During the dinner that followed, surrounded by musicians, diplomats, and VIPs seated opposite each other, Nadim told me he didn’t hear much from Sarah, that he hadn’t seen her since Samuel’s funeral in Paris; she was somewhere in Asia, nothing more. He asked me if I knew they had gotten divorced long ago, and this question wounded me terribly; Nadim was unaware of our closeness. Despite himself, by this simple phrase he tore me away from her. I changed the subject, we talked about our memories of Syria, the concerts in Aleppo, my few lute classes in Damascus with him, our evenings, the ouns, that beautiful Arabic word used for gatherings of friends. I didn’t dare mention the civil war that was just beginning.
A Jordanian diplomat (impeccable dark suit, white shirt, gold-rimmed glasses) suddenly interrupted the conversation, he had known the Iraqi oud master Munir Bashir in Amman, he said — I have often noticed, in these sorts of musical dinners, that those present easily mention the Great Performers they have met or heard, without it being apparent if these implicit comparisons are praises or humiliations; these evocations often provoke, among the musicians, annoyed smiles, marked with suppressed anger faced with the boorishness of the so-called admirers. Nadim smiled to the Jordanian with a weary, knowing, or blasé air, yes Munir Bashir was the greatest and no, he had never had the luck to meet him, even though they had a friend in common, Jalaleddin Weiss. The name of Weiss brought us immediately back to Syria, to our memories, and the diplomat finally turned to his neighbor on the right, a UN official, abandoning us to our reminiscences. With the help of the wine and fatigue, Nadim, in that exhausted state of exaltation that follows great concerts, confided to me point-blank that Sarah had been the love of his life. Despite the failure of their marriage. If only life had been easier for me, in those years, he said. If only we’d had that child, he said. That would have changed things, he said. The past is the past. And tomorrow it’s her birthday, he said.
I looked at Nadim’s hands, I could see again his fingers sliding over the walnut of the oud or handling the plectrum, that eagle’s feather you have to hold without strangling it. The tablecloth was white, there were green squash seeds fallen from the crust of a piece of bread next to my glass, in which bubbles were rising slowly to the surface of the water; tiny bubbles, which formed a thin vertical line, without it being apparent, in the absolute transparency of the whole, where they could be coming from. Suddenly these same bubbles were in my eye, I shouldn’t have looked at them, they rose and rose — their needle-like thinness, their sourceless obstinacy, with no other goal but ascendency and disappearance, their slight burning made me squeeze my eyelids shut, incapable of raising my eyes to Nadim, to long ago, to that past whose name he had just uttered — the longer I kept my head lowered, the more the burning, at the corners of my eyes, intensified, the bubbles grew and grew, they sought, as in the glass, to reach the outside, I had to keep them from doing so.
I made up an urgent excuse and fled in a cowardly way, after having summarily excused myself.
Darjeeling, March 1
Dearest François-Joseph,
Thank you for this magnificent birthday gift. It’s the most beautiful jewel anyone has ever given me — and I’m delighted that you’re the one who discovered it. It will find a prize place in my collection. I know neither this language, nor this music, but the story of this song is absolutely magical. Sevdah! Saudade! I will include it, with your permission, in an upcoming article. Always these shared constructions, these round-trips, these superimposed masks. Vienna, Porta Orientis; all the cities of Europe are gates to the Orient. Do you remember that Persian literature of Europe that Scarcia talked about in Tehran? All of Europe is in the Orient. Everything is cosmopolitan, interdependent. I imagine that sevdalinka resounding between Vienna and Sarajevo like the saudade of the fados of Lisbon, and I’m a little . . . A little what? I miss you, you and Europe. I can feel very strongly the sankhara dukkha, omnipresent suffering, which is perhaps the Buddhist name for melancholy. The movement of the wheel of samsara. The passage of time, the suffering of the awareness of impermanence. I must not give in to it. I will meditate; I always include you in my visualizations, you are behind me, with all the people I love.
With love, say hello to the Strudlhofstiege for me,
S.
Franz Ritter wrote:
Dearest Sarah,
Happy birthday!
I hope all’s well at the monastery. You’re not too cold? I picture you sitting cross-legged facing a bowl of rice in a freezing cell, and it’s a little worrisome, as visions go. I suppose your Lamasery isn’t like the one in Tintin in Tibet, but maybe you’ll have the luck of seeing a monk levitating. Or hearing the radong, the great Tibetan horn, I think they make a din of all the devils. Apparently, they come in different lengths, according to the tonalities; these instruments are so large that it’s very difficult to modulate the sound with the breath and the mouth. I looked for some recordings in our sound library, but there isn’t much on the “Tibetan music” shelf. But enough chatter. I’m allowing myself to disturb you in your contemplation because I have a little birthday present for you.
Bosnian folklore includes traditional songs called sevdalinke. The name comes from a Turkish word, sevdah, borrowed from the Arabic sawda, which means “the black mood.” In Avicenna’s Canon of Medicine, it’s the name for the dark mood, the melan kholia of the Greeks, melancholy. So it’s the Bosnian equivalent for the Portuguese word saudade, which (unlike what etymologists assert) also comes from the Arabic sawda — and from the same black bile. Sevdalinke are the expression of melancholy, like fados. The melodies and the accompaniment are a Balkan version of Ottoman music. End of etymological preamble. Now, your gift:
I’m giving you a song, a sevdalinka: Kraj tanana šadrvana, which tells a little story. The daughter of the sultan, as night falls, listens to the clear water of her fountain tinkling; every evening, a young Arab slave watches the magnificent princess in silence, fixedly. Each time, the slave’s face turns even paler; finally he becomes pale as death. She asks him his first name, where he comes from, and what his tribe is; he simply replies that his name is Mohammed, that he comes from Yemen, from the tribe of the Asra: it’s those Asra, he says, who die when they fall in love.
The text of this song with the Turkish-Arab motif is not, as one might think, an old poem from the Ottoman era. It’s a work by Safvet-beg Bašagić — a translation of a famous poem by Heinrich Heine, “Der Asra.” (Remember the tomb of poor Heine at the Montmartre cemetery?)
Safvet-beg, born in 1870 in Nevesinje in Herzegovina, studied in Vienna at the end of the nineteenth century; he knew Turkish, and learned Arabic and Persian from Viennese Orientalists. He wrote an Austro-Hungarian thesis in German; he translated Omar Khayyam into Bosnian. This sevdalinka joins Heinrich Heine to the ancient Ottoman Empire — the Orientalist poem becomes Oriental. It rediscovers (after a long imaginary journey, which passes through Vienna and Sarajevo) the music of the Orient.
It’s one of the most well-known and most often sung sevdalinke in Bosnia, where few among those who hear it know that it comes from the imagination of the poet of the Lorelei, a Jew who was born in Düsseldorf and died in Paris. You can listen to it easily (I recommend the versions by Himzo Polovina) on the internet.
I hope this little gift pleases you,
With much love,
Soon I hope,
Franz
I wanted to tell her about my meeting with Nadim, the concert, the fragments of their intimacy he had confided in me, but I couldn’t bring myself to, and this strange birthday gift took the place of a difficult confession. A seven a.m. thought: my cowardliness is unprecedented, I abandoned an old friend there for the matter of a woman, as Mother would say. I left those doubts inside me, those idiotic doubts that Sarah would have swept aside with one of her definitive gestures, at least I think so, I didn’t ask her about these things. She never talked to me again about Nadi
m in terms that were anything but respectful and distant. My thoughts are so confused that I don’t know if Nadim is my friend, my enemy, or a distant ghostly memory whose Shakespearean appearance in Vienna only confused my contradictory emotions even more, the trail of that comet that illuminated my sky in Tehran.
I say to myself “it’s time to forget all that, Sarah, the past, the Orient” and yet I am still obsessed, a compass pointing always toward the inbox of my email, still no news from Sarawak, it’s one p.m. over there, is she getting ready for lunch, the weather’s fine, between 73 and 80 degrees, according to the illusory world of the computer. When Xavier de Maistre published A Journey Around My Room, he didn’t imagine that 150 years later this kind of exploration would become the norm. Farewell colonial pith-helmet, farewell mosquito nets, I visit Sarawak in my bathrobe. Then I’ll do a tour of the Balkans, listen to a sevdalinka while watching images from Višegrad. Then I’ll cross Tibet, from Darjeeling to the sands of the Taklamakan, desert of deserts, and I’ll reach Kashgar, city of mysteries and caravans — in front of me, to the west, stand the Pamirs; behind them Tajikistan and the Wakhan corridor that stretches out like a hooked finger, you could glide on its phalanges as far as Kabul.
It’s the hour of abandonment, of solitude and agony; the night is holding firm, it hasn’t yet decided to veer into day, nor has my body agreed to veer into sleep — tense, my back stiff, arms heavy, the beginnings of a cramp in my calf, my diaphragm painful, I should lie down, why go back to bed now, with dawn just around the corner.
This should be the time for prayer, the time to open the Horologion, the Book of Hours for those still awake, and to pray; Lord have pity on those, like me, who have no faith and await a miracle they won’t be able to see. But the miracle has been close to us. Some have smelt the perfume of incense in the desert, around the monasteries of the Fathers; they have heard, in the immensity of stones, the memory of Saint Macarius, the hermit who, one day, in the evening of his life, crushed a flea with his hand: he was sad about his revenge and to punish himself stayed naked in the desert for six months, until his body was nothing but an open wound. And he died in peace, “leaving the memory of great virtues to the world.” We have seen the column of St. Simeon Stylites, the eroded rock in its great pink basilica, St. Simeon man of the stars, whom the stars discovered naked, on summer nights, on his immense pillar, in the hollow of Syrian valleys; we have seen St. Joseph of Cupertino, aerial fool, transformed into a dove in the midst of churches by his cowl and levitation; have followed the footsteps of St. Nicholas the Alexandrine, who also left to rejoin the desert sands, which are God powdered in the sun, and the traces of those less illustrious saints which are slowly being covered by the pebbles, the gravel, footsteps, bones caressed in turn by the moon, friable in winter and oblivion: the pilgrims who drowned in front of Acre, lungs full of the water eroding the Promised Land, the barbarous, cannibalistic knight who had infidels roasted in Antioch before converting to divine unicity in Oriental aridity, the Cherkess sapper of the ramparts of Vienna, who dug by hand the fate of Europe, he betrayed and was forgiven, the little medieval sculptor endlessly sanding a wooden Christ while singing lullabies to it as if to a doll, the Kabbalist from Spain buried in the Zohar, the alchemist in purple robes of the elusive mercury, the magi of Persia whose dead flesh never sullied the Earth, the crows who popped out the eyes of hanged men like cherries, the wild beasts tearing apart the condemned in the arena, the sawdust, the sand that absorbs their blood, the shouts and ashes of the pyre, the twisted, fertile olive tree, the dragons, the griffons, the lakes, the oceans, the endless sediments where age-old butterflies are imprisoned, the mountains disappearing into their own glaciers, pebble after pebble, second after second, until the liquid magma sun, all things singing the praises of their creator — but faith rejects me, even in the depths of night. Aside from my satori of the lifeguard’s flip-flops in the mosque of Süleyman the Magnificent, no ladder to watch the angels climbing, no cave to sleep in for two hundred years, well guarded by a dog, near Ephesus; only Sarah found, in other grottos, the energy of tradition and its path to enlightenment. Her long path toward Buddhism began with a scholarly interest, with the discovery, in Masudi’s Golden Prairies, of the story of Budasaf, when she was working on the idea of the marvelous at the beginning of her career: her journey to the East crossed classical Islam, Christianity, and even the mysterious Sabeans of the Koran, whom Masudi, from the depths of his eighth century, thought were inspired by that same Budasaf, the first Muslim image of the Buddha whom he associates with Hermes the Wise. She patiently reconstituted the transformations of these stories, up to their Christian counterpart, the life of the saints Barlaam and Josaphat, the Syrian version of the story of the bodhisattva and his path toward awakening; she developed a passion for the life of Prince Siddhartha Gautama himself, the Buddha of our era, and his teachings. I know she has love for the Buddha and for the Tibetan tradition whose meditation practices she has adopted, for the characters of Marpa the Translator and his disciple Milarepa, the black magician who succeeded, around the year 1100, by bending himself to the terrifying discipline imposed by his master, at attaining enlightenment within a single lifetime, which makes all aspirants to awakening dream — including Sarah. She soon abandoned colonial opium to concentrate on the Buddha; she became enthusiastic about the exploration of Tibet, about the scholars, missionaries and adventurers who, in modern times, revealed Tibetan Buddhism to Europe before, in the 1960s, great Tibetan teachers settled in the four corners of the West and themselves began transmitting spiritual energy. Like an annoyed gardener who, thinking he’s destroying a weed, ends up disseminating the seeds to the four winds, China, by occupying Tibet, burning down the monasteries and sending countless monks into exile, spread Tibetan Buddhism throughout the world.
Even to Leopoldstadt: emerging from our visit to the Museum of Crime, museum of cut-up women, executioners, and brothels, in one of those little streets where Vienna wavers between low houses, nineteenth-century buildings, and modern apartment houses, a stone’s throw from the Carmelite market, as I was looking at my feet, so as to avoid looking at her too much, and as she was thinking out loud about the Viennese soul, crime, and death, Sarah stopped suddenly and said, Look, a Buddhist center! And she began reading the programs in the window, waxing ecstatic over the names of the Tibetan Rinpoches who sponsored this gompa in exile — she was surprised that this community belonged to the same Tibetan school as she did, red or yellow hats, I forget, I never bothered to remember the color of the hat or the names of the great Tulkus she reveres, but I was happy at the auspiciousness she saw in this encounter, the bright glints in her eyes and her smile, even secretly envisaging that she might, perhaps, someday, make this center in Leopoldstadt her new cave — there were many auspicious signs that day, a strange mixture of our shared past: two streets lower down, we encountered Hammer-Purgstall Street; I had forgotten (if I had ever known it) that a street in Vienna was named after the old Orientalist. The plaque mentioned him as “founder of the Academy of Sciences,” and it’s certainly this quality, more than his passion for Oriental texts, that had earned him this distinction. The Hainfeld conference was revolving in my head as Sarah (black trousers, red turtleneck sweater, black coat under her flamboyant locks) kept talking about fate. A mixture of erotic images, memories of Tehran and Hammer-Purgstall’s castle in Styria was devouring me, I took her arm and, so as not to leave the neighborhood right away, not to cross the canal again, I veered off toward the Taborstrasse.
In the pastry shop where we stopped, a swanky establishment with a neo-Baroque décor, Sarah was talking about missionaries and I felt, as she was talking about Huc the Lazarist from Montauban, as if this ocean of words had no other aim than to hide her embarrassment; even though the story of this Father Huc — so fascinated by his trip to Lhasa and his debates with Buddhist monks that during the next twenty years he dreamed of returning there — was more or less interesting, I had trouble
giving it the necessary attention. Everywhere I saw the ruins of our failed relationship, the painful impossibility of rediscovering the same tempo, the same melody, and then, as she was wearing herself out inculcating me in the rudiments of philosophy, the Buddha, the Dharma, the Sangha, while drinking her tea, I couldn’t help but miss those blue-veined hands wrapped around her cup, those lips painted with the same red as her sweater that left a slight stain on the porcelain, her carotid beating under the angle of her face, and I was sure that the only thing that united us now, beyond the memories melted around us like stained snow, was this shared embarrassment, this awkward chatter that sought only to fill the silence of our confusion. Tehran had disappeared. The complicity of bodies had vanished. The complicity of souls was in the process of disappearing. This second visit to Vienna was opening up a long winter that the third visit only confirmed — she wanted to work on Vienna as Porta Orientis and didn’t even sleep at my place, which, at bottom, kept me from languishing, motionless and solitary in my bed, hoping all night she would come join me; I could hear the pages of her book turning, then could see her lamp go out, under my door, and I would listen for a long time to her breathing, only renouncing at dawn the hope that she would appear against the light on the threshold to my bedroom, even just for a kiss on my forehead, which would have chased away the monsters of darkness.
Sarah didn’t know that Leopoldstadt, where this pastry shop was, had been the headquarters of Jewish life in Vienna in the nineteenth century, with the greatest temples in the city, including the magnificent, they say, Turkish synagogue in the Moorish style — all those buildings were destroyed in 1938, I explained, and all that was left were commemorative plaques and a few images of the time. Near here Schoenberg, Schnitzler, and Freud had grown up — the names that came to my mind, among so many others, like the name of a school friend, my only Jewish friend in Vienna: his name was Seth, but his first name was actually Septimus, since he was the seventh and final child of a very kind couple of professors from Galicia. His parents were not religious: as a cultural education, they forced their son to cross the entire city two afternoons a week to Leopoldstadt to take lessons in Yiddish literature from an old Lithuanian master who had miraculously escaped catastrophe and whom the storms of the twentieth century had finally deposited in the Taborstrasse. These teachings were a real chore for Septimus; they consisted, between studies of eighteenth-century grammarians and dialectical subtleties, of reading pages and pages of Isaac Bashevis Singer and commenting on them. One day my friend complained to his master:
Compass Page 41
