Bosnian Chronicle Page 41

  Daville and the young Freycinet sat at the table in the shade. Spread out before them were copies of their reports, back issues of Le Moniteur containing the government announcements and decrees, and paper, ink, and quills.

  Jacques Freycinet was a hefty young man, with fresh pink and white cheeks and that calm, self-possessed voice and bearing common to children of well-to-do families. Business was obviously in his blood. No member of the clan had ever done or wanted to do anything else, or had ambitions to belong to another class, and he was in no way different from the rest of them. Like all the others in his family he was neat, polite, alert, tactful, ready to stand up for his rights, conscious of his interests, though not in a blinkered, unimaginative way.

  Freycinet had traveled the route from Sarajevo to Kostaynitsa both ways; he had rented an entire inn at Sarajevo for his depot and was now negotiating with merchants, pack drivers, and local authorities. He had come to exchange information with Daville, to tell him of his observations and to make certain proposals. The Consul was pleased to have this lively and polite southerner as a co-worker on problems that had often seemed to him insurmountable.

  “Alors, let me repeat once more,” said Freycinet with that stolidity which creeps into a businessman’s voice when he is marshaling facts to serve his interest, “we must allow seven days for the trip from Sarajevo to Kostaynitsa, including these overnight stops: Kiselyak, Busovacha, Karaula, Yaytse, Zmiyanye, Novi Han, Priedor, and, of course, Kostaynitsa. In the winter we must reckon with twice as many, that is to say fourteen stages. We’ll need at least two more caravanseries along the road, if we’re to keep the freight out of the weather and prevent stealing. Transport costs have gone up and are still rising. The reason for that is Austrian competition and, I’m inclined to think, certain Sarajevo merchants, Serbs and Jews, who seem to be working hand in hand with the English. Currently we had better count with these prices: from Salonica to Sarajevo at the rate of 155 piasters per load, from Sarajevo to Kostaynitsa 55 piasters. Two years ago the costs were exactly one half of that. And we should do all we can to prevent further increase, because that might put the route out of business altogether. And we’d better make an allowance for the whims and greed of Turkish officials, for the inclination of the natives to pilfer and steal, the danger that the Serbian uprisings may spread and result in banditry along the Albanian frontier, and, finally, the risk of epidemics along the way.”

  Daville, ever ready to see the fingers of the English Intelligence in everything, wanted to know the reasoning behind Freycinet’s suspicion that the Sarajevo merchants were working for English interests, but the young man would not be flustered or diverted. Holding his notes in front of him, he went on: “Well, to recapitulate and conclude. Dangers to traffic are the following: unrest in Serbia, Albanian bandits, pilfering in Bosnia itself, rising costs of transport, arbitrary duties and tax, competition, and, lastly, plague and other epidemics. The measures that ought to be taken are: first, two new caravansaries between Sarajevo and Kostaynitsa; second, stabilizing the wild fluctuations of the Turkish exchange by a special firman at the rate of 5.50 piasters to a thaler of 6 francs or one Maria-Theresa thaler, 11.50 piasters to a Venetian zecchino, and so forth; third, enlarging the quarantine station at Kostaynitsa, building a bridge to replace the ferry, enlarging the warehouse to accommodate at least eight thousand bales of cotton, establishing resthouses for travelers, et cetera; fourth, special gifts to the Vizier Suleiman Pasha and to certain other key Turks at the time these demands are put to them. The whole plan would cost approximately ten to thirteen thousand francs. It would solve the main difficulties and make the route safe and practical.”

  Daville made a note of these things, to include them in his official report. At the same time he decided, with a certain pleasurable anticipation, to read the young man his own report, written in 1807, in which he had so accurately foreseen Napoleon’s intentions and all the measures they were now putting into effect.

  “Ah, mon cher monsieur, I could tell you a good deal about what happens in this country when you come up with a sensible scheme or a useful enterprise. I could tell you some tales, but you can see for yourself the kind of country this is, the kind of people, the kind of government, and the enormous trouble one has to go through for every blessed little thing.”

  The young man, however, had nothing more to say; having pithily stated the problems and outlined the means for solving them, he had no appreciation of generalized complaints and “psychological” subtleties. He consented politely to listen to Daville’s report of 1807, which the Consul began to read.

  The shadow in which they sat grew longer and longer. The lemonade that was set before them in tall crystal glasses grew more tepid by the minute, for they had both forgotten it.

  In that same summer stillness, two blocks above the Consulate where Daville and Freycinet conducted their business, only slightly to the left and nearer the stream which, shrunken and out of sight, cascaded down into the valley, Musa Krdzaliya and his companions sat in the former’s garden.

  The steep and neglected slope of the garden was choking in vegetation. On a small outcropping, the top of which offered a narrow strip of near-level ground, under a tall pear tree, a rug had been spread and on it were remains of food, coffee cups, and a bottle of chilled plum brandy. Here the sun was already gone, though it still lay on the other side of the Lashva. Musa the Singer and Hamza the Crier lay in the grass. The third man Murad Hodzich, known as the Swaying Hodja, half sat and half lay on the slope, his feet braced against the pear tree. Also propped against the tree was his tambura, a stringed instrument resembling a mandolin, the tip of which was covered with an inverted brandy glass.

  He was a swarthy little man, as compact and mottled as a cockerel. A pair of big dark eyes, with a fanatical gleam in them, stared, unblinking, from his small sallow face. He came from one of the better Travnik families and had once gone to school, but brandy had not allowed him to finish or to become an imam at Travnik, as so many in his family had done. It was said that when he came up for his final examination and faced the head of the school and the board of examiners he was so drunk he could barely stand on his feet; he swayed and reeled, and the Head dismissed him and called him “the Swaying Hodja.” And the name had stuck. Deeply offended, the sensitive and temperamental young man then became a chronic drunkard. And the more he drank the greater became his resentment and wounded vanity. Dropped from the ranks of his contemporaries so early in his life, he dreamed of surpassing them all one day with a spectacular feat of some kind and so revenging himself for everything. Like so many failures who have a mousy physique but a passionate temperament, he was consumed with a burning secret ambition not to spend the rest of his days as an unknown, unrespected nobody, but to make the world sit up and take notice by some forceful and astounding deed—how where, or with what, he himself did not know. As time went on this obsession, fanned by heavy drinking to the pitch of insanity, took hold of him completely. The lower he fell, the more he deceived himself with big words and lies, with vain daydreams and flamboyant tales. This often made him a butt of jokes and mockery among his companions, who were drunkards like himself.

  As always in those fine summer days, the three of them began to drink in Musa’s garden and later, in the gathering dark, went down to town to continue drinking there. Waiting for the night to fall and light up the big stars along the narrow blue strip of the Travnik sky, and already floating in a haze of brandy, they hummed or talked in undertones, with sluggish tongues, disconnectedly, without particular reference to one another’s words. It was the talk and singing of men sodden with drink, a substitute for the work and movement they had long become unused to. In these conversations they traveled and lived adventurously and saw the fulfillment of ambitions which they would never be able to realize in any other way; they looked at one another with unseeing eyes, they listened without hearing, they puffed themselves up, swelled, basked in their own greatness, took wing and soared,
they became all the things they never were and never would be, and possessed things that were nonexistent and which only brandy can bestow, for a fleeting moment, on those who give themselves up to it body and soul.

  Musa was the least talkative of the three. He lay, completely sunk in the thick, dark green grass, with arms folded under his head, his left knee bent and his right leg flung over it, as though he were sitting in a chair. His gaze was lost in the bright sky. Through the skein of grass his fingers felt the touch of the tepid earth which, it seemed to him, rose and fell in long measured breaths; and he was conscious, at the same time, of the soft stream of warm air entering his sleeves and the loosened leggings of his baggy pants. It was a hardly perceptible wafting, a special Travnik breeze that gets up in the early summer evenings, creeping languidly and staying close to the ground as it moves along, gently ruffling the grass and the undergrowth. Musa, who was somewhere halfway between the morning’s hangover and a new haze that was fast thickening, reveled in the warmth of the earth and in this gentle, steady flow of air, which made him feel as though he were being lifted up, floating and soaring, not so much because the breeze was strong and insistent but because he himself was no more than a breath and a bubble of restless heat, so light and feathery that he became airborne of his own account and just soared away with them.

  And as he took off and flew and lay unmoving, he heard the voices of his two companions as in a dream. Hamza’s voice was hoarse and hard to understand, but the Swaying Hodja’s was deep and clear; he was speaking slowly and solemnly, his eyes fixed on one spot, as though he were reading from a book.

  A few days before, the three of them had come to the conclusion that they had ran out of money and must try to get hold of some at all costs. It had long been the turn of the Swaying Hodja to see to it, but he had trouble raising it and preferred to drink on other people’s money.

  They talked now about the loan which he was supposed to get from his uncle in Podlugovo. The uncle had become quite rich lately.

  “Where does his money come from?” asked Hamza, suspiciously and irritably, for he knew this uncle and rather doubted that the money could be got out of him.

  “He made it on cotton this summer.”

  “Pack driving for the French?”

  “No, buying and selling the cotton that ‘drops off’ in the villages.”

  “And the cotton is still coming?” drawled Hamza.

  “They say it is. Makes you wonder. The English closed up the sea road, you know, and Bonaparte’s left without cotton. But he’s got to dress that big army of his, so now they’re sending it through Bosnia. All the way from Novi Pazar to Kostaynitsa it’s just one horse after another, one bale after another. The roads crowded, the inns bursting at the seams. You can’t get a pack driver anywhere, the French have hired them all, and they pay with real solid ducats. Anybody that’s got a horse these days, it’s worth its weight in gold. Anybody that deals in cotton is a rich man inside a month.”

  “All right, but how do they get the cotton?”

  “How? Well, they get it. The French wouldn’t sell it for anything. You could offer them a house for an armful of cotton and they wouldn’t. So the people learned to steal. They steal in the inns, where the drivers unload the horses for the night. When they take down the freight all the bales are there, but next morning, when they load again, a bale of cotton is missing. So there’s a hue and cry. Where is it, who was it? But you can’t hold up the whole caravan for a bale of cotton, so they start without it. And in the villages it’s the same thing. The children go out, hide in the bushes by the road, and slit the bale sacks with their little knives. The road is narrow between the bushes, the cotton starts falling out and getting caught on the branches on both sides. The caravan goes by, the kids come out and gather the wisps in their little hampers, then hide again and wait for the next caravan. The French blame the drivers and take the damage out of their wages. In some places they send guards and catch the kids, but you can’t round up a whole countryside of children. So they keep plucking Bonaparte’s cotton off the bush and the trees, like it was Egypt, and people come from the market towns and buy it. Plenty of them got dressed that way and made a little pile besides.”

  “And it all goes through Bosnia?” Hamza asked drowsily.

  “No, not just Bosnia. Happens all over Turkey. Bonaparte’s got himself concessions from Istanbul and has sent consuls and merchants with wads of money all through the land, and there you are. Do you know, for Bonaparte’s cotton my uncle . . .”

  “Well, get the money then,” Musa interrupted with quiet contempt, “and we won’t ask whether it comes from your maternal or paternal uncle, or where it grows, or how it collects. What we need is money.”

  Musa did not care for these tales of the Swaying Hodja, which, as a rule, were overlong and exaggerated and served to show, more often than not, that he’d had a little schooling and knew his way about and was at home in the affairs of the world. Hamza, on the other hand, was more patient and listened to them quietly and with good humor, which never left him even during the periods when he hadn’t a penny to his name.

  “God knows we need money,” said Hamza in a kind of croaky echo. “We need it badly.”

  “And I’ll get it, Allah help me, or perish in the attempt,” the Swaying Hodja promised earnestly.

  His promise and oaths brought no reaction from the other two. Silence fell. Three bodies, weakened by idleness, steadily burning with alcohol or burning for it, breathed quietly and pretended to relax, sprawling on the grass in the warm shade.

  “Quite a man, this Bonaparte.” The Swaying Hodja spoke thickly, as if talking to himself. “Quite a man. He can beat and conquer anyone living. And they say he’s small and puny, nothing much to look at.”

  “Small, about your size, but with a big heart,” Hamza said with another yawn.

  “Never carries a sword or a pistol, they say,” the Swaying Hodja went on. “Just turns up his collar and pulls his hat over his eyes and runs off at the head of his army. Anything that lives, he just walks over it. Fire spurts out of his eyes. No sword can cut him down, no bullet can touch him.”

  The Swaying Hodja plucked the empty brandy glass from the tip of his tambura, filled it and drank, all with his left hand, while the right one remained inside his open shirt front; with his chin on his chest, he kept his vacuous gaze riveted on the grainy bark of the pear tree. The brandy promptly sang out of him. Hardly opening his lips, not shifting his gaze or changing his position, he sang in his deep baritone:

  “Lovely Naza was taken ill

  Her mother’s only child . . .”

  Again he reached for the glass, filled it, tossed it back and took up his tambura. “Ah, if I could meet him just once . . .”

  “Meet whom?” asked Hamza, even though he’d heard these and similar fantasies a hundred times.

  “Whom did you think? Bonaparte. If I could get my hands on him, just the two of us, damn his infidel soul, and then whoever wins good luck to him.”

  The crazy words petered out in complete silence. Once more the Swaying Hodja plucked his glass from the instrument, shook noisily after drinking it, and continued in a much deeper voice: “If he wins, he can have my head. I wouldn’t care this much. But if I win and tie him up, I wouldn’t kill him. I’d simply march him through the Turkish army, tied up like that, and make him pay taxes to the Sultan, same as the lowest infidel shepherd from below Karaula.”

  “He’s a long way off, Murad. A long way off, this Bonaparte, Hamza said good-humoredly, “And that’s a great big army he’s got. And, brother, what about all those other infidel empires you’d have to go through first?”

  “Oh, there’d be no trouble with those.” The Swaying Hodja gave a deprecating wave. “True, he’s far away when he’s home in his own land, but he wanders around all the time and won’t sit still. Last year he came to Vienna to get married to the Austrian Emperor’s daughter . . .”

  “Well, yes, here around Vie
nna it might’ve worked out,” said Hamza with a grin, “if you’d only thought about it in time.”

  “That’s what I’m trying to tell you. We’ve got to pull ourselves together and get out into the world, instead of moping and rotting away in this Travnik mildew. Let’s get a little glory before we die. I’ve been saying it over and over, but all I hear from you two is, ‘No, don’t. Wait. We’ll do it today. Let’s do it tomorrow.’ So what do you expect . . . ?”

  Saying this, the Swaying Hodja resolutely snatched the brandy glass off his tambura, filled it to the brim, and tossed it back sharply.

  Neither Hamza nor Musa commented any more on his loud musings. With deft, practiced movements, they too reached for their glasses and helped themselves to the flask in the grass. Left to himself, the little Swaying Hodja sank into that proud and disdainful silence which is the aftermath of hard-fought bouts and great feats of valor, the kind that never receive their just recognition and due reward. Sullen, his chin on his chest, his right hand on his unbuttoned shirt, he gazed absently in front of him. “Three long years she ailed . . .” His doleful baritone burst forth once again, as if another person were singing from inside.

  Hamza coughed and perked up. “Good luck to you, Murad, you old war horse! You’ll be going yet, by the will of Allah. Wait and see, you’ll be on your way. The world will find out who Murad is and the stuff he’s made of, where he comes from and who his people are.”

  “Your health, my friend,” the Swaying Hodja said, deeply moved, raising his glass wearily like a man whose arms were heavy with the weight of glory.

  Time passed again. Musa lay quietly, unmoving, and he floated up and soared on the breeze and on the warm exhalation of the earth under him, freed, at least for a while, from the laws of gravity and the shackles of time.

  Over the Travnik valley, daylight seemed to grow more limpid and incandescent, glittering with the pure light of the sun under the ultramarine dome of the sky.