In Search of the Lost Orient, page 5
In France, the value of regionalism, which had traditionally been defended on the Right, became a cause of the Left, with various liberation fronts springing up in Brittany and the Occitan and Basque regions in the southwest. Attending a Breton fest-noz and treading the soil of the Larzac plateau became all-important. The cause of the Irish Republican Army was supported in spirit and in spirits with Irish music, Guinness, and whiskey (I confess to doing my part). Less ruddily celebrated, but sometimes present at a stray table during meetings, were Kurds, and even South Arabians and Baluchi people (three favorites of Viennot, who would be killed in Baluchistan in 1974). The cry of the day was “Long live the just fight of the ____ people!” (and you could fill in the blank with your personal favorite). Viennot spoke fluent Arabic. He had returned from Dhofar, a place I’d never heard of niched between Yemen and the Sultanate of Oman where a Marxist-Leninist guerilla movement was taking place (one that, he claimed, was particularly committed to women’s liberation) and where people spoke a mysterious language (studied by Rodinson)—Modern South Arabic. (I wasn’t nearly done with my encounters with mysterious languages, the first being my mother tongue, of course.) With two friends, Philippe Roger, the future director of the journal Critique, and Jean-Marie Bouissou, who would become the Japan specialist at CERI (Centre de recherches internationales), we decided to go there while pretending that our destination was Yemen.
So you encounter a guerilla group there?
No, but we do have a bizarre experience. France had no diplomatic relations with North Yemen, and with South Yemen relations were tense—France’s official representative there being a mere chargé d’affaires. One had to obtain the proper visa in London, which naturally we did by hitch-hiking both ways. But hitch-hiking to Yemen was not possible. A single airline, the Brothers Air Services Co. (BASCO), offered weekly flights between Brussels and Aden with DC-6 propeller planes from the 1950s. Once in Aden, one had to deal with “revolutionary” Yemeni authorities to continue on to Dhofar. It was there that I fabricated my first false papers. We had asked an Algerian friend to compose for us a letter in Arabic that would declare us to be a delegation sent by UNEF (Union nationale des étudiants de France, France’s leftist student union) to show the solidarity of the students of France with the democratic revolution of Yemen. We then got our letter signed by the president of UNEF, to whom we said it was a simple statement certifying that we were up to date with our union dues payments. He signed and added several rubber stamps. Ah, so important those stamps!
What we were attempting was obviously a bit dodgy, and I’m not sure the Yemeni officials actually believed our story. After a night in prison and a week of tramping tirelessly from ministry to ministry (I had gotten good at that), we obtained permission to travel to Dhofar thanks to a document signed, who knows why, by the Ministry of Health. Then comes a surprise turn of events: the French embassy invites us to their offices to drink champagne while nudging us to find out how we obtained our letter of transit and also offering us a nice pair of binoculars in case we happen to find ourselves in the vicinity of a mysterious Soviet naval base. We turned down the binoculars, but not the champagne.
Afterward, we left Aden for al-Mukalla with twenty or so other travelers, all seated on the roof of a tanker truck. There was no road, so the truck drove along the beach at low tide, since the wet sand was firm enough to support its weight. At high tide, we slept under the truck until the tide was low enough again. But we were stopped before arriving at the Dhofar border with no possibility of continuing on. It wasn’t until ten years later that I discovered why: the British had sent Baluchi commandos serving under SAS officers to the tip of the border, and they had destroyed the convoy that preceded ours and were waiting to ambush the next one—that is, us. Later I met the commanding officer of that battalion, a certain Dennys Galway. In 1980 he was sent by British services to Peshawar to do the same thing as me—support the Mujahideen. We traded stories over drinks.
So in Yemen we were blocked from going on to Dhofar, but we got to visit Hadramaout and on the way passed through the village of Osama bin Laden’s father. After returning to Aden, we traveled to North Yemen, where we had other adventures. I should underscore that we were the first French citizens to arrive by that route since the civil war, even though there were other French people living there. No sooner had we crossed the border than the radio announced France’s diplomatic recognition of the Yemen Arab Republic. So even with our dusty backpacks, jeans, and twenty-year-old faces, people had taken us for the official French delegation!
We were very well received. We were taken to Sanaa, the capital, and government officials were surprised when we refused to stay at the hotel where they had reserved a room for us—we had no money to pay for it. Instead, we went to a sort of dormitory housing tribal combatants that had just come down from the mountain to test the armistice. Before going to sleep, each fighter placed his grenades and revolver under his pillow, his Kalashnikov at the foot of the bed and daggers at his side. In fact, the next day one of them stabbed a republican soldier in the street right in front of us because the soldier was supposedly looking at him funny. An aesthetic detail: Yemeni daggers hang conspicuously right over the crotch inside ornate silver sheaths. Two days later, an official appeared to escort us to our first meeting with the president of the republic. We had not dropped our pretense of being diplomats, while at the same time playing naïve and innocent. But the president immediately understood what was going on and found it all rather amusing. In fact, he was a good sport in fact and let us borrow his car for three days of tourism that allowed us to visit the palace, where a fallen imam was chewing his khat atop the highest tower, watching the sun set between the droplets of a water fountain. But his wives were no longer there.
But once again you had to return home.
Yes, but when we showed up at the BASCO counter to fly to Brussels, the prices had changed! The only inexpensive airline ticket we found was for Bombay, which would mean a slight detour via India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran, et cetera. Since we only had about fifty dollars each and a bottle of whiskey, which we ended up selling for three times its price in India, we flew to Bombay and took third-class trains and buses from Bombay to Istanbul. So I was back on the hippy highway I knew well. In Istanbul a got swindled out of ten dollars that I was supposed to exchange, and my punishment was to hitchhike back alone—three people hitchhiking together being impossible. I had all of five dollars in my pocket. On the road leaving the city, a young fellow driving a French car pulled over. He told me he was a graduate of HEC (Hautes études commerciales, France’s leading business school) and was returning from an internship at a Lebanese bank. What’s more, he had decided to blow his pay by eating in restaurants every day, and if possible with a guest. Since those were his conditions for getting a ride, I accepted, and we had a pleasant journey back to France and even picked up Philippe and Jean-Marie along the way in Ljubljana and Trieste. All’s well that ends well.
So no stay in Afghanistan that year?
No, just a quick drive-by between Pakistan and Iran. I returned the following year, in 1971, this time with Philippe Roger and a female friend, because I wanted to travel north of Nuristan toward the Pamirs. We trekked across on foot after once again negotiating to obtain the magic letter that allowed us to pass into the forbidden zone. This was trekking before that word and activity became popular. We had two opium-addicted Ishmaels for guides, a burro to carry our backpacks, and got altitude sickness at fourteen thousand feet, where the summer pastures and shepherds’ huts of the Nuristani were located. After descending the pass of Diwana Baba (Crazy Grandfather), I arrived again in Barg-i Matal, with its little fortress, its goat thieves, the Kunar River, and the forests of pines and evergreen oaks.
Chapter 5
RETURN TO THE FOLD
So, back to your studies?
Yes. In Paris I continued my studies to prepare for the agrégation in philosophy which I succeeded in passing in 1972, the same year I got my degree in Persian from Langues orientales.1 I was twenty-two. Unlike a cohort of students in the class just below mine, I agreed to apply myself to passing the agrégation, even with the social demotion it would signify by being assigned to teach at a high school—and in the provinces to boot. Some of my classmates looked on that as such a waste. With the exception of a few brilliant individuals, such as Bernard-Henri Lévy or Alexandre Adler, who found other avenues to pursue their careers, most of my peers succeeded in getting out of high school teaching after a year or two and were reassigned to posts as prépa teachers in khâgne or hypokhâgne, or else they went abroad and came back later when they could land a position at a university. Then there were those, like Olivier and Jean Rolin, who established themselves, in their case by writing novels. There were also those who became leaders of missions or secretaries at the National Assembly or the Senate—a demanding but well-paid job that allows one to have several free months off every year. Still others, rather than teach high school, took the concours to enter the ENA (École nationale d’administration), France’s national school of administration. I encountered some of them later at the Foreign Affairs Ministry. In sum, a new social space was emerging, more fluid and less of a pyramid, but probably based more on meeting so-and-so, networks, and opportunities, and always on the selective grandes écoles (France’s elite power schools) as launch pad.
After the agrégation, you returned to Afghanistan.
No, not Afghanistan. I left this time with a car of my own, a used Renault 4L, and a girlfriend. In Belgrade we noticed that her passport had just expired, so I took out a nice pen and with one sure-handed gesture I changed a two into a three, which instantly gave her an extra year—1973 instead of 1972. We decided to do a big Middle Eastern tour: Iran, Iraq, Jordan—but we got off track in Iraq and ended up in Syria and then in Lebanon. After passing the written portion of the agrégation, I left Paris this time after, and not before, taking the oral exams; but I was again on the road when I finally learned from a letter waiting for me in Istanbul that I had succeeded and ranked fairly well at that. When I got back to Paris at the end of September and stopped in at the Cité universitaire, the concierge informed me that the Education Ministry was trying to locate me and had sent several official telegrams (brown instead of blue envelopes) requesting I appear immediately. While wondering what this summons was all about, I did what I was told and went directly to the ministry in my jeans. Today, of course, jeans can be worn on practically any occasion, but at the time it was not considered correct. At the reception desk, I was informed that the general inspector, Madame Dina Dreyfus, wanted to see me immediately.
She was an austere, distinguished woman dressed in black and wearing a pearl necklace. She had been the first wife of Claude Lévi-Strauss. She said to me in effect, “Sir, you deserted your post. You were to begin as teacher-in-training on September 1 in a class under your responsibility at the technical lycée in Puteaux. But as you did not present yourself at your assigned school, you may be barred from l’Éducation nationale and even from the entire civil service. I am calling the director of your school.” And as soon as she had him on the line, she continued in the same vein: “Monsieur le proviseur, I have in my office the philosophy professor who did not show up to begin his teaching.” The principal replied, “What philosophy professor?” Madame Dreyfus: “The one preassigned to the post?” The principal: “What post?” In fact, he had no idea that philosophy had been added to the curriculum in the last year at technical high schools! Dina Dreyfus hung up in a huff. “Philosophy doesn’t exist!” she exclaimed. “Right then, so you’ll be pardoned this time, but you start tomorrow.”
And that’s what I did, finding myself in front of a mixed class the very next day—a discovery for me. Several students were twenty years old, as is often the case in technical high schools, and I was only twenty-three myself. I spent one year at that school.
So now that you were a young professor, you had a salary and could live independently?
Yes, and it was during that year that I finally got to enjoy the festive side of May ’68—in a commune. It was more than an apartment share but a real ’68-style communauté of a dozen people sharing daily life and chores together. In truth, the festive side also came with its share of personality conflicts and a thousand little material problems, but it was an excellent experience. We lived in a large, beautiful, but hardly luxurious house in rue Montbauron in Versailles, not far from the château. We benefited from the real estate speculation going on at that time—owners either left their properties empty or rented to people like us.
Of course, the arrangement ended badly because we didn’t cooperate when we were asked to leave. So they cut off the water, broke the locks, removed tiles from the roof and in November we were forced to leave—in the rain. I was able to find refuge in the home of my father’s cousin, who lived with his daughters in the house of Monsignor Jean Calvet, their great uncle, who was the dean of the theology faculty of the Institut Catholique de Paris until 1945. Being the only male in the house, I was gently banished to Calvet’s private chapel adjoining his library, where I was able to discover Catholic literature that had not been a part of my upbringing. Monsignor Calvet recounts in his memoirs (he died in 1965) that at the beginning of the twentieth century he was one of the first priests authorized by Church officials to pursue a degree in philosophy at a public university—up until then boycotted by the Church. He also mentions that the attending professor for his oral exam at Albi was none other than Jean Jaurès! He wore his soutane to the exam, and all went well it seems. However, fifty pages later, he relates in dispassionate factual language that his secretary, Raoul Villain, assassinated Jean Jaurès on July 31, 1914, “in a fit of madness.” I can’t help thinking that Monsignor Calvet never got over a slight ache of resentment that started with that secular oral exam in philosophy.
So that was the end of your commune experience?
No, I later had another similar living arrangement because I enjoyed it; but it again finished badly, this time because of an incident involving drugs. It was the early ’70s, remember, and the start of hard drugs. Another factor was that I was assigned to Dreux, where a post had become vacant at the technical high school when my predecessor decided to become a sculptor. With two friends I set off to check out the town, and I liked it right away. The school was in the center, and the students were mostly women, which was not unpleasant at all, nor was the fact that it was a technical lycée. In truth, another motive for beginning this self-imposed exile in Dreux was the drug story I mentioned, which the investigative police at the Quai des Orfèvres also got wind of. The officer in charge of questioning us quickly understood that I had almost nothing to do with the matter, but he nevertheless advised me to make myself scarce. I decided to act on his suggestion by accepting this move to the countryside.
And so you settle in Dreux?
I rented a small house from a farmhand in Gironville, a village about ten miles from Dreux. It had no central heating and no telephone (it took two years to get a line installed at that time), but it did have a fireplace, a shower, and a vegetable garden. In short, I’d become the country mouse, just like I’d been told to do, and I soon became acquainted with three other farmhands and some Turkish immigrants who worked a neighboring farm, one of whom would play a decisive role in my life twenty years later. My two female friends whom I’d first gone to Dreux with became my roommates, and we spent a year there. I would go teach my classes at the technical lycée while they went off to the Paris flea markets in the winter and worked locally as additional farmhands in the summer.
Were you in touch with your parents during these years when you entered the working world?
I did not have close relations with my parents at that time. My father was pleased that I had a job, but he was still very upset that I had gone off to Afghanistan and screwed up my chance to get into the École normale. But we didn’t break off all communication. I still have some letters—sent or received—that took three months to travel between Kabul and Paris. In fact, my journey from La Rochelle to Louis-le-Grand at age eighteen constituted my break with my family home. I traveled to Paris alone—it was too costly for my parents to make the journey with me. My things were shipped by train in a metal trunk weighing fifty-seven kilos and delivered directly to Louis-le-Grand. I was granted permission to take a taxi from Austerlitz station, which was the end of the line when one arrived from La Rochelle. I arrived on a Sunday afternoon at Louis-le-Grand with my boarding assignment number: 296. I climbed the stairs to the sleeping quarters—a vast, unattractive space with bars on the windows and forty beds, with no partition walls dividing them except for the box of the dorm master situated in the middle. There was another boarder present at the other end of the room. We walked toward each other, and he stuck out his hand and introduced himself: “____, first-place finisher in the general concours of translation into Latin.” Soon afterward, I was able to move to the dorm of the upperclassmen, where each boarder had his own box.
