“Master, would it be possible to change authors, even just once?”
The master must have had a sense of humor, for Septimus was inflicted, as punishment, the task of memorizing a very long short story by Israel Joshua Singer, big brother of the former; I can see him again reciting that story of betrayal for hours on end, until he knew it by heart. His Roman first name, his open friendliness, and his classes on Yiddish culture made him an exceptional being in my eyes. Septimus Leibowitz later became one of the greatest historians of Yiddishland before the Destruction, pulling, in long monographs, an entire material and linguistic world out of oblivion. It’s been too long since I’ve seen him, even though our offices are less than two hundred meters away from each other, in one of the courtyards of that miraculous campus of the University of Vienna that the whole world envies — during her last visit Sarah thought our cortile, which we share with art historians, was absolutely magnificent: she gushed over our patio, with its two big porticos and the bench where she waited quietly, book in hand, for me to finish my class. I hoped, bringing to an end my lecture on Debussy’s Pagodes, that she hadn’t gotten lost and had followed my directions to find our porte-cochère in the Garnisongasse; I couldn’t help but look out the window every five minutes, so much so that the students must have been wondering what meteorological bug had bitten me, to search the Viennese sky so anxiously, which moreover was of an entirely customary gray. At the end of the seminar I devoured the stairs four at a time, then tried to resume a normal gait as I reached the ground floor; she was reading calmly on the bench, a big orange scarf around her shoulders. Since early that morning, I had been in doubt: should I show her around the department? I wavered between my childlike pride at showing her my office, the library, the classrooms, and the shame that would seize me if we met colleagues, especially female ones: how to introduce her? Sarah, a friend, and that’s it, everyone has friends. Except no one had ever seen me in this department with anyone other than honorable colleagues or my mother, and even then, very rarely. Exactly, maybe it’s time for that to change, I thought. To come with a world-renowned star of research, a charismatic woman, that’s something that would polish up my image, I thought. But maybe not, I thought. Maybe they’d think I want to cause a sensation, with this sublime redhead with the orange scarf. And at bottom, did I really want to fritter away a precious asset in hallway conversations? Sarah’s staying too short a time to waste it with colleagues who might find her to their taste. Already she isn’t sleeping at my place, with the doubtful excuse of taking advantage of God knows what luxury hotel, so I shouldn’t abandon her to the hands of smutty professors or jealous harpies.
Sarah was immersed in an enormous paperback and was smiling; she was smiling at the book. The day before I had found her in a café in the center of town, we’d strolled along the Graben, but just as a carpenter’s plane takes a while to lay bare the warmth of wood under an old varnish, seeing her there, absorbed in her reading, her scarf around her shoulders, in this familiar, quotidian setting, I was submerged in an immense wave of melancholy, movement of water and salt, tenderness and nostalgia. She was forty-five and could pass for a student. A dark comb held back her hair, a silver fibula shone on her shawl. She wasn’t wearing make-up. She had a childlike joy on her face.
Finally she noticed I was watching her, got up, closed her book. Did I rush over to her, did I cover her with kisses until she disappeared into me, no, not at all. I kissed her clumsily on the cheek, from afar.
“So, you’ve seen it, it’s not bad here, is it?”
“How are you? Did your lecture go well? This place is magnificent, really, what a wonder of a campus!”
I explained to her that this immense ensemble used to be the general hospital of Vienna, founded in the eighteenth century, enlarged throughout the nineteenth, and donated to scholarship just a few years ago. I showed her around the site — the big square, the bookshops; the former Jewish oratory of the hospital (healing for souls) which today is a monument to the victims of Nazism, a small dome-shaped construction reminiscent of the mausoleums of saints in Syrian villages. Sarah kept repeating “What a beautiful university.” “Another kind of monastery,” I replied, which made her smile. Crossing the successive courtyards we arrived at the wide, clumsy, cracked round brick tower of the former asylum for the mad, which with its five floors dominates a little park where a group of students, sitting in the grass despite the threatening weather, were talking and eating sandwiches. The long, very narrow windows, the graffiti on the façade, and the fencing round an endless renovation worksite gave the building an absolutely sinister air — perhaps because I knew what sorts of horrors the Narrenturm contained, the Museum of Pathological Anatomy, a jumble of jars of formaldehyde full of atrocious tumors, congenital malformations, bicephalous creatures, deformed fetuses, syphilitic chancres, and bladder stones in rooms with peeling paint, dusty wardrobes, uneven floors where you stumble over missing tiles, guarded by white-smocked medics who make you wonder if, for fun, they get drunk on the alcohol from the medical preparations, one day testing the juice of a phallus afflicted with gigantism and the next that of a megalocephalous embryo, naively hoping to acquire their symbolic properties. All the horror of nature in its pure state. The pain of dead bodies replaced that of insane minds and the only shouts you hear there, these days, are the screams of terror of a few tourists who walk through these circles of affliction that are as bad as those of Hell.
Sarah took pity on me: my description was enough for her, she didn’t insist (a sign, I naively thought, that her Buddhist practice had calmed down her passion for horrors) on visiting that immense dump of medicine from long ago. We sat down on a bench not far from the students; fortunately Sarah couldn’t understand the subject of their conversation, not very scholarly. She was dreaming out loud, she talked about that Narrenturm, compared it to the big novel she was reading: it’s the tower of Don Quixote, she said. The Tower of the Mad. Don Quixote is the first Arabic novel, you know. The first European novel and the first Arabic novel, look, Cervantes attributes it to Sayyid Hamid Ibn al-Ayyil, which he writes as Cide Hamete Benengeli. The first great madman in literature appears from the pen of a Mudejar historian from La Mancha. They should take over that tower and make it into a museum of madness, which would begin with the Eastern saints mad for Christ, the Don Quixotes, and would include quite a few Orientalists. A museum of integration and bastardy.
“They could even offer an apartment to our friend Bilger, on the top floor, with windows to be able to observe him.”
“How mean you can be. No, on the top floor there would be the Arabic original of Quixote, written 240 years later, The Life and Adventures of Fariac, by Faris al-Shidyaq.”
She continued her explorations of the lands of dream. But she was probably right, that might not be a bad idea, a museum for the other in the self in the Tower of the Mad, both an homage to and an exploration of otherness. A vertiginous museum, as vertiginous as that round asylum with cells overflowing with the debris of corpses and deadly juices worthy of her article on Sarawak — how long has she been there, a few months at most, when was the last email she sent me,
Dearest Franz,
Soon I’ll leave Darjeeling.
A week ago, my teacher spoke to me, after the teachings. I should return to the world, he said. He thinks my place is not here. It’s not a punishment, he said. It’s hard to admit. You know me, I feel wounded and discouraged. It’s pride speaking, I know that. I feel as if I’m a child who’s been unfairly scolded, and I suffer from seeing how powerful my ego is. As if, in disappointment, everything I’ve learned here disappears. Suffering, dukkha, is the strongest thing. The prospect of going back to Europe — that is, Paris — exhausts me in advance. I’ve been tentatively offered a post in Calcutta at the French School of the Far East. Nothing official, just an associate researcher, but at least that gives me a starting point. Some new territories. Working on India would
fascinate me — on the representations of India in Europe, on images of Europe in India. On the influence of Indian thought in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. On Christian missionaries in India. Just as I’ve done for two years on Buddhism. Of course none of that puts bread on the table, but I could possibly find a few classes to give here and there. Life is so easy in India. Or so hard.
I can imagine your reaction (I can hear your earnest, sure-of-yourself tone): Sarah, you’re running away. No, you’d say: you’re fleeing. The Art of Flight. After all these years, I don’t have many attachments in France — a few colleagues, two or three old high school friends whom I haven’t seen in ten years. My parents. Sometimes I imagine myself going back to their apartment, my room as a teenager, next to Samuel’s full of relics, and I tremble. The few months I spent there after his death, immersed in colonial opium, still send shivers up my spine. My teacher is the person who knows me better than anyone, and he no doubt is right: a monastery is not a place to hide. Nonattachment is not a flight. At least that’s what I understood. Yet, even if I think about it deeply, I have trouble seeing the difference . . . This command is so brutal to me that it’s incomprehensible.
With love, I’ll write more very soon,
S.
P.S. Upon rereading this letter I see only the confusion of my own emotions, the product of my pride. What an image you’ll have of me! I don’t know why I write all this to you — or rather, yes, I do know. Forgive me.
Since last spring, no other signs of life despite my many letters, as usual — I kept her up to date on my slightest actions and thoughts, my musical investigations; I worried about her health without bothering her with the difficulties of mine, my countless appointments with Dr. Kraus (“Ah, Dr. Ritter, happy to see you here. When you’re cured or dead I’ll be terribly bored”) to find sleep and reason, and finally I grew weary. Silence comes after everything. Everything is enclosed in silence. Everything is extinguished there, or falls asleep there.
Until the new installment of her thoughts on symbolic cannibalism I received yesterday morning. The wine of the dead of Sarawak. She compares this practice to a medieval legend, a tragic love poem, which first appears in Thomas of Britain’s Roman de Tristan — Iseult sighs for Tristan, and from her sadness a somber song is born, which she sings to her ladies in waiting; this lyric lay tells of the fate of Guirun, surprised by a ruse of his beloved’s husband, and killed immediately. The husband then removes Guirun’s heart, and makes the woman Guirun loved eat it. This story is then transposed many times; many women condemned to swallowing their lovers’ hearts, in terrifying banquets. The life of the troubadour Guillem de Cabestan ends in this way, with him killed and his mistress forced to devour his heart, before she leaps out of her tower window. Sometimes the most extreme violence has unsuspected consequences; it allows the lovers to be inside each other once and for all, to overcome the abyss that separates self from other. Love is realized in death, Sarah argues, which is very sad. I wonder which is the least enviable role, the eaten or the eater, despite all the culinary precautions medieval tales surround themselves with to describe the horrible recipe of the heart in love.
Look, the night is beginning to turn light. I can hear a few birds. Obviously I’m starting to be sleepy. My eyes are closing. I didn’t correct that paper, but I had promised that student —
Dearest Franz,
Forgive me for not sending you news earlier — it’s been so long since I wrote to you that I don’t know anymore how to break this silence; so I sent you that article — I did well.
I’ve been in Sarawak since early summer, after a brief stay in Calcutta (an even crazier city than you can imagine) and Java, where I met the ghosts of Rimbaud and Segalen. In Sarawak I knew nothing and no one other than the saga of the Brooke family, and it’s good sometimes to abandon yourself to novelty and discovery. I followed a very nice anthropologist into the forest, she’s the one who put me on the trail (if I can put it that way) of the wine of the dead and let me spend some time with the Berawans.
How are you? You can’t imagine how happy your (short) email made me. I’ve thought a lot about Damascus and Tehran, these last few days. About time passing. I pictured my article in a canvas sack in the bottom of a boat, then on board a train, in a bicyclist’s saddlebag, in your mailbox, and finally in your hands. Quite a journey for a few pages.
Tell me a little about yourself . . .
With much love, soon I hope,
Sarah
Franz Ritter wrote:
Dearest, I received your offprint yesterday morning, I didn’t know they were still printing those . . . Thank you very much, but how horrible, that wine of the dead! I’m worried, all of a sudden. Are you doing well? What are you doing in Sarawak? Here it’s everything as usual. The Christmas market has just opened in the middle of the university. Atrocious odors of mulled wine and sausages. Do you plan on coming back through Europe soon?
Send me news.
Much love.
Franz
The heart hasn’t been eaten, it’s still beating — of course she doesn’t realize I’m also sitting in front of the screen. Reply. But is she doing well? What’s this story of the Berawans, I was so worried I couldn’t get any sleep. Nothing much new in my old city. How long is she staying in Sarawak? Lie: what a coincidence, I’d just gotten up when her email arrived. Love, sign and send quickly, so as not to give her the possibility of setting off for God knows what mysterious lands.
And wait.
And wait. No, I can’t stay here rereading over and over her emails waiting for
Franz!
It’s strange and wonderful to know you’re there, on the other side of the world, and to think that these emails travel much faster than the sun. I feel as if you’re listening to me.
You tell me my article on the Berawans of Sarawak worries you — I’m happy you’re thinking of me; in fact I don’t feel so great, I’m a little sad, right now. But that has nothing to do with Sarawak, it’s the hazards of the calendar: suddenly the day comes round again and I plunge into commemoration — then everything is slightly tinged with mourning, despite myself, and this little fog takes a few days to dissipate.
As you read, the Berawans place the bodies of their dead in earthen jars on the verandas of “longhouses,” those collective habitations equivalent to our villages where up to a hundred families can live. They let the corpse decompose. The liquid from the decomposition flows through a hollow bamboo placed at the bottom of the jar. Like for rice wine. They wait for this life to stop flowing from the body to declare it dead. Death, for them, is a long process, not a single instant. This liquid residue from putrefaction is a sign of the life that’s still present. A fluid, tangible, drinkable life.
Beyond the horror that this tradition might provoke in us, there is a great beauty in this custom. It’s death that escapes from the body, not just life. Both together, always. It’s not just a symbolic cannibalism, like that of Dik el-Jinn the Mad from love who got drunk from the cup shaped from the ashes of his passion. It’s a cosmogony.
Life is a long meditation on death.
Remember the Death of Isolde, which you spoke to me about at such length? You heard in that a total love, of which Wagner himself wasn’t aware. A moment of love, of union, of unity with the All, unity between the Eastern enlightened ones and Western darkness, between text and music, between voice and orchestra. As for me, I hear in it the expression of compassion, karuna. Not just Eros seeking eternity. Music as the “universal expression of the suffering of the world,” said Nietzsche. This Isolde loves, at the instant of her death, so much, that she loves the entire world. Flesh allied with spirit. It’s a fragile instant. It contains the seed for its own destruction. Every work contains the seeds of its own destruction. Like us. We are equal neither to love nor to death. For that we need enlightenment, awareness. Otherwise we just make corpse juice, ev
erything that goes out of us is nothing but an elixir of suffering.
I miss you. I miss laughter. A little lightness. I’d very much like to be near you. I’ve had enough of travel. No, that’s not true — I’ll never have enough of travel, but I’ve understood something, maybe along with Pessoa:
They say that the good Khayyam rests
In Nishapur among the fragrant roses
But it’s not Khayyam who lies there,
It’s here he is, he is our roses.
I think I can guess now what my teacher meant to tell me, in Darjeeling, when he recommended that I leave. The world needs integration, diasporas. Europe is no longer my continent, so I can go back to it. Be part of the networks that intersect there, explore it as a stranger. Bring something to it. Give, in my turn, and bring to light the gift of diversity.
I’ll come to Vienna for a little, what do you think of that? I’ll come find you at the university, I’ll sit on the bench in the pretty courtyard, I’ll wait for you, looking by turns at the light from your office and the readers in the library; a teacher will have left the window of his lecture room open; music will fill the patio, and I will have, like the last time, the sensation of being in a friendly, reassuring world, of pleasure and knowledge. I’ll laugh in advance at your sullen surprise of seeing me there, you’ll say, “You could have warned me, all the same,” and you’ll have that tender, half-embarrassed gesture, a little stilted, that makes you stick your chest toward me to kiss me while stepping back a little, hands behind your back. I like these hesitations very much, they remind me of Aleppo, Palmyra, and especially Tehran, they’re sweet and tender.
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