Omer Pasha Latas Read online

  One day he received a letter from his father. He had never been particularly glad of these letters in which the resigned tone of a weak man barely concealed the complaints about the hardness of life typical of a small, overlooked man. He found his father’s mere handwriting disagreeable, the typical handwriting of a frontier officer, but with affected, puny letters, alternately too sharp and upright, and sloping like battered wheat. This time the missive was longer than usual and, after some awkward beating about the bush, it contained unexpected bad news. His father had been suspended from service and placed under investigation. Was it misuse of state funds? Fraud? Embezzlement? It was not clear. The words honesty, God and justice kept recurring. Knowing his father, the young man concluded that the old man was guilty. In any case, it was obvious that a dark and insurmountable obstacle had fallen across the path that was just opening up for him. Whatever the outcome of the investigation, for him this was a terrible blow that called everything into question.

  A warm, tranquil Zadar summer. The cadets in their last year were studying in the large garden filled with trees and lush southern vegetation, separated from their officer rank by just a few weeks. They strolled along the shady paths or sat on benches sunk into laurel bushes. The ancient garden buzzed like a beehive with their whispered studying or half-aloud repetition. Mićo Latas was sitting on one of the benches, thinner and darker in complexion than usual; before him lay spread out school scripts with geometry problems that presented no difficulty. Only he was trying to solve not those problems but other greater and more difficult ones.

  He passed the final examinations at the top of his class. He received congratulations in a fever, with vacant eyes and dry, blue lips. A letter had reached him the previous day: his father had been pensioned off for embezzling state funds. For his father, this was the mildest outcome and a kind of way out (a wretched one, like himself), but for his son it meant that at that moment any escape had been completely and definitively closed off. His officer’s report sheet, not yet written, would contain this great stigma, so great that it would not be worth even embarking on the contest that awaited him. For it would mean trying to compete in the merciless race for the highest positions in the Austrian officer corps with his legs shackled. Poverty, his lowly origins, his belonging to the Orthodox faith, these were heavy burdens, and now this on top of it all! No, with a father punished for misuse of state funds no one could make a career, the great career that was the only option for him, in the great imperial army! And outside the army there was neither career nor life.

  Finding himself in a completely hopeless situation and realizing that suddenly his experience, intelligence and his acquired skill could not help him, for a moment the young man glanced beyond this life. He would seek a solution where all solutions were superfluous. Since he could not erase or destroy the pathetic petty considerations that now made his life meaningless, he would destroy himself. And in this way, with one blow, he would take his revenge both on his father who had given him a life he had not sought, and was now depriving him of the possibility of living it, and on the authorities whose laws, like steel chains, bound him to his father’s corpse. Beside the pillow soaked in his blood he would leave a piece of paper with a few words that would have to be believed and which would be stronger than laws and regulations.

  He took a sensual pleasure in this thought, but then he stopped and drew back instinctively, his eager young eyes seeking life and the solutions it offered, which in this case seemed not to exist.

  In such difficult moments, when we feel that the ground is slipping away from under our feet and our hands stretch vainly upward, we reach instinctively for what we had not realized we knew or possessed. We are suddenly aware of the buried experience and habits of our forebears that we had not imagined lived on in us. In such moments, when it was necessary to flee from death and disgrace, and there was no way out anywhere, his forebears had found only one solution: Turkey. To escape and flee where no one went or ought to go. That was itself a kind of death and disgrace, and more bitter than both. It meant setting off into the complete unknown, into Turkey, and being branded and condemned to death in Austria, where anyone would be free to kill him. But here a way out could be glimpsed, the possibility of a way out, an endlessly distant and unbelievably small uncertain bright spot in the darkness. Nevertheless, at such moments, a man will sometimes pass through the eye of a needle and find salvation.

  And once he had caught sight of that ray of pale light in the darkness, he set off toward it without reflection, instinctively, like a migratory bird. As he forged his plans for flight and prepared for their realization, he felt something of his strength return and a will to live reappear. In truth, it was a dull, dark strength, without a trace of joy or brightness, but the main thing was to be moving and alive.

  His companions scattered to their homes for a short break before joining their garrisons. He was the last to leave. And during those days he made his final decision.

  He exploited the general upheaval occasioned by the sudden dispersal of the cadets to make contact through some Zadar lads with a peasant from the hinterland who often came to the market and to prepare what he needed for his disappearance from the world he had up to now considered his own, and for his flight with no return.

  On one of the first days of July he was granted an exeat until 9 p.m. and set off for a long walk. He had done this several times before, but this time he did not come back.

  As previously arranged, he spent the night with the peasant from the hinterland. Cautious and wary, he did not sleep inside, but under the open sky, above the house, on a narrow, flat space between two large rocks, as in a grave.

  Here he took the badges and “gilt” buttons off his uniform, exchanged his cadet’s shoes for good new peasant shoes that the farmer had obtained for him. He put an ordinance map of the frontier, his diploma, a flint stone and tinder into a waxed linen bag that he wore round his neck, under his shirt. He stuffed a pistol, knife, a small compass and some soldier’s rusk into his pockets. He stretched out his empty arms and then took a heavy peasant’s staff in his right hand. And he set off along a track leading into the mountains. There the peasant, taking the four silver forints that had been agreed, left him on his own.

  The following night, stormy and cold, as though it were October and not the beginning of July, found him near the Turkish border, in a wooded area on one of the barely passable smugglers’ crossing points.

  This was in fact the steep bed of a stream transformed into a torrent of invisible water after a midnight mountain downpour. The young man’s feet faltered and slipped. He grabbed at the bushes on the steep slopes, made slow progress. Lightning flashed and thunder clapped nearby and in the distance. The forest roared like a stormy sea. He felt his energy waning and the wind, rain, darkness and lightning closing off and deadening all his senses. If he went on like this, he would faint, and be swept away by the torrent under him, like a log down a muddy creek.

  By the light of two crossing streaks of lightning, he noticed a piece of flat ground under the tossing branches on the right-hand slope. Clutching at bushes, rooting through the mud with his fingers, dragging himself out of it and then slipping back, he managed with the last of his strength to haul himself onto that strip of land overgrown with grass. He felt a strong tree trunk under his fingers and leaned his back against it, breathing heavily like a drowning man. The joy of rest filled him. The rain battered him less here. A bit of flat ground beneath him and a firm support at his back, that was all a great blessing. Imperceptibly, he had entered a world of new relationships, on the other side of what he had until then considered the only possible existence. Nothing any longer had a name, but simply served the immediate objective of the moment. He no longer felt even his own body as a familiar and unchangeable whole, but each part on its own, temporary and unconnected, and each part in its own way. His bruised, soaking feet on the wet earth seemed to him to stretch to the end of the world, and from them ran an
endless series of shivers of weariness, scaling his warmed spine and disappearing, as into a chasm, in some distant, dark and unknown place where his head ought to be, but where now a shapeless sea of delirium streamed.

  He was sinking steadily into a kind of coma. Thunder and lightning raged, rain buffeted by wind teemed down. He heard and watched it all, but only as part of a dream that was overwhelming and shrouding everything.

  At the thought that he might succumb to sleep in this dangerous place, he made one last effort, collected his dormant, dissipated energies, and leaped to his feet, stretching his arms like a swimmer surfacing from the depths. At that moment something hit him in the eye, something like a thin, moist, malicious hand. The blow was not so much hard or painful as unpleasant and as though deliberately insulting. Wham! In fact, he had been struck by the leafy top of a slender branch caught behind another one and suddenly released by his movement. For an instant he was stunned, there in the darkness, as though simultaneously slapped and spat on. So, this was how the frontier greeted an innocent fugitive, forced to cross it by night, with no passport or guide, and in a place where respectable travelers did not cross. It took him some time to collect himself.

  “I shall wash this all from me and be avenged!” he said to himself, passing his left palm over his wet, stinging face, and clenching the heavy stick in his right hand.

  The rain was easing, the gusts of wind were becoming rarer and weaker. The young man continued on his way, feeling around him in the dark and seeking the firm edge of the track with his numb feet. He seethed with a cold, inexplicable fury because of that low and unexpected blow. He was trembling. Ah, someone would pay for this, at some stage, wherever in the world it was and whoever it was. Someone would suffer long and hard for every minute of his suffering; hundreds, thousands of people would tremble the way he was trembling, not for minutes and hours but for days and years.

  His rage helped him as he trudged, setting the rhythm of his steps and lighting the darkness like a signpost.

  At last, high above him he could glimpse the dim edge of a mountain ridge, and behind it something like a hint of dawn. With every step, that bit of brightness was steadily transformed into the cold, sulfur-like light of the new day.

  •

  Through the dawn, as through the vast curtain of a pale, blue-yellow glow from the sky to the earth, Mićo Latas stepped onto Turkish territory. That he remembered vividly. But that was also the beginning of years of strict, oppressive, complete oblivion.

  For every Turkish convert who climbs this high, there is a desert region, narrow or wide, silent and impassable, that divides the two utterly different parts of his life, absorbs all calls across that divide, smothers all more intense memories. Without that isolation strip a renegade would not be able to survive, live or get ahead. The enormous difference between what had been and what was now would crush him in an instant and turn him into dead, nameless dust. Later, after many years, when the fugitive had climbed up the social ladder and when he was able to allow himself to relax fully and rest, that barrier would weaken and occasionally let some distant memories through. But then it was no longer dangerous and could not prove fatal, because the new man had long since established himself in his Turkish surroundings and reinforced his new persona, and those memories, unreal and pale, had nothing of their former destructive power.

  It was at that sulfur-like bright curtain of his first dawn on the Turkish frontier that a landscape of burned bridges, suppressed memories and empty years began to form for Omer Pasha. Here he too, like so many real and legendary fugitives and Turkish converts before him, drank of those “waters of oblivion,” which keep a man alive, freeing him for a while from unbearable memories. This was the beginning of a time of false starts, humiliation, uncertainty but also of desperate resolve and a slow, difficult ascent. And it was not short-lived. Seven, nearly eight years. And what years!

  From the foreshortened and hazy perspective of the present all that looked pale and unreal, as if set up simply to make a good end to a difficult story. For the first few days after crossing the frontier, he avoided villages and small towns and then one morning he went down into Glamoč, with a made-up tale about his origins, about his reasons for crossing out of infidel lands and his travels through Turkish Bosnia. He found work on the lands of the Filipović beys. He worked with the livestock. Today that sounds incredible and amusing. And even at the time it had not seemed real or that it could last long. And it did not. He soon moved to Banja Luka, a bright, prosperous market town. He hired himself to a merchant, Alija Bojić. In that household he found good, warmhearted people. He served in the house and the shop, he even chopped wood and carried water, but it was all temporary and random, he did not believe for a moment that this was suitable work for him. His employers did not believe it either. One day Ali Aga suggested that he convert to Islam. He did so in a fatherly tone, not in the least offensive. After brief reflection, the young man agreed. It was easily done, like everything else. He felt that he was taking new, strange exams at his school in Zadar. He did not remember anything in detail, but he still bore in his mouth the taste of those times when he had been unable to breathe freely and felt that walking through the streets of Banja Luka was like climbing inhumanly steep steps, with hot coals in his belly, looking neither ahead nor behind but just at the step on which he was standing.

  He learned Turkish pretty well and everything about the Turkish way of life that could be learned in such circumstances. After a certain time, Ali Aga himself suggested that he move on and seek his true destiny, which was clearly not in Banja Luka nor in his present occupation.

  The commander of the Banja Luka garrison, an exceptionally well-educated officer, who recognized the young man’s knowledge of languages and his skill in drawing, recommended him to the pasha of Vidin. He stayed for a while in Vidin, tutoring the pasha’s sons. Later, naturally, his path led him to Istanbul. There, with good references from the pasha of Vidin, he was appointed as teacher of drawing and mathematics at the higher military school. Seen from this distance, all these towns, people and events looked like the steps of his ascent.

  He spent three years at that school, teaching and himself studying. Spending a lot of time with the Istanbul ulema, he became acquainted with the nature and customs of those people, the life of the army and religious rituals and regulations. He endeavored to make his whole bearing that of a model young officer and a good Muslim. He refrained from alcohol, avoided the company of dissolute and improvident officers, and attended the mosque regularly. He never talked about himself, never asked anyone for anything, but was always ready to be of service to others. He gave the appearance of a man devoid of passions and ambition. He kept his distance from Christians and converts, but he studied the French language zealously.

  One day Sultan Mahmud visited the school and, on that occasion, the teacher Captain Omer Effendi was presented to him. The very next day, he was appointed as teacher of mathematics and geometric drawing to the heir to the throne, Abdul Medjid. And it was somewhere here that the expanse of forbidden memories came to an end but not all of a sudden or at a defined point. The teacher to the heir continued to work at the higher military school. At court, in conversations with his lively and sensitive student, he saw, and picked up other hints, all the efforts Mahmud II was making to turn Turkey into a more or less modern state through his reforms and the introduction of a good administration. But at his school he remained a humble teacher, an officer of unknown origin with an obscure past, a man whom it didn’t suit to advance, to stand out in any way, least of all in promoting dangerous innovations. He kept company with older, old-fashioned people from whom he again learned what people were thinking and doing in the conservative circles opposed to the sultan’s plans.

  It was only when the well-intentioned, long-suffering Sultan Mahmud died and the young Abdul Medjid came to the throne, that a time of rapid and full development and advancement began for Omer Effendi. He left his teaching post and, p
assing rapidly from rank to rank, he devoted himself to work on the organization of the army under the immediate supervision of the young sultan.

  Everything in the seraskier’s memory was now becoming clearer and more specific. He could once again freely call each thing by its proper name, dwelling with complete self-satisfaction on individual events and scenes.

  He soon became the youngest brigade general. At last, a title that was truly his, that drew down a new bright curtain, closing off behind him the whole dark space he had crossed. He was sent with an expeditionary force to Syria, with the task of crushing the Egyptian renegade Ibrahim Pasha. At the time, near the coast of Asia Minor, there was an international military fleet demonstrating support for Turkey, against the Egyptian rebel. In negotiations with the commanders of those naval units, Omer Pasha played the role of an officer-diplomat, making use of his knowledge of various languages. In these negotiations, the foreigners’ attention was drawn to the tall young senior officer with something European and lively in his way of being and bearing.

  In Istanbul, he was greeted with praise and recognition.

  Determined to follow his father’s path, Abdul Medjid continued to introduce “apposite and salutary” reforms in Turkey. In individual countries, especially on the periphery of the empire, those reforms provoked resistance, which could not be overcome by persuasion or administrative measures. Military force was required, led by an able, dedicated commander, and such people were in short supply in the Turkish army of the time. Ruthlessly stern, but skilled and with a knowledge of local conditions, with no personal or family connections or considerations, Omer Pasha quickly became indispensable in carrying out the sultan’s plans. He was sent wherever a rebellion had to be quelled. To Albania, back to Syria, and to Kurdistan. Whatever he needed was put at his disposal without hesitation, and, with his small but well-organized and skillfully led army, he carried out his tasks in the shortest possible time and returned to Istanbul victorious.