression) that had shouted, written, fought in favor of democracy, all ended up hanged in an obscure prison, killed on the front, or forced into exile. I left Iran soon after the start of the war; I returned eight years later, in 1989. It wasn’t the same country anymore. The university was full of former combatants incapable of putting two words together, who had become students by the grace of the Basij militia. Students who would become teachers. Ignorant teachers who in turn trained students destined for mediocrity. All the poets, all the musicians, all the scholars were in internal exile, crushed by the dictatorship of mourning. All of them in the shadow of martyrs. With every bat of an eyelash, they were reminded of a martyr. Their streets, their alleys, their grocery stores bore the names of martyrs. The dead, the blood. The poetry of death, songs of the dead, flowers of death. Lyrical poetry turned into names of offensives: Dawn I, Dawn II, Dawn III, Dawn IV, Dawn V, Kerbela I, Kerbela II, Kerbela III, Kerbela IV, and so on until the Parousia of the Mahdi. I don’t know where or when Azra died. In Evin Prison, probably. I died with her. Long before her. In 1979, Year 1 of the Revolution, solar Year 1357 of the Hegira. She didn’t want to see me anymore. It was as simple as that. She dissolved into her shame. While Khomeini was fighting to consolidate his power, Azra, emboldened by her love of Lahouti’s poems, left me once and for all. She had learned the truth, she said. A truth — how I had schemed to distance her lover, how I had lied about her father — but not the truth. The truth is my love for her, which she could see every instant we were together. That’s the only truth. I’ve never been whole except those times when we were together. I never married. I’ve never made any promises to anyone. I’ve waited for her all my life.
“Fred Lyautey didn’t have my patience. Lahouti hanged himself from an elm with a sheet, on the grounds of his clinic, in December 1980. Azra hadn’t seen him for almost two years. A kind soul told her about his death. But Azra didn’t come to the evening of homage we organized for Lyautey at the Institute. And none of those famous poets who supposedly respected his work came. It was a beautiful evening, meditative, fervent, intimate. He had designated me, with his usual grandiloquence, as his ‘executor for his literary affairs.’ I burned all his papers in a sink, along with mine. All the memories from that period. The photos contorted, yellow in the flames; the notebooks burned up, slow as logs.”
We left. Gilbert de Morgan was still reciting mysterious poems. He made a little gesture with his hand at us when we passed through the gate in his garden wall. He remained alone with his housekeeper and that family of birds we call Spechte in German, often capped with red, that nest inside tree trunks.
In the taxi that brought us back to the center of Tehran, Sarah kept repeating “what a poor guy, good Lord, why tell us that, what nonsense,” in an incredulous tone, as if, in the end, she couldn’t bring herself to admit the truth of Gilbert de Morgan’s story, couldn’t convince herself that this man, whom she had known for over ten years, who had counted for so much in her professional life, was actually an other, a Faust who needed no Mephisto to sell his soul to Evil and possess Azra, a character all of whose knowledge was constructed on a moral imposture so great that it became unreal. Sarah couldn’t grasp the truth of this story simply because he himself had told it. He couldn’t be crazy enough to self-destruct, and so — at least this was Sarah’s reasoning, Sarah’s way of protecting herself — he was lying. He was inventing stories. He wanted us to blame him for God knows what obscure reason. Perhaps he was taking someone else’s horrors on himself. If she was angry at him and called him a filthy pig, it was mostly because he had spattered us with these base acts, these betrayals. He couldn’t confess so simply that he had raped and blackmailed that girl, he couldn’t recount that so coldly, in his garden, drinking vodka, and I could sense her voice wavering. She was on the verge of tears, in that taxi that was rushing at top speed down the Modarres motorway, previously named, during the time of Azra and Farid, the motorway of the King of Kings. I was not convinced that Morgan was lying. On the contrary, the scene we had just witnessed, that settling of accounts with himself, seemed extraordinarily honest to me, even in its historical implications.
The twilight air was warm, dry, electric; it smelled of the burnt grass of flowerbeds and of all the lies of nature.
In the end I think I sympathized with him, this Gilbert de Morgan with the long face. Did he already know he was sick, on the afternoon of that confession? It’s likely — two weeks later he left Iran once and for all for reasons of health. I don’t remember showing this text to Sarah; I should send it to her, in a version with all the commentaries about her taken out. Would she be interested? She’d probably read these pages differently. Farid and Azra’s love story would become a parable of imperialism and the Revolution. Sarah would contrast the characters of Lyautey and Morgan; she’d draw from it a meditation on the question of otherness: Fred Lyautey completely denied it and plunged into the other, thought he became the other, and almost succeeded, in madness; Morgan tried to possess it, that otherness, to dominate it, pull it toward him, appropriate it and take pleasure from it. It is extremely depressing to think that Sarah is incapable of reading a love story for what it is, a love story, that is, the abdication of reason in passion; it’s symptomatic, the good doctor would say. She resists. For Sarah love is nothing but a bundle of contingencies, at best a universal potluck, at worst a game of domination in the mirror of desire. How sad. She’s trying to protect herself from the pain of emotions, that’s for sure. She wants to control whatever can affect her; she defends herself in advance from the blows that could hit her. She isolates herself.
All Orientalists, yesterday’s as well as today’s, ask themselves this question of difference, of self and other — not long after Morgan left, when my idol the musicologist Jean During had just arrived in Tehran, we received a visit from Gianroberto Scarcia, eminent Italian specialist in Persian literature, student of the brilliant Bausani, father of Italian Iranology. Scarcia was an extraordinarily brilliant man, erudite, amusing; he was interested in, among other things, the Persian literature of Europe: this expression, Persian literature of Europe, fascinated Sarah. That classical poems could have been composed in Persian a few kilometers away from Vienna up to the end of the nineteenth century delighted her just as much (even more, possibly) as the memory of the Arabic poets of Sicily, the Balearic Islands or Valencia. Scarcia even argued that the last Persian poet of the West, as he called him, was an Albanian who had composed two novels in verse and written erotic ghazals until the 1950s, between Tirana and Belgrade. The langua
ge of Hafez had continued to irrigate the old continent after the Balkan War and even the Second World War. What was fascinating, Scarcia added with a childlike smile, is that these texts continued the great tradition of classical poetry, but fed it with modernity — just as Naim Frashëri, the bard of the Albanian nation, the last Persian poet of the West, also composed in Albanian and even in Turkish and Greek. But at a very different time: in the twentieth century Albania was independent, and Turkish-Persian culture was dying out in the Balkans. “What a strange position,” Sarah said, captivated, “that of a poet who writes in a language that no one or almost no one, in his country, understands anymore, or wants to understand!” And Scarcia, with a mischievous spark in his clear eyes, added that a history of the Arab-Persian literature of Europe should be written to rediscover this forgotten heritage. The other in the self. Scarcia seemed sad: “Unfortunately, a large part of these treasures were destroyed with the libraries of Bosnia in the early 1990s. These traces of a different Europe are frowned upon. But books and manuscripts remain in Istanbul, Bulgaria, Albania, and at Bratislava University. As you say, dear Sarah, Orientalism should be a humanism.” Sarah opened her eyes wide in astonishment — Scarcia must have read her article on Ignác Goldziher, Gershom Scholem, and Jewish Orientalism. Scarcia had read everything. From the height of his eighty years, he saw the world with a curiosity that was never disappointed.
The construction of a European identity as a friendly puzzle of nationalisms erased anything that didn’t fit into ideological boxes. Goodbye difference, goodbye diversity.
A humanism based on what? What is universal? God, who makes Himself very discreet in the silence of the night? Between the throat-slitters, the starvers, the polluters — can the unity of the human condition still be based on anything? I have no idea. Knowledge, perhaps. Knowledge and the planet as a new horizon. Man as mammal. Complex residue of a carbon-based evolution. A plant rot. A bug. There’s no more life in man than in a bug. Just as much. More matter, but just as much life. I complain about Dr. Kraus but my condition is enviable enough compared to that of an insect. The human species isn’t doing its best these days. You want to take refuge in your books, your records and your memories of childhood. Turn off the radio. Or drown yourself in opium, like Faugier. He was there too during Gianroberto Scarcia’s visit. He was returning from an expedition into the lower depths. That ever-joyful specialist in prostitution was concocting a lexicon of Persian slang, a dictionary of horrors — the technical terms for drugs, of course, but also the expressions of the male and female prostitutes he frequented. Faugier was AC/DC — or as the French say “il marchait à voile et à vapeur,” he used both sail and steam; he would tell us about his excursions, in his outspoken street-urchin way, like Victor Hugo’s Gavroche, and often I wanted to block my ears. If you listened only to him, you could easily imagine that Tehran was a huge brothel for drug addicts — an exaggerated image but not entirely divorced from reality. One day while leaving Tajrish Square in a taxi, the driver, very old — his steering wheel didn’t seem to be affected by his violent trembling — had asked me the question very directly, almost point-blank: How much does a whore cost in Europe? He had had to repeat this phrase several times, so difficult did the word jendeh seem to me, both to pronounce and understand: I had never heard it in anyone’s mouth. I’d had to justify my ignorance laboriously; the old man refused to believe I had never visited any prostitutes. Finally just to get some peace and quiet, I blurted out a number at random, which seemed to him incredible; he began laughing, and saying ah, now I understand why you don’t go to whores! At that price, you might as well get married! He told me that as recently as yesterday, he had ridden a whore in his taxi. “After eight p.m.,” he said, “women alone are usually whores. The one yesterday offered me her services.”
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