Bosnian Chronicle Read online

  He had a grudge against the rich because they had so much and because they spent and squandered, and passionately hated those who had nothing, those dark and perennial have-nots, that dragon with a million insatiable mouths. When the Residency people wanted to tease him, one of them would go to him and in the course of the conversation would say, in a compassionate voice and with a look of exaggerated sympathy, that so-and-so deserved attention “because he was poor.” Like a machine that never fails, Baki would forget everything and leap from his seat, crying in his shrill voice: “What do you want with the poor? What are they to you? Let them sink if they have to. Am I God Almighty that I should turn beggars into rich people? Even He’s given it up! He’s fed up with them.” He would drop his head and lower his voice in a sad caricature of the man who had spoken to him. “Because he’s poor! And what if he is poor? Since when is it an honor to be poor or some kind of title that gives a man certain rights? You say ‘He’s poor’ as if you were saying ‘He’s a hadji’ or ‘He’s a pasha.’” Then he would raise his voice and peer into the man’s face, sputtering with rage: “Why does he eat if he is poor? No one can eat as much as the poor. Why doesn’t he eat less?”

  He had nothing but praise for the native Bosnians who were simple and uncomplaining, whose poor were not impatient or demanding or aggressive like the poor of Istanbul or Salonica, who were content to spend their lives in quiet and anonymous squalor. He did not care for the people of Travnik because he had noticed that they were fond of ornament and that almost all of them, to a man, dressed well. He saw men wearing wide sashes and trousers decorated with silk braid, and women wearing shifts of heavy cloth and face veils embroidered with real gold; and that made him angry, because he could not explain to himself how these people got their money, why they bought such expensive and superfluous finery, and how they could afford to replace it, considering how fast the stuff wore out and was discarded. Such tangled speculations made him feel quite dizzy. And if, in talking to him, anyone rose to the defense of the Travnichani and took the line that it was a pleasure to see them in the bazaar, always so neat and well turned out, Baki would promptly jump at him. “Neat indeed! Where do they get the money for those fine clothes of theirs? Where? I ask you, where do these peasants get the money from?” And if the man continued in his praise of the townspeople and tried to justify their expensive taste in dressing, the Treasurer would get more and more stirred up. His blue eyes, so perplexed and at the same time so irresistibly comic, would suddenly turn a blustery purple and there would be a vicious glint in them. He would mince around on his short, invisible legs that were hobbled by too much fat, and wave his stubby arms like a crazed dervish. Finally he would find himself in the middle of the room, his feet astride, with outstretched arms, his pudgy fingers spread out like a fan, hissing and shrilling over and over again, in a sharp, breathless, piercing crescendo: “Where do they get the money? Where do they get it? Where—do—they—get—it?”

  At this point, the man who had come to tease and infuriate him would go away, leaving the frantic Treasurer in the middle of the room, unanswered, like a man foundering without help and hope in that raging ocean of endless expenses and swirling accounts which make up this witless and miserable world.

  The man who knew the Treasurer best and could tell the most stories about him was Eshref Effendi, the ailing physician to the Vizier. It was from him that D’Avenat learned most about the Treasurer.

  Sitting out in the sun, with his high-booted legs stretched out in front of him, his long thin hands resting on his knees, veined and gnarled, Eshref Effendi spoke in his deep and rasping hunter’s voice. “True, he’s ridiculous now and no one takes him seriously any more. A pig wouldn’t rub himself against him—but you should’ve seen him once. Even today you should not underestimate him. You say he’s the color of parchment and his hands shake. That may be so. But you would be making a mistake if you thought that he hasn’t long to live or that he won’t harm and threaten everything living around him as much as is in his power. Yes, he’s yellower than an old quince, but he has never been anything else. He was born yellow. For more than fifty years this thing has been crawling around God’s world, coughing, sneezing, moaning, puffing, and blowing in all directions like a punctured bellows. From that first day when he soiled the mattress on which his mother had brought him into the world, he’s been dirtying everything around him and suffering at the same time. He spent half his lifetime struggling with terrible constipation, and the other half with ghastly diarrhea and in racing across the yard with the water pot in his hand. But all that didn’t stop him, any more than his chronic toothache, insomnia, eczemas, and hemorrhages could have stopped him, from rolling around like a little barrel and doing mischief, all kinds of mischief, to everyone and everything, with the speed of a snake and the force of a bull. I always protest when they talk of him as a miser. No, that’s an insult to real misers. A miser loves money, or at least the thrill of miserliness, and is willing to sacrifice a good deal for it; but this one loves nothing and no one except himself, and loathes everything in this world, the living creatures as well as dead things. No, he’s not a miser, he is a dry rot, the kind of noxious dry rot that eats through iron.” Eshref Effendi finished his speech with a cryptic smile. “Oh, I know him, better than anyone, even though he never could touch me. You know, I’ve always been a hunter and nothing more. A free man. I could always stick people like him into my belt.”

  Besides these leading personages, D’Avenat managed to get to know other more important officials and to inform the Consul about them in great detail.

  There was the thin, dark-skinned Deputy Secretary, Ibrahim Effendi, who was said to be incorruptible: a shy taciturn man, who was only concerned with his large brood of children and with the Vizier’s files and records.

  His life was a perpetual struggle with clumsy and irresponsible scribes, messengers, and mail carriers, and with the Vizier’s papers which could never be got in order, almost as if there was a curse on them. He spent his days in a semidark room crammed with file boxes and shelves. Here there was a kind of order that only he understood. Whenever they asked him for a copy of some document or for an old letter, he became as flustered as if something utterly unexpected and unheard-of were happening; he jumped up, stopped in the middle of the room, clapped his hands to his temples, and tried to remember. All of a sudden the look in his dark eyes became a squint and he could see “two shelves simultaneously, on two opposite sides,” as Eshref Effendi put it. All the while he would murmur the name of the document they had asked for, faster and faster, slurring it more and more, until the sound of it was no more than a long, indistinct humming through his nose. Then, just as abruptly, the humming would stop, the Deputy Secretary would lunge forward as if catching a bird, and pounce with both hands on some shelf or other. The letter in question was usually there. But if, as sometimes happened, it was not, the Deputy Secretary would return to the middle of the room and start his concentration act all over again, including the nasal hum and a second leap in another direction. So it went on until the thing was found.

  The commanding officer of the Vizier’s Guard was one amiable, scatterbrained Behdjet, a man of robust health, fat and lobster-faced, brave enough but an incorrigible dice player and lazybones. The two-dozen-odd foot soldiers and cavalry that made up the Vizier’s motley bodyguard did not give Behdjet much trouble or much work. All in all, they solved the problem in such a way that Behdjet didn’t have to worry about them much, or they about him. They played dice, ate, drank, and slept. The Guard captain’s main and hardest task was having to battle the Treasurer, Baki, whenever the time came to squeeze the monthly pay out of him, or some special expense for himself or his soldiers, without lengthy palaver and undue delays. On those occasions there would be unbelievable scenes.

  With his pettyfogging and quibbling the Treasurer managed to rouse even the placid Behdjet out of his equanimity, so much so that the latter pulled his knife and threatened to
cut the skinflint of a treasurer into small pieces, “like for a kebab.” And Baki, who was normally timid and weak, would defy Behdjet’s naked knife in defense of his coffers, blinded with hate and revulsion against the spendthrift, vowing that before he died he would see Behdjet’s head stuck on a pole, on that slope below the cemetery where the chopped heads of evildoers were displayed. In the end, the matter was closed with the captain’s getting his money and coming out of the Treasurer’s office laughing aloud, while Baki remained standing over his money chest, passing his fingers over the newly inflicted hole as though it were a wound; getting ready, for the hundredth time, to go to the Vizier and complain about the no-good thief of a captain who had been plundering his treasury and embittering his life for years. And he longed deeply and fervently, with all his Treasurer’s soul, that he might live long enough to see the victory of right and order, and see too—really and truly see—that hollow and insolent head of Behdjet’s leering down from a pole.

  The post of Deputy Vizier was held by Suleiman Pasha Skoplyak, who, as we have seen, had occupied the same office under the previous Vizier. He was seldom in Travnik. And when there, he was much more accommodating and better disposed toward the Austrian than the French Consul. Nevertheless, this native Bosnian was the only man in the weird agglomeration at the Residency of whom one could say with reasonable safety that he intended to honor his promises and had the power and the skill to carry them out.

  10

  The consular era had brought ferment and unrest to this provincial capital. The immediate and indirect effects of it were that many men rose and many stumbled and fell; many would remember it for the better, others for the worse.

  But what ever caused the barber’s apprentice, Salko Maluhiya, son of a poor widow, to reap such a beating from the servants of the Moslem begs? Why was this mishap associated in his mind with the consular era, when he was not even remotely connected either with the consular officials or with the begs and notables or with the men of learning and the bazaar folk?

  Salko’s predicament was bound up with one of those life forces that throb inside us and around us, that give us wings and carry us forward, that paralyze and strike us down. It was this force, to which we give the abbreviated name “love,” that prompted Salko the Barber to squeeze and scratch himself through the blackthorn hedge of the Austrian Consul’s garden and climb a tree to get a glimpse of the Consul’s daughter Agatha.

  Like all true lovers, Salko neither showed nor talked about his love, but he found a way to gratify it, at least up to a point.

  During his free hour at lunchtime, he crept unnoticed through the stables of the caravansary adjoining the Consulate, and from there, by a trap hole through which manure was removed from the stable, he gained a hedge from which he could observe the consular garden; in that garden, more often than not, was the Consul’s daughter, to whom he was drawn by something bigger and more powerful than all the strength of his frail apprentice’s body.

  Between this hedge and the consular garden there was a strip of seedy-looking plum orchard, owned by the Hafizadich begs; looking across it, one had a clear view of the Consul’s garden, laid out in the European style. Its paths were neat and the molehills smoothed away. In the middle, round and star-shaped beds had been dug and planted with flowers, and there were stakes crowned with globes of red and blue glass.

  The whole area was sunny and well watered, so that whatever was sown grew quickly and to a great height, with abundant blossoms and fruit.

  It was here that Salko the Barber saw the daughter of Herr von Mitterer. As a matter of fact, he had also seen her in the town, driving with her father. But that happened so seldom and was so fleeting that he hardly knew what to look at first: the Consul’s uniform, the yellow high-polished open carriage, or the young miss, whose legs were always tightly bundled in a gray carriage rug with an embroidered crimson crown and a monogram. And now this same remote girl, the color of whose eyes he’d not yet had the luck to see, was there close at hand, for him to gaze at with impunity; moving all alone, unaware that anyone was watching her, through the garden in front of the low veranda which had been renovated and glazed that spring.

  Hidden from men’s eyes, crouching, with mouth half open and breath bated, Salko peeped stealthily through the fence. And the girl, believing herself quite alone, walked among the flowers, studied the bark of trees, hopped from one side of the path to the other, then paused and either glanced up at the sky or down at her hands. (Much as young animals pause in the middle of their play, not knowing what to do next with their bodies.) Then she would resume walking from one end to the other, waving her arms and clapping her hands, now in front of her, now behind her back. The gleaming stake balls of different colors threw back a comical distorted image of her brightly clad figure, together with the sky and the greenery.

  Salko forgot the world utterly and lost all sense of time, place, and the existence of his own body. And it was only afterwards, when he got up to go, that he would feel how numb his folded legs had become, how sore were his fingers and nails, which by then were full of earth and bark. And much later, back at the shop, where he was often clouted for being late, his heart would still pump hard in a disturbing way. All the same, the following day he could scarcely wait to get through his frugal lunch and leave the shop and slink through the caravansary stables toward the fence of the Hafizadich plum orchard, trembling beforehand at the possibility of being caught and at the joys that awaited him.

  One day—on a bright and quiet afternoon after a morning of rain—the girl was not in the garden. The flowerbeds were wet and the paths swept clean by the shower. Rain-washed, the glass balls shone in the sun, gaily reflecting the scattered cotton wool of clouds. Seeing that the girl was not there, and racked by longing and impatience, Salko first climbed the fence and then the old plum tree that grew alongside it, completely ringed by a thick bush of alder. He peered out through the dense alder foliage.

  On the ground-floor veranda all windows had been thrown open and the panes sparkled with the sun and the bright sky. By contrast, the veranda’s interior looked much cooler. Salko took it all in at leisure. A red carpet on the floor, incomprehensible pictures on the wall. The Consul’s daughter was sitting on a small, very low stool. She had a large book in her lap, but raised her eyes every other moment and gazed absently down the veranda and out through the windows. This new attitude, in which he had never seen her before, excited him even more. The darker the shadows that fell on her, the more distant she grew, the longer he felt he must gaze. He was terrified lest his foot should slip or he should break a twig. He was numb with happiness at seeing her so motionless, with a face that seemed even paler and longer in the shadows; a premonition spread through him that there was more to come, that something even more exciting and extraordinary was about to happen, as strange as the rest of that rainy day. He told himself that nothing was going to happen. And what could possibly happen? And then again, it might.

  There now, she lay both her palms on the open book. His breath and mind stood still—it will, it was going to happen. And, true enough, the girl rose slowly and hesitantly, put her palms together and then opened them so that they were joined only by her fingertips. She gazed at her nails—now it was bound to happen! Suddenly she pulled her fingers apart, as if snapping something thin and invisible, looked down her dress, moved her arms away from her body and slowly began to dance in the middle of the red carpet. She tilted her head slightly, as if listening to something, and gazed at the tips of her shoes with lowered eyes. Her face was still, entranced; mirroring the shadows and lights of the rainy day as she moved.

  And Salko, realizing that his premonition had come true, lost all sense of where and who he was, edged forward from the trunk of the tree to the outer branches, raised himself higher above the fence, and stretched out a little more every time she kicked a leg during her dance. He pressed his face hard into the young bark and didn’t mind the tickling of the leaves. His whole inside d
anced and swooned. It was difficult to endure so much joy in such an awkward attitude. And the girl didn’t stop dancing. As she repeated the same figure a second and a third time, a thrill of delight ran right through him, as if he were looking at something precious and long familiar.

  Suddenly the tree gave a loud crack. The branch under him snapped and gave way; he felt himself sinking through the alder leaves, the branches switched and tore at him, he bumped hard twice, once with his shoulder, then with his head. He scraped through the hedge and into the garden of Hafizadich. He hit the fence first and from there tumbled to the ground between some moldy and worm-eaten boards that covered an irrigation ditch. The rotten boards gave way under his weight and he sank up to his knees in slime and mud.

  When he lifted up his filthy scratched face and opened his eyes, he saw above him a maid from Hafizadich’s scullery, an old woman with a wrinkled yellow face, like his mother’s.

  “Did you kill yourself, you little devil? What bad luck brings you to the ditch?”

  But he only looked around him wildly, searching for a glimmer of that loveliness in which he had basked a moment before in his elevated place, before he toppled from it. He was listening to the old woman, without understanding her, when he saw, with wide-open eyes, the servants of Hafizadich running with sticks in their hands from the far end of the garden; but he could not collect himself or grasp what had happened or what those people wanted of him.

  The frail, sad, and lonely little girl resumed her walking and her artless games on the veranda and in the garden, knowing nothing of what had just taken place because of her in the neighboring garden, just as earlier she had not been aware that anyone was watching her.

  After the beating in the Hafizadich garden and the clouting he got subsequently at the barber shop for coming back late, Salko went to bed that day without supper. This was the usual punishment meted out by his mother, a sallow woman, old before her time, whom poverty had worn out and made harsh and shrewish. Thereafter the boy gave up stealing into other people’s gardens and clambering over fences and trees in quest of things that were not for him. He stuck to his work and, paler and more wistful than before, dreamed of the beautiful little foreign girl. She now danced for him exactly as his heart and imagination commanded, and he no longer risked the danger of falling into a strange ditch and being caught and thrashed.