Bosnian Chronicle Read online

  Yes, even he, now, was thinking of France, not as his own native land which he knew well and had always known, in which he had seen both good and evil, but of France as a marvelous far-off land of order and perfection of which men dreamed forever in the midst of coarseness and desolation. There would always be a France, as long as there was Europe. She would never disappear, unless in a certain sense (that is, in the sense of incandescent order and perfection) all Europe became a kind of France. But that was impossible. People were too different, too alien, and too remote from one another.

  Here, by chance association, Daville remembered an incident with the Vizier the previous summer. The lively and curious Vizier had always shown an interest in French life and so one day he told Daville that he had heard a great deal about the French stage and would like to hear at least something of what was being shown in the French theaters, even if he could not see a real stage.

  Delighted with the request, Daville had come back the very next day with the second volume of Racine’s works under his arm, intending to read the Vizier some scenes from Bajazet. After coffee and pipes were served, all the servants withdrew; there remained only D’Avenat, who was to translate. The Consul explained to the Vizier, as well as he could, what a stage was, how it looked, and the task and purpose of the art of acting. Then he began to read the scene in which Bajazet leaves his son Amurath in the safekeeping of the Sultana Roxana. The Vizier frowned, but kept listening to D’Avenat’s dry translation and the Consul’s feeling recital. But when it came to the dialogue between the Sultana and the Grand Vizier, Mehmed Pasha held up the reading with a hearty laugh and a wave of the hand.

  “The fellow doesn’t know what he’s talking about,” the Vizier said, weak with mirth. “Not since the world began did a grand vizier set foot in the harem and talk to the sultan’s wives. That sort of thing is quite out of the question.”

  He kept laughing for some minutes, loudly, heartily, not hiding his disappointment, or the fact that the point and value of such entertainment was utterly beyond him. And he said as much openly, almost rudely, with all the tactlessness of a man reared in a different civilization.

  In vain did Daville, vexed and hurt, try to explain the meaning of tragedy and the aims of poetry. The Vizier didn’t stop waving his hand. “We too have all kinds of dervishes and holy beggars who spin out ringing verses by the mile. We give them alms, but it would never enter our minds to treat them on the same level with people of action and respect. No, no, I don’t understand.”

  For days afterwards, Daville had thought of the episode as something unpleasant and offensive, as one of his private failures. Now, in retrospect, he was able to contemplate it more calmly, in a mellower light, like a man remembering a ludicrous incident that caused him disproportionate and unwarranted chagrin in his childhood. He only marveled that at a time like this he should remember such a trifle, out of so many grave and important things he had gone through with Mehmed Pasha.

  Now as he moved along the snow-covered road, toward the snowbound town, after his farewell to the Vizier, everything fell into its proper place and struck him as understandable and rational. Disagreements were natural, failures unavoidable. And even his sad farewell to Mehmed Pasha now gave him a pang of another kind. He felt his loss as badly as before, but now a fear was added to it—a fear of new troubles and failures. All of it was muted and distant as yet, an inseparable aspect of a life in which, by some mysterious arithmetic, one made gains and sustained losses along the way.

  With these thoughts, which impressed him as new and strange, but comforting for the time being, he rode quickly and made Travnik before nightfall.

  The departure of Husref Mehmed Pasha was a signal for rioting among the Travnik Moslems. No one doubted any longer that the Vizier had escaped the wrath of the bazaar by cunning and stealth. It was also known that the French Consul had seen him out. This made the bitterness all the greater.

  One could see now what was meant by a riot in a Moslem bazaar in a Bosnian town, and what such a riot looked like.

  Year after year, the bazaar worked quietly and scrambled after a living, haggling, counting, and languishing in boredom, comparing one year with another, and all the while keeping its eyes and ears open, making mental notes of all that happened, buying news and gossip, spreading them in whispers from shop to shop, reserving its conclusions and avoiding any expression of its opinion. In this way, slowly and imperceptibly, the temper of the bazaar coalesced and took the shape of a common opinion. It was at first only a vague general mood, outwardly manifested in brusque movements and under-the-breath curses at no one in particular; then, by stages, it hardened into an opinion that was no longer kept secret; and finally it became a firm and definite conviction, about which it was no longer necessary to talk and which could only be expressed in deeds.

  Imbued and linked together by this conviction, the bazaar whispered, braced itself, waited, as bees wait for the hour of swarming. It was impossible to follow the logic of these blind, furious, and usually ineffectual bazaar riots, yet they had a logic all their own, just as they had a technique all their own, obscure yet compounded of tradition and instinct. The only part that was clearly visible was the way they flared up, raged, and died away.

  One day, which would dawn and begin like any other, the usual drowsy peace of the town would be broken, the shutters would come down and there would be an ominous scraping of doors and rattling of bolted stanchions in the warehouses. All of a sudden the bazaar folk would scramble from their habitual places, in which they had squatted for years without moving, neat and cleanly dressed, with their legs crossed, deigning to serve their customers, in their baggy trousers of fine cloth, their braided waistcoats and brightly striped long-sleeved shirts. This ritual movement of theirs and the muffled noise of closing doors and shutters were enough to send up the electrifying cry through the whole town and the countryside: “The bazaar’s closed down!”

  They were grave and fateful words; their meaning was plain to everyone.

  The women and children would go down into the cellars. The more respectable bazaar people sought the safety of their houses, ready to defend them and perish on the threshold. And from the small coffeehouses and outlying quarters groups of poor Moslem folk came filtering in, people who had nothing to lose and stood to gain something in a riot or violent change. For here too, as in all outbursts and convulsions the world over, there were those who instigated and led a movement and others who carried it out and made it a reality. Materializing out of nowhere, one or two men would leap in front of the mob and spearhead it. As a rule they were noisy, violent, disgruntled cranks and have-nots whom no one had ever seen or known before and who, when the riot subsided, would vanish once more into the nameless squalor on the hillside outskirts from which they had emerged, or remain pining in some police jail.

  And this would last a day, two, three, or five, depending on the place and circumstances, until something was smashed up or burned down, until someone’s blood had spouted, or until the riot spent itself and petered out of its own accord.

  Then, one by one, the shops would open again, the riffraff would melt away, and the bazaar people, ashamed and seedy-looking, grave and pale-faced, would resume their work and customary way of life.

  Such, in general outline, were the origins, the evolution, and the end of a typical riot in a Bosnian town. The Travnik bazaar, like the Moslem landowners of Bosnia, had for years followed the efforts of Selim III to reorganize the Turkish Empire along new lines, dictated by the pressures and needs of contemporary European life. The bazaar made no bones about its suspicion and hatred of the Sultan’s reforms, and often stated them openly in direct representations to the Sublime Porte and also to the local representative of the Sultan, the Vizier of Travnik. The bazaar never doubted that the reforms would profit only the foreigners and enable them to undermine and destroy the Empire from within. In the eyes of the Islamic world, and thus also in the eyes of Bosnian Moslems, the ultimate f
ruit of the reforms would be a decline of faith, loss of possessions, family, and life in this world, and damnation in the next.

  As soon as it became known that the Vizier had left, ostensibly for the Serbian frontier, to inspect the positions and map a campaign, there set in that ominous silence which precedes eruptions of popular anger, and that conspiracy of looks and whispers which is unintelligible to an outsider. The outbreak was imminent and only waited for its appointed moment.

  As usual, the outward cause of the eruption was incidental and trivial.

  César D’Avenat had in his employ a messenger and confidential agent by the name of Mehmed, known as Whiskers, a strapping, broad-shouldered man from Herzegovina. All those who served in the foreign consulates were detested by the local Moslems, and this Mehmed more so than the others. That same winter Mehmed had married a young and pretty Turkish woman, who had come from Belgrade to visit her relations in Travnik. The young woman had been married in Belgrade to a certain Bekri Mustapha, who had kept a coffeehouse in a wooden cabin in Dorchole. Four witnesses, all of them Travnik Moslems, swore on oath that Bekri Mustapha had died of excessive drinking and that his wife was free. Thereupon the Moslem magistrate remarried the woman to Mehmed.

  About the time of the Vizier’s departure, Bekri Mustapha suddenly appeared in Travnik, dead drunk, it was true, but alive and looking for his wife. Drunk as he was and without any papers, he had no success with the magistrate at first. The coffeehouse keeper explained that he had spent eleven days traveling from Belgrade to Travnik, through snowdrifts and in bitter cold, which was the reason he had drunk so much brandy that he now found it quite impossible to sober up. But he was only asking for his rights: the return of his wife whom another man had made his own by trickery.

  The bazaar intervened. Everyone felt that this was a very good opportunity to take it out on the hated Mehmed and his chief D’Avenat and the consuls and consulates in general. They all considered it their duty to help an honest Moslem defend his rights against these foreigners and their lackeys. As for Bekri Mustapha, who had arrived without a coat and decent boots in the depths of winter, bare as a skewer, feeding on raw onions and keeping himself warm on plum brandy, he was now suddenly lavished with warm clothes, fed, plied with drink and attention by the whole bazaar. Someone even made him a present of a short fur coat with a ragged fox collar, which he wore with much solemnity. Blinking and hiccupping, he went like that from shop to shop, borne along like a banner on the popular concern and sympathy, and demanded his rights in a louder voice than ever. He did not sober up, it was true, but that was no longer essential to the defense of his rights, since the bazaar had taken his case into its own hands.

  When the magistrate firmly declined to restore the woman to the drunken man on his bare word, the bazaar went up in arms. The long-awaited riot had at last found its pretext and could burst forth openly and rage unimpeded. And burst it did—despite the fact that the winter days were not the best time for it and that these things usually occurred in the summer or autumn.

  None of the foreigners could possibly have imagined the violence and scope of the mass hysteria that from time to time seized the population of these small towns, scattered and marooned among the mountain ranges. Even to D’Avenat, who knew the East but didn’t as yet know Bosnia, it was all quite new and gave him, at times, real cause for concern. Daville shut himself up in the Consulate with his family and awaited the worst.

  About an hour before noon on that winter day, the bazaar ground to a halt as if by a secret, invisible signal. The air was filled with the banging of shutters, gates, and door stanchions, echoing and re-echoing like the rumble and clap of a hail-bearing summer storm, as if stone avalanches were rolling down the steep slopes of Travnik from every side, with a thunderous sound, threatening to bury the town and every living creature in it.

  In the hush that spread immediately afterwards, a few shots and wild cries rang out; then, beginning with a murmur that gradually swelled to a muffled roar, crowds of riffraff, street urchins, and underage youths began to collect. When the mob had grown to two or three hundred strong, they moved off, at first haltingly and then faster and more resolutely, in the direction of the French Consulate. They swung clubs and waved their arms. Most of their shouting was aimed at the Moslem magistrate who had married off Bekri Mustapha’s wife and was otherwise known as a supporter of Selim’s reforms and a Vizier’s man.

  One of the men, a stranger with a long mustache, cried out in a loud voice that it was the fault of people like the magistrate that nowadays a person of true faith didn’t dare to lift up his head and that his children starved; he heaped words of abuse on the despised Mehmed, a lackey of the unbelievers and a pork eater, and urged the mob to grab him at once and clap him in irons, together with the magistrate who dispossessed true Moslems of their wives and gave them in marriage to other men, for a consideration, who in fact was not a real magistrate but a betrayer of faith, worse than any Christian priest. Another small pasty-faced man, a meek and diffident little tailor from the lower bazaar, out of whom ordinarily not a peep was ever heard in his own house, listened closely to the mustachioed speaker and then suddenly screwed up his eyes, jerked his head up high, and gave a hoarse savage yell of unexpected force, as if to make up for his long silence: “To hell with the priest-magistrate!”

  This emboldened the others. Shouts and curses began to ring out against the magistrate, the Vizier, the consulates, and especially against Mehmed the Whiskers. Timid youths, not wishing to be left out of it, would rehearse their contribution by mumbling it under their breath, after which they would dart out in front, toss their heads up excitedly as if about to sing, and yell out the words they had rehearsed. Then, blushing, they would wait to hear their shout echoed, now faintly, now more loudly, in the murmur and approbation of the mob. So they encouraged and egged one another on, rousing themselves more and more to the pitch where every man felt free, within the limits of the riot, to shout and do whatever he pleased and to give vent to everything that troubled and oppressed him.

  Suleiman Pasha Skoplyak, the Deputy Vizier, who well knew the meaning and the usual course of a Travnik riot, and never lost sight of his responsibility toward the Consulate, did the most sensible thing in the circumstances. He ordered the arrest of the consular messenger Mehmed and locked him up in the fortress.

  The mob that spread out in front of the Consulate was furious to find that the building was shut off from the road by a wide courtyard and a big garden, so that the house was not even within a stone’s throw. While the throng was making up its mind about the next move, someone shouted that Mehmed was being taken away through the back streets. The crowd surged uphill and ran to the bridge at the foot of the fortress. Mehmed was already inside, and the big mailed door had been bolted. Now a confused milling began. The majority turned back to town, singing, while others stayed on by the edge of the moat, looking up at the windows of the gate tower as if waiting for something to happen, and demanding, with loud shouts, the most hair-raising punishment and torture for the arrested messenger.

  Now the bazaar—as empty as if a gale had swept it—filled with the rumble and cries of the idle crowd, whom Mehmed’s arrest had only partially appeased. Suddenly these too died down and the men began to call and look at one another. Querulous heads swiveled in all directions. The mob was at that stage of boredom and flagging attention when it was willing to accept any diversion and change, whether vicious and bloody or good-humored and jocose. Presently all eyes became riveted on the steep lane that led down from the French Consulate to the bazaar.

  Down the lane and through the scattered crowd came D’Avenat, solemn and armed, on his tall bay mare. Everyone stopped in amazement, rooted to the spot, and stared at the rider who went on his way calmly and without a care, as though he were followed by a detachment of cavalry. If one of the crowd had shouted something, anything, they might all have started yelling, milling, and shoving, and rocks would certainly have flown back and
forth. But as it turned out, everyone first wanted to see what this intrepid consular dragoman was about, and where he was going, and only then join their voices to any abuse that might be hurled after him. The upshot was that nobody said anything and the mob stood around expectantly, without a common will or a clear purpose. D’Avenat made up for it by shouting himself, in a loud and stinging voice, as only a Levantine knew how, bending down in the saddle from one side to the other, as if herding a bunch of cattle. He was deathly pale. His eyes blazed and his teeth showed in a wide snarl.

  “Were you bitten by a snake that you dare to lay a finger on the Imperial French Consulate!” he shouted, glowering at those nearest to him. And he went on: “Are you rioting against us, your best friends? Who put you up to it? Some drunken fool whose brain is soaked in Bosnian brandy? Don’t you know that the new Sultan and the French Emperor are the best of friends? That orders have come from Istanbul for everyone to respect the French Consul and honor him as a guest of state?”

  A voice in the crowd muttered something unintelligible, but the mob failed to take it up. D’Avenat seized the opportunity and turned in the direction of the lone voice, addressing it pointedly, as if everyone else were on his side and he were speaking on their behalf. “How’s that? What do you mean? You dare to stick your nose in something emperors have arranged and agreed between themselves, and spoil it? All right, let’s look at the man who’s inciting peaceful citizens to disaster! And get this through your thick skulls. The Sultan won’t put up with it. If anything happens to our consulate all Bosnia will be scorched down to the ground and even the babes in their cradles will not be spared!”

  A few voices were heard again, but scattered and halfhearted. The crowd backed away from the rider, who seemed to take his safe passage utterly for granted, and he rode like that the entire length of the bazaar, shouting angrily that he was going to see Suleiman Pasha and would ask him who was the master in this town; and afterwards—they could take his word for it—many of them would be very sorry indeed they’d listened to the advice of madmen and gone against orders from the highest quarter.