Bosnian Chronicle Page 31

  Desfosses didn’t hide his amazement at the obstinate way in which not only the Moslems but the Bosnians of all faiths resisted every influence, even the best, every novelty and sign of progress that was eminently feasible in the present circumstances and which depended on them alone. He pointed out the laming effect of such Chinese rigidity, such withdrawal from life at large. “How could this land possibly settle down and evolve some kind of order,” he queried, “and become at least as civilized as its nearest neighbors, when its people are more divided than any in Europe? There are four different religions existing side by side on this narrow, mountainous, and barren strip of land. Each one is exclusive and rigidly separated from the other three. All of you live under one sky and by the same earth, yet each one of the four groups claims a spiritual home in the remote world outside, in Rome, in Moscow, in Istanbul, in Mecca, in Jerusalem, and God knows where else—but not in the place where they are born and die. And each one believes that its own progress and welfare cannot be achieved without harming and setting back the other three communities, and, conversely, that the other three can only advance at its own expense. And each one has made intolerance the highest virtue and looks for its salvation to the outside world, each from a different direction.”

  The friar heard him out with the smile of a man who believes he knows a thing or two and has no need of authenticating and enlarging his knowledge. Evidently determined to contradict Desfosses at all costs, he went on to say that, considering their circumstances, his people could only live and survive the way they were, unless they wanted to turn renegades, become depraved, and perish.

  Desfosses replied that a people, if they were to adopt a healthier, more rational way of life, did not necessarily have to give up their faith and their ritual. And, in his opinion, it was precisely men like the friars who had the possibility and the duty of working to that purpose.

  “Ah, mon cher monsieur,” said Fra Julian with that geniality peculiar to men defending an untenable premise, “it’s easy for you to talk about the need for material progress and about healthy influences and Chinese rigidity, but if we had been less rigid and had opened our doors to all sorts of ‘healthy influences,’ my good parishioners Peter and Anthony would today be called Mohammed and Hussein.”

  “Allow me, but there is no need to go to extremes right away—or to be stubborn about it.”

  “Well, what are you to do? We Bosnians are pigheaded people. Everybody knows that—we’re famous for it,” said Fra Julian in the same tone of complacency.

  “Forgive me, but why do you care how you look in other people’s eyes, or what people think and know about you? As if that were of any importance! What matters is how much a person gets out of life and what he makes of himself, of his environment, and his children.”

  “We have preserved our viewpoint and no one can boast of having forced us to change it.”

  “But Father Julian, it’s not the viewpoint that matters but life. A viewpoint is meant to serve life, but what is your life here?”

  Fra Julian was just opening his mouth to produce a quotation, as was his habit, but the host interrupted their conversation. Fra Ivo had got up. Flushed with good food, and acting a little like a monsignor, he held out his heavy fat hand to everyone; wheezing and puffing, he announced that it was winter, there was a snowstorm, that it was a long way to Dolats and they had better get started if they wanted to get there by daylight.

  Desfosses and young Fra Julian were sorry to part.

  While they were still at the table, Desfosses had now and then glanced at the white restless hands of Frau von Mitterer. As often as he saw that pearly luster of her skin reappear unchanged in the same places of her arm, whenever she made a movement, he had shut his eyes momentarily, feeling that between him and that woman there was a kind of steady current which no one could possibly know about or see. Her uneven, high-pitched voice cascaded through his ears all the time. Even the rather hard accent with which she spoke French had appeared to him not as a defect but as an unusual attraction peculiar to her. With a voice like that, he had thought then, one could speak any language in the world and to every man it would sound as near and intimate as his own mother tongue.

  Before the party broke up, the talk turned to music and Anna Maria showed Desfosses her Musikzimmer, a small light room with very little furniture, several silhouette portraits on the walls, and a large gilded harp in the middle of the floor. Anna Maria complained that she’d had to leave her clavichord in Vienna and had only been able to take along her harp, which was now a great comfort to her in this wilderness. With that she stretched out her arm, which fell bare to the elbow, and languidly passed her fingers over the strings.

  In those few chords, plucked so casually, the young man seemed to hear the music of the spheres rippling down over the leaden silence of Travnik, heralding days of opulence and delight in the midst of barrenness.

  He stood on the other side of the harp, saying in a low voice how much he would love to hear her play and sing. But she reminded him with a mute glance of Mme Daville’s mourning and promised to do it another time.

  “You must promise to come out for a ride as soon as the weather improves. Do you mind the cold?”

  “Why should I mind?” she answered slowly from the other side of the harp, and her voice passing through the strings impressed the young man as an intimation set to music.

  He looked deep into her brown eyes, with a glow somewhere in their depths, and he imagined that even there he could see a promise beyond understanding.

  Meanwhile, in the next room, von Mitterer had managed to convey to Daville, in a perfectly natural and casual fashion, in the greatest confidence, as it were, that the relations between Austria and Turkey were going from bad to worse and that Vienna had been obliged to take serious military measures not only along the frontier but in the interior as well, since it counted with the possibility that Turkey might attack them during the coming summer.

  Daville, who had learned of the Austrian preparations and, in common with the rest of the world, believed that they were aimed not at Turkey but at France—Turkey being only a pretext—found in this declaration of von Mitterer’s fresh confirmation of his belief. Daville pretended to believe the Colonel’s words, while speculating how soon he might have a courier available to report this intentionally dropped indiscretion as one more proof of the hostile designs of the Vienna government.

  As the guests were leaving, Anna Maria and Desfosses repeated in front of everybody that they would not let winter interfere with their riding and that they would go out on horseback as soon as the weather turned dry and sunny.

  On the evening of that first day of Christmas, the inmates of the French Consulate did not linger long around the supper table. By tacit agreement they all wanted to withdraw to their rooms as soon as possible.

  Madame Daville was depressed and could barely hold back her tears during supper. This had been her first venture into the outside world since the death of her child and now she was suffering from the effect of this first contact; for it had shaken her and brought back once more a poignant sense of anguish and loss which the silence of her retirement had already begun to heal. In her most troubled moments she had vowed that she would control her tears and suppress her grief and would offer her child, together with her own pain of bereavement, to God as a sacrifice. But now the tears welled unchecked and the pain was as strong as on the first day, before she had made the vow. She wept and at the same time begged God to forgive her for not being able to keep her vow, made in a moment when she had overestimated her strength. And she cried without restraint, doubling up with the pain that tore at her innards more terribly than the pangs of birth.

  In his study Daville wrote his report on the conversation with the Austrian Consul, well pleased that his premonitions, “in this humble corner of world politics, from this bleak observation post,” had turned out to be correct.

  Desfosses had not even lighted his candles but was
pacing up and down his bedroom with long steps and pausing by the window from time to time, seeking out the lights of the Austrian Consulate on the other side of the river. The night was opaque and deaf, there was nothing to see or hear outside; but the young man was pulsing with light and sounds. Whenever he stopped and closed his eyes, the darkness and the silence would coalesce into sound and light, and both would become Anna Maria. Her words spread a radiance and that glow at the bottom of her eyes spelled, as it did in the afternoon, the quiet and somehow significant words, “Why should I mind?”

  To the young man, the whole world had suddenly become eclipsed by a towering harp, and he fell asleep lulled by the hypnotic, Dionysian music of his own trembling senses.

  14

  At last there came dry and sunny days when it was possible to go riding despite the cold. As they had agreed at Christmas, the riders from both Consulates met on the frozen road that goes through Kupilo.

  This road seemed to have been made for excursions on horseback. Even, straight, and well drained, more than a mile long, carved out of the steep slopes at the foot of Karauldjik and Kayabasha, it ran alongside the Lashva, but high above the river and the town which lay in the valley below. At its farther end it became slightly wider and rougher and began to fork out into rutty country roads, which continued farther uphill to the villages of Yankovichi and Orashye.

  The sun rises late in Travnik. Desfosses, accompanied by a groom, rode along the sunlit road while beneath him the town still lay in shadow, under a blanket of smoke and mist. Puffs of vapor came from the riders’ mouths and rose like a haze from the animals’ croups. The hard-frozen ground threw back a muffled echo of the clattering hoofs. The sun was still among the clouds, yet the valley was slowly filling with a rosy light. Desfosses rode in fits and starts, now at a slow walk so that it seemed as if at any moment he might stop and dismount, then again at a brisk canter, leaving the groom on his sluggish dun horse almost a gunshot’s distance behind him. That was how the young man whiled away the time as he waited for the moment when he would catch a glimpse of Anna Maria and her escort somewhere on the road. For those who are buoyed up by youth and driven by desire, even the boredom of waiting and the exasperation of uncertainty are part and parcel of the great delight which love holds out for everyone. The young man waited in trepidation but also with an absolute conviction that in the end all his fears—Is she ill? Have they stopped her from coming? Did anything happen to her on the way?—would be proved groundless, for in affairs of the heart everything was good and favorable except the ending.

  And every morning, in fact, as the sun teetered over the jagged rim of the mountains and doubts and questions came flocking to his head on a mounting note of wonder, Anna Maria would inevitably appear in her black costume and a long skirt à l’amazone, as if poured and cast in one piece onto her sidesaddle on the tall black horse. Then both would rein in and come close to each other, as naturally as the sun rose above them and the day grew lighter in the valley. Even from a distance of a hundred yards the young man imagined he could see, with perfect clarity, the way her hat à la Valois blended, as no other woman’s did, with the sweep of her brown hair into one indivisible whole; and he could see too her pale face in the morning freshness and the eyes still dusty with sleep. (“Your eyes look as if you haven’t slept enough,” he would tell her each time as soon as they met, giving the words “not slept enough” a bold and pointed meaning, at which she would drop her eyes and show her eyelids, glistening with a bluish shadow.)

  For a while, after their greeting and the first exchange of words, they would remain stationary; then they would separate and after a short ride meet again, as if by accident, and ride on part of the way side by side, talking quickly and eagerly, only to part once more and again meet further on and resume their chatter. They owed these maneuverings to convention and to their station of society, but inwardly they did not part even for a second, and as soon as they came together they picked up their conversation of a moment before with the same delight. To their escorts and to anyone who might watch them casually, they both looked as if they were mainly concerned with their horses and their riding, and their encounters seemed accidental and their talk innocent, for it was mostly about the road, the weather, and the pace of their horses. No one could have known the contents of that wisp of white vapor which fluttered like a restless little flag now from her lips, now from his, then broke off and scattered, to unfurl once more on the cold air, livelier and longer than before.

  And when the sun reached the nethermost point of the valley and all the space above it turned pink for a moment, and the half-frozen Lashva began to smoke as though invisible fires were smoldering all through the town, the young man and the woman took lingering and cordial leave of each other (it is when they part that lovers betray themselves most easily!), and then descended, each at his end of the road, toward the town under the snow and hoarfrost.

  The first one who noticed that there was something afoot between young Desfosses and the handsome Frau von Mitterer, ten years his senior, was Colonel von Mitterer himself. He knew his wife well and thought of her as a “sick child.” He knew her sudden enthusiasms, her “wanderings” as he called them, and could easily foresee the evolution and their ending. Thus the Colonel saw at once what was happening with his wife and could tell in advance the whole course of the affliction: the first kindling of the imagination, the enthusiasm with Platonic overtones, dismay at the coarse male desire for sensual contact, panic, flight, despair—“everyone desires me and no one loves me”—and, at last, oblivion and the discovery of new objects for enthusiasm and despair. Likewise it didn’t take much insight to gauge the intentions of this tall young man who had been wrenched from Paris, dumped in Travnik, and set before the beauteous Frau von Mitterer, the only civilized woman for a hundred miles around. What the Colonel found difficult and vexing this time was the question of his position and attitude toward the French Consulate.

  The Colonel had himself set the pattern of relations with the rival Consulate and its staff—for himself as well as his family and his colleagues; from time to time these relations were reexamined, adjusted, and changed, as a watch is wound and adjusted, to conform to the instructions of the Ministry and to the over-all situation. This was a grave and difficult matter for him, because his military sense of exactitude and his conscientiousness as an official were stronger and better developed in him than any other sentiment. And now, with her conduct, Anna Maria might change and unbalance those relations to the detriment of the service and the Colonel’s official reputation. This particular problem had never before been raised by her “wanderings,” and for the Colonel it was a new, hitherto unknown burden that his wife placed on him.

  Even though he was only a tiny flywheel in the works of the great Austrian Empire, the Colonel, by dint of his position as Consul-General in Travnik, knew that his government was making military preparations, counting on a new coalition against Napoleon, and that the deployments, insofar as they could not be hidden, were made to appear as if they were directed against Turkey. But the Colonel had explicit instructions to soothe the Turkish authorities and in fact to convince them that these preparations could in no way be construed as warmongering against Turkey. At the same time, he was receiving ever stricter and more frequent orders to keep an eye on the activities of the French Consul and his agents, and to report back everything in the minutest detail.

  From all this it was not hard for the Colonel to conclude that in all probability there would be an early rupture of relations with France, a new alliance, and war.

  So it went without saying that the Colonel was discomfited by his wife’s infatuation and by the lovers’ rides in the middle of winter, before the eyes of the world and the servants. But he also knew that it was no use talking to Anna Maria, for rational arguments usually elicited the opposite reaction from her. He saw that there was nothing else for it but to await the moment when the young man would reach out for Anna Maria as a
woman, and she would, as on all earlier occasions, shrink back in disgust and despair and the whole thing would snap off by itself, for good and ever. And the Colonel fervently wished that this moment would come as soon as possible.

  Nor did these outings and trysts with Frau von Mitterer escape the notice of Daville, who, even in normal circumstances, was inclined to regard his “talented but somewhat bouncy” colleague with a jaundiced eye. And since he too had decided ideas on the point of his own and his staff’s relations toward the Austrian Consulate, he found these encounters no less inconvenient. (As often happened in many other matters, Daville’s wishes on this point coincided with von Mitterer’s.) But he too did not know exactly how to stop them.

  In his attitude toward women Daville had, since his youth, shown a strict discipline of mind and body. This discipline was as much the product of a stern and sound upbringing as of congenital “cold blood” and weak imagination. Like all such men, Daville had a feeling of superstitious fear about all irregular and messy affairs of this kind. Even as a modest and abstemious young man in Paris and in the army, he had always kept a kind of guilty silence during the wild and loose talks of other young men. And now it would have been easier for him to express his displeasure and admonish young Desfosses on virtually any other count than on a question involving a woman.

  Besides, Daville was afraid—yes, that’s the right word: afraid—of his young colleague. He was afraid of his restless, alien, but keen mind, of his varied and disorderly but far-ranging knowledge, of his carefree attitude and his levity, his intellectual curiosity, his physical strength, and especially his utter lack of fear of anything. This was the reason that Daville too marked time and looked for a suitable, circumspect method of warning the young man.