Omer Pasha Latas Read online

  I do grant that “he was anxious to cover up his tracks.” Not only had he treated with Berlin; he’d also stood in for the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, whose memory could not but be obnoxious to the Titoists. In 1951, when a certain government-sponsored historical exhibition was about to open, Andrić learned that among other items would be a photograph of the signing of the Tripartite Pact, in which he could be seen “straight and tall, in full dress, in all his majesty,” right behind the Third Reich’s bullying plenipotentiary Joachim von Ribbentrop, who would meet the noose at Nuremberg for his part in Nazi war crimes. (About the pact we read: “Hitler’s bribe [to Yugoslavia] was the offer of Salonika, and it was taken.”) And so the anxious Andrić of 1951 entreated Djilas, “with a bitter, even savage, twist to his lips,” to be cut out of the picture. Djilas picked up the phone, and the army obligingly excised the entire photo. Had the novelist been a Fascist collaborator, the Titoists would surely have stood him against a wall. On the contrary, Djilas remarks that in 1945, “I admired Andrić’s steadfast refusal to deal on any terms with Nedrić’s Quisling regime.”

  And so I would discount a footnoted rumor, which “may simply have been propaganda,” that in 1944 “several Serbian writers, including Ivo Andrić . . . were ready to join the Chetniks in the mountains.” These latter were anti-Communist insurgents, who soon decided that Tito’s bunch were worse than the Nazis, with whom they accordingly made local devil’s deals. The Allies withdrew support, and at the end of the war, the Chetniks’ leader was shot in Belgrade. These would not have been comfortable companions for our tactful, cautious, lanky diplomat.

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  Why those innuendoes against him? Given the complex antipathies of the Balkans, was it enough to be hated that he was a great writer? Did his comment that “the influence of Turkish rule in Bosnia was absolutely negative” sufficiently damn him? Did his novels bear a discernible anti-Muslim taint? Or was there more to criticize?

  Some years after saving Andrić from his embarrassment about the Tripartite Pact, Djilas began openly disagreeing with Tito. Having resigned from the party, with prison and loss of civil rights on the horizon, he asked Andrić for a professional reading of his memoir of Montenegrin childhood, Land Without Justice (which, like his better-known Wartime, I strongly recommend). Andrić replied: “It’s awkward for me . . . I’m a party member.” One may well infer a trace of ordinary human resentment in the rejected party’s summation: “As far as I know, he never harmed a soul, though I cannot boast of his having done anyone any good either. . . .”

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  In its entry on Yugoslavia, the 1976 Britannica concludes: “There are . . . only two really major contemporary figures: Ivo Andrić, the Nobel Prize winner in 1961, is a prose master—best known for his Bridge on the Drina (1945)—whose works, as the Nobel committee noted, have been characterized by ‘epic force,’ great compassion, and clarity of style. The other is Miroslav Krleža, a satirist whose [works] . . . foreshadow the themes of modern existentialism.”

  Djilas again: “Andrić liked living and working in peace. . . . His [official] greetings and toasts were far more flattering than Krleža’s, precisely because Andrić was an alien fitting himself into a new situation . . . Andrić was simply an opportunist—but not a simple opportunist.”

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  Yes, he must have been an alien, for his characters are conspicuous in their alienage. Consider, for instance, in Drina, the Christian boy from Višegrad who in 1516 was wrested from his parents for the Turkish “tribute of blood,” and thus “changed his way of life, his faith, his name and his country.” In short, he grew into an alien opportunist—and eventually became one of the sultan’s great viziers. All the while he never escaped a “black pain which cut into his breast with that special well-known childhood pang.” And so he brought into being the eponymous bridge on the Drina to serve his lost home at Višegrad.

  To be an alien is to live between—and one longish pre–civil war (1974) history of the Habsburg Empire considers that Andrić “represents a bridge between imperial and royal Habsburg and future Yugoslav Bosnia. Although he portrayed the imperial administration of Bosnia with great sensitivity and knowledge, he . . . [was] outwardly directed toward Serbia.” It might be equally appropriate to call him inwardly directed toward the Ottoman culture of his childhood. Let us temporarily set aside his hypothetical political sympathies and consider him as the great literary master that he is.

  Faulkner could utter foolish provocations about race war, but only an ideologue would therefore dismiss his magnificent novels and stories about the tragically echoing ambiguities of race relations in the Deep South. Indeed, Andrić’s more slender corpus is as complex and subtle as Faulkner’s. To my mind, his supreme achievement is the understated Bosnian Chronicle, but the more crowd-pleasing Drina likewise veils his reductionist “absolutely negative” judgment of the Ottomans in a brilliant-colored web of nuance. Whatever one might think of the long Turkish occupation of Bosnia, with its gifts and cruelties, nuance positively shines in the novel’s central device: the vicissitudes of that vizier’s bridge and the generations it served. “This hard and long building process was for them [the Višegrad people] a foreign task undertaken at another’s expense. Only when, as the fruit of this effort, the great bridge arose, men began to remember details and to embroider the creation of a real, skillfully built and lasting bridge with fabulous tales which they well knew to weave and remember.” No “absolutely negative” here!

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  But by now it should be clear that Omer Pasha Latas will be no paean to the Ottoman period. In the very first pages, when our eponymous protagonist comes to Sarajevo in 1850 to implement certain moderately progressive reforms at whatever cost to the local Muslim gentry, “The procession . . . was truly impressive and intimidating, but somehow overdone. In front of it and behind it, to the right and left of it, stretched the deprivation of a poor harvest and a hungry spring, the bleakness of crooked, puddle-filled alleys, dilapidated eaves and long unpainted houses, the poorly dressed people and their anxious faces.”

  But unlike the vizier of Drina, Omer Pasha, who began his life utterly beyond the Ottoman pale, voluntarily defects to the Turkish Empire. Almost right away “he found good, warmhearted people,” and upon their advice he converts to Islam.

  As it happens, there was a real “Omer-paša Latas[,] [b]orn Michael Lattas,” whom Malcolm’s history describes as “one of the most effective and intelligent governors [Bosnia] ever had in this last century of Ottoman rule,” and who implemented certain reforms to the benefit of the Christian minority. In Andrić’s portrayal you will find little testimony of his effectiveness, and even less of his arguable benignity. He is, in a word, lost.

  If warmhearted people are less in evidence in Omer Pasha than they might be (Andrić specializes in the envious, the jealous, the lovesick, and above all the disappointed), localism and syncretism remain his affectionate obsessions. One of this novel’s many briefly yet elegantly sketched characters is the eastern Bosnian village headman Knez Bogdan Zimonjić, whose massively silent obstinacy holds its own against Omer Pasha’s seduction and threats. The unpleasant Omer Pasha himself (“I will reduce your entire Bosnia to rubble, so no one will know who is a bey and who an aga”) contains multitudes: for instance, the failed father of his Austrian past, his unhappy wife (another former Christian), and the “traitors’ unit” of kindred converts, with whom he operates in exquisitely delineated uneasy dependence. “Most were despairing vagrants who had lost one homeland and not found another, damaged by life among strangers, with burned bridges behind them . . . condemned to being loyal soldiers because they had nowhere to go”—call them fragmentary fictive representations of a certain post-1945 Dr. Ivo Andrić.

  And so let me now quote another war reporter, Aleksa Djilas, writing in the gruesome year 1992: “Though he came from a Croatian family in Bosnia”—I pause to remind you of the claim that “Dr. Ivo Andrić is himself a Serb and a Bosnian”—“An
drić considered himself a Yugoslav—a nationality that encompassed identities of all the different Yugoslav groups. . . . [He] believed only a general acceptance of such a Yugoslav identity within a common state could put an end to the ancient conflicts among various Yugoslav groups.” Whether or not the last sentence is a stretch, I believe that Andrić’s literary project is indeed the noble one of encompassing all the identities he knew.

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  Who and what, then, was an Ottoman, a Muslim, an occupier, a person of the third sort? “Knowing that to be a true Turk meant being naturally hard, haughty, basically cold and unyielding,” the fictive Omer Pasha does his best to live up to this stereotype, but one hallmark of Andrić’s genius is that as we read him we keep wondering about the problematic nature of all identities, let alone assumed ones. Consider this telling observation from the viewpoint of the procurer Ahmet Aga: Omer Pasha “was beginning to lose his sense of proportion, to forget not only what was permissible and natural and what was not, but also what he himself really wanted and could do and what he could not.” That goes for most of the novel’s characters, from the man who loses his sanity after a love-inflaming glimpse of a strange woman, to Omer Pasha’s irresolute and undistinguished brother, whom the great man advises to consider suicide.

  And so we should read Andrić with due regard for ambiguity and irony. There are Turks and Turkish masks. When the Croatian-born, European-trained painter Karas, having received a commission to paint Omer Pasha, enters the empire, “the first Turkish junior officer who had examined his passport at the border, though barely able to read, had worn . . . a cold, repellent mask. . . . And it was the same everywhere.” If you like, take such passages as nail-in-the-coffin proofs of (requoting Ajami) this author’s “great dread of Islam in the Balkans.” But Omer Pasha, the strict cold Turk, is not a Turk. And Karas, a non-Muslim failure wherever he goes, takes comfort in bigoted resentment.

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  In this strange novel there comes no resolution, if only because the book remained unfinished at the time of Andrić’s death; the bitter epiphanies of minor characters shed but glancing flickers upon the impermeable solitude of Omer Pasha himself, who at the end departs for unknown places with us none the wiser as to his mission’s practical accomplishments. How life will devolve for his raging wife, and whether Karas’s portrait ever turned out well, of these and other matters we are left ignorant.

  Omer Pasha Latas consists less of sequential chapters than of vignettes, which in Drina would have transformed themselves into tales out of the folk tradition, and even here sometimes blossom into magical realism, as in the case of a certain Kostake Nenishanu, maître d’hotel of Omer Pasha’s entourage, who unavailingly pursues and finally murders a Christian prostitute: “the story of his crime . . . spread in different directions and to a different rhythm, to grow and branch out, present everywhere but invisible as an underground stream,” serving the superficially opposed purposes of wish compensation and didactic morality tale—the more so as they diverge from actuality. Not only does this passage give a tolerable idea of Andrić’s art; it also stands in for alienation’s beautiful escapist dreams. The novel’s characters cannot understand each other or even themselves.

  One might say, this is surely the human condition . . . but then new passages hammer away at the Turks, until it grows more difficult to reject Ajami’s interpretation of Andrić’s politics—difficult, but not impossible.

  It is hardly unreasonable to see Bosnia, as Andrić did in Omer Pasha, as “a society where there have long been disorder, violence and abuse.” And at times, certainly in the 1990s and the 1940s, maybe in 1850–1851 when the novel is set, “people could be divided,” as he upliftingly put it, “into three groups, unequal in size, but sharing the same wretchedness: prisoners, those who pursued and guarded them and silent, impotent onlookers.” These observations ring true, but not eternal. And so readers must decide for themselves whether or not Omer Pasha Latas contains bigotry. Perhaps the best compliment they could pay it would be to delve into Bosnian history.

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  As for “that Serb or Croat (take your pick) monstre sacré Ivo Andrić,” (in the words of Danilo Kiš, another great writer from the region) let me leave you with one last assessment from Djilas: “In Andrić’s cautious and quiet reserve there was something hard and unyielding, even bitter, which any threat to the deeper currents of his life would have encountered. . . . In his deepest and most creative self, Andrić tried to live outside finite time.” Good Communists could hardly approve of that! And indeed, Djilas went on to insist that “somehow, everyone must pay his debt to his times.” However, he ended the sentence as follows, either to soften the disparagement of Andrić or because he was now considering his own darkening situation: “But the wise man thinks his own thoughts and does things his own way.”

  Andrić did pay his debt to his times. He wrote about what formed him. His bitterness was sincere, his descriptions beautiful. Meanwhile, like Omer Pasha, he thought his own thoughts, leaving us with haunting sentences and difficult questions.

  —WILLIAM T. VOLLMANN

  *Readers should be warned that my attempt to express narrative continuity in regard to Bosnia’s multiple tragedies may be controversial or even offensive. Many accounts take the position that the Bosnian genocide of the 1990s was a unique event, like the Holocaust, and that it would not have happened without its Serbian instigators. “The biggest obstacle to all understanding of the conflict [in Bosnia of 1992–1993] is the assumption that what has happened . . . is the product . . . of forces lying within Bosnia’s own internal history. This is the myth which was carefully propagated by those who caused the conflict. . . .” (Noel Malcolm, Bosnia, A Short History). All I can say is that books written in and about (for instance) the 1940s are sufficiently replete with gruesome slaughters for the greater glory of this creed or that ethnicity as to make me uncomfortable with this reductionist position. If my own conflation (or, if you like, misunderstanding) causes pain to anyone, I am sincerely sorry.

  OMER PASHA LATAS

  GUIDE TO THE PRONUNCIATION OF SERBO-CROATIAN

  C, c ts, as in cats

  Č, č ch, as in church

  Ć, ć tj, close to č, but softer, i.e., t in future

  Dž, dž j, as in just

  Đ, đ dj, close to dž, but softer, i.e., d in verdure

  J, j y, as in yellow

  Š, š sh, as in ship

  Ž, ž zh, as in treasure

  ARRIVAL

  AFTER all sorts of hints and rumors, the day finally came when the Ottoman commander in chief, the seraskier Omer Pasha, entered Sarajevo with his army.

  It was customary for the governors of Bosnia, the viziers, to pass through Sarajevo on their way to their residence in the western town of Travnik. And the citizens of Sarajevo remembered the passage of each individual vizier for a long time. The traders in the marketplace and the beys, the powerful marketplace and the all-powerful beys, had always been glad that the seat of the vizier was in Travnik, and would never have been reconciled to its being moved to Sarajevo and having the vizier sit right here “on top of them” as they put it. And even the vizier’s passage through their town was hedged about with conditions established over the years. The vizier and his entourage could stay for no more than three days, and during that time they were given accommodation, food and whatever else was their due.

  For their part, the viziers used the manner of their entry into Sarajevo and their brief sojourn there to convey something of their nature and power, their intentions and subsequent plans. There were those who came modestly and peacefully, like merchants, prepared to negotiate the level of the bribes they might expect. There were honorable men, resolved to carry out to the best of their ability the task allotted them in Istanbul, who neither threatened, nor flattered, nor anticipated inordinate benefit for themselves. There were stern military men, sent to eliminate abuses and disorder through the severity and force of their rule; they passed through Sar
ajevo with a military entourage and dark intimations or open threats. There had been all sorts and types, but never anything like what was happening now.

  The imperial seraskier entered Sarajevo with a substantial and well-equipped army and with the most sweeping powers. His task was to discipline and bring to heel not the rebellious populace nor an external enemy but those who had ruled Bosnia for centuries and who had until the previous day been called the sultan’s sons: the beys, the leaders and members of the most prominent families. He was coming in addition to, alongside and over the head of the regular vizier, the civil governor, based in Travnik, and he asked no one how long he could stay in Sarajevo or where he should choose his headquarters. He was not coming as an authority to rule and manage, but to wage war and punish. And, to cap it all, this seraskier, who had suppressed many rebellions throughout the empire, was none other than a former Christian from the Lika district, an Austrian cadet, who had fled to Bosnia a quarter of a century earlier, converted to Islam and then, through his knowledge, skill and personal merit, risen to the highest military position in the empire.

  It did not occur to anyone to impose conditions in connection with his passage through Sarajevo on such a person. The leaders, who knew that this military might and its infamous seraskier were moving against them and their basic interests and way of life, endeavored to ascertain the seraskier’s wishes and intentions, in order to preempt them, to appear to satisfy them or to circumvent them. They could see and were well aware that this was not one of those former old-fashioned Ottoman executioners, with ceremonial cannon and a personal entourage of a hundred or so men, with little experience of the world or local conditions, but a proper soldier and administrator, with troops equipped with modern weapons and training, with the skill of an educated officer, a convert and careerist, with the zeal of a mercenary and ruthlessness of an unbeliever and foreigner. Rich, proud and devious, they hoped nevertheless to succeed in avoiding direct conflict and armed dispute, somehow to deceive and endure him, and that, in the end, they would watch him depart as they had so many others in the past, and that in Bosnia and in Herzegovina, the old order, their order, would prevail “as it always has and as it always will.” But at this moment, they too were beset by profound uncertainty and fear as they secretly weighed up their strength and prospects.