Bosnian Chronicle Read online

  Daville felt his throat tighten.

  From the uneasiness of the French authorities in Dalmatia in recent days he had gathered that something was afoot, but he had no other information and did not want von Paulich to see this.

  Collecting himself a little, he thanked von Paulich in a voice hoarse with emotion and added at once that he was in full accord with his ideas, that this had always been his own attitude, and that it was no fault of his if things had sometimes been different with von Paulich’s predecessor. He even wished to go a step further. “I hope, my dear Colonel, that war can be avoided, but if it cannot be, then I hope it will be waged without hatred and will not last long. In that case, I hope very much that the tender and exalted family ties which link our two courts will be a mitigating element and will hasten the conclusion of peace.”

  At this point von Paulich, who until then had looked him straight in the eye, glanced away and his averted face grew stern and distant.

  And that was how they parted.

  A week later special couriers arrived, the Austrian one from Brod and after him the French courier from Split, and the two consuls learned almost simultaneously that war had been declared.

  Next day Daville had a letter from von Paulich, informing him that their two countries were at war and recalling all they had verbally agreed to concerning their mutual conduct so long as the war lasted. He wound up the letter by assuring Mme Daville of his undying respect and repeating that he was at her disposal for any service of a nonofficial nature.

  Daville answered promptly, averring that he and his staff would observe their agreement to the letter, as “here in the Orient, all nationals of Western countries, without exception, must regard themselves as members of a single family, no matter what their differences in Europe itself.” He added that Mme Daville thanked him for his remembrance and was sorry to lose the Colonel’s company for a while.

  And so, in the autumn of 1813, entering another period of war, the two consuls also commenced the last year of the “Consular Era.”

  The steep paths in the great garden around the French Consulate were strewn with fallen leaves that trickled in dry rustling rivulets down toward the terrace, already seeded for the next season. On these tumbling footpaths, under the leaning, harvested fruit trees, it was warm and quiet, as always during the days when the whole of nature relaxes in momentary peace, in that bewitching, lulling pause between summer and autumn.

  It was here that Daville, hidden away, with only a fragmentary view of the neighboring hill in front of him, searched his heart very earnestly and saw his past exaltations, plans, and conviction for what they were.

  It was here, in the last days of October, that he learned from D’Avenat the outcome of the Battle of Leipzig, and heard of the French defeats in Spain from a passing courier. For it was here in the garden that he spent his entire days, until the weather grew quite cold and the early autumn rains turned the yellow, rustly leaves into a clammy mass of shapeless mud.

  One Sunday before noon—it was November 1, 1813—the cannon was fired from the Travnik fortress, shattering the dead humid silence between the steep and bare hillsides. The people down in the bazaar lifted their heads and counted the shots, while glancing at each other with mute questioning eyes. Twenty-one shots were fired. The white gun smoke above the fortress thinned and faded and silence descended once again, only to be broken again a little later.

  The voice of the town crier rose up in the middle of the bazaar. It was the goitered and asthmatic Hamza, whose voice was growing noticeably feebler, just like his laughter and sense of humor. Still, he gave it all he had and tried to make up with gestures for the voice he no longer had.

  Laboring for breath in the damp winter air, he announced that Allah had blessed the arms of the Crescent Moon with a glorious and just victory over the rebellious infidels, that Belgrade had fallen into Turkish hands, and that the last traces of the infidel insurgents in Serbia had been wiped out forever.

  The news spread like a flash from one end of the town to the other.

  On the afternoon of that same day D’Avenat went down into the city to find out how the populace was taking the news.

  The top crust of Travnik, the begs and the bazaar folk, would not have been true to character if they had shown their joy openly and aloud, even at such great news as a victory of their arms. They condescended to mumble a few monosyllabic banalities, not even bothering to pronounce them distinctly; anything else would not have been in keeping with their ideas of dignity and restraint. They seemed, in fact, to look upon the news as a mixed blessing; for good as it was to know that Serbia had been pacified, it was not especially pleasant to think of Ali Pasha returning as a victor, since now, presumably, he would be even harder and tougher to deal with than he had been thus far. And besides, they had been hearing a good many criers and victorious announcements down the years, but none of them could remember a time when one New Year was an improvement over the old. That was how D’Avenat “read” them, although not one of them deigned to give him as much as a glance in answer to his unseemly questioning.

  He also went to Dolats, to find out what the Brothers were saying. However, Fra Ivo pretended he was busy in the church; he dragged out the service as never before and refused to leave the altar until D’Avenat tired of waiting and went back to Travnik.

  He looked in on the monk Pakhomi at his house and found him lying in bed like a hermit, in a chilly room bare of furniture, wearing all his clothes, green in the face. Instead of questioning him as he had intended, he offered him his services as a doctor, but the monk declined all medicines and claimed that he was well and lacked nothing.

  Next day, both Daville and von Paulich paid an official visit to the Deputy Vizier and offered their congratulations on the victory, but they timed their calls so as not to meet either at the Residency or on their way in and out.

  When the first heavy snow fell, Ali Pasha returned to Travnik. He entered the town to a roaring gun salute and a blare of trumpets, while children scampered alongside. The Travnik begs suddenly found their tongues. Most of them praised the victory and the victor with moderate and dignified phrases, but took care to do so aloud and in public.

  On the very first day Daville sent D’Avenat to the Residency to convey his felicitations and deliver a present to the victorious Vizier.

  Some ten years before, when Daville was Chargé d’Affaires in a mission to the Knights of Malta at Naples, he had bought a heavy, beautifully wrought gold ring that had no stone but an exquisite carved laurel wreath in the place where the stone would normally have been. Daville had bought it from the estate of an heirless and indebted Knight of Malta. According to the family tradition the ring had once been used as a victor’s trophy in the tournaments of the Knights of the Maltese Order.

  Lately, as things had taken an irrevocable turn toward defeat and he had lost his own sense of direction and suffered agonies of uncertainty about his homeland, his future, and that of his family, Daville gave things away more often and more easily, and found a strange new satisfaction in presenting other people with the objects he had loved and jealously guarded till now. In giving away these dear and precious things, which so far he had looked upon as part and parcel of his personal life, he felt as though he were bribing Fate, who now seemed to have forsaken him and his family. At the same time the act filled him with a deep and genuine joy, quite like the joy he had once felt when he was buying these things for himself.

  D’Avenat was not allowed to see the Vizier, but delivered the present to the Secretary, with the explanation that for hundreds of years this treasure had been awarded to the man who won in combat and that the Consul was now sending it to a happy victor with his compliments and good wishes.

  Ali Pasha’s Secretary was one Assim Effendi, called “the Stammerer.” He was pale and haggard, a shadow of a man, with an impediment in his speech and a pair of squinting eyes of dissimilar color. He had a look of being perpetually frightened to death
and so infected every visitor in advance with a terror of the Vizier.

  Two days later the consuls had their audiences, first the Austrian and then the Frenchman. The days of the French preeminence were over.

  Ali Pasha was worn out but content. In the reflected glare of the snowy winter day, Daville noticed for the first time that the Vizier’s pupils flickered every now and then restlessly; the moment his eyes steadied and his gaze became even, the strange flickering would begin. The Vizier was apparently conscious of it and felt awkward about it, for he kept turning his eyes and shifting his glance, which once again gave an unpleasant and wary expression to his whole face.

  Ali Pasha, who for this occasion had placed the ring on the middle finger of his right hand, thanked Daville for his gift and good wishes. He hardly mentioned the Serbian campaign and his successes; the little he said about them had the ring of false modesty typical of vain and touchy people, who prefer to keep silent because they consider all words inadequate and insufficient, and because their silence cows the man in front of them and takes their success out of the realm of description and so places it beyond the reach of average people. By this stratagem, successful people of this type manage to shut up anyone who talks to them about their victory, even years after the event.

  The conversation began to drag and sound insincere. Silences kept occurring in which Daville searched for fresh and stronger words of praise for the Vizier’s triumph; and the Vizier let him search, while his own eyes cruised around the room and his face bore an air of restive boredom, as though he were privately convinced that the right and proper words could never be found.

  And as usually happens in such cases, in his eagerness to show as much sympathy and sincere joy as possible, Daville unwittingly hurt the feelings of the Vizier.

  “Does anyone know the whereabouts of the rebel leader Karageorge?” asked Daville, perhaps because he had heard that Karageorge had fled to Austria.

  “Who knows or cares where he is,” the Vizier said contemptuously.

  “But isn’t there a risk that some country might give him asylum and help, and that he might afterwards return to Serbia?”

  The corners of the Vizier’s mouth twitched in anger, then curled in a smile. “He will never come back. Besides, there’s nothing for him to get back to. Serbia is so thoroughly ravaged that it’ll be many years before he or anyone else can think of another uprising.”

  Daville had even less luck in steering the conversation to France and the war plans of the Allies, who at this time were preparing to cross the Rhine.

  On his way back to Travnik the Vizier had been met at Busovacha by a special courier sent by von Paulich, who had handed him, together with von Paulich’s congratulations, a comprehensive written report on the state of the European battlefront. Von Paulich had written the Vizier that “God had finally struck down the unbearable pride of France and the united efforts of the European nations had borne fruit.” He had described in detail the Battle of Leipzig, Napoleon’s defeat and withdrawal behind the Rhine, the relentless advance of the Allies, and the preparations for the crossing of the Rhine and final victory. He gave exact figures for the French losses in killed, wounded, and equipment, as well as the armed strength of the subject states which had broken away from Napoleon. And on his arrival in Travnik, Ali Pasha had found other reports that fully confirmed what von Paulich had written.

  That was why he now adopted this tone with Daville, and was careful not to mention either his ruler or his country by a single word, as if he were talking to the representative of a nameless and obscure never-never land which had no concrete shape and no fixed position in space; or, as if he were superstitious and reluctant to rub elbows, even mentally, with those whom Kismet had snubbed and who had long passed to the side of the vanquished.

  Daville glanced once more at his ring on the Vizier’s finger, then took his leave in a studiedly cheerful manner, which seemed to come more easily the more difficult and equivocal his position grew.

  When they left the Residency, the covered courtyard was already in darkness, but as they rode out through the gates Daville was dazzled by the whiteness of the soft wet snow that lay heaped in the streets and thick on the house roofs. It was around four o’clock in the afternoon. Blue shadows stretched over the snow. As always on those very short days, dusk came early and sadly in this mountain valley, and beneath the heavy snow the purl of water could still be heard. Everything exuded dampness. The wooden bridge echoed with a hollow sound under the horses’ hoofs.

  As always when he left the Residency, Daville felt a momentary relief. For a while he forgot who was the victor and who the vanquished, and thought only of how to ride, this one more time, quietly and with dignity through the town. A shudder ran through him, partly from excitement, partly from the overheated air at the Residency and the damp air of the evening. He tried not to shiver. It reminded him of that February day when he had ridden for the first time through this same bazaar, to the abuse, the spitting, or the contemptuous silence of these fanatical people, as he was on his way to his first audience with Husref Mehmed Pasha. And all of a sudden he had the feeling that all his life, since he had reached the age of sensibility, he had done nothing else but ride along this same road, with the same escort, deep in the same thoughts.

  Slowly and through necessity, he had inured himself in these seven years to a great many distasteful and painful things, but he still went to the Residency with the same feeling of unpleasant apprehension. Even in the happiest of times and in the most favorable circumstances, he had always, as far as he could, avoided going to the Residency and tried to accomplish his errands through D’Avenat. And when an item of business seemed to require a visit to the Vizier and could really not be settled without it, he girded himself for it as though it were a major expedition, and slept badly and ate little for days ahead. He rehearsed what he would say and how he would say it, he tried to anticipate their answers and wiles and so wore himself out in advance. And to give himself at least some rest, peace, and comfort, he would tell himself in bed at night: “Ah, tomorrow at this time, I shall be lying here again, and those two bitter hours of torture will be far behind me.”

  The enervating game would start right in the morning. Grooms would scamper and horses would clatter in the courtyard and in front of the Consulate. Then, in due course, D’Avenat would appear with his dark suffused face which would have taken the heart out of a heavenly angel let alone an ordinary worried mortal. This was the sign for the agony to begin.

  From the gathering children and loafers the town usually knew that one of the consuls was due to pass through to the Residency. Then, from the bend at the top of the main market street, Daville’s procession would appear, always the same. In the van, the Vizier’s mounted guard, whose job it was to escort the Consul both ways. Behind him, the Consul on his black horse, dignified and expressionless; two paces farther back, D’Avenat on his frisky bay mare, which the Travnik Turks hated almost as much as D’Avenat himself. Bringing up the rear were two consular kavasses on good Bosnian horses, armed with pistols and daggers.

  That was how they expected him to ride through every time, mounted straight as a ramrod, looking neither to the left nor to the right, neither too high nor between the horse’s ears, neither tense nor woolgathering, neither smiling nor glum, but calm, grave, and yet alert, with something of that improbable air of generals in their portraits as they look out over the battle into the distance, at a point somewhere between the road and the line of horizon, where, at a decisive moment, certain well-deployed reinforcements are supposed to appear.

  He himself hardly knew how many hundreds of times, over the years, he had passed like this over the same road, but he knew that, always and under all viziers, it had been an experience very akin to inquisition. He used even to dream about the road and suffer all kinds of agonies in his dream, riding with a ghostly escort between a double row of menace and ambush, on his way to a Residency that was utterly beyond his reach
.

  And now, as he was remembering all this, he was riding once more, in exactly the same fashion, through the twilit bazaar, full of snow.

  Most of the shops were already closed and shuttered. Passers-by were few and they walked slowly, bent forward as if dragging chains behind them, through the deep and lumpy snow, with their hands stuck in their waistbands and their ears muffled in handkerchiefs.

  When they got to the Consulate, D’Avenat asked Daville to see him for a few minutes, so that he could tell him what he had heard from the Vizier’s retinue.

  A traveler from Istanbul had brought word of Ibrahim Halimi Pasha. After a two-month stay at Gallipoli, the former Vizier had been banished to a small town in Asia Minor, after all his estates in Istanbul and on the Bosporus had been confiscated. His entourage had gradually dispersed, every man looking to his own bread and interests. Left almost alone, Ibrahim Pasha had set out for his exile; and as he journeyed to the distant little Anatolian hamlet, where the land was barren, craggy, and scorched, a stony desert without grass or a drop of running water, he passed the days rehashing his old daydream—the dream of how, cut off from the world and dressed in the simple clothes of a gardener, he would till his parcel of soil in silence and solitude.

  A few days before his departure into exile, his former Secretary, Tahir Beg, had suddenly died—of heart failure, it was said. His death had been a heavy blow to Ibrahim Pasha, who had only one remedy against it, an old man’s failing memory, as he spent his last days in the rocky and waterless region.