Bosnian Chronicle Page 18

  “Don’t touch me, you jailer, you cold torturer . . . you beast without a soul and conscience. Beast, beast! . . .” Then a fresh torrent of words, followed by a stream of tears, a quaking of the voice, and a gradual abatement. She was still sobbing, but now she allowed the Colonel to take her by the shoulders and guide her to the leather chair. She slumped down with a deep sigh. “Joseph . . . oh dear God!”

  It was a sign the outburst was over, that she was ready to listen to any explanation without talking back. The Colonel stroked her hair and assured her that he would sit down forthwith and write the application; he would phrase it firmly and unequivocally and have it copied and dispatched first thing tomorrow. He stammered endearments, made promises, and soothed her, dreading fresh outbursts and fresh tears. But Anna Maria was drained out and sleepy, grievous but silent and helpless. She let the Colonel take her to the bedroom, wipe the last tears from her eyes, put her to bed, tuck her in, and lull her to sleep with gentle, childish words of endearment.

  When he returned to his study and put the candleholder on the table, he felt shivery and faint; the pain under his ribs on the right side had grown sharper. In these scenes, the worst moment for the Colonel was when everything was over, when he finally managed to calm his wife and then remained alone, each time with a clear realization that he could not go on living like this.

  Once again the Colonel slung his greatcoat around his shoulders; it was heavy and cold, like something borrowed and strange. He sat down at the table, took a fresh sheet of paper, and began now, in earnest, to compose his application for a transfer.

  Once more he wrote by the straight, unflickering candlelight. He cited the unblemished years of his previous service, pointed out that he was ready even now to give his best, but begged to be transferred from this post. He produced cogent arguments, demonstrating that “only a person without a family” could live and work in Travnik “under present conditions.” Lines of regular writing formed again, but cold and dark this time, like the links of a chain; they failed to generate the bright effervescence of a moment before, the feeling of strength and belonging to a larger whole. He wrote as a beaten man would write of his weakness and shame, acting under inexorable pressure which no one could know or see.

  The application was ready. Determined to send it off in the morning without fail, he now read it through a second time, as if it were his sentence. He read on, but his mind kept detaching itself from the dolorous text and returning to the past.

  He saw himself as a pallid dark-haired lieutenant, sitting under a froth of lather before the officers’ barber, watching the barber clip his thick hair and the fine regulation pigtail that was his pride and joy; shaving his head down to the scalp and getting ready to transform him, in suitable disguise, into a “Serbian lad” who would pass unnoticed in Turkish towns and the Serbian countryside and monasteries. He remembered his wanderings and his fears, the mishaps and troubles. He saw his return to the Zemun garrison, after successful reconnaissance, and heard the greetings of his comrades and the warm words of his superior officers.

  He saw himself boarding a dugout on a dark rainy night, with two soldiers, and crossing the Sava and landing on the steep bank under the fortress of Kalimegdan, near the gates, to receive from his agent wax impressions of all doorkeys in Kalimegdan, the Belgrade fortress. He saw himself handing them over to his Major on his return, shivering with exhilaration and also with fever and exhaustion.

  He saw himself in the mail coach on his way to Vienna—“a man who has made good” and is to receive a reward. He was carrying with him a letter from his commanding officer that described him in terms of the highest praise, as a “young officer who is as shrewd as he is fearless.”

  He saw himself . . .

  There was a light noise outside in the corridor. The Colonel looked up in alarm, rigid in the anticipation of his wife’s stormy footsteps. He listened—but everything was quiet. Some unimportant sound must have fooled him. But the images of a moment before had fled his memory and wouldn’t return. He was confronted by the orderly lines of his writing, now lifeless and obscure to his bleary eyes. Where had he lost that young officer on his way to Vienna? Where were the freedom and daring of youth?

  Heaving suddenly, the Colonel got up from the table, like a man gasping for a breath of relief. He went up to the window and parted the green curtains a little; but there, hardly a few inches from his eyes, the night rose up like a hulking wall of ice and darkness. Von Mitterer stood facing it, like one condemned, not daring to turn around and go back to the black handwriting of his application on the table.

  Standing there and thinking of his transfer, he fortunately had no idea of how many more nights, how many autumns and winters, he would spend like this, caught between this dark wall and his worktable, waiting in vain for his application to be granted. For his letter would lie in the archives of the Geheime Hof-und-Staatskanzlei, together with his report on the strategic positions around Travnik, though in a different section. His application would reach Vienna quickly and punctually, and be referred to the proper official, a tired gray-haired Sektionschef. The man would browse through it one winter morning in his warm, high-ceilinged, bright office, which looked out to the Franciscan church, and would then draw an ironic red-pencil line under the sentence in which von Mitterer suggested that they replace him with “einem familienlosen Individuum”—a man without a family. He would write in the margin that the Consul must be patient.

  For the Sektionschef was a placid man, a confirmed bachelor, a pampered lover of music and the arts who, from the cozy and secure heights of his position, could not possibly know or imagine the Consul’s plight, or the kind of place Travnik was, or for that matter the endless variety of human predicaments and needs. A man like that would never, not even in his last moments, in the throes of death, find himself face to face with the kind of wall that von Mitterer confronted that night.

  8

  The year 1807 failed to keep a single one of the promises which Daville thought he had sensed in the balmy air of the previous autumn, as he rode above Kupilo. In truth, nothing was as likely to deceive a man as his own feelings of calm and pleasurable satisfaction at the course of events. They misled Daville too.

  The year had hardly begun when he was stunned by the worst blow that could have been dealt him in his thankless job at Travnik. The surprise came in a quarter where he least expected it. D’Avenat found out, confidentially, that Mehmed Pasha was being replaced. A firman to that effect had not yet arrived, but the Vizier was already making secret preparations for departure, with all his effects and his entire retinue.

  As D’Avenat explained it, Mehmed Pasha had no desire to await the firman at Travnik, but preferred to leave the town earlier, on some convenient pretext; he would simply not return. The Vizier knew well what happened in a Turkish town the day a courier rode in with an imperial firman decreeing the transfer of the incumbent Pasha and the appointment of a new one. He could almost see the arrogant Tartar mercenary who made his living on such errands and on the morbid curiosity of the bazaar and the lowest riffraff—made his living and enjoyed it. He could see and hear him rushing into the town, galloping like mad, cracking his whip and announcing, at the top of his voice, the name of the replaced and the newly appointed Vizier. “Makhsul Mehmed Pasha, makhsul! Khazul Suleiman Pasha, khazul!” (Mehmed Pasha is replaced! Suleiman Pasha is appointed in his place!)

  The street crowd would glance up querulously, admiring him; they would argue about the Sultan’s decision; they would be pleased, enthusiastic, sometimes riotous. Invariably they cursed the man who was leaving and praised the one who was to come.

  It was the moment when the name of the outgoing Pasha was tossed to the idle street rabble like a piece of carcass to ravening dogs, with license to defile it without fear of punishment, and make obscene jokes over it, to flaunt their arrogance and feel heroes-for-a-day, without harm or damage. Little people, who would not have dared to lift their heads when the
Pasha came riding by, suddenly popped up like some noisy avenging angels, even though the Pasha in question had done them no personal harm and wasn’t even aware of their existence. Often, on such occasions, one might see a half-educated student or a bankrupt merchant rant away over a glass of plum brandy and pass thunderous judgment on the unseated Vizier, as though he himself had overthrown him in hand-to-hand combat; and he would thump his chest in an excess of emotion: “I’d sooner have lived to see this day, understand, than be given half of Bosnia!”

  Mehmed Pasha knew that this had always been so, everywhere, that little nameless people always scrambled over the dead bodies of those who fell in the internecine struggle of the great. So it was understandable that he preferred to slip away.

  Daville at once requested an audience. At this divan the Vizier admitted, in the strictest confidence, that he would indeed leave Travnik, on the pretext of making an early inspection tour of the forces being readied for a spring campaign against Serbia, and that he wouldn’t come back again. From what the Vizier said, it transpired that he’d had word from a friend in Istanbul that the capital was in a state of anarchy and that a murderous intramural struggle was going on between the factions and individuals who, in May of the previous year, had overthrown Sultan Selim. The only point on which all were agreed was the need to banish everyone who showed even the slightest approval of the plans and reforms of the dethroned Sultan. In those circumstances, the accusation of the Bosnian begs that he was a friend of France and a follower of Selim’s regime had fallen on eager ears. He knew that he had been replaced already. He only hoped that his friends’ intercession had been effective enough to save him from exile, and that he might be given another pashalik far from Istanbul. In any case, he wanted to leave Travnik now, before the firman came, and as quietly as possible, so as not to give his Bosnian enemies an opportunity to gloat over his downfall and try to revenge themselves. Out on the road, somewhere in Sienica or Priepolye, he would then wait for the firman announcing his new appointment.

  All this Mehmed Pasha conveyed to Daville in that vague oriental voice which, even in matters of the utmost finality, does not altogether preclude doubts or the possibility of change or surprises. The Vizier’s face never lost its smile or, more accurately, his perfect white teeth did not for a moment cease flashing in the crack between the beard and the thick, black, well-groomed mustaches—as neither the Vizier nor the Consul had any real ground for laughter.

  Daville watched the Vizier, while listening to the interpreter, and nodded politely, without being aware of it. In reality, the Vizier’s information had left him devastated. The cold and queasy sensation in his innards, which, sometimes strongly, sometimes faintly, attended all his visits to the Residency and his every conversation with the Turks, now cut powerfully across his abdomen like a blunt foreign body, impeding his thoughts and speech.

  In the recall of the Vizier from Bosnia Daville saw both a personal setback and a considerable reversal for the French government. Hearing Mehmed Pasha speak of his departure in that studiedly casual way of his, he felt cheated, unappreciated, and abandoned in this cold land, hemmed in by a scheming, malicious, and baffling race whose thoughts and feelings would always remain an enigma; a country where staying might also mean “going,” in more senses than one, where a smile was not a smile, where “yes” did not mean yes any more than “no” meant a final no. He managed to improvise a few sentences and tell the Vizier how much he regretted his leaving; he expressed the hope that the matter might still be settled favorably, and assured him of his unshakeable friendship and the great esteem of his government. He left the Residency with strong premonitions about the future.

  In that mood, Daville remembered the all but forgotten Sultan’s emissary. The death of that hapless man, which had not ruffled anyone’s conscience, began to trouble him again, now that it was shown to have been of some advantage.

  At the beginning of the new year the Vizier quietly dispatched the more valuable things of his household, and shortly afterwards left Travnik with his Mamelukes. The gleeful and vindictive whispering that was beginning to grow louder among the Travnik Turks could reach him no longer. The only one who knew the date of the departure and saw the Vizier off was Daville.

  The parting of the Vizier and the Consul was cordial. On a sunny January day, Daville and his interpreter D’Avenat rode out about four miles beyond Travnik. In front of a lonely roadside café, under an arbor sagging with the weight of snow, the Vizier and the Consul spoke warmly to each other for the last time.

  The Vizier rubbed his cold hands and made an effort to keep smiling. “Give my greetings to General Marmont,” he said in that peculiar warm voice which approximated sincerity in the way one drop of water approximates another, and which had a soothing and persuasive effect even on the wariest listener. “Please tell him, and all those who should know, that I shall remain a friend of your noble country and a sincere admirer of the great Napoleon no matter where destiny or circumstances happen to take me.”

  “I shall not fail to do it. I shall see to it,” Daville said, moved to the quick.

  “And to you, my dear friend, I wish good health, good luck, and every success. I am only sorry I shall not be at your side in the troubled hours which, I fear, you are bound to have with the barbarous and unenlightened Bosnian folk. I have entrusted your affairs to Suleiman Pasha Skoplyak, who will replace me for the time being. You may depend on him. He is rough and simple, like all Bosnians, but a man of honor in whom one can believe. Let me repeat, it is only on your account that I am sorry to leave. But that is how it must be. Had I wanted to be a tyrant and a head-chopper, I could have stayed on and brought these conceited, rattlebrained begs to their knees, once and for all, but I am not that kind and have no desire to be. That’s why I must leave.”

  Shivering in the cold, pale and blue-lipped in his black cape that reached to the ground, D’Avenat translated quickly and mechanically, like a man who had learned all this by heart long before.

  Daville knew perfectly well that what the Vizier had said was not, and could not be, entirely and completely accurate, but he was still touched by it. One approaches every parting with a twofold illusion. The person we are parting from—especially when, as in this case, it is likely to be forever—appears to us far more valuable and deserving of our attention than heretofore, and we ourselves feel much more capable of generous and selfless friendship than in fact we are.

  Then the Vizier mounted his tall bay horse, disguising his lameness with quick, brisk movements. His big entourage followed after him. And when the two clusters of people—the sizable one of the Vizier’s, and Daville’s tiny one—had gone little more than half a mile apart, one of the Vizier’s outriders swerved sharply from the ranks, shot back like an arrow, and swiftly overtook Daville and his escort, who had halted at that moment. He reined in his panting horse fiercely and recited in a loud voice: “The august lord Husref Mehmed Pasha once more sends his high regards to the esteemed representative of the great French Emperor. May all good wishes attend his every step.”

  Surprised and somewhat taken aback, Daville took off his hat with ceremonious flourish, whereupon the messenger galloped back, at the same breakneck speed, to gain the Vizier’s train riding away on the snowy plain. In any intercourse with Orientals there are always some incidents of this kind that pleasantly surprise and stir one, even though it is understood that they are not so much a sign of special attention and personal regard as an integral part of an ancient and inexhaustible ceremonial.

  From behind, the swaddled Mamelukes looked like women. The horses’ hoofs kicked up a snowy dust that billowed into a pink and white cloud in the winter sun. As it rode on into the distance, the band of horsemen dwindled steadily and the cloud of snow dust swelled higher. In that cloud they finally vanished.

  Daville rode back along the hard-frozen road that was barely distinguishable from the rest of the snowy whiteness. The roofs of solitary peasant homesteads, the fen
ces and colewort patches on the side, were under snow, noticeable only by their thin skeletal outlines on the rolling whiteness. The shadows of rose and gold were turning to blue and gray. The sky darkened to pale indigo. The sunlit afternoon had quickly changed into a winter twilight.

  The horses stepped along smartly, all but mincing; small icicles trembled on the frozen tufts of hair on their fetlocks.

  Daville rode on, with a sensation of coming back from a funeral. He thought about the Vizier from whom he had just parted, and the thought had the quality of something irretrievably lost a long time ago. He remembered fragments of his many conversations with him. He seemed to see his smile, that beam of masking brightness that danced all day long between his mouth and his eyes until, presumably, sleep snuffed it out.

  He remembered the Vizier’s protestations, up to the very last moment, of his love for France and his esteem of the French.

  Now, in the afterglow of the parting, he considered their sincerity. He thought he could see the Vizier’s motives quite plainly, pure and divorced from the usual diplomatic flatteries. He thought he understood in a general way how and why foreigners loved France, the French way of life, and French ideas. They were drawn to them by the law of contrasts; they loved France for all those things they were unable to find in their own country, for which their spirit hungered unappeased; they loved her, and rightly, as a many-faceted image of beauty and harmonious rational life, which no momentary clouding can change or disfigure, an image which, after every eclipse and every flood, glows up afresh before the world as an indestructible force and a joy forever; they loved her even when they knew her only slightly, only superficially, or not at all. And there will always be many who will continue to love her, sometimes from the most contrary motives and impulses, for men will never cease asking and wishing something higher and better than what destiny has given them.