Bosnian Chronicle Page 36

  “Now that you’ve come along to defend him,” the tall man cried, “I think I’ll string him up on this here mulberry tree.”

  “You’d better not. You can’t! I’m going to call the guards. I’ll go to the Mayor. Who are you?” The old man cried shrilly drawing breath between sentences.

  “I’m someone who’s not afraid of you. Get out of my sight while your skin is still in one piece.”

  The mob began to surge and shout. More people from the bazaar gathered around them. During the squabble the tall man paused after each sentence and looked at them sideways, to see if they were with him. They looked back at him, without moving, but with obvious approval.

  The tall Moslem went up to the old mulberry tree by the roadside, followed by Cologna and the mob. They were all shouting and waving their arms. Cologna himself never stopped shouting, but no one would listen to him or let him finish.

  “It’s an effrontery! Banditry! Crime! You’re spitting on the Sultan’s good name. You bastard Turks!” screamed the doctor.

  “Shut up or you’ll hang right alongside him!”

  “Who? I? You dare to touch me, you dirty barbarians!” All of Cologna’s joints seemed to loosen up and he swung out wildly and kicked around him. He and the tall man were now the focus of all jostling. The man from Foynitsa was pushed aside, forgotten.

  The tall Moslem jerked himself up and, his upper body askew, called to his people in a taunting voice: “You heard him, didn’t you? Fouling the Faith and the men of God!”

  The milling and shoving around Cologna grew more intense.

  “Who? The Faith? What man of God?” cried Cologna. “I know more about Islam than you do, you illegitimate Bosnian! I am . . . I am . . .” Cologna went on shrilling as he twisted around, sputtering and beside himself.

  “Up with him! Hang the infidel dog!”

  In the frantic crush and pulling Cologna’s words came through indistinctly, like a gagging sound. “. . . Moslem . . . I’m a Moslem, better than you! . . .”

  At that point some of the men from the bazaar stepped in and rescued the doctor from the mob. Three of them were now prepared to stand witness that the old man had twice loudly and clearly averred his willingness to embrace the pure Faith, and as such had become inviolate. They now escorted him home, with as much attention and as solemnly as if he were a young bride. And it was high time too, for the old gentleman had lost all self-control and was trembling all over, gibbering and stammering disconnectedly.

  The startled and disappointed men who had brought in Kulier and had been his accusers, judges, and executioners, now let him go and sent him staggering on his way home to Foynitsa.

  The rumor went around quickly that the physician of the Austrian Consulate had become a Moslem. Even in this town, which had gone stark crazy, where each new day dawned madder than the one before and where scenes were enacted quite beyond description or belief, the news of the doctor’s conversion hit the people like a bolt from the blue. As none of the Christians dared to go out in the streets, it was impossible to question it or verify it. The Austrian Consul sent a servant to Fra Ivo Yankovich in Dolats, but the canon received the news with scepticism and promised to come to see the Consul as soon as the riot abated a little, perhaps even the next day. In the late evening, at the Consul’s request, Rotta went out to Cologna’s house along the steep cobblestone road. Half an hour later he was back, silent and ashen as never before. He had been scared to death by unknown men who looked wild and bristled with arms and shouted to his face: “Get yourself converted, infidel, while there’s still time!” They carried on like drunks who had gone out of their minds. But what he had seen at Cologna’s had shaken him much more.

  Having barely managed to get himself admitted into the house, from which some perfectly calm and unarmed Turks had just issued, he had run into the doctor’s manservant, the Albanian, in a state of excitement. The hall was in disorder and the doctor’s voice could be heard inside the room.

  The old man was pacing up and down in acute agitation; his face, usually bloodless and dun-colored, was lightly suffused and his jaw trembled. Out of slit eyes, as though he were looking into the distance and could see only dimly and distinguish with difficulty, he gave the interpreter a long, hard stare that was anything but friendly. And as soon as Rotta mentioned that he was coming from the Consulate-General to find out what had happened, Cologna interrupted him excitedly.

  “Nothing happened, nothing at all. And nothing’s going to happen either. I don’t want anyone to worry about me. I’ll look after myself. Here I stand and defend myself like a good soldier.” The old man paused, abruptly tossed back his head and pushed out his chest, then said with a catch in his breath: “Yes, here I stand. Here, here!”

  “Yes, of course, stand . . . stand, Herr Doktor,” mumbled the timid and superstitious Rotta, suddenly bereft of his composure and self-assurance. As he spoke he took a step back and, keeping his eyes on the doctor, groped behind him with a shaking hand for the doorknob, repeating all the while: “Yes, do stand, please.”

  Relaxing his stiff and chesty posture, the old man presently leaned toward the cowed Rotta, with a much gentler, almost confidential expression. His wizened old face, or rather his eyes, lighted up with a knowing, triumphant smile. As though communicating an important secret, he said quietly, over a wagging finger: “Aleikhiselam says: ‘Like blood doth Satan spread through the human body!’ But Aleikhiselam also says: ‘Verily shall ye see your Master as ye see the moon at the full cycle.’”

  At that he wheeled around, suddenly assuming a grave and pained air; while the interpreter, whom it would have taken much less to frighten to death, used the moment to open the door noiselessly and slink like a shadow into the hall, without greetings or leave-taking.

  Outside the moon was already up. Rotta hurried through the side alleys, dodging the shadows and feeling as if the ghouls were at his back. And when he got home and went in to the Consul he still could not pull himself together or give any coherent account of what had happened to Cologna and what the story was about his conversion. He could only repeat obstinately that the doctor had gone off his head; and when the Consul wanted to know rather more in detail how the madness outwardly manifested itself, he kept saying: “Mad, mad. Anyone who talks about God and Satan like that must be mad. You should have seen him. You should have seen him.”

  By the end of the evening the news had gone around the town that the doctor of the Austrian Consulate had declared his intention to embrace Islam and that he would be initiated on the following day in all due solemnity. However, it was fated that the ceremony should never take place and that the actual truth of the old doctor’s “conversion” should never see the light of day.

  A day later, another rumor raced through the town, with even more lightning speed than the first, that Cologna had been found dead that morning on a garden path near a stream, in that ravine at the foot of the cliff on which his house stood. The top of the old man’s head was bashed in. The Albanian manservant could not explain when and how the doctor had left the house in the night and how he had fallen over the precipice.

  Informed of the doctor’s death, the parish priest at Dolats came down to Travnik to see for himself and to arrange the funeral. Risking an attack by the wandering mobs, Fra Ivo reached the doctor’s house but did not tarry too long. Despite his great size and weight, he scrambled nimbly and quickly down the steep road before the sticks and pickaxes of the roused Moslems who would not let him as much as peep into the house. The hodja had already taken charge of the corpse, since the three citizens had confirmed that the doctor, of his own free will, had three times publicly declared his willingness to be received into the Moslem faith and that even now he was a truer True-Believer than many a so-called Moslem in the bazaar of Travnik.

  And Rotta, hearing of the doctor’s death, rode up to the house with his kavass Ahmed, but finding only a few busy-looking Turks in front of the doctor’s home, he came straight back to the
Consulate. The kavass remained for the burial.

  Had the times been different, or at least a little quieter, had the key people at the Residency been in town, the spiritual and temporal authorities would have intervened, the Austrian Consulate would have acted with more decision, Fra Ivo would have cajoled the officials and the more influential Turks, and the affair with the hapless Cologna would have been settled in a clearer fashion. But in the present state of anarchy and mob rule no one was inclined to listen to anyone or understand anything. The hysteria, which just then had begun to show signs of slackening, found something new to feed on; it seized on the corpse of the old man as a welcome trophy and would not let it go without bloodshed and more broken heads.

  The doctor was buried before noon on a green slope of the Moslem hillside cemetery. Although the bazaar was still closed, a great many Moslems left their houses to participate in the funeral of the physician who had turned Moslem in such a strange and unexpected way. Especially numerous were the armed riffraff, who had wanted to hang him only the day before; grave and solemn-faced, they avidly took turns at carrying the litter, so that the shrouded body of the doctor on the bier slid continuously over a great number of eager masculine shoulders in quick succession.

  Thus the great riot came to an end with an exciting and unforeseen climax. The arrests and killings of Serbs ceased. Once more the town relapsed into that seedy, shamefaced mood when men are anxious to forget as quickly as possible all that has happened; when the swirling throngs of the worst and noisiest shouters and bullies ebbs away to the distant periphery, like flood water receding to its original bed; when the old order returns and, for a time at any rate, strikes everyone as better and more bearable. Once again, silence closed over Travnik, oppressive and uniform, as though it had never been ruffled.

  Return to normalcy was hastened by the return of Suleiman Pasha Skoplyak. The presence of his authoritative voice and his skilled hands made itself felt right away.

  Immediately after his arrival, he summoned the leading citizens and demanded to know what had become of the peaceful town and its law-abiding inhabitants. He stood before them, tall, weatherbeaten, wearing the same austere dress he had worn during the campaign, his lean, muscled chest thrown out like a greyhound’s, his hard blue eyes unflinching, and questioned and scolded them like children. Having spent six weeks on a real battlefield and a fortnight on his estate at Kupres, he now gazed sternly at these pale tired men who had suddenly sobered up, and asked them bluntly since when the bazaar had taken it upon itself to be the judge and executioner, who had given them such authority, and where their wits had been in the last ten days.

  “I am told the rayah got up on their hind legs, they were unruly and full of mischief. That may be so. But one should remember that the rayah have no spirit of their own, they breathe through their masters. You know that very well. It’s always the masters who turn bad first, the rayah merely follows. And once the rayah get up on their hind legs and have it their own way, that’ll be the end of it. There’ll be no rayah left, and who’s going to do your work then?”

  Suleiman Pasha spoke in the tone of a man who until yesterday has dealt in grave and difficult matters, of which these people, with their narrow parochial minds haven’t the slightest idea, but which he must try to explain to them as best he can.

  “Allah, praise and honor to Him, gave us two things—land and the power to do justice. And here, you go and squat on your cushions and leave justice in the hands of the rabble and a few bastard Moslems—how long do you suppose the villagers will put up with it? The peasant’s business is to work, the aga’s to keep an eye on him, because grass needs the dew and the sickle, both. You can’t have one without the other. Look at me”—he turned to the man nearest him, not without pride—“I am fifty-five years old, but before I sit down to supper tonight I will have visited all my fields around Bugoyno. Believe me, there are no worthless and disobedient tenants on my estate.”

  And indeed his long neck and sinewy arms were deeply burned by the sun and as rough as those of a day worker.

  None of the assembled men knew how to reply to that. Each one longed to be out of his sight as soon as possible, to forget all that had taken place and to be forgotten himself.

  As soon as the riot subsided, von Mitterer set about investigating the mystery of Cologna’s conversion and his strange death. In doing so he was not prompted by any concern for Cologna himself, whom for some time now he had regarded as unpredictable and an embarrassment to the service. Having known him well, von Mitterer thought him quite capable of declaring himself for Islam in a moment of heated argument; and it was just as plausible and possible that he might have committed suicide or lost consciousness and fallen into the ravine in a moment of great emotional stress. Moreover, now that the riots had abated and things were beginning to look different and people were revising their opinions and attitudes, it was not an easy task to try to get to the bottom of something that had taken place in altogether different circumstances, in a climate of widespread madness, blood-letting, and turmoil.

  Von Mitterer was nevertheless compelled to take these steps for the prestige of the Empire and in order to prevent further attacks on imperial subjects or members of the consular staff. And Fra Ivo urged him to do it for the sake of the Catholic community, which wanted to know the truth of Cologna’s alleged turncoat behavior and his funeral.

  Suleiman Pasha, who from the very first had been the only one in the Residency sympathetically inclined toward von Mitterer and had always been more open and cordial with him than with Daville (with whom he had to converse through an interpreter, and whose face he did not like), tried to oblige him. But at the same time he advised him in all sincerity not to make matters more acute by pursuing them too far.

  “I know that it is your duty to intervene for one of your own imperial subjects,” he said to the Consul in his cool, reasonable, and deliberate manner, which everyone, himself not excluded, was apt to consider infallible. “I realize that you cannot do otherwise. Only, is it a good thing to tie the reputation of the Empire to every imperial subject that comes along? There are many kinds of men, but there’s only one reputation of the Empire.”

  And Suleiman Pasha went on discussing, in a dry and impersonal voice the prospects of settling the matter in a way that would be satisfactory to all.

  As for the question whether Cologna had in fact been converted or not, the best course would be to leave the matter alone altogether, since the whole thing had been so chaotic that one could not tell the day from the night, let alone one religion from another or a real Moslem from a convert. To put it quite bluntly, the person under discussion had been the sort of man whose conversion could not be regarded either as a grave loss to the Christian faith or a special gain for Islam.

  On the subject of his obscure death, so soon after his obscure conversion, this would bear even less scrutiny. Dead men tell no tales, but a man who has taken leave of his senses and does not watch where he is going is, of course, likely to slip and stumble. Indeed, this would seem to be a realistic interpretation and would not offend anyone. And what useful purpose would now be served by exploring other possibilities on which no sufficient light can ever be thrown and for which the Consulate would never obtain the kind of satisfaction it had in mind?

  “And how can I now find and round up all those tramps and morons who wanted to play the Turk and dispense justice around Travnik?” said Suleiman Pasha. “No more than you can resurrect and interrogate the late doctor now lying in the Turkish cemetery. Who can make amends now? Is it not better to leave things as they are and give our attention to more sensible business? I know well how you feel, it’s the way I would have felt myself. I shall order an inquiry into the death of the physician, which will show that no one is to blame really. We shall have a detailed report drawn up, with all the witnesses and the evidence. And you will forward it to your superiors, so that there will be no further argument either on your side or ours.”

>   Von Mitterer had to agree that this solution, if not the best, was the only possible one in the circumstances. All the same, he requested and received from the office of the Vizier copies of the relevant instructions and depositions which, as far as distant Vienna was concerned, might give the impression that the Consulate had acted and received due satisfaction and indemnity. Together with Rotta’s memorandum on his last meeting with Cologna, the material stood a fair chance of placating Vienna, representing the case as an unfortunate accident of an unbalanced man, and saving the Consul’s face. Privately, however, von Mitterer was none too pleased with the course of the affair or with himself.

  Pale and lonely, in his twilit study, von Mitterer thought about it all and felt himself disarmed and helpless in the face of a whole maze of conflicting circumstances, in the midst of which he was doing his conscientious and devoted best to perform his duty and was straining beyond his strength, while realizing clearly that all was hopeless and in vain. The Colonel shivered, even though outside the evening was heavy with the heat of July, and felt at times as though he too were swooning and teetering on the edge of an unknown ravine.

  17

  This second and more hideous riot was not connected in any way with the French Consulate. On the contrary, it had centered, in its later stages, around the Austrian Consulate and its physician Cologna. Nevertheless, the inmates of the French Consulate had spent some anxious days and sleepless nights. Save for a couple of brief outings by Desfosses, no one had dared even to appear at the window during that time. As for Daville, the second riot oppressed him worse than the first, for this was excitement of a kind that no man can ever take in his stride, one that, on the contrary, he finds harder and harder to bear the more often it is repeated.