Bosnian Chronicle Page 27

  His Albanians were shouting and yelling, as if to give more force to his cries, and were about to break down the heavy doors.

  At that moment one of the long narrow windows, cut in the wall on both sides of the gate, opened slowly. The shutter, which was rust-bound and overgrown with moss and lichen, was raised up with difficulty. A rolled-up mat appeared on the half-apron window; out of it slid an almost naked corpse which fell down with a thud on the white mosaic floor of the courtyard.

  The first to run up was Bariaktar. Before him lay the dead, bareheaded, bruised, and purple-faced Sultan Selim. It was too late for everything. Bariaktar had got what he wanted, but there was no value or point to his victory. Evil and madness had carried the day over good and reason. Vice remained on the throne, disorder in the government and the state.

  “Such, monsieur, was the end of the noblest sovereign of the Ottoman Empire,” concluded the Vizier, as if waking up, eased, from the trance in which he had spoken till then.

  When Daville came home after this conversation, he reflected that no one was ever likely to know how dearly he paid for his small successes and for the concessions he obtained from the Vizier. Even D’Avenat was subdued and could find no words.

  12

  The year 1808 was evidently to be a year of losses and misfortunes of all kinds. Instead of that humid season, “which is neither autumn nor winter,” Travnik was visited by an early and bitter cold wave at the start of November. At this time one of Daville’s children suddenly fell ill.

  This middle son of Daville’s was in his third year and had up till then been robust and thriving, in contrast to his younger brother who had been born at Split during the journey out and had always been delicate. When the child first sickened his mother treated him with herb tea and household medicines, but when he lost strength rapidly even the staunch Mme Daville lost her confidence and self-possession. They began to call in doctors and all those who styled themselves doctors and were regarded as such by the world. The Davilles were able to see then what health and sickness meant for these people and what life and falling ill amounted to in this country.

  The doctors were: D’Avenat, who was on the staff of the Consulate; Fra Luka Dafinich, from the monastery at Gucha Gora; Mordo Atias, a Travnik druggist; and Giovanni Mario Cologna, the accredited doctor of the Austrian Consulate. The attendance of the last had an official character, for he solemnly announced that he “came, on the instructions of the Austrian Consul-General, to place my professional skill at the disposal of the French Consul-General.” Almost immediately, there was disagreement and conflict between him and D’Avenat, both on diagnosis and the course of treatment. Mordo Artias kept quiet, while Fra Luka wanted to go back to Gucha Gora for some special herbs.

  In reality these Travnik physicians were upset and at a loss, for they had never had to treat such a small child. The range of their skill did not include, as it were, the two extreme ends of the human span. In these countries small children died or lived by the whim of chance, just as very old people died away or stretched out their lives a little longer. It was all a question of the children’s or old people’s power of resistance, the care they received from those around them, and, in the last instance, of the will of fate which neither medicines nor doctors could alter. For that reason, creatures such as these, who have either not lived long enough to grow strong or have lived too long to keep their strength, were not a proper subject for cures and doctors’ care. And, except for the fact that in this case prominent people in high positions were involved, not one of the doctors would have bothered about this tiny human being. As it was, their visits were more an expression of attention toward the parents than of actual concern for the child. In this there was hardly any difference between Fra Luka and Mordo Atias on the one side and D’Avenat and Cologna on the other, for even these two foreigners were by now quite steeped in the ideas and customs of Eastern countries. And besides, their knowledge went neither further nor deeper than that of the other two.

  Faced with this situation, Daville decided to take his child all the way down to Sinj, where there was a good and well-known French army doctor. The Travnik “physicians,” true to their ideas, were unanimous in firmly opposing this bold and unusual decision, but the Consul stuck to it.

  In the cold weather, which was rapidly worsening, and along icebound roads, the Consul set off accompanied by a kavass and three grooms. He himself carried the sick child in his arms, well wrapped up.

  The strange caravan started from the Consulate at dawn. They had hardly crossed the Karaul Mountains when the child died in his father’s arms. They spent the night in an inn with the dead child and turned back to Travnik the following morning. They reached the Consulate at dusk.

  Madame Daville had just put her baby son to bed and was whispering a prayer “for the ones on the road” when she was startled by the clatter of horses and knocking at the gate. She went limp and remained rooted to the post, waiting there until Daville came into the room, carrying the bundled child in his arms as tenderly and carefully as he had taken him. He laid the dead child down, threw off the great black cape that still radiated the chill of outdoors, and then put his arms around his wife who, stunned and frozen rigid, kept whispering the last words of the prayer that, a moment before, she had offered for the safe return of her infant.

  Cold and sore from a two-day ride, Daville could barely stand on his feet. His arms, which had been holding first the sick, then the dead child in the same position for many hours, were in a painful cramp. But now, forgetting all this, he embraced her frail body with a wordless tenderness that expressed his infinite love of her and of the child. He closed his eyes and let his feelings sweep over him: it seemed to him that by forgetting his exhaustion and overcoming his pain in this way, he was still carrying his child toward recovery and health, that the child would not die as long as he bore it like that across the world, in pain and anguish. And all the while this creature in his arms kept weeping softly and quietly, as only a brave and selfless woman can.

  Desfosses stood a little way behind them, dazed and superfluous, looking on in astonishment, unable to understand this sudden transformation of a plain, ordinary man.

  Next day, in sunny weather and a dry frost, little Jules-François-Amyntas Daville was buried in the Catholic cemetery. The Austrian Consul, his wife and daughter came to the funeral and later went to the French Consulate to offer their sympathies. Frau von Mitterer offered her help and talked with a good deal of emotion about children, illnesses, and death. Daville and his wife listened quietly and gazed at her with dry eyes, like people to whom every word of consolation is welcome but whom, in reality, no one can help and who expect no help from anyone. The conversation turned into a long dialogue between Frau von Mitterer and Desfosses and finally ended in a long monologue from Anna Maria about fate.

  Anna Maria was pale and solemn. Shocks and upsets were her true element. Her brown hair tossed and shook itself into restless curls. Her great eyes lit up her pallid face with an unnatural brilliance, which in turn brought out the gray depths of the eyes, so that it was difficult to look at them for long and without flinching. Her face was round and smooth, her neck without a wrinkle, her breasts those of a full-blown girl. In this circle of death and sorrow, between her careworn, pasty-faced husband and her frail, tongue-tied daughter, she seemed to shine and dominate all the more with her strange and dangerous beauty. Desfosses couldn’t take his eyes off her slender firm hands. The skin of these hands was of a marble whiteness; but when they moved, bent, and waved, the whiteness took on a dull pearly sheen, as if mirroring the faint dance of an invisible, pure white flame. Something of that white gleam stayed in his eyes the rest of that day. And when he next saw Anna Maria in the church at Dolats, where Requiem was read for the little departed one, his first glance went out to her hands. But this time both were in black gloves.

  After a few unquiet days, the old life was resumed. Winter closed all doors and drove the people into t
heir warm houses. Once more, communication between the two consulates ceased. Even Desfosses cut short his outings. His talks with Daville before lunch and supper had grown mellower and more cordial, and turned mostly on the kind of topic that precluded a difference of opinion. As usually happens on the days immediately after a funeral, they avoided talking of the loss and death of the child, but since the thought of these could not be exorcised, they spoke a good deal about the child’s illness, then about health and sickness in general, and more particularly about the cures and doctors in this difficult country.

  Countless and various are the surprises that await an Occidental who is suddenly thrown into the East and forced to live there, but one of the biggest and most disturbing surprises is manifest in the problem of health and sickness. To a man of the West the life of the body is suddenly revealed in an altogether new light. The West too knows sickness in various forms, each with its own terror, but they are something to be fought and alleviated, or at least kept out of sight of the healthy and cheerful workaday world, through special efforts of the community, by convention and by the established traditions of social life. Here in the East, on the other hand, sickness is looked upon as something not in the least exceptional. It makes its appearance and runs its course alongside health, and takes turns with it; one can hear it and feel it at every step. Here a man treats his illness as naturally as he eats, and he suffers as naturally as he lives. Sickness is the other, heavier half of life. Epileptics, syphilitics, lepers, hysterics, morons, hunchbacks, lame ones, stammerers, blind men, cripples, all swarm in broad daylight, creep and crawl, begging alms or else brazenly silent, flaunting their hideous deformities almost with pride. And it is just as well that the women, especially Moslem ones, veil and hide themselves, for otherwise the number of sick one meets would be twice as great. Daville and Desfosses were invariably reminded of it when they saw some peasant coming down a steep country road on his way to Travnik, leading his horse by the bridle, with a woman jogging on it, all shrouded up in her garments, like a bundle of unknown pain and sickness.

  And it is not only the poor who fall ill. While sickness here is the lot of the poor, it is the scourge of the rich too. On the compost pile of affluence, as of poverty, there blooms the same flower: sickness. Even the Vizier’s Residency, when one has looked at it closer and got to know it better, is in this respect not very different from the poverty and squalor one sees in the streets on market days. If the ways of suffering are different, the attitude to sickness is the same.

  During the illness of Daville’s child, Desfosses had got to know all four of the Travnik physicians. They were, as we have seen, D’Avenat, Cologna, Mordo Atias, and Fra Luka Dafinch.

  We have already got to know D’Avenat as interpreter and temporary official at the French Consulate. Even when he was still in Mehmed Pasha’s service, he had not practiced much as a doctor. In common with many other foreigners, he had used the title of “Doctor” as a kind of credential for doing a variety of other work in which he showed greater skill and knowledge. He was happy and content now in his new position, which he liked and which suited his talents. In his youth, it seemed, he had done some medical study at Montpellier, but he lacked all the usual prerequisites for a career of medicine. He had no love for people and no confidence in nature. Like the majority of Occidentals who for one reason or another stay on in the Orient and grow used to life among the Turks, he had become infected with a profound pessimism and a sceptical view of life. The healthy and sick halves of mankind were to him two worlds without any real connection. He looked upon recovery as a temporary condition, not as a bridge from human sickness to human health, for in his opinion there was no such bridge. A man was born, or fell sick, and that was his lot in this life; all the other miseries, like pain, expenses, treatments, doctors, and other sad things, were no more than a natural counterpart of it. For that reason he much preferred to have to do with healthy people than sick ones. He had a revulsion toward the very ill and was apt, in some ways, to look upon a long confinement as a personal insult, for he felt that invalids of this kind ought to make up their minds—go one way or the other; that is to say, join the healthy or the dead.

  On the rare occasions when he had treated the Turkish masters he used to serve, he had done it not so much by relying on his knowledge and his more or less “neutral” medicines, as by projecting a very strong will and by his ruthless daring. He flattered his influential patients skillfully, praising their strength and stamina, encouraging their vanity and the will to resist disease, or deprecating, by suggestion, the illness itself and its importance. This came to him all the more easily because he was used to flattering them as wholesomely and persistently when they were well, though in different ways and for other purposes. Very early in his career he had grasped the importance of flattering patients and the power of intimidation, and had understood the impact which a kind or a sharp word can have on them when spoken at the right moment and in the right place. Rude and inconsiderate with the great majority of people, he saved all his attention and all his kind words for the mighty and the great. In this he was extraordinarily deft and bold-faced.

  Such was D’Avenat’s way as a doctor.

  His complete opposite was Mordo Atias, a small taciturn Jew, who owned a store in the lower bazaar where he sold not only medicines and treatment prescriptions but everything from eyeglasses and writing materials to potions for childless women, wool dyes, and good advice of all kinds.

  The Atiases were the oldest Jewish family in Travnik. They had lived there for more than a hundred and fifty years. They had built their first house outside the town in a narrow and damp gulley, through which flowed one of those nameless streams that run down into the Lashva. It was a gorge within the Travnik gorge, almost entirely sunless, humid, and full of torrential pebbles, overgrown on all sides with alder and clematis. Here they were born and died, generation after generation. Later they managed to leave this damp, twilit, and unhealthy spot and to move up into the town, but all of them retained something of their earlier home, for they were all stunted and pale, as if they had grown up in a cellar; they were silent and retiring, they lived modestly, all but unnoticed, although with time they grew prosperous and even rich. And there was always one of the family who dealt in medicines and doctoring.

  Of all the Travnik doctors, and those who were considered as such and were called to the Consulate in that capacity, there was least to be said about Mordo Atias. And what indeed was there to be said about a man who himself hardly said a word, went nowhere, did not associate with anyone, did not ask for anything, but looked only after his business and his home? All of Travnik and the surrounding villages knew Mordo and his medicine shop, but that, at the same time, was all they knew about him.

  He was a small man, all but hidden in a beard, mustaches, bushy eyebrows, and side locks, dressed in a striped kaftan and baggy blue trousers. As far back as the family could remember, their ancestors had been doctors and apothecaries while they still lived in Spain. They continued to ply these skills as exiles and refugees, first at Salonica and then at Travnik. Mordo’s grandfather, Isaac the Doctor, had died here in Travnik, one of the first victims of the great plague in the middle of the last century; his son had taken over the practice and had passed it on, some twenty years before, to Mordo himself. The family had preserved books and notes of some of the well-known Arab and Spanish physicians, which the Atiases had taken with them when they left Andalusia as exiles and had passed down from generation to generation like a secret treasure. For more than twenty years Mordo had been sitting on his little shop platform, day in and day out, except on the Sabbath, with his legs crossed under him, hunched forward, his head bowed, always busy with customers or working on his powders, herbs, and potions. The shop, which resembled a wooden box, crammed from top to bottom, was so low and narrow that Mordo could lay his hand on everything without having to get up from his place. He sat like this summer and winter, always the same, wearing the same kind
of clothes, his mood always the same; a huddling bundle of silence that neither drank coffee nor smoked tobacco nor took part in the bazaar jokes and gossip.

  A customer would come by, a sick man or someone from a sick man’s family, and would lean on the edge of the narrow platform and state his complaint. Mordo would then pronounce his diagnosis, mumbling through invisible lips behind the thick bush of mustache and beard; he would give the person his medicine and tell him the charge. It was impossible to draw him into a conversation. Even with sick customers, he said no more about their ailments than was absolutely necessary. He would listen to them patiently, and gaze at them with mute lackluster eyes out of that forest of hair, among which there wasn’t a single gray one as yet, and to all their tales of woe he would answer always with the same staple sentences, of which the concluding one would be: “The medicine is in my hand but health is in God’s.” This put an end to any further conversation and signaled the customer to take the stuff and pay for it or else “kiss and leave it.”

  “Yes, yes, I’ll take it. What can I do but take it? If it was poison, I’d take it,” wailed the patient, who felt the need of talking and complaining as much as he needed medicines.

  But Mordo was not mollified. He wrapped the prescription in blue paper, set it down before the patient, and busied himself with the work he had put aside when the customer appeared.

  On market days a crowd of peasants and their women would collect in front of Mordo’s shop. One of them would sit on the wooden platform and carry on a whispering dialogue with Mordo, while the others stood in the street and waited. They came for medicines or brought herbs to sell. They chatted quietly, bargained, explained, went, and came back. Only Mordo remained in his place, motionless, cold, and silent.