Bosnian Chronicle Page 32

  Meanwhile the month of January passed and February once again brought damp and foggy days with deep mud and slippery roads, which put a stop to what neither Daville nor von Mitterer had dared or known how to stop. Riding was no longer feasible. Desfosses, it was true, went out even in weather such as this, foot-slogging through the countryside in his high boots and brown cloak with a collar of otter pelt, freezing and tiring himself to the point of exhaustion. But Anna Maria, her temperament and inclination notwithstanding, could not leave the house in such weather; like an angel banished from the heavens, half-sad, half-smiling, and somehow ethereal, she gazed at the world with her big eyes “dusty with sleep,” and walked absently past the other members of the household as if they were lifeless shadows and harmless ghosts. She spent the greater part of the day at the harp, running unsparingly through her abundant repertory of German and Italian songs, or losing herself in endless improvisations and fantasias. Her strong and warm, though occasionally unsteady, voice, in which the threat of tears and sobs was never far below the surface, filled the small room and spread to the other parts of the house. From his study the Colonel could hear Anna Maria singing, as she accompanied herself on the harp:

  “Tutta raccolta ancor

  Nel palpitante cor

  Tremente ho l’almar.”

  My soul trembles still

  All gathered into my

  Fluttering heart.

  Listening to that voice of passion and bold feelings, he shuddered with helpless hatred against that world, incomprehensible to him, from which all his domestic unhappiness and his bitter shame welled unceasingly. He dropped his pen and clapped his palms over his ears, but still he could hear, from the first floor below him, as from a mysterious depth, the haunting voice of his wife and the trickling and strumming notes of her harp. They came from a world which was the reverse of all that was sacred, important, and near to the Colonel. This music, it seemed to him, had haunted him ever since he could remember, it would never be silent; faint and tearful though it was, it would outlast him and everything that lived: armies and empires, order and justice, duties and conventions, and would still moan and trickle over all of them in much the same way, like a thin spout of water singing above the ruins.

  And the Colonel took up his pen again and went on with the report he had started, writing at feverish speed, to the time of the music which rose up from below, feeling that it was all quite unbearable and yet had to be endured.

  Elsewhere their daughter Agatha was also listening to the singing. On the warm, light veranda, the “winter garden” of Frau von Mitterer’s, the little girl was sitting in her low chair on the red carpet. In her lap she held, unopened, the new issue of Almanac of the Muses. Its pages were full of wonderful new pieces, in prose and verse, of an edifying nature, and she had tried to force herself to read them, but in vain; something painful and irresistible compelled her to listen to her mother’s voice coming from the music room.

  The frail little creature, with intelligent eyes and a bald unwavering gaze, diffident and taciturn since childhood, had an inkling of many things that were as yet obscure to her but which she felt to be grave and somehow fateful. For years now she had been dimly aware of the relations within the family, had quietly observed her father, mother, servants, and family friends, and been disturbed by glimmerings of knowledge that were baffling in themselves but which added up to sorrow, ugliness, and vexation. She felt more and more ashamed and shrank back into herself, yet there too, within herself, she found new reasons for embarrassment and withdrawal. When they were still at Zemun she had had a few playmates among the officers’ daughters and her life, besides, had been filled with school, with fierce worship of the nun-teachers, and a hundred small worries and joys. But now she was utterly alone and left to herself, a prey to her restive years, alone between a kind ineffectual father and a stormy incomprehensible mother.

  Listening to her mother’s singing, the girl hid her face behind the copy of the Almanac, dying of inexpressible shame and a strange apprehension. She pretended to read, but in reality she listened with closed eyes to the song which she knew well from her childhood years, hating and fearing it as something which only grownups understood and permitted themselves, but which was horrid and intolerable all the same and made mockery even of the loveliest of books and the best of thoughts.

  The opening weeks of the month of March were exceptionally warm and dry, more like the end of April, and were an unexpected boon to the riders from the consulates. Waiting and encounters started afresh on the high straight road above the valley, with exhilarating gallops over the soft earth and yellow flattened grass, through the mild but fresh air of a premature spring. Once more the consuls began to worry, each for himself, and to consider ways of foiling the equestrian idyl without causing a sharp dispute.

  According to the information reaching both consuls, a clash between the government at Vienna and Napoleon was inevitable. “Relations between the two countries are developing in the opposite direction from those affectionate relations being cultivated, as all the world can see, on the bridle path above Travnik,” Daville told his wife, permitting himself one of those intrafamily jokes which husbands are wont to indulge in before their wives, at little or no cost of intellect or strain. But the joke was also a rehearsal for what might very well be the opening gambit in a man-to-man confrontation with young Desfosses on that distasteful topic. Things really couldn’t go on much longer as they were.

  In the meantime, the demon called “quest of a knight,” which sent Anna Maria in pursuit of young, gifted, and forceful men, and which caused her to reel back just as violently the moment the knight, a man of flesh and blood, showed human desires and appetites, this demon intervened here too, and simplified matters for both Daville and von Mitterer—if, indeed, in the case of the latter, one could at all speak of things being simplified. What was bound to come, did come: the moment when Anna Maria, disenchanted, recoiling, and feeling sick, dropped everything and ran and hid herself in her room, overwhelmed by a sense of loathing toward herself and the whole world, rent by thoughts of suicide and by the urge to vent it all on her husband or anyone else for that matter.

  The unusually warm last week of March quickened the course of events and brought them to a head.

  One sunny morning the level road between the bare thickets echoed once again to the clatter of horses. Both Anna Maria and Desfosses were exhilarated with the beauty and freshness of the morning. Each in turn would spur his horse into a gallop, then they would meet again farther along the road and, excited and panting, exchange glowing words and broken sentences whose meaning and import were clear only to themselves; which, in turn, sent their blood coursing even faster, stirred as it was with riding and the incandescence of the day. Anna Maria would whip her horse in the middle of a conversation and streak down to the far end of the road, leaving the excited young man in the middle of a sentence; then she would come back at a walk and the conversation would be resumed. This game tired them both out. Like the experienced riders they were, they spurred their horses apart, then met again and parted once more, like a pair of balls that constantly attracted each other and crisply bounded apart. The game increased the distance between them and the escorts. Their grooms and kavasses rode slowly on their small ponies and stayed aloof from the game of the gentlefolk. They did not mingle with each other but waited in separate groups until their masters had spent their energy and had enough, after which they could then return to their homes.

  Racing like this, each on their own, the young man and woman met at one moment at the end of the level road at a spot where it veered suddenly and became rocky and rutted. On this curve there was a small copse of pines. In the sunlit morning the trees looked like a shapeless black mass and the ground beneath them was russet and dry with the fallen needles. Desfosses quickly dismounted and suggested that Anna Maria dismount too and take a closer look at the wood which, in his words, reminded him of Italy. The word Italy had an immed
iate effect on her. Dismounting, she hooked the bridle rein on her arm and walked onto the smooth carpet of rust-hued pine needles, shakily, for her legs were numb from riding.

  They entered the wood, which grew thicker and closed in behind them. She found the going difficult in her boots, and held the long skirt of her black riding habit in one hand. She stopped and hesitated. The young man spoke up, as if to exorcise the deep silence of the forest and reassure both himself and her. He drew a comparison between the wood and a temple, or something of that order. Between the words there was emptiness and silence, filled with his short hot breath and the quickening thumps of his heart. The young man then slung both their reins over a branch. The horses stood quietly, their muscles quivering.

  Then he drew her, stumbling, another few steps to a hollow where the pine trunks and trailing branches completely hid them from view. She drew back and slipped, awkward and frightened, on the thick layer of pine needles. And before she could get free or say anything, she saw the flushed face of the young man quite close to her own. There was no more talk of Italy and temples. Those great red lips were bearing down on hers, now quite wordless. She paled, opened her eyes wide as if she had suddenly awakened, wanted to push him away and run, but her knees gave way under her. His arms already circled her waist. She moaned like someone who was being killed quietly, defenseless. “No! Not this!” She rolled up the whites of her eyes, then let go of the hem of the long skirt which she had been clutching up to that moment, and grew limp.

  Gone was the familiar world of words and walks, of consuls and consulates. Gone too was the pair of them, in this convulsive, knotted bundle on the thick matting of pine needles that crackled under them. Embracing the swooned woman, the young man cuddled and caressed her as if with a hundred invisible arms. The wetness of his lips mingled with her tears,—for she was crying—and with blood, for somehow her mouth had begun to bleed. And still they did not separate; indeed they were no longer two mouths but one. But this embrace of a young man gone wild and a woman in a trance didn’t last even a full minute. Anna Maria suddenly started, her eyes widened even more, as if staring into a terrifying abyss; she came to herself and, in a sudden access of strength, angrily thrust the impassioned young man away, pounding at his chest with both her little fists, hysterically, like an infuriated child, crying with each blow: “No, no, no!”

  The great rapture, in which everything had gone down in limbo, was shattered. Just as they had not been conscious of sinking to the ground, so now they were unaware of being back on their feet. She was sobbing with fury and jabbing at her hair and hat, while he, rattled and clumsy, brushed the dry pine needles from her black habit, gave her back her whip, and helped her to clamber out of the hollow. The horses were standing where they had left them, shaking their heads.

  They regained the road and mounted before their escorts could notice that they had ever dismounted. As they were parting, they looked more flushed than usual and he blinked in the glaring sun. Anna Maria was quite transformed. Her lips were now so blanched that they were almost lost in the bloodless face, and there was a new, suddenly “awakened,” look in her eyes, with two black circles in the place of pupils, into which it was even more difficult to see than into the erstwhile deep gleam. Her whole face was puffed up, with an ugly expression of rage and endless loathing of herself and everything around her; it suddenly seemed aged and neglected.

  Desfosses, who in other circumstances did not easily lose his presence of mind and his cool native confidence in himself, was genuinely bewildered and felt ill at ease. He realized that this was no longer bashfulness or the usual society woman’s fear of embarrassment and scandal. He suddenly felt himself to be lower and more defenseless than this strange woman whose peculiar temper and fretting heart were a world in themselves, in which she could exist all by herself.

  It all seemed so changed and chaotic, everything about him and inside him, even the dimensions of his own body.

  And so the winter riders, those tender lovers from the high road to Kupilo, parted forever.

  Von Mitterer saw at once that the relationship of his wife and the new would-be knight had reached, as so often before, the critical point of reversal, and that domestic storms were about to begin. And in fact, after two days of complete withdrawal, without food or company, the scenes began with the usual groundless reproaches and imprecations (“Joseph, for the love of God . . . !”), which the Colonel had anticipated and quietly resolved to endure to the end, like all the earlier ones.

  Soon Daville too noticed that Desfosses no longer went out riding with Frau von Mitterer. This suited him perfectly, for it relieved him of the uncomfortable duty of having to speak about it to the young man and telling him that all intimate contact with the Austrian Consulate must be broken off. The fact was, all reports seemed to point to a new straining of relations between Napoleon and the Vienna Court. Daville read these reports with alarm, as he listened to the strong south winds of March howling around the house.

  During that time the “young Consul,” sitting in his warm room, choked with rage at Anna Maria and, still more, at himself. He tried in vain to understand her behavior; but no matter what explanations he found, they all left him with a feeling of disillusion, of shame and wounded vanity, and, what was more, with the sharp pain of desire aroused and left unslaked.

  He remembered too—now that it was too late—his uncle in Paris and the advice this uncle had given him one day when he saw him at the Palais Royal dining with an actress who was known for her eccentric ways. “I see that you’ve grown up and become a man,” the old gentleman had told him, “and that you’re beginning to break your neck like the rest of them. Well, that’s how it has to be, and will be, I suppose. Let me give you just one piece of advice: keep away from foolish women.”

  The good and wise uncle often haunted his dreams.

  Now that the affair had fizzled out in such a silly and ludicrous fashion, he saw clearly, like a man shaken awake, the moral repugnance of his “entanglement” with the middle-aged and eccentric Frau Konsul, to which his momentary lapse of self-control and his boredom at Travnik had driven him.

  And now he went back in his memory to last summer’s tableau vivant in the garden with Jelka, the girl from Dolats, whom he had all but forgotten; and several times that night he jumped up from the table or sprang out of his bed, with the blood rushing to his head, his eyes filmed over, and his whole being filled to bursting with shame and rage at himself—emotions which youth can experience every bit as devastatingly as its passions. And, standing in the middle of the room, he cursed himself for having acted like an idiot and a boor; and at the same time he never ceased to analyze the reasons for his lack of success.

  “What sort of country is this? What kind of atmosphere?” he asked himself then. “What kind of women are these? They look at you meekly and submissively, like flowers in the grass waiting to be plucked, or else with burning eyes (through the strings of a harp), enough to melt your heart. And when you give in to that pleasing look the first lot drop to their knees, twisting the whole thing around by a hundred and eighty degrees, and beg you in such a fainting voice and with such a sacrificial look that you feel sick to your heart, everything suddenly becomes mean and depressing, and you lose all interest in living and loving. And the other lot put up a fight as if you were a bandit and start swinging like an English boxer.”

  That was how, on the floor above Daville and his sleeping family, the “young Consul” searched his soul and wrestled with his private anguish, until he got the better of it and the anguish, like all torments of youth, began to fade into oblivion.

  15

  The news and instructions from Paris, which Daville had been getting with considerable delay over the last few days, showed that the great war machine of the Empire was once more on the move, this time against Austria.

  Daville felt personally threatened and embroiled. It seemed to him a personal calamity that this lava should be rolling toward these v
ery parts which contained his own small sector and where he had great responsibility. The vexing urge to do something and initiate some kind of action, and the crippling fear that he might make a mistake or leave something undone, never left him now, not even in sleep. The calm and sang froid of young Desfosses irritated him more than usual. To the young man it seemed natural that the imperial army should wage war somewhere or other and he saw no reason in this whatever to change his manner of life or way of thinking. Daville fairly trembled with suppressed anger as he listened to the glib phrases and bon mots that presumably were the fashion of the young men of Paris, and which Desfosses employed when speaking of the coming war, without respect or enthusiasm, but also without doubt in its victorious outcome. They filled Daville with instinctive envy and sharpened his distress at having no one to talk to (“to exchange fears and hopes”) about the war and everything else, on a level and in a spirit that were close and peculiar to himself and his generation. Now more than ever the world seemed to him to be full of snares and jeopardy and of those shapeless thoughts and fears which war spread over the land and wedged among the people, particularly those who were advanced in years or weak and tired out.

  Daville felt at times as though he were losing his breath and dropping with fatigue, as though for years he had been marching alongside a dark and soulless column with which he could no longer keep in step, and which threatened to walk over him and crush him if he so much as knelt down and stopped marching. Whenever he was left alone, he would heave a deep sigh and say quickly in a low voice: “Ah, dear God, dear God!” He spoke the words without being aware of them, not connecting them to what was happening around him at that moment, for they were part of his breath and sigh.