Bosnian Chronicle Page 24

  The steep, green, and flowering slopes seemed to bloom all over again and the air was filled with an unknown, intoxicating breath which—it seemed now to him—had been coursing in this valley all the time, hidden just below the surface. The secret wealth of this dark squalid land suddenly took shape and became visible to the naked eye, and all at once one discovered that the stubborn silence hid within itself this fitful, quickening breath of love which melted alike the last moan of resistance and the joy of surrender, that its mute and forever blank visage was no more than a mask beneath which there glowed fountains of light, crimson with the sweetness of young blood.

  Near them, there was a thick and gnarled old pear tree, uprooted and lying athwart the steep slope like a sofa. Rotted away at the lower end, it was still sprouting new branches along the upper trunk. They leaned on it, then sank down, embracing; first the girl, then he on top of her, against the broad trunk of the pear tree, as on a bed laid ready for them. She was still unresisting, making no sound or movement, but when the young man’s hands slid downward and gripped her soft middle between the waistcoat and the trousers, where there was only her shirt, the girl pulled away to free herself, straining over backwards, like the branch of a fruit tree ready to snap back when they bed it down at harvest time. He never even felt her thrusting him away; and he suddenly found himself standing on the path once again, not knowing when or how it happened. The girl was kneeling at his feet, with her hands clasped and her face turned up to him, almost as if she were praying. Blood had drained out of her cheeks, her eyes were liquid with tears. She spoke words which he did not recognize but which at that moment were clearer to him than his own mother tongue: imploring him to be human and to spare her, not to ruin her, since she herself didn’t have it in her to withstand this thing which had taken hold of her with all the force of death, which was even more dire and irreparable than death itself. She pleaded with him, on his mother’s life and by all that was dearest to him, and kept repeating in a voice suddenly hoarse with emotion and urgency: “Don’t, don’t . . . !”

  Conscious of the thudding of blood in the veins of his neck, the young man tried to collect himself and grasp the meaning of the unexpected turnabout, accomplished with such lightning speed. He asked himself in amazement what it was that had suddenly wrenched this swooning woman from under him and rooted them both in this ludicrous posture: he roused and on his feet, like a heathen scourge conqueror; and she on her knees at his feet, her fingers laced in supplication and her moist eyes lifted up to his face, like a saint in a holy picture. He wanted to pull her up from the ground, circle his arms around her again, and lay her down on the leafy bedstead of the fallen pear tree; but he had neither the strength nor the daring for it. Everything had suddenly changed, in a baffling fashion.

  He didn’t know how or when it had happened but he could see plainly that this submissive girl, pliant as a reed, had in some astonishing way passed from the “vegetable world,” of which she had been a part until then, into an altogether different realm; that she had cunningly escaped under the sure protection of some stronger will which he was unable to challenge. He felt himself cheated, outplayed, sorely disillusioned. He was overcome by shame, then infuriated, with her, himself, with the whole world. He bent down and carefully raised her up from the ground, mumbling a word or two. She was still limp and docile, yielding to every movement of his arm as she had done a little while before, but she continued to implore him with looks and words to take pity on her and spare her. He no longer thought of embracing her. Frowning, studiedly polite, he helped her rearrange the folds in her trousers and pin the silver brooch at her throat, which had come undone. Then, just as abruptly and inexplicably, the girl ran off down the slope toward the Consulate building.

  The young man passed a few unquiet days. He was constantly haunted by a sense of bewilderment, by the helpless fury and shame of those moments in the garden. In his thoughts he kept harking back to the question: what came over him and the girl, and what had happened, exactly? And he tried, just as stubbornly, to push it out of his mind and not to remember the brief encounter on the deserted garden path. But now and then he told himself with a sheepish grin: “Yes, yes, you’re certainly a model lover and a fine psychologist to boot. For some mysterious reason you go and get it into your head that she’s part and parcel of the plant world, a pagan symbol of the country, an undiscovered treasure waiting only to be gathered up. So you condescend to bend down. And once you’re down there, everything changes all of a sudden. She’s on her knees like little Isaac about to be sacrificed by Abraham, only an angel flies down in the nick of time and snatches him from the jaws of death. Because that’s exactly what she looked like. And you did Abraham to perfection. Congratulations! Now you’re starting to play real live tableaux on Biblical subjects, with deeply moral and devout motives. I congratulate you!”

  And only long rides in the hillside woods around the town could restore him to something like equanimity and turn his thoughts in other directions.

  For some days he was tormented by his frustrated desire and youthful vanity, and then that too ceased. He began to calm down and forget. He still saw the needleworkers as he passed through the garden, and Jelka’s lowered head among them, but he no longer stopped or felt embarrassed; he would call out to them gaily and speak a word or two that he had learned and memorized that day, and then pass on with a smile, brisk and without a care in the world.

  However, one evening about this time, he added a sentence to his manuscript on Bosnia, in the chapter devoted to the types and racial characteristics of the Bosnian people: “The women are well built as a rule and many of them have conspicuously fine and regular features, beautiful bodies, and a white skin that is dazzling to the eye.”

  11

  It seemed as if nothing in this country was immune to sudden, startling changes. Everything, at any moment, might become the opposite of what it seemed to be. Daville was beginning to reconcile himself to the unpleasant fact that he had lost Mehmed Husref Pasha, a lively and openhanded man on whose cordial reception, understanding, and at least token help he could always depend, and that in his place he now had to deal with the cold, unbending, and lugubrious Ibrahim Pasha, who was as hard on himself as on others, from whose stony countenance it was hard to wheedle a good word or a human emotion.

  This impression of his had grown stronger since his initial contact with the Vizier; moreover, everything he had learned about him from D’Avenat added fresh substance to it. Very soon, however, Daville was forced to conclude that his interpreter, for all his realistic and expert approach, was actually a one-sided judge of men. It was true that in ordinary business and the routine intercourse of workaday life his judgment was penetrating, pitilessly accurate, and dependable. But as soon as he was faced with subtler and more complex problems, his indolence and disregard of moral issues led him to generalize, oversimplify, and make snap judgments. So it was in this case.

  After his second and third audiences, the Consul discovered that the Vizier was not as remote as he had seemed at first sight. Above all, the new Vizier also had his “favorite topic of conversation.” In his case it was not the sea, as with Mehmed Husref Pasha, or some other lively and positive subject. For Ibrahim Pasha the starting and finishing point of every conversation was the fall of his master Selim III, and his own personal tragedy which had been closely bound up with that fall. From this point, his views fanned out in all directions. They even shadowed and colored all that was happening in the world around him; and viewed thus, it was natural that the world should appear dark, troubled, and without hope.

  Still, the Consul was heartened by the discovery that the Vizier was not simply a “physical freak and a spiritual mummy,” and that there were topics and words that moved and stirred him. What was more, the Consul realized with time that this hard and somber Vizier, whose every conversation was a lecture on the worthlessness of all existence, was in many respects a better and more trustworthy man than the flash
ing, volatile, and ever-smiling Mehmed Pasha. The way in which Daville listened to his pessimistic judgments and general discourses pleased the Vizier and inspired his confidence, for it was to his taste. He never talked as long or as confidentially either to von Mitterer or to any other personage, as he came more and more to talk to Daville. And the Consul, in his turn, grew fonder and fonder of these meetings in which the pair of them wallowed avidly in the manifold troubles of this imperfect world and at the end of which he would usually extract some small concession, which had been the purpose of his visit to the Vizier in the first place.

  The conversation usually began with a tribute to Napoleon’s most recent success on the battlefront or in the field of international politics; but the Vizier, obeying his natural compulsion, moved at once from cheerful and affirmative topics to grave and unpleasant ones—England, for example, her toughness, ruthlessness, and acquisitive drive, against which even Napoleon’s avenging genius was helpless.

  From there it was only a step to a general discourse on the problems of ruling people and telling them what to do, on the thankless job of those who ruled and gave orders, on how public affairs tended, more often than not, to fly off at a tangent and double back on themselves, contrary to the wishes of high-minded men and the clear but unenforceable laws of morality. At that point, he would pass on to the fate of Selim III and his followers. Daville would listen with mute attention and deep sympathy as the Vizier’s words took on a note of pathetic zeal: “The world is determined not to be happy. People can’t stand a sensible government or a noble-minded ruler. Goodness in this world is like a naked orphan. May the All-Highest guide your Emperor, but I saw with my own eyes what happened to my master Sultan Selim. There was a man whom God had blessed with every good quality of mind and body. He slaved away and burnt himself out like a candle for the happiness and progress of the Empire. Clever, gentle, and righteous, he never had an evil or treacherous thought, never dreamt what depths of malice, duplicity, and bad faith men harbored in themselves; and so he laid himself wide open and no one could save him from it. Spending all his strength in the discharge of his sovereign duties and leading a pure life such as hadn’t been known since the times of the caliphs, Selim did nothing to defend himself from the attacks and treachery of evil schemers. That explains why a mere detachment of Jamaks, the scum of the army, led by a mad rabble rouser, could force such a ruler from the throne and shut him up in the Serai, in order to wipe out all his far-seeing plans for pulling the Empire out of its rut and apathy and to place on the throne a shallow, sensual wretch who surrounded himself with boors, drunkards, and professional traitors. There, that’s the kind of politics the world dotes on. And how few people there are who can see that, and even fewer who are able and willing to prevent it!”

  From this topic he would pass on to Bosnia and the conditions under which he and the Consul had to live there. The minute he turned to Bosnia and the Bosnians the Vizier’s language and word pictures became exceedingly sharp and dismal, and here Daville found himself listening with genuine compassion and real understanding.

  The Vizier was inconsolable over the fact that the news of Selim’s fall had overtaken him at a moment when, at the head of his army, he was about to push the Russians out of Wallachia and Moldavia, with success almost in his grasp. Thus at one stroke the tragedy robbed the Empire of the best of Sultans and him, Ibrahim Pasha, of a great victory that was as good as won, only to cast him suddenly, a humiliated and broken man, into this remote and poverty-stricken land.

  “You can see yourself, my noble friend, where we are and the kind of people I have to contend and put up with. It would be easier to run a herd of wild bison than these Bosnian begs and chieftains. They are wild, wild, wild. They’re brainless, rude, and uncouth, but touchy and puffed up at the same time, headstrong but nothing inside the head. Believe me when I tell you, these Bosnians have no feeling of honor in their hearts and no sense in their heads; they fall over one another with their quarrels and intrigue and that’s the only thing they know and can do. And with these people I’m supposed to go and put down the uprising in Serbia! That’s been the story of our Empire since they removed and banished Sultan Selim, and God alone knows what we’re going to do next.”

  The Vizier’s voice died away in silence and his hollow eyes, which only despair could light up now, glowed up weakly, like tarnished crystals, on his impassive face.

  Framing his words carefully, Daville broke the silence: “But if things were to change at Istanbul by some lucky turn of circumstances, and you were reinstated in the office of Grand Vizier . . .”

  “Oh, even then!” said the Vizier, who that morning took particular pleasure in painting the future in the bleakest of colors. “Even then,” he went on in a dull voice, “I would be dispatching firmans that no one would carry out. I would be defending the country from the Russians, the English, the Serbs, and every other kind of blight. I would be trying to save something that’s almost impossible to save.”

  At the end of such talks the Consul would usually state the purpose of his visit, which might concern a permit for the export of grain to Dalmatia, some frontier dispute or the like, and the Vizier, still deep in his bleak reveries, would give his approval without much thought.

  At other times the Vizier would speak of different things during the audience, but always in the same glum tone of quiet hopelessness and disillusion. He talked of the new Grand Vizier, who hated him and envied him because he had been more fortunate in the previous wars, and who for that reason kept him in suspense and withheld the equipment and the intelligence he needed in the campaign against Serbia. Or he would give Daville the latest news about his predecessor in Travnik, Husref Mehmed Pasha, whom the same Grand Vizier had exiled all the way to Keser.

  All this so filled and burdened the Consul’s head that, in spite of the fact that he usually accomplished his mission successfuly, he returned home as if poisoned and could not eat his supper and would spend the night dreaming of calamities, exiles, and misery of all sorts.

  All the same, Daville was glad that in the Vizier’s incurable pessimism he had found, momentarily at least, a point of contact with the man; it was like a narrow, isolated strip of no man’s land on which the two of them could meet as man to man, in that crude Turkish world that was devoid of a spark of understanding or a vestige of humanity to which he, a luckless foreign consul, might respond. At times it seemed to him it would need only a little effort and a little leisure for a real friendship and a close human relationship to spring up between him and the Vizier.

  And just then some incident would occur that would show up, all at once, the impassable distance between them, that revealed the Vizier in an entirely new light, a worse and more deplorable person than D’Avenat had pictured him in their conversations. And once more Daville would be thrown into utter confusion, robbed of the hope of ever finding in these parts “one spark of humanity” that would live longer than a fear or outlast a smile or a glance. The Consul would then tell himself, in wonder and despair, that the harsh school of the East knew no recess and went on forever, that in these lands there was no end to surprises, just as there was no true moderation, no steadfast judgment, no lasting value in human relationships.

  One could not tell or foresee, even approximately, the next move these people were likely to make.

  One day the Vizier unexpectedly summoned both consuls at the same time, which had never happened before. Their two processions met at the gate. The divan had the air of a special occasion. The courtiers whispered and buzzed. The Vizier was cordial and dignified. After the first coffee and chibouks, the Secretary and the town mayor also appeared and took their places modestly. The Vizier told the consuls how his Deputy, Suleiman Pasha, had crossed the river Drina the week before with his Bosnian troops and had routed a very strong and well-equipped Serbian force, trained and led by “Russian officers.” He ventured to hope that as a result of this victory there would be no Russians left in Serbia, wh
ich in all probability would mean the end of the whole rebellion. It was an important victory, said the Vizier, and the moment was obviously close at hand when quiet and order would be restored in Serbia. Knowing that the consuls, as good friends and neighbors, would be delighted to hear this, he had called them to share his pleasure at the good news.

  The Vizier fell silent. As if that were a signal, a group of pages entered the audience hall almost at a trot. A reed mat was spread across the vacant part of the great hall. They brought in several baskets, sacks of goat hair, and greasy black sheepskin bags. They quickly untied and opened these containers and began to empty them on the outspread mat. While this was being done, the servants brought the consuls lemonade and fresh chibouks.

  A great big heap of severed human ears and noses began to grow on the mat—an indescribable heap of wretched human flesh, salted and blackened in its own dried blood. A cold and sickly reek of damp salt and curdled blood spread through the audience hall. Then, out of the baskets and sacks, they took several hats, belts, and bandoleers with metal eagles on them; and from other bags they pulled out red and yellow pennants, narrow and gold-tasseled, with a picture of a saint in the middle. These were followed by two or three icons, which hit the floor with a dull thud. Finally they carried in a sheaf of bayonets tied with bark rope.

  These were the trophies of the victory over the rebel Serbian army “which the Russians had organized and led.”

  Someone unseen on the fringe of the gathering said in a deep, praying voice: “Allah has blessed the arms of Islam!” All those present echoed it with an indistinct murmur.

  Daville, who would not have expected a scene like this even in his dreams, felt his stomach heave and the lemonade turn acrid on his tongue, threatening to burst through his nose. He forgot his pipe and could only stare at von Mitterer, as if expecting rescue and an explanation from him. The Austrian was himself pale and bowed, but as he had long been used to surprises of this kind, he was the first to find words and congratulate the Vizier and the Bosnian army on their victory. Anxious not to appear to lag behind his rival, Daville suppressed his fear and revulsion and spoke a few sentences in honor of the victory, adding his wishes for the continued success of imperial arms and peace in the Empire. He said this in a somewhat wooden voice; he seemed to hear each one of his words clearly, as if another person spoke them. Everything was duly translated. Then, once again, it was the turn of the Vizier. He thanked the consuls for their good wishes and felicitations, saying that he deemed himself well blessed to have them beside him at a moment when, with considerable emotion, he beheld these arms which the faithless Muscovites had shamefully left behind them on the battlefield.