East of the East you don’t escape the conquering violence of Europe either, its merchants, its soldiers, its Orientalists or its missionaries — Orientalists are the variation on the theme, the missionaries; while scholars translate and import foreign knowledge, the religious export their faith, learn local languages in order to make the Gospels intelligible there. The first Tonkin, Chinese or Khmer dictionaries were written by missionaries, Jesuit, Lazarist, Dominican. These missionaries paid a heavy tribute to the propagation of Faith — we should devote a volume of my great work to them:
On the Divers Forms of Lunacie in the Orient
Volume the Fourth
Encyclopedia of the Decapitated
The emperors of China and Annam, among others, martyred a considerable number of peddlers of Jesus, many of them subsequently beatified and even canonized by Rome, martyrs in Vietnam, China, or Korea, whose sufferings were no less terrible than the Roman martyrs, like Saint Théophane Vénard the ill-named — it took five saber blows to decapitate him not far from Hanoi: the young Frenchman testified to his faith by the shores of the Red River, in the 1850s, when the French offensive in Annam forced the Emperor to toughen persecutions against Christians. He is shown calmly kneeling facing the river, executioner at his side: the first saber blow, too swift and poorly aimed, misses the neck and only nicks his cheek; Théophane continues to pray. The second blow, perhaps because the executioner is even more tense from his initial failure, touches the side of his throat, spreads a little of the missionary’s blood but does not interrupt his prayers; the executioner (I picture him tall, fat, bald, like in the movies, but he could have been small, hairy, and especially, they say, drunk, which would explain his misses in an entirely plausible way) would have to lift his arm five times for the martyr’s head to roll, his body collapse and his prayers fall silent. His head would be placed on a pike, as an example, on the bank of the Red River; his body buried in the silt — catechumens would steal both body and head under cover of night, they would offer the torso a real burial in a Christian cemetery and the head a glass dome so it could be preserved as a relic by the diocese of Hanoi, and 150 years later the young priest from the Foreign Missions of Paris would be canonized, along with a number of his torn-apart, strangled, burned, or decapitated brothers.
Type of death: head cut off with a saber, crucifixion, dismemberment, evisceration, drowning, various tortures — that’s what the files on missionaries in Asia would read.
What saint will I ask for comfort in my agony, Saint Théophane Vénard or some other massacred saints, or simply Saint Martin, the saint of my childhood, of whom I was so proud, in Austria, during the torchlit processions on November 11, his name day — for my fellow-citizens of Vienna, Saint Martin is not Saint Martin of Tours, whose tomb I had seen as a child with Grandmother and Mother in the basilica of the same name (gilt, more Oriental than Gallic), which, in my childlike religiosity, gave me a privileged closeness to the Roman legionary with the divided cloak, a closeness associated for me with the reeds on the shores of the Loire, the sandbanks, the porphyry columns of the underground, silent sepulchre where this so charitable saint lay who, according to my Grandmother, could be asked for his intercession for any purpose, which I didn’t fail to do, clumsily no doubt, demanding sweets, biscuits, and toys. My devotions to the soldier-bishop were entirely self-interested, and in Vienna, when we went to the country in the middle of autumn to eat the Saint Martin’s day goose, this slightly dry fowl was for me directly linked to Tours; it no doubt arrived from there by flying — if a bell were capable of returning from Rome to announce the Resurrection, a goose could easily fly from the Touraine to Austria to pay homage to the saint by lying down, completely roasted, between the chestnuts and the Serviettenknödel. Strangely, although Grandmother’s village bore his name, Saint Benedict was never anything to me but phonemes: probably because, in the mind of a child, a legionary sharing his cloak with a poor man is much more attractive than an Italian monk, important as he may have been for medieval spirituality — Saint Benedict however is the patron saint of the dying, there’s my intercessor, I could perhaps invest in an image of Saint Benedict, be unfaithful to my icon of Saint Christopher. The giant from Chananea also died decapitated, on Samos; he’s the saint of passage, the one who helps you cross rivers, who carried Christ from one shore to the other, patron saint of travelers and mystics. Sarah loved the Eastern saints. Saint Andrew of Constantinople or Saint Simeon the Holy Fool, she would tell the stories of these fools in Christ who used their madness to hide their holiness — madness, at the time, signifying the otherness of customs, the inexplicable difference of actions: Simeon who, finding a dead dog on the road at the entrance to Emesa, tied a rope around its neck and dragged it behind him as if it were alive; Simeon still, who played at putting out the church candles by throwing nuts at them and then, when they tried to chase him away, climbed onto the rostrum to bombard the congregants with his dried fruit, until he chased the faithful out of the church; Simeon dancing, beating with his hands and feet, making fun of monks, and eating lupines like a bear.
Bilger could be a saint, who knows. The first archaeologist saint, who hides his holiness beneath an impenetrable madness. Perhaps he experienced enlightenment in the desert, on the digs, confronting the traces of the past that he pulled from the sand, their Biblical wisdom penetrating him little by little until it became, one day that was clearer than the others, an immense rainbow. Bilger in any case is the most sincere of us all; he is not content with a slight rift, with insomnia, with indecipherable illnesses like mine, or with the spiritual thirst of Sarah; today he is the explorer of his profound otherness.
Sarah was also very fond of missionaries, martyred or not; they are, she said, the underground wave, the mystical, scholarly counterpart to the gunboat — both advance together, the soldiers following or shortly preceding the missionaries and the Orientalists, who sometimes are the same. Sometimes all three at once: member of a religious order, Orientalist, and soldier, like Alois Musil, the Dominican Father Jaussen, and Louis Massignon, the holy trinity of 1917. The first crossing of Tibet, for example (and I was happy to be able to teach Sarah this exalted fact of ecclesiastical nationalism) was the work of an Austrian Jesuit from Linz, Johannes Grueber, possibly an ancestor of my neighbor: this holy man from the seventeenth century, a mathematician in his spare time, and a missionary, was, on his way back from China, the first European to visit Lhasa. Sarah, in her long exploration of the lands of Buddhism, met other missionaries, other Orientalists, whose histories she often told me, at least as fascinating as the desert spies — Father Évariste Huc for example, whose benevolence as a man from the South (if my memory serves me right he was from Montauban by the Tarn River, rosy homeland of the painter Ingres so cherished by Orientalists and Halil Pasha) cheered up a Viennese tea that was otherwise rather tense and gloomy, during a visit from Sarah, the first after Samuel’s death. She was studying Darjeeling, at the time. Horrible Viennese museums, memories of Orientalists, and a strange distance that we tried to fill with bouts of scholarship and learned discourse. Her visit had seemed very long to me. Sarah irritated me. I was both proud of showing her my Viennese life and terribly disappointed at not immediately rediscovering the intimacy of Tehran. It was all awkwardness, impatience, squabbles and misunderstandings. I’d have liked to take her to the Belvedere Museum or show her the traces of my childhood in Mariahilf, and she was interested in nothing but horrors or Buddhist centers. I had spent those months remembering her, investing so much in the wait, constructing an imaginary character, so perfect that it would, all of a sudden, fulfill my life — what selfishness, when I think about it. I never realized the extent of her mourning, the pain, the feeling of injustice that the sudden loss of such a close being can represent, despite her letters:
Dear Franz, thank you for this diplomatic note, which managed to make me smile — not an easy thing for me to do right now. I miss you a lot. Or rather I miss ev
erything a lot. I feel as if I’m outside the world, floating in mourning. I just have to meet my mother’s gaze for us both to start crying. Crying for the other’s sadness, that void we each see on our exhausted faces. Paris is a tomb, tatters of memories. I continue my incursions into the literary territories of opium. I don’t really know where I am anymore.
With sad kisses, till soon,
Sarah
Franz Ritter wrote:
Dearest Sarah,
Ah if you knew how hard it is to live up to one’s pretensions when one doesn’t have the luck of being French, how laborious it is to raise oneself by the mere strength of one’s intelligence to the summits of your compatriots and understand their sublime motivations, their preoccupations and their emotions!!! The other night I was invited to dinner by the cultural attaché of your great country, and I was able to take the measure of the great distance I still had to travel to reach his ankle. The attaché is a musician — you remember that he never missed an opportunity to talk to me about the Opera or the Vienna Philharmonic. A bachelor, he hosts a lot of parties, in his beautiful villa in Niavaran. I was very flattered by the invitation. Come, he said to me, I’ve invited some Iranian friends, we’ll play some music and have dinner. An informal dinner, potluck.
I arrive at the appointed time, around eight p.m., after walking for a quarter of an hour in the snow because the Paykan taxi spun its wheels and refused to climb any higher. I reach the gate, ring the bell, wait, ring again: nothing. So I decide to take advantage of the occasion to take a little walk in the freezing night, especially, I must admit, because remaining motionless meant exposing myself to certain death. I stroll for a few minutes at random and, passing in front of the house again, I meet the employee of the house who is emerging: I rush over, question her, and she says:
“Oh, you’re the one who rang. Monsieur is playing music with his friends, he never answers when he’s playing.”
Probably because the music room is on the other side of the villa and you can’t hear the bell. OK OK OK. I hurry inside and walk into the entrance hall with its imposing Doric columns, its classic lighting like the music floating in, harpsichord, flute, Couperin? I cross the large living room taking great care not to walk on the precious rugs. I wonder if I should wait there, and you know me, I’m pretty polite, so I wait, standing, for a pause to enter the music room, as at the Musikverein. I have time to take a good look at the paintings, the bronze sculptures of ephebes and — horror! — the traces of snowy mud my poorly wiped shoes have left everywhere on the marble. Shame. A Teuton disembarks in this haven of beauty. You could easily follow my hesitant trajectory, skirting round the rugs, going from one statue to the other. Even greater shame. No matter: I notice a pearly box that looks as if it contains tissues, I grasp it, hoping the sonata will last long enough for me to perform my lowly task, kneel down, box in hand, and hear:
“Oh, you’re there? What are you doing, playing marbles? Come in, come in.”
In fact, the box contained porcelain marbles, don’t ask me how I could mistake it for a box of tissues, I couldn’t answer: aesthetic emotion no doubt, you say to yourself that in such a setting a box of Kleenex must of course be nacreous. Ridiculous, I made myself an object of ridicule, here I am suspected of wanting to play marbles on the rug while they’re playing great music. A philistine. The Austrian musicologist plays marbles on the Oriental rugs instead of listening to Couperin.
I sigh, carefully set down the box and follow the attaché into said music room: a sofa, two armchairs, a few Orientalist paintings, more sculptures, a spinet, the musicians (the attaché seated at the keyboard, an Iranian flutist) and the audience, a young man with a very kind smile.
“Let me introduce you: Mirza, Abbas. Franz Ritter, Austrian musicologist, student of Jean During.”
We shake hands; I sit down, and they start playing again, which gives me time to forget my shame for a bit and laugh at myself. The attaché was humming a little as he played, eyes closed in concentration. The music was beautiful, I must say, with the vibrating profundity of the flute, the fragile crystal of the harpsichord.
After five minutes, they finish the piece, I applaud. The attaché gets up:
“Good, it’s time to start on that fondue. This way, epicures.”
Oh yes, I forgot to point out that I was invited for a Savoyard fondue, such a rare dish in Tehran that one wouldn’t want to miss it. When the attaché had suggested it to me, I had replied:
“A fondue? I’ve never had one.”
“Never? There’s no fondue in Austria? Well, this is the time to invite you over. It’s much better than raclette, even Swiss raclette. More refined. Yes, more refined. And with this snow, it’s the ideal dish.”
The cultural attaché is interested in all the arts, culinary included.
So, all four of us head for the kitchen. I had been envisioning, despite the attaché’s precautions and his reference to pot luck, a rather snobbish dinner with large and small dishes served at the table, and I find myself with an apron around my waist, à la bonne franquette, as you say, home-style.
The task of slicing the bread falls upon me. Fine. I slice, under the careful supervision of the chef, who inspects the thickness of the slices. The chef is Mirza, also President of the Gourmet Club, which, I learn, meets once a week at the attaché’s place.
“Last week, oh, quails, sublime quails,” he tells me. “Succulent. Of course, tonight is simple, no comparison. Fondue, charcuterie, white wine. All the originality lies in the Iranian bread and the sabzi, obviously. It’ll be delicious.”
Compass Page 39
