Compass

by Mathias Enard

  The attaché observes his guests bustling around with a delighted air, he likes animation in his kitchen, you sense. He delicately slices the ham and the salami, places some rounds on a large Iranian blue china dish. I haven’t eaten pork in months, and I feel as if I’m committing an extraordinary transgression. We set the table, talk while we finish the aperitifs, and it’s time to sit down. We take out the skewers and prepare the sabzi, which, along with the sangak flatbread, gives a multicultural air to this pagan dinner. And the attaché exclaims, in a way that’s not at all diplomatic:

  “Good, strip-fondue, whoever loses his piece of bread takes off his shirt.” And he bursts out laughing, which makes him lift his eyes to the sky, shaking his head from right to left. Shocked, I cling to my fondue fork.

  Wine is served, delicious, a white Graves. Mirza begins, plunges his bread into the melted cheese, and takes it out without any trouble, drawing little strands along with it. I try in turn: I have to admit it’s excellent.

  The conversation revolves around wine.

  The attaché announces, with a satisfied air:

  “I would like to announce that I am now a shareholder in a Côtes-du-Rhône vineyard. Yes, my dear friends.”

  I can read the envy on the faces of the two other sybarites.

  “Oh, that’s excellent.” They nod their heads in unison. “The Côtes-du-Rhône!”

  They talk about saccharimeters, vats, and fermentation. I’m pretty occupied with battling the fondue — I notice that, when it cools down, it’s no piece of cake, if you’ll excuse the expression, especially with a piece of Iranian bread, since it’s soft and permeable, thus not supporting prolonged immersion in the warm liquid without disintegrating dangerously. Several times I almost lost my shirt.

  In short, I did not eat very much.

  Finally, the fondue ends without incident, with no one losing anything but their illusions in the pot. Next comes dessert, coffee, digéstif, and talk about art, in precisely this order: candied chestnuts from Provence, Italian espresso, Cognac, and “content and form.” I drink in the attaché’s words, helped by the VSOP Cognac:

  “I am an aesthete,” he says. “Aesthetics is in everything. Sometimes, form even creates meaning, at bottom.”

  “Which brings us back to the fondue,” I say.

  I receive a black look from the two assistant aesthetes, but the attaché, who has a sense of humor, makes a little nervous hiccup, ho-ho, before continuing, with an inspired air:

  “Iran is the land of forms. A country that is aesthetically formal,” he says, lingering over every syllable.

  You see, this sort of thing leaves me with a lot of time to think about you. I hope I’ve made you smile in these desperate times.

  With much love,

  Franz

  Paris is a tomb and I tell her humorous society stories, sketch caricatures of people that she couldn’t care less about, what an idiot, what shame — sometimes absence and desperate powerlessness give you the confused gestures of a drowning man. What’s more this attaché allied a deep liking for Iran with immense cultural knowledge. Plus I lied, I didn’t tell her about those long weeks in Tehran without her, spent almost exclusively with Parviz reading poetry, the great Parviz, the friend who patiently listened to everything I didn’t say.

  Except for Parviz, I had no friends left in Tehran. Faugier had finally gone back, physically destroyed, morally lost in his subject of study, in an opiated dream. He said farewell to me as if he were leaving for the other world, gravely, with a sober gravity that was quite frightening in that formerly exuberant dandy — I remembered the man from Istanbul, the seductive Gavroche, the prince of night in Istanbul and Tehran, and he had dissolved, almost faded away. I don’t know what’s become of him. Sarah and I talked about him many times, and one thing is more or less certain: Marc Faugier, despite all his expertise, all his publications, no longer belongs to the world of academia. Even Google yields no more news of him.

  New researchers had arrived, among others a compatriot, an Austrian student of Bert Fragner, director of the Institute of Iranian Studies at the Academy of Sciences in Vienna, that same Academy of Sciences that had been founded, in his time, by dear Hammer-Purgstall. This historian wasn’t a bad fellow, he just had one defect, which was to talk while walking — he would pace up and down the corridors thinking out loud in a low voice, for hours, kilometers of corridors traveled, and this monody as knowledgeable as it was unintelligible got on my nerves terribly. When he wasn’t strolling back and forth, he would launch into endless Go parties with another newcomer, this one a Norwegian: an exotic Norwegian who played flamenco guitar at such a high level that every year he took part in a festival in Seville. Everything the world could offer in the way of absurd encounters: a philatelist Austrian passionate about the history of Iranian stamps playing Go with a gypsy Norwegian guitarist who specialized in research on oil administration.

  Those last few weeks I lived at Parviz’s house or as a recluse, aside from one or two social gatherings like that invitation to the music-loving cultural attaché’s, surrounded by the objects that Sarah hadn’t been able to take with her in her hurried departure for Paris: a lot of books, the prayer rug from Khorassan, of a magnificent mauve color, which I still have next to my bed, a silver-plated electric samovar, a collection of copies of ancient miniatures. Among the books, the works of Annemarie Schwarzenbach, of course, especially The Happy Valley and Death in Persia, in which the Swiss writer describes the valley of the Lahr, at the foot of Mount Damavand. Sarah and I had planned on going there, to that high arid valley where the streams from the highest summit in Iran flow, a valley where the Comte de Gobineau had also set his tent 150 years earlier — the majestic snow-capped cone streaked with basalt in the summer, the image, along with Mount Fuji or Kilimanjaro, of the perfect mountain, standing solitary in the middle of the sky, surpassing, from its height of 5,600 meters, the surrounding peaks. There was also a voluminous book of images based on Annemarie’s life; many photos which she had taken herself in the course of her travels and portraits taken by others, especially her husband Claude Carac the embassy secretary — in one of them we see her half-naked, narrow shoulders, short hair, the water of the river up to her knees, arms alongside her body, wearing only a pair of black shorts. The nudity of her breasts, the position of her hands, hanging alongside her thighs, and her surprised face give her a fragile look, with a sad or vulnerable inexpressiveness, in the grandiose landscape of the high valley lined with rushes and thorn bushes and overhung by the dry, rocky slopes of the mountains. I spent entire nights of solitude leafing through this book of photographs, in my room, and regretted I didn’t own any images of Sarah, any album to leaf through to find myself in her company again — I made up for it with Annemarie Schwarzenbach; I read the story of her journey with Ella Maillart from Switzerland to India. But it was in the two texts of passionate fever and narcotic melancholy that Annemarie sets in Iran — of which one is a more distanced reflection of the other, very intimate one — where I sought something of Sarah, for something that Sarah might have told me, the profound reason for her passion for the life and work of this “inconsolable angel.” Both books were underlined and annotated in ink; you could retrace, according to the color of the annotations, the passages that had to do with anguish, the unspeakable fear that took hold of the narrator at night, the passages relating to drugs and illness and those concerning the Orient, the young woman’s vision of the Orient. Reading her notes (spidery scrawls, black marginalia I had to decipher more than read) I could glimpse, or I thought I could glimpse, one of the basic questions that not only underlay Sarah’s work, but that made Annemarie Schwarzenbach’s so engaging — the Orient as resilience, as quest for a cure for an obscure illness, a profound anguish. A psychological quest. A mystical search without any god or transcendence other than the depths of the self, a search that, in the case of Schwarzenbach, resulted in a
sad failure. There is nothing in this region to facilitate her cure, nothing to alleviate her pain: the mosques remain empty, the mihrab is only a niche in a wall; the landscapes are dried out in the summer, inaccessible in the winter. She moves forward in a deserted world. And even when she finds love, with a half-Turkish, half-Cherkess young woman and thinks she’s filling with life the desolate surroundings she left near the slopes of blazing Damavand, what she discovers is death. Illness of the beloved and a visit from the Angel. Love lets us share the sufferings of the other no more than it cures our own. At bottom, we are always alone, said Annemarie Schwarzenbach, and I feared, as I deciphered her marginal notes to Death in Persia, that it was also Sarah’s deep belief, a belief that no doubt, at the time I was reading those lines, was amplified by mourning, as it was for me by solitude.

  Her interest in and passion for Buddhism are not just a search for a cure, but a profound conviction, which I knew was present long before her brother’s death — her departure for India after her detours through the Far East of Parisian libraries was not a surprise, even though I took it as a slap, I have to admit, as if she’d abandoned me. It was me she was leaving along with Europe and I had every intention of making her pay for it, I must confess, I wanted to avenge myself on her suffering. It took this particularly touching email, talking about Darjeeling and Andalusia:

  Darjeeling, June 15

  Dearest Franz,

  Here I am, back in Darjeeling, after a quick visit to Europe: Paris, two days for family, then Granada, two days for a boring conference (you know how it is) and two days to come back here, via Madrid, Delhi, and Calcutta. I’d have liked to go through Vienna (seen from here Europe is so small one can easily imagine crossing it on a whim) but I wasn’t sure you were there. Or that you really wanted to see me.

  Every time I go back to Darjeeling I feel as if I’m rediscovering calm, beauty, peace. The tea plantations devour the hills; they’re little round shrubs with long leaves, planted close together: seen from above, the fields look like a mosaic of dense green buttons, mossy balls invading the Himalayan slopes.

  Soon it will be monsoon season, in one month it will rain more than in your country in a year. The great cleansing. The mountains will sweat, drip, disgorge themselves; every street, every alleyway, every footpath will be transformed into a wild torrent. The stones, the bridges, sometimes even the houses are carried away.

  I’m renting a little room not far from the monastery where my teacher teaches. Life is simple. I meditate in my room early in the morning, then I go to the monastery to receive teachings; in the afternoon I read or write a little, meditate again in the evening, then sleep, and so on. The routine suits me well. I’m trying to learn a little Nepalese and Tibetan, without much success. The vernacular, here, is English. Oh, guess what? I discovered that Alexandra David-Néel had been a singer, a soprano. And even began a career: can you believe, she was booked at the operas of Hanoi and Haiphong . . . Where she sang Massenet, Bizet, etc. The program from the Hanoi opera would interest you! Orientalism in the Orient, exoticism in exoticism, it’s your field! Then Alexandra David-Néel was one of the first explorers of Tibet and one of the first Buddhist women in Europe. See, I’m thinking of you.

  Someday we should talk about Tehran, even Damascus. I am aware of my share of responsibility in this whole story, which we could call “our story,” if that weren’t so grandiloquent. I’d very much like to come see you in Vienna. We could talk, a little; we could take walks — I still have a bunch of horrible museums to see. The Funeral Museum, for example. Just kidding. This is all a little incoherent . . . Probably because I’d like to tell you things I don’t dare write, return to episodes one doesn’t want to go back to — I never thanked you for your letters when Samuel died. The warmth and compassion I found there still shine today. No word of comfort has touched me as much as yours.

  Two years soon. Two years already. Buddhists don’t speak of “conversion,” you don’t convert to Buddhism, you take refuge in it. You take refuge in the Buddha. That’s exactly what I did. I took refuge here, in the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Sangha. I’ll follow the direction shown by those three compasses. I feel a little consoled. I’m discovering, inside me and around me, a new energy, a strength that doesn’t require me at all to abdicate my reason, quite the contrary. What counts is experience.

  I can see you smiling . . . It’s hard to share. Picture me getting up at dawn with pleasure, meditating for an hour with pleasure, listening to and studying very old, wise texts that reveal the world to me much more naturally than anything I was able to read or hear before now. Their truth imposes itself very rationally. There is nothing to believe. There is no question of “faith.” There is nothing but sentient beings, lost in suffering, there is nothing but the very simple, very complex awareness of a world where everything is connected, a world without substance. I’d like to show you all that, but I know that everyone travels this path on his own — or not.

  Let’s change the subject — in Granada I heard a fascinating talk, in the midst of torrents of boredom, a spark of beauty in the rivers of yawns. It was a paper on the Hebraic lyric poetry of Andalusia in relation to Arabic poetry, through the poems of Ibn Nagrila, a combatant-poet (he was a vizier) who they say composed even on the battlefield. How beautiful these poems were, and their Arabic “brothers”! Still full of those entirely earthly love songs, descriptions of faces, of lips, of gazes, I went for a stroll in the Alhambra. It was very beautiful out, and the sky contrasted with the red walls of the buildings, the blue color framed them, like a photograph. I was caught up in a strange feeling; I felt as if I had in front of me all the tumult of Time. Ibn Nagrila died long before the splendor of the Alhambra, and yet he sang of fountains and gardens, roses and springtime — these flowers in the Generalife Palace are no longer the same flowers, the stones in the walls themselves are no longer the same stones; I was thinking of the detours of my family, of history, which brought me there where, probably, my distant ancestors had lived, and I had the very strong sensation that all roses are only a single rose, all lives a single life, that time is a movement as illusory as the tide or the journey of the sun. A question of perspective. And perhaps because I was emerging from that conference of historians bent on patiently writing down the story of existences, I had a vision of Europe as indistinct, as multiple, as diverse as those rose bushes in the Alhambra that plunge their roots, without realizing it, so deeply into the past and the future, to such a point that it’s impossible to say from where they’re actually growing. And this dizzying sensation was not unpleasant, on the contrary, it reconciled me for a bit with the world, revealed to me for an instant the woollen ball of the Wheel.

  I can hear your laughter from here. But I can assure you it was a singular, very rare moment. Both the experience of beauty and the sensation of its emptiness. OK, on these fine words I’ll have to leave you, it’s getting late. Tomorrow I’ll go to the internet café to “send” this missive. Answer me soon, tell me a little about Vienna, your life in Vienna, your plans . . .

  With love,

  Yours,

  Sarah

  for me to find myself entirely disarmed, surprised, as in love as I was in Tehran, even more, perhaps — what had I done during those two years, I’d buried myself in my Viennese life, in academia; I had written articles, pursued some research, published a book in an obscure collection for scholars; I had felt the beginnings of illness, the first nights of insomnia. To take refuge. That’s a beautiful expression, a beautiful practice. To fight against suffering, or rather to try to escape this world, this Wheel of Fate, which is nothing but suffering. When I received this Andalusian letter I collapsed: Tehran came flooding back to me, the memories of Damascus too, Paris, Vienna, suddenly tinted, the way a simple ray of light is enough to give its tonality to the immense sky of evening, sadness and bitterness. Dr. Kraus didn’t think I was in very good shape. Mother was worried about my thinn
ess and my apathy. I was trying to compose, a practice (aside from my tinkering with the poems by Levet in Tehran) I had abandoned for many years, to write, put down on paper, or rather the ether of the screen, my memories of Iran, to find a music that would resemble them, a song. In vain I was trying to discover, around me, at the university or at a concert, a new face on which to impose these cumbersome, rebellious feelings that wanted no one but Sarah; I ended up fleeing (like the other night with Katharina Fuchs) what I myself had sought to initiate.

  Fine surprise: when I was struggling in the past, Nadim came to give a recital in Vienna, with an ensemble from Aleppo; I bought a seat in the third row of the orchestra — I hadn’t warned him of my presence. They played the rast, bayati, and hedjazi modes, long improvisations sustained by percussion, dialogue with a ney — and this reed flute, long and grave, married wonderfully well with Nadim’s lute, so brilliant. Without a singer, Nadim relied on traditional melodies; the audience (the entire Arabic community of Vienna was there, including the ambassadors) recognized the songs before they got lost in the variations, and you could almost hear the hall humming these tunes in a low voice, with a concentrated fervor, vibrant with respectful passion. Nadim smiled as he played — the shadow of his short beard gave, by contrast, even more luminosity to his face. I knew he couldn’t see me, blinded by the glare of the footlights. After the encore, during the very long applause, I thought about slipping away, going home without greeting him, fleeing; when the lights came back on, I was still hesitating. What would I say to him? What would we speak about, aside from Sarah? Did I really want to hear what he said?

  I found out where his dressing room was; the hallway was full of officials waiting to greet the artists. I felt a little ridiculous, in the midst of these people; I was afraid — of what? That he wouldn’t recognize me? That he’d be as embarrassed as I was? Nadim is much more generous — scarcely had he crossed the threshold of his dressing room than without even those few seconds of hesitation that separate a stranger from an old comrade he strode through the crowd to embrace me, saying, I hoped you’d be here, old friend.