Omer Pasha Latas Page 14

  The tailor had been married once before. And it was a sore point for him, because his wife had left him, as impotent, just a week after the wedding. Now he listened with fear and alarm to the kavedžibaša talking about marriage, watching him with his bloodless, watery, blue eyes.

  “Ah, what’s the use!” said the tailor with a sigh.

  “What do you mean ‘what’s the use’? What’s not good about it, I ask you. A good wife is worth a fortune, you foolish man!”

  “What’ll I do with her?” the tailor said again quietly and thoughtfully. He evidently liked what Ahmet Aga most loathed: talking generally and broadly about such things.

  “Whatever you like! As soon as you put down your needle, you wash your hands, eat your dinner and get on top of your wife.”

  The tailor hung his head sadly.

  “You can talk with her as well,” the kavedžibaša corrected himself. “You talk, then she talks, you have a conversation, your stomachs full. You can . . . but why should I go on, my good man? You can do what you like, you can beat her like a drum, if that’s what you really want. Since she’s yours! There!”

  Two of Ahmet Aga’s assistants had come in, but, caught up in his task, he had not noticed them. One of them joined in the conversation boldly and mischievously, sighing artificially.

  “A beautiful woman, that’s the best thing! Ah, beauty!”

  “‘Beauty, beauty!’ Beauty passes.”

  The tailor mumbled this to himself, shaking his head, like a man who enjoyed philosophizing about women as much as he was afraid of them and of marriage.

  “All right, beauty passes, let’s say it does, but you still have your wife.”

  The tailor looked blankly around him, not understanding. The lads had trouble suppressing their laughter.

  It was only then that the kavedžibaša noticed and drove them both out brusquely.

  “Come, come, my good man, pay no attention to those wastrels, there’s nothing to consider. Let’s call the musicians and start making the halva tomorrow. I want to do this for you, I like you. That’s it!”

  The tailor went out, stepping uncertainly, while Ahmet Aga waved him away with both hands, irritated at expending so many words on this wretched little tailor, angry with himself and the whole world, but mostly with “that business,” the source of all these cares and troubles.

  But Ahmet Aga completed this task too, like everything else. He married the tailor off and even gave him a little dowry that he haggled over for a long time and that made him very angry. But his anger was far greater when, just ten days after the wedding, the bride appeared, veiled, complaining in a whisper that he had given her a husband who was less of a man “than I am myself.” Ahmet Aga was furious, but he controlled himself and, also whispering, threatened that there would be hell to pay if she ever had the nerve to come here to disturb him with that business again, and he drove her out, hissing that he was not a god to make “husbands to measure.” But, still, the next day he sent her a three-pound case of good Austrian sugar. It took him several days, preoccupied with other tasks, to put her out if his mind. But the thought occasionally returned, like a vague displeasure, that the woman might well appear again one day, with who knows what complaints and demands. She was capable of anything.

  But there were worse cases and more difficult scenes that could not be so easily brushed aside and hidden from the world, nor so easily made light of. Yet, in the end, Ahmet Aga resolved these too, like all the others, with kindness or force, zealously, ruthlessly and completely.

  One such difficult case had come his way recently, a great deal of work for Ahmet Aga, and word of it spread beyond the residence.

  One of the seraskier’s “admirers” had found a fourteen-year-old girl for him in Brod. The girl had moved from Slavonski Brod, where she lived with her widowed mother and stepfather, to Bosanski Brod to stay with some relatives. It was here that the admirer had managed to persuade her to go into Omer Pasha’s service, where she would “be with children.” Restless and dissatisfied with her family situation, the child agreed and was brought to Sarajevo, to the pasha’s harem and his ambiguous service.

  Ahmet Aga was decisively opposed to such outside intermediaries. He referred to them, in all seriousness, as scoundrels, maintaining that they did his pasha a disservice and only made difficulties, which he then had to disentangle and resolve. So it was this time too. Less than two weeks had passed when the little girl’s mother arrived in Sarajevo from Brod. She had slipped across the border with no papers or escort. She had sought the help of an honest man, a merchant who had been friendly with her late husband. The merchant, a calm, practical man, questioned the unhappy mother to discover what the problem was, but after every second word, she would weep and repeat, sobbing:

  “Jesus, Jesus!”

  “Hold on, forget that! Wait! Is she already in the residence or not?”

  “I don’t know. They said she was with an Ahmet Aga, or some such name . . . Jesus, Jesus!”

  “With Ahmet Aga? Ah, then even seven Jesuses can’t help you!”

  But this weeping, apparently lost and helpless mother had extraordinary, unwavering strength and one day she turned up in front of the kavedžibaša in his coffee kitchen. She cried, pleaded, threatened, demanded that her daughter be returned to her, asked to go herself to see the seraskier.

  Incensed with “idiots and bootlickers” meddling in his business, and thus putting him in such an awkward position, the kavedžibaša now turned on the mother.

  “The seraskier himself indeed, whatever next! You, go to see the seraskier? What’s got into you, foolish woman?”

  And he threatened to send her back where she had come from under guard the very next day.

  But he did not do so. The woman was persistent and refused to be driven away. Somehow she succeeded in finding a contact in the pasha’s harem, where they were all decisively opposed to any newcomer. They encouraged her not to abandon her demand. She kept coming, asking for Ahmet Aga, but the guards sent her away from the gate. One day she managed to sneak in, turning up early in the morning in front of the astonished kavedžibaša. She begged him in a tearful voice and that infuriated him.

  “Go away, go away!” he shouted at her, but more softly and gently than usual, as though he was driving away small, naughty children or chickens.

  “Go on, go away!”

  “Don’t send me away, kind aga, help me if you know what your own flesh, your own child means!”

  “I know nothing, nothing!”

  “You know, how can you not know?”

  “I don’t know!”

  Then the woman fell onto her knees, stretched out her arms toward him and in a strong, deep voice, altered by her tears, she wailed:

  “I’m a mother! You must know what that is!”

  “I’m a mother!” she repeated, separating the syllables, bowed over as in prayer, beating her palms on the floor in the rhythm of her pleas. Her words echoed increasingly loudly and the echo broke up in the gloomy room.

  She tried to grip him round his legs. Stepping back, Ahmet Aga waved both his hands like a man defending himself from frivolous and stupid words.

  “‘A mother, a mother’! What’s got into you? ‘A mother’! There are hundreds of thousands of mothers here in Bosnia, but just one seraskier in the whole empire. One! Be off with you, go away!”

  The woman did not respond to these words; it seemed at first that they had passed over her head. She repeated, mechanically, a few more times: “I’m a mother!” but then suddenly she raised her head and stared, silently, with a fixed gaze, at the man looming over her, as if she was only now hearing him properly and seeing him clearly, and was beginning fully to understand everything. She stood up awkwardly, pitifully, and immediately started to move away, step by step. She walked backward, not shifting her terrified gaze from the kavedžibaša’s face, moving her lips soundlessly, while her head nodded as though she was approving something against her will. She seemed to
float out of the coffee kitchen.

  That did not quite free Ahmet Aga from the unhappy woman. But neither did she achieve all that she came for. The affair was concluded with the mother finally agreeing, somewhat soothed by lies and fine promises, that her daughter should stay in the pasha’s service. She saw her and talked with her. A contract was even signed, according to which the mother was supposed to receive two thirds of her daughter’s pay. Then the woman from Brod left Sarajevo.

  At the time, Omer Pasha was not in Sarajevo, but somewhere in the north of Bosnia, and when on one scorching day, suddenly as ever, he turned up in Sarajevo, he did not find the time even to see the little girl from Brod. He asked that the painter from Zagreb be brought to him.

  Soldiers set out at a run through the town to find Karas and bring him to the residence. Once there he waited for a long time in the courtyard for the kavedžibaša to receive him, pacing over the white gravel. Soldiers in uniform and variously dressed serving lads passed by in haste and each one as he passed stared at the unusual stranger. Bored with all of that, Karas went down some stone steps into a smaller courtyard, filled with shade, and here, sitting in a stone window recess, he began to sketch a crooked quince tree, with branches oddly twisted, as in a spasm, against a wall.

  Thus preoccupied, the painter did not hear when people began to search for him, calling, from the upper yard.

  The residence echoed with the calling. Several voices were heard at once. Ahmet Aga shouted from his coffee kitchen, sounding gruff but agitated. One of the lads responded from the upper courtyard, and from somewhere deep inside both of them were answered by the senior officer, Sulejman, nicknamed the Caber.

  First came Ahmet Aga’s voice:

  “So now you tell me he’s not the devil or the devil’s son that . . . that acrobat, scribe . . .whatever the hell he is? Huh, tell me! He’s been getting in my hair for two weeks now: he wants to see the pasha, now, and now when the pasha wants him, he’s gone.”

  The kavedžibaša pronounced these words through his nose to the point of unintelligibility, and almost plaintively, as always when he was shaken out of his immobility and silence, which happened only when the pasha gave him an order or wanted something.

  To start with, no one responded, not because no one heard him, but because they all pretended not to hear, because no one liked answering the kavedžibaša when he was agitated. Finally, the soldier on duty did reply, a good-looking young man of limited intelligence.

  “He’s not here, Ahmet Aga; I’m sorry, but he’s not here.”

  “What do you mean he’s not? How can he not be? You make him appear, by hook or by crook, or you won’t be here!”

  Swift steps and running could be heard from upstairs and from the upper courtyard. Then the Caber’s thin voice called from the lower yard:

  “Pssht! That’s enough racket in the residence! Come down and say what you have to say, don’t yell as though you’re on a mountain.”

  “The man’s somewhere round here, can’t have been swallowed up.”

  And the soldiers scoured the courtyard, but the “German” was not there. That provoked renewed agitation and new plaintive curses from the kavedžibaša. Finally, someone pointed to the narrow, deep window on the lower level. There was the painter, in the stone alcove, sitting with one leg tucked under him, his sketch pad on his lap. The soldier told him, in words and still more in gestures, to follow him that instant. The man stood up slowly, cast another glance at his sketch pad and at the crooked quince he had been drawing, then set off calmly after the soldier.

  They passed the dark coffee kitchen, where the kavedžibaša was sitting, his back to them. He did not look around, just grumbled:

  “Take him, take him as fast as you can, he vanishes at every step, squirming and slippery like an eel.”

  They passed through a small, less attractive courtyard, up several worn stone steps, into a garden with a round, freshly watered flower bed in the center, and entered through a wide doorway into a dark hall and then into a spacious, bare, almost empty room. A young officer entered, followed by an older one. Serving lads and officials of various ranks and variously dressed kept peering in through the door, entering, leaving and whispering to one another. One of them was black. But here everything took place silently, everyone spoke in subdued tones and moved with inaudible steps. The seraskier’s presence could be felt close by, but this was not the end of the lengthy preparation through which anyone appearing before the pasha had to pass. The waiting lasted quite a lot longer before the first loud footsteps and clink of spurs was heard and an officer in parade uniform entered; he had a red face and copper-colored moustache. He saluted the painter as prescribed, then led him up some broad steps.

  Upstairs the floors were spread with carpets, everything was finer and more luxurious. The officer stopped for a moment outside a white double door, as if collecting himself, then adopted a stiff stance, full of respect, knocked and opened the door.

  It was hard when one first entered to make out exactly who was in that large room: the daylight from numerous windows met and merged with the light coming in from the corridor, through the open door. It was only when the door was closed, the shadows settled and the light became more uniform, that the painter was able to see standing in the center of the room a tall, broad-shouldered, slender officer in a dark uniform with two bright, large medals; he had a tall red fez on his head. His beard was carefully trimmed and slightly graying, while the moustache that disappeared into it was still completely black. What stood out particularly were his eyes, beautiful, sharply outlined like an eagle’s, in which a special gleam came and went.

  The officer was standing stiffly and upright, like a renowned general from an old Austrian engraving, resting one hand on a table on which lay a curved Turkish saber, partly encrusted with gold, the red straps of its belt hanging down the dusky-colored baize with which the table was covered.

  The painter pulled himself together, took one more step forward and bowed, like a man about to introduce himself, but the pasha was faster.

  “You are Mr. Karas?” he asked in German, sternly.

  “I am, your excellency, the painter and artist Vjekoslav Karas,” he replied in Croatian.

  The pasha spoke in a deep baritone, somewhat husky from tobacco, while Karas in a thin voice, so high that it seemed to come entirely out of his dense beard.

  They reached an agreement quickly, but not easily.

  The pasha wanted them to get started immediately. People whose vocation and position require them often to make rapid decisions on weighty issues, tend to show an inclination to haste also in trivial everyday matters that surprises and confuses a humble, quiet man. Karas, who had been running after the pasha for six weeks now, trying in vain to catch up with him and pin him down, was in an awkward position, surprised by the haste. He said quietly that he would have to prepare the material for a sketch, but the pasha interrupted him. With a broad gesture of his hand and a gentler voice he invited him to prepare whatever he needed, to choose the place and to begin the sketch at once.

  Adjutants and serving lads with meek expressions ran in, their arms crossed over their chests. They moved about noiselessly, but fast, many of them, so that it looked as if they were going to collide at any moment, yet they managed to pass one another, handing things over, exchanging information and instructions in swift whispers.

  The glass door giving onto a deep bay window was opened and a table and armchair moved there, the painter’s leather bag and fairly battered yellow chest with his painting equipment brought in.

  Meanwhile, the painter and his model had an opportunity to observe one another. In fact, Karas observed Omer Pasha, while the pasha, like all vain, ambitious people who had climbed high on the ladders of power, saw in the slightly built painter of unusual appearance only a craftsman whose task was to immortalize his, Omer Pasha’s, likeness for all peoples and all times, which meant he was actually observing himself.

  And here, i
n the deep bay window, where the daylight was stronger, the painter’s attention was drawn to Omer Pasha’s eyes and in their pupils to the fire of an intoxication that comes not from alcohol, a strange gleam of arrogance that lit up now and then and was extinguished like a lighthouse beam. The eyebrows and lashes, with their dark-blue sheen, were thick and full. The sockets were widely spaced, sharply and unusually cut: in their outlines there appeared by turn two expressions, of a bird of prey and of feminine seductiveness.

  Karas thought about this, remembering other eyes that he had seen and painted. He recalled a famous Roman model, the beautiful, ample Pina, known among the painters of the Via Margutta as Fiammetta, who had served as the model for his painting of a maenad. Her eyes had the drunken glow of naive, sensuous and brutal existential joy. He recalled also the Roman girls from high society, whom he had watched from a distance as they passed, inaccessible as brilliant visions, along the avenues of Monte Pincio; their eyes too shone with the merciless gleam of wealth and exclusiveness, and that gleam fell like the sharpest frost over his powerful desire for warm female love. Yes, he recalled many faces and eyes, many pupils that flared, lit up by one of the numerous human passions, because he really had “an eye for eyes,” as his Roman companions used to say, but he had never seen eyes that burned like these with vanity and arrogance.

  Ever since he crossed the Turkish border and had been traveling through Bosnia, meeting local people and officials, he had been plagued by the question: what was the source of such arrogance, such constant, callous disparaging of other people and everything around them on the part of those who had risen even slightly above others through their power or wealth? He had seen this arrogance in every conceivable degree, tone and shade on the faces of people of different ages, occupations and position. The first Turkish junior officer who had examined his passport at the border, though barely able to read, had worn just such a cold, repellent mask.

  Karas had traveled from Brod to Travnik in a carriage along with a Jewish stockbroker from Trieste and a Travnik merchant, Rašid Aga. This Rašid Aga was so self-important and looked down on the two foreigners and everything around him so disdainfully that at their first rest stop in Derventa, the Jew said to Karas in Italian, with a wry smile: