Bosnian Chronicle Read online

  Especially loud and hard to please were the older peasant women who came to buy spectacles. They would begin by spinning a long tale of how until lately they’d had no difficulty threading even the thinnest needle, but ever since last winter, after a cold or something, their eyes had started to blur and now they could hardly see what they were knitting. Mordo would look at a woman in her late forties, whose sight was naturally beginning to fail; he would study the width of her face and the thickness of her nose, then take a pair of tin-rimmed spectacles out of a round black box and put them on the woman’s nose. The woman would first look at her hands, turning them palms upward, and then at a ball of wool which Mordo would give her. “Can you see? Or can’t you?” he would ask through his teeth, saving his voice.

  “I can see, I can see well. It’s wool, but it looks far away somehow, as if it’s down there at the bottom of the street,” the peasant woman said with hesitation.

  Mordo produced another pair and asked, “Better?”—economizing on words.

  “It’s better. Then again it isn’t. There’s a kind of fog before my eyes, like smoke . . . like something . . .”

  Unruffled, Mordo pulled out a third pair, the last size he had. The woman would have to see with these and buy them or else “kiss an’ leave them.” There could be no further discussion with Mordo, for love or money.

  Then it was the turn of the next patient, a gaunt, pale, and rawboned peasant from the mountain village of Paklarevo. In his inaudible voice and Spanish accent, Mordo demanded to know what hurt him.

  “Here in the middle, there’s something like a hot coal . . . may it never happen to you . . . and it hurts, hurts . . .” said the peasant, indicating his chest with a finger. He would have wanted to go on talking about the pain, but Mordo broke in drily, with faulty syntax but in a tone of authority: “There nothing to hurt. Cannot hurt in that spot.”

  The peasant tried to explain that the pain was exactly in that spot, but moved his finger a little to the right as he did so. “Yes, it hurts. . . . How can I tell you? The pain goes this way . . . it starts here, then it moves over, if you’ll excuse me, all the way over . . .”

  Eventually the sick man gave way a little, Mordo gave way a little, and they reached agreement about the spot where the pain was more or less located. Then Mordo asked him in a curt and businesslike manner whether he had any rue in his garden, and told him to bray the herb in a mortar, add a little honey, and sprinkle the mixture with the powder which he would give him; he was then to roll the mixture into three little balls between his palms and swallow them before sunrise. “And so every day for eight days, from Friday to Friday. Pain and illness will pass. Give me two groschen. Good luck to you.”

  The peasant, who until that moment had been trying to memorize the instructions with unconscious mouthing and rolling of his eyes, suddenly forgot everything, even the pain which had caused him to come, and clutched at the part of his coat where he kept his linen bag with money. Now began the slow pulling out, with many sighs and much reluctance, and the act of untying, counting, and finally paying with a sigh of real pain.

  And then Mordo sat once more, unmoving, diminutive, in a huddle with the next customer, while the peasant slowly left the bazaar behind him and set out along the bank of a stream toward his village eyrie of Paklarevo. On one side of his chest there was the pain that never let up; on the other, in his pocket, there was Mordo’s powder wrapped in blue paper. And through his whole being there cursed another, separate pain as it were, the pain of regret for the money, which now seemed to him like money thrown out, the pain of distrust and fear, lest he may have been cheated. He kept on walking like that, straight into the sunset, utterly listless and bent, for there was no creature as sad and bewildered as a peasant who was sick.

  But there was one visitor to whom Mordo talked longer and more intimately, with whom he didn’t mind losing a few minutes and an extra word or two. That was Fra Luka Dafinich, better known as “the Doctor.” Fra Luka used to work and live on the best terms with Mordo’s father David, and for twenty years now he and Mordo had been inseparable friends and confidants. When, as a younger man, he had served in the country parishes, he used to come to Travnik as often as he could and first visit Mordo at his shop, before going to the parish priest at Dolats. The Travnik bazaar had long become used to seeing Mordo and Fra Luka huddling and whispering together, or browsing through herbs and medicines.

  Fra Luka was born in Zenitsa, but he entered the monastery at Gucha Gora when still a child, after plague had wiped out his entire family. Here, except for short intervals, he had spent his entire life among medicines and medical books and instruments. His cell was filled with pots, earthen jars, and boxes, and the walls and rafters were hung with sheaves and bags of dried herbs, twigs, and roots. On the window sill was a large bowl with leeches in clear water, and a smaller one containing scorpions in oil. By the sofa, which was covered with an old, stained, burned, and patched rug, there was a brazier of baked clay; a pot of herbs cooked on it constantly. In the corners and along the shelves there were hunks of rare woods, small and large stones, animal skins and horns.

  But with all that the cell was always clean, well aired, pleasant, and smelling mostly of juniper berries or mint tea.

  On the wall there were three pictures: Hippocrates, St. Aloysius Gonzaga, and the portrait of an unknown medieval knight in armor, with a visor and a great plume on his head. Where Fra Luka got this picture from, or what he saw in it, no one had ever been able to find out. Once when the Turks were inspecting the monastery and, having found nothing objectionable, came across this picture, they were told that it was the portrait of some sultan or other. An argument developed as to whether it was possible and proper to make pictures of the sultans, but as the picture was quite faded and the Turks were uneducated, the matter was left at that. Those pictures had hung there for over five decades and, as they had not been very clear to begin with, with time they faded completely, so that St. Aloysius now resembled Hippocrates, and Hippocrates the “Sultan,” and the “Sultan,” poorly engraved on some cheap kind of soft paper, no longer resembled anything; and only Fra Luka could still make out his sword and his helmet with anything like certainty and see his fighting visage of fifty years before.

  When he was still a young student of divinity, Fra Luka had shown an eagerness and a gift for medical knowledge. Seeing this and knowing how much the people and the brothers themselves needed a good and skillful doctor, the monastery superiors sent the young man to the medical school at Padua. But the following year, at the first change in the monastery council, the new opposing party of superiors decided that this was unsuitable for Fra Luka and too expensive for the Order, and they recalled him to Bosnia. When in the third year the original council was re-elected once more, they sent the young friar to Padua for a second time, to complete his medical studies. But a year later the opposition was returned to the council, they canceled everything that had been put into effect earlier, and, among other things, out of spite, ordered Fra Luka to come back from Padua to Gucha Gora.

  With the knowledge he had gained and the books he had managed to collect, Fra Luka had then settled down in this cell and continued to study and gather medicines with passionate devotion and to heal people lovingly. This passion had never left him and this love had never grown cold.

  All was peace and order in this cell, around which the tall, nearsighted, thin “Doctor” moved without making a sound. Fra Luka’s thinness had become a byword throughout the province. (“There are two things even the most learned Koran scholars cannot tell: what the earth rests on and what Fra Luka’s habit hangs on.”) On this towering and fleshless body there sat an upright, lively, and fine head, with blue eyes that had a vague look of transport and vacancy, with a thin wreath of white hair on a well-formed skull, and a delicate rosy skin that was sprinkled with tiny bluish bloodbursts. He had remained active and nimble right up to his old age. “That man doesn’t walk, he flashes by like a saber,�
� one of the guardian Brothers said of him; and in fact this man with the smiling eyes and darting but inaudible movements never sat still. His long, wizened, but immaculately clean fingers were busy all day long with countless small objects, scraping, knocking, smearing, tying, making notes, rummaging among the boxes and shelves. For to Brother Luka nothing was without significance, unnecessary, or dispensable. Under those thin fingers and the smiling, nearsighted eyes everything sprang to life, became articulate, and clamored for a place of its own among the medicaments or, at least, among the staple or unusual items.

  Having observed the herbs, minerals, and living beings around him, and their changes and movements, day after day, year after year, Fra Luka became more and more firmly convinced that in this world as we see it only two things existed—growth and decay—intimately and inseparably bound up with each other, eternally and everywhere in action. All phenomena around us were merely different phases of that endless, complex, and everlasting ebb and flow; mere figments and fleeting moments which we arbitrarily set apart, designated, and called by precise names like health, illness, and dying; none of which, in fact, existed. Only growth and decay existed, in different states and different perceptions. And the whole art of healing consisted in recognizing, seizing, and using the forces that surged in the direction of growth, “as a sailor makes use of winds,” and in avoiding and removing the forces that worked for decay. Wherever a man succeeded in catching hold of the forces of growth, he recovered and sailed on; where he failed to do it, he sank, quite simply and without appeal. And in the great and invisible account book of growth and decay one force was carried from one side of the ledger to the other.

  Such was his view of the world in the over-all; in detail it was, of course, far more difficult and involved. Every living creature, every plant, every disease, every season of the year, every day, and every minute, each again had its own growth and its own decay. And all of it was dovetailed together, linked in endless obscure ways, all of it functioned and bubbled, pulsed and streamed, day and night, deep inside the earth and all over it, high up in space and beyond the planets, all obeying the single, twofold law of ebb and flow which was so hard to grasp and follow.

  All his life Fra Luka had been hopelessly bewitched by this vision of the world and by the sublime harmony which man could only guess at, which he at times succeeded in turning to his advantage, but which he could never master. What was a man in his position to do, one to whom all this had been revealed and who was destined to labor away on a hopeless task beyond anyone’s grasp, the quest of medicine and the curing of sickness, God permitting . . . ? Which part of this picture should he scoop up and memorize first—this incandescent vision that sometimes opened out before him in a flash, clear, intelligible, and near at hand, within his grasp, and at other times grew dim and became a witless swirling, like a blizzard in a pitch-black night? How could he find his way in that ravishing hide and seek of dazzling light, in that seeming welter of tangled, contrary influences and blind forces and elements? How was he to gather up at least some significant threads and tie the effects to the causes?

  This was Fra Luka’s only worry and his chief preoccupation, besides the priestly and monastic duties of his Order. It was what made him so rapt and distracted, so haggard and thin like a strung wire. It was why he lavished so much zeal on a stalk of grass or a sick person, no matter where he found them, no matter how they looked or by what name they called themselves.

  Fra Luka firmly believed that there were as many healing forces in nature as there were diseases among humans and animals. Each one exactly corresponded to its opposite, down to the last atom and molecule. These were profound calculations, not to be measured or solved; but, by the same token, there was no doubt in his mind that they were exact, that somewhere at the infinite vanishing point out of human sight they worked out to a perfect equation. And these healing forces were to be found, as the ancients taught, “in herbis, in verbis, et in lapidibus”—in herbs, in words, and in stones. Privately Fra Luka held the bold conviction—although he wouldn’t admit it to himself—that every change for the worse in the human body could be reversed, at least in theory, since the illness and its cure had a common beginning and lived side by side, though apart, often infinitely far apart from each other. If the physician succeeded in joining them, the illness fell back; if he did not succeed, the illness overwhelmed and destroyed the organism in which it had taken hold. No failures and disappointments could shake this secret belief of his. With this silent conviction, Fra Luka approached every medicine and every patient. It was true that he perpetuated this inexplicable faith of his by quickly and firmly forgetting, like many a doctor, every patient who died or whom he failed to cure, while remembering every successful cure as far back as fifty years.

  Such was Fra Luka Dafinich, the Doctor. He was an ardent and incorrigible friend of the ailing part of humanity. Among his friends he counted the whole of nature, and had only two enemies: friars and mice.

  The business with the friars was an old and long story. Generations of them came and went and they differed from one another in many respects, but in one thing they were in accord: they underestimated and deprecated Fra Luka’s medical skill. Ever since they had sent him to Padua as a student and then recalled him, and later shuttled him back and forth once more, he had lost all hope of ever finding some appreciation or help among his Brethren. Once the Guardian of the monastery, Fra Martin Dembich, known as Dembo, described Fra Luka’s relations with other Brothers in these terms: “You see this ‘doctor’ of ours? When he prays aloud to God, in the choir with the other Brothers, he’s not thinking the same thing as they. They may be saying the same prayer, but here’s what he is thinking: ‘O God, put some sense into the heads of these no-good Brothers and soften their hearts, so that they will not hinder me at every step in the good and useful work I am doing. Or, if you can’t grant that—seeing how the heads of these Brethren may be too hard even for the hand of God—then at least fortify me with holy patience that I may be able to bear with them such as they are, without hatred or an evil word, and that in their illness I may be able to help them with my skill, which they despise and criticize.’ And the friars pray and think like this: ‘O God, enlighten our Fra Luka, cure him of his grievous affliction, cure him of medicines and his passion to cure. Blessed be all the little pains Thou visitest upon us (since one has to die of something!), only take Thou, take off our necks this man who wants to cure us of them.’”

  To Dembo, who was witty, forceful, and a merciless tease, though an excellent Superior and a model monk, Fra Luka had for many years been the subject of endless tales and jokes. And yet he too, like so many others, was fated to die in Fra Luka’s arms. But even at that last moment, when he was grimacing with pain, Dembo chuckled and told the assembled Brothers, while laboring for breath: “Brothers, all the accounts of the monastery are in order, the credit as well as the cash. The Vicar knows all the particulars. Bless you all and remember me in your prayers. Remember, two things did me in: my asthma and my doctor.”

  So mocked Dembo, exaggerating even on his deathbed.

  But all that was long before, “in Dembo’s time,” when Fra Luka was younger and sprier and those of his generation were still living; today very few of them were still alive, for he had entered his eighty-first year on St. Ivo’s day this summer. He had long forgiven the Brothers for not letting him stay longer at Padua, for not ever giving him as much as he needed for books and experiments; and they, in the course of time, had let up teasing him about his unusual way of life, his medical passion, and his fraternizing with Mordo Atias. To this day Fra Luka regularly went to Travnik, sat down with Mordo on his shop platform, and exchanged information and experiences; bartering herbs and roots for sulphur or lapis lazuli, since there was no one who could dry lime flowers or preserve osier herb, St.-John’s-wort, or yarrow like Fra Luka. But the Brothers had long become accustomed to this “friendship between the Old and New Testament.”

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bsp; What used to be the greatest irritant to the Brothers and a frequent cause of dispute—his visiting and healing the sick outside the monastery—was now held down to a minimum. Once this had been a source of constant embarrassment to the Order and the only cause of serious discord between Fra Luka and the monastery superiors. And even then it was not Fra Luka who had sought patients in the mundane community, especially not among the Turks, but the Turks themselves who had asked for him, sometimes calling and begging him to come but more often ordering him and sending the police to get him.

  These visits of Fra Luka’s caused him and his monastery a good many headaches, trouble, and harm. It happened sometimes that they called him and begged him to treat a sick Moslem or a Moslem woman, and later both he and the monastery would be blamed if the patient took a turn for the worse and died. And even when the treatment was successful and the pleased family lavished gifts on Fra Luka, there would be some stupid and evil-minded Turks who would accuse him of entering a Turkish house. Invariably there were witnesses to prove that the friar had been called and had come in a good and decent cause, but until that was proved and set right and the complaint was thrown out, the monastery went through a good deal of trouble, fear, and expense. So the Brothers forbade Fra Luka to go and see a case in a Moslem house until that house obtained a permit from the authorities, in which it was clearly stated that they were calling him of their own free will and that the authorities had nothing against it.

  There were plenty of cases when the treatments were successful and pious and grateful people showered gifts and thanks on Fra Luka and the monastery. A certain beg, one of the humbler village begs but a stouthearted and influential man, whom Fra Luka had healed of an old wound below the knee, would say to the friar whenever he met him: “As I get up on my feet in the morning, yours is the first name I mention after Allah’s.”

  And as long as he lived, this beg defended the monastery and the friars and, when they needed him, acted as their witness and guarantor.