Bosnian Chronicle Read online

  The old doctor ceremoniously offered the young man a seat but remained standing himself, explaining that he was merely observing an old Salernian rule: Post prandium sta—After a meal one should stand.

  Desfosses sat down on a hard armless chair, but was filled with a sense of physical and mental superiority which made his mission appear easy and simple to him, almost pleasant. He began to speak in that tone of smug confidence which young men so often adopt in conversing with old men who seem to them outdated and at the end of their rope, quite forgetting that bodily infirmity and slowness of mind are often accompanied by vast experience and hard-won skill in handling human affairs. He delivered Daville’s message to von Mitterer, trying to make it appear for what it was, namely a well-meant suggestion in their common interest and not a sign of weakness or fear. He concluded and was pleased with himself.

  Cologna hastened to assure him that he was honored to have been chosen as an intermediary, that he would pass on the message conscientiously, that he fully appreciated the intentions and shared the opinion of M. Daville. He agreed that his own background, profession, and convictions made him the most suitable person for such a role.

  Now, evidently, it was Cologna’s turn to be pleased with himself.

  The young man listened to him as he might have listened to the babble of water, gazing absently at his regular, long face with its lively round eyes, bloodless lips, and teeth that moved as he spoke. Old age! thought the young man. The worst of it was not that one suffered and died but that one grew old, for growing old was a malady for which there was no cure or hope; it was a long-dragged-out death. Except that the young man did not think of aging in terms of a common human destiny, which included his own, but as an affliction that was peculiar to the doctor alone.

  And Cologna said: “I don’t need too many explanations. I understand the Consul’s situation, as I understand the situation of every enlightened man from the West whose fate it is to live in these parts. For a man like that, living in Turkey means walking the sharp blade of a knife or roasting over a slow fire. I know it too well, for people like me are born on the knife’s edge and we live and die on it. And in this fire we grow and burn ourselves to a cinder.”

  Through his musings about age and growing old, the young man began to listen with more attention and to grasp the doctor’s words.

  “No one knows what it means to be born and to live on the borderline between two worlds. What it means to know and understand the one and the other and yet be unable to do anything that might help them explain themselves to each other or bring them closer together. What it means to love and hate either, to waver between the two and imitate now one now the other. To have two homes and yet none, to be at home everywhere and yet remain a stranger forever. In short, to live crucified, but as victim and torturer at one and the same time.”

  The young man listened in amazement. These were no longer empty phrases and compliments; it was as if a third man had joined in the conversation and was now holding forth. Before him stood a man with flashing eyes and long thin arms outspread, demonstrating how one lived torn between two conflicting worlds.

  As often happens with young people, Desfosses could not help feeling that this conversation was not entirely adventitious, that it was somehow, in a special and intimate way, bound up with his own thoughts and with the book which he was preparing to write. There weren’t too many opportunities in Travnik for conversations of this kind; he felt pleasantly stimulated and in his excitement began to ask questions, then to make observations of his own and describe his own impressions.

  He spoke as much from inner necessity as from a desire to prolong the discussion. But there was no need to prompt the old man to talk. He never as much as wandered from his main theme. Although, here and there, he was brought up short for want of a French phrase and substituted an Italian one, he spoke like one inspired, almost as if he were reading from a prepared text: “Yes, these are the miseries which torment the Christians in the Levant and which you people from the Christian West will never be able to understand fully, just as the Turks cannot understand them. Such is the fate of a man from the Levant, for he is poussière humaine, human dust, drifting wearily between East and West, belonging to neither and pulverized by both. These are people who speak many languages but have no language of their own, who are familiar with two religions but hold fast to neither. They are victims of the fatal division of mankind into Christian and non-Christian; eternal interpreters and go-betweens, who carry within them so much that is unclear and inarticulate; they are good connoisseurs of the East and West and of their customs and beliefs, but are equally despised and suspected by both. To them can be applied the words written six centuries ago by the great Jelaleddin, Jelaleddin Rumi: ‘. . . For I cannot tell who I am. I am neither a Christian, nor a Jew, nor a Parsee, nor a Mussulman. I am neither of the East nor of the West, neither from dry land nor from the sea.’ They are like that. They are a small mankind apart, stumbling under a double load of Eastern sin, that ought to be saved and redeemed a second time, though no one can say how or by whom. They are a frontier people, bodily and spiritually, from that black and bloody dividing line which through some terrible, absurd misunderstanding has been drawn between man and man, all creatures of God, between whom there should not and must not be any such lines. They are the pebble between the land and the sea, condemned to eternal swirling and pull. They are the third world, a repository of the curse and damnation which the cleaving of the earth into two worlds has left in its wake. They are . . .”

  Excited, with shining eyes, Desfosses watched the transformed old man who, with his arms flung out so that he resembled a cross, vainly searched for words and then suddenly wound up in a broken voice: “It is heroism without glory, martyrdom without rewards. But at least you who are our kinsman and believe in the same God, you people of the West who are Christians by the same grace that we are, at least you should understand us and accept us and lighten our burden.”

  The doctor dropped his arms with an air of utter hopelessness, of anger almost. There was no vestige left of that queer, elusive “Illyrian doctor” Desfosses had known. Here stood a man who thought his own thoughts and expressed them forcefully. Desfosses burned with the desire to hear and learn more; he had quite forgotten his own feeling of superiority of a little while before and the house he was in and the business on which he had come. He knew that he had sat there far longer than he should have or had intended to, but he didn’t get up.

  The old man’s eyes were on him with a look full of unspoken emotion, as though he were watching someone who was moving away out of reach and whose going saddened him. “Yes, monsieur, you may understand this life of ours, but to you it’s only an uncomfortable dream. You’re living here now, but you know it’s only for a time and sooner or later you will go back to your country, where conditions are better and life has more dignity. You will rise up from this nightmare and walk with your head high once more, but we never shall, for to us it’s the only life.”

  Toward the end of the conversation the doctor grew more and more subdued and queer. Now he too sat down, quite close to the young man, leaning toward him in an attitude of the most intimate confidence and motioning him with both hands to keep quiet, almost as if, by an inadvertent word or gesture, he might frighten and scare away something fragile, precious, and timid that was there, like a bird, on the floor at their feet. Staring fixedly at a spot on the carpet, he spoke in a whisper, yet also in a voice that was warm and soft with an inner sweetness. “In the end, when all is truly and finally said and done, everything is nevertheless good and works out for the best. It is true that here everything seems to be out of joint and snarled up beyond hope. ‘Un jour tout sera bien, voilà notre espérance’—One day everything will be all right, that’s our hope, as your philosopher has said. And it is hard to visualize it any other way. For, in the last instance, are my thoughts, which are good and right, worth any less than someone else’s identical thoughts in
Rome or Paris? Simply because I’ve conceived them in this mountain gorge known as Travnik? Certainly not. What is to prevent my thoughts from being jotted down and appearing between the covers of a book? Nothing! And even if things seem to be disjointed and chaotic, they are nevertheless linked together and interdependent. Not a single human thought, no enterprise of the mind, is ever lost. All of us are on the right road, we shall all be amazed when we meet eventually. And we shall meet and understand one another, no matter how scattered we may be now or how far we may have strayed. That will be a happy meeting indeed, a glorious surprise that will save us all.”

  The young man had trouble following the doctor’s premise, but he was eager to hear him talk on. And Cologna did go on, in the same confidential tone of joyful excitement, even though what he said was at times not immediately pertinent. Desfosses nodded his approval, grew excited himself and now and then, unable to hold back, threw in some observations of his own. He told the old man about his discovery on the road at Turbe, where the telltale layers under the road’s surface clearly indicated various historical epochs—the same story he had once told Daville, without much success.

  “I know you look around you and notice things. You are interested in the past as well as the present. You know how to look,” said the doctor approvingly. And, like a man divulging a secret of hidden treasure and letting his smiling eyes insinuate more than words can encompass, the old man said in a low but dramatic voice: “Next time you go through the bazaar, stop by the Yeni Mosque. There is a high wall around the whole area. Inside, under huge old trees, there are graves and no one can remember any longer whose they are. But the people still remember that once upon a time, before the Turks came to the country, the mosque used to be the Church of St. Catherine. And they believe that the sacristy stands to this day in one of the corners of the mosque and that no one can open it. If you look a little closer at the stones in the ancient wall, you will see that they were taken from Roman ruins and tomb monuments. And on one particular stone that has been built into the wall of the mosque enclosure you can read quite clearly several neat and regular Roman letters from a text fragment: ‘Marco Flavio . . . optimo . . .’ And deep down below, in the hidden foundations, there are great big blocks of red granite, the remains of a much older cult, the former shrine of the god Mithras. On one of these blocks there is a mysterious relief, in which one can make out the young god of light killing a powerful wild boar in full flight. And who knows what else is hidden in those depths, under those foundations? No man can tell whose endeavors may be buried there or what traces may have been wiped out forever. And that is just one little plot of land, in this remote little town. Where are all the countless other great settlements the world over?”

  Desfosses stared at the old man, expecting further confidences, but here the doctor suddenly changed his voice and began to speak much louder, as though any outsider were now allowed to hear what he was saying: “You understand, all these things are fitted one into another, bound together, and it is only to the outward eye that they appear lost and forgotten, scattered about and lacking a master plan. They all stretch away, quite unconsciously, toward a single goal, like rays converging on a distant, unknown focus. One should bear in mind that it is expressly written in the Koran: ‘Perhaps one day God shall visit peace upon you and your adversaries and create friendship between you. He is mighty, gentle, and merciful.’ So there’s hope, and where there’s hope . . . you understand?”

  His eyes brightened with a meaningful, triumphant smile, the purport of which was to hearten and reassure the young man, and with his palms he outlined a round form in the air in front of his face, as if he wanted to show the closed circle of the universe.

  “You understand?” the old man repeated meaningfully, with a touch of impatience, as though he considered it needless and redundant to search around for words to express anything so obvious and certain, anything so near and familiar to him.

  And having said it, his whole tone changed again. Once more he rose, thin and erect, bowed unctuously and spoke sonorous hollow words, telling the young man how honored he felt by his visit and by the mission entrusted to him.

  That was how they parted.

  On his way back to the Consulate, Desfosses walked absently in the pool of light which the kavass’s lantern splashed in front of him. He no longer heard or noticed anything around him. He thought about the eccentric old doctor and his lively, hopscotch kind of reasoning, and tried to collect and organize his own thoughts which crowded back to his mind in a wild, unexpected merry-go-round.

  16

  The news reaching Travnik from Istanbul grew more confused and disturbing. Neither Bariaktar’s successful coup d’état nor the tragic death of Selim III had produced the stability everyone had hoped for. The year was hardly out when there was another revolution and Mustapha Bariaktar was killed.

  The upheavals and changes in the distant capital were echoed in the remote province, though much later, in a distorted fashion that was almost a caricature, like something in a trick mirror. Fear, discontent, economic insecurity, and wrath that could find no outlet racked and poisoned the Turks in the towns and cities. They felt themselves betrayed from inside and threatened from outside, like a people with a vivid premonition of an earthquake that brings a havoc of change. Their instinct for survival and self-defense drove them to action and gestures of protest, but circumstances denied them the means of action and barred all avenues of recourse, so that their energy swirled around uselessly and spent itself in the wind. In the crowded little towns between steep mountains where different faiths and conflicting interests were thrown together quarter to quarter, tempers grew brittle and created a mood in which anything was possible, in which blind forces were bound to clash and furious outbreaks certain to follow one after another.

  In Europe at this time battles were being fought on a scale of horror and intensity that had never been seen before, whose effects on history could not yet be grasped. In Istanbul there was one coup d’état after another, sultans came and went, heads of grand viziers rolled in the dust.

  Travnik was astir. As every spring, under standing orders from the capital, an army was being raised against Serbia; the hubbub and clamor as usual greatly exceeded the results. Suleiman Pasha had already left with his small but disciplined force. The Vizier was to march off any day. Ibrahim Pasha, in fact, had no precise idea of the campaign plan or the size of the army he was supposed to lead. He moved off because he could not do otherwise, because he had received a firman to move and because he hoped that by his presence in the expedition he would induce the others to do their duty. But the Janissaries did not submit kindly to muster and marching orders and used every conceivable dodge to keep out of it. While some were being called up, the others quietly vanished; or else they simply provoked a brawl and a riot, under cover of which they melted away discreetly and returned to their homes, while on the muster roll they were officially on their way to Serbia.

  Both consuls made every effort to gain the most comprehensive information about the Vizier’s intentions, about the number and quality of the troupes under his command, and about the true situation on the Serbian battlefront. Both they and their assistants wasted their days in this activity, which at times seemed to them complex and tremendously important and at times futile and meaningless.

  As soon as the Vizier followed Suleiman Pasha to the river Drina, leaving all authority and responsibility for public order with the weak and timid town Mayor, the Travnik bazaar closed down, suddenly and unexpectedly, for the second time. In reality it was a continuation of the previous year’s riot, which had never guttered completely but had gone on simmering under a sullen silence, waiting for an opportune moment to flare out anew. This time the fury of the mob vented itself on the Serbs who had been caught in various parts of Bosnia and brought to Travnik on the suspicion that they were in touch with the rebels in Serbia and were plotting a similar uprising in Bosnia itself. But their rage was direc
ted just as much at the Turkish authorities, who were accused of weakness, corruption, and betrayal.

  Feeling that the new uprising in Serbia was a threat to all they held dearest and nearest, and that the Vizier, like all the other Osmanlis, failed to protect them as he should have, and that they themselves had no will or energy left to defend themselves, the Bosnian Moslems fell into the morbid excitability typical of a threatened class and avenged their impotence with barren and pointless acts of cruelty.

  Almost every day captured Serbs were brought in, first in twos and threes, then in groups, sometimes by the dozen—bound and exhausted men from the Drina and the border country, charged with grave but unspecified offenses. There were townsmen and priests among them, but the majority were peasants. No one bothered to examine the charges or pass proper judgment. Day by day they were tossed into the raging Travnik bazaar as into the crater of a flaming volcano, and the bazaar became their executioner without due process or trial.

  In spite of Daville’s warnings and entreaties Desfosses went out and saw the gypsies torture and kill two men in the middle of the livestock market. Standing on an elevated spot behind the backs of the mob, who were completely engrossed in the spectacle before them, he could watch unnoticed and have a clear view of the victims, the hangmen, and the spectators.

  The victims were a couple of tall swarthy men who might have been brothers, so alike they were. As far as one could make out from the remnants of their dress, which had been ripped and tattered during the journey and at the hands of their captors, they were from a small town. They were caught, it was said, at a moment when they were trying to smuggle into Serbia, in hollowed-out walking sticks, some letters from the Catholic bishop of Sarajevo.