Bosnian Chronicle Page 53

When he lifted his head and opened his eyes, he saw the smiling, reproachful face of his wife. She scolded him for overtiring himself, and told him to undress, lie down, and rest. But now that he was already wide awake, even the thought of lying alone in bed with his ghosts appalled him. He began to make order among the papers on the table, while talking to her. Up until now he had been reluctant to tell his wife, clearly and in so many words, just what had happened in the world and in France and what it all meant for them. Now, all of a sudden, the act came easily, it was simplicity itself.

  On being told so clearly and unequivocally that the entire scheme of things had radically changed, and their own situation right with it, and that their stay in Travnik had indeed come to an end, Mme Daville was at first shattered and thrown off balance. But only for a moment—until her mind cleared and she could see what this meant for her family and what practical problems it entailed for her personally. As soon as she understood that, she calmed down. And, forthwith, they began to discuss the journey, the moving of household things and their future arrangements in France.

  28

  Madame Daville set to work. Just as once she had furnished and made this same house livable for them, she now made everything ready for the move—quietly, with concentration, energetically, without complaining or seeking anyone’s advice. The household, which she had put together in these seven years, was dismantled slowly and methodically. Everything was marked, well wrapped, and got ready for the trip. The part of it that most distressed Mme Daville was the flower terrace and the big garden with its vegetable beds.

  The white hyacinths, which Frau von Mitterer had once christened “Wedding Joy,” or “Imperial Bridegroom,” were as sturdy and full-flowered as ever, but the center of the terrace was now given over to Dutch tulips which Mme Daville had managed to obtain in recent years in great quantity and a variety of colors. The previous season they had been spotty and uneven, but this year they had done well and had just come into bloom, in a uniform, showy display that was like rows of schoolchildren in procession.

  In the garden, the German sweet peas were already out. She had got the seed from von Paulich the year before, a few weeks before the war was declared. Now the deaf-mute Mundjar was hoeing them.

  Mundjar was still at work, as he had been every spring. He knew nothing about the events in the world or the change in these people’s fortunes. To him this year was like any other. Forever bent double, he crumbled the soil with his hands, clod by clod, he spread manure, watered, transplanted, smiled at Jean-Paul, or at little Eugénie when the nanny brought her out on the terrace. With a quick and expressive flip of his soiled fingers, grimacing and making the emphatic, worldless sounds of a mute, he tried to tell Mme Daville that in von Paulich’s garden this same sweet pea was pushing up higher and flowering much better, though in itself that meant nothing, as it was no yardstick of the final results. These they would be able to judge when the pods came out.

  Madame Daville looked at him. She let him know by signs that she had understood him, then went back into the house to resume her packing. Only there did she remember that in a few days she would have to abandon everything, the garden as well as the house, and that neither she nor any of her family would see the ripe pods of that pea. And at that tears came to her eyes.

  And so at the French Consulate they quietly made preparations to leave. There was, however, one thing that worried Daville—the question of money. Some time before, he had sent to France all the savings they had. For months now he had received no pay. The Sarajevo Jews who had worked with Freycinet and often loaned money to the Consulate were now distrustful. D’Avenat had some savings, but he was staying on at Travnik in an ill-defined capacity and in a state of complete uncertainty, and it would not be fair to deprive him of what he had and ask him to lend money to the state, and without security at that.

  Both the interpreters, D’Avenat and Rafo Atias, were well aware of Daville’s predicament. And while he was fretting and wondering which way to turn, old Solomon Atias, Rafo’s uncle, came in one day, unannounced. He was the most respected of the Atias brothers and the head of the whole numerous clan of Travnik Atiases.

  Short, running to fat, and bowlegged, in a greasy kaftan, with a short-necked head that sat almost flat on his narrow shoulders, he had the large bulbous eyes of those who suffer from a heart defect. He was out of breath and sweating profusely from the heat of the May day and the unaccustomed walk up the steep hill. Timidly he shut the door behind him and slumped panting into a chair. A scent of garlic and uncured hides enveloped him like a cloud. His hairy, dark-skinned fists lay clenched on his knees and a tiny bead of sweat glistened on every hair.

  They exchanged greetings several times and floundered for a while in meaningless civilities. Daville would not come out and admit that he and his family were leaving Travnik, and the fat, panting Solomon was quite unable to say why he had come. At length, however, in that hoarse, throaty voice which always reminded Daville of Spain, Solomon began to discourse about unexpected changes and the great needs of states and state officials, which to him were perfectly understandable, and how times were hard for everyone, even an ordinary merchant who was only concerned with his own little bailiwick, and finally—well, finally—if Monsieur le Consul did not receive official funds in time, and, after all, a trip was a trip and one couldn’t very well put off an official schedule, he, Solomon Atias, was here, always at the service of the French Imperial—or rather, French Royal—Consulate, and what little he possessed or was able to do was entirely at the disposal of Monsieur le Consul.

  Daville, whose first thought had been that Atias had come to request or demand something of him, was surprised and touched. His voice shook with emotion: the muscles of his face, between the mouth and the chin, where his ruddy skin was beginning to wither and wrinkle and sag, twitched visibly.

  Daville thanked him and, in the embarrassed pause that followed, pressed some refreshments on him. At length they agreed that Atias would lend the Consulate twenty-five imperial ducats on a bill of exchange.

  Solomon’s large bulging eyes grew moist, which made them glitter more than usual, so that their yellowish, blood-veined whites became less conspicuous. Daville’s eyes, too, filled with tears of emotion—indeed, emotion seemed to be a permanent state with him these days. But now they could talk more easily and freely.

  Daville sought to give his gratitude a wider, more encompassing expression. He spoke of his sympathy and understanding toward the Jews, of compassion and the need for people to know and help each other, without distinction. He confined himself to vague and general sentiments, for he could no longer speak of Napoleon, whose name had a special meaning for the Jews and still exerted a powerful attraction; nor could he speak openly and definitely about his new government or mention his new sovereign by name. Solomon perspired and breathed heavily, his big eyes resting on Daville, as if all that were clear to him and pained him also, as much as it pained Daville, if not more, as if he knew and thoroughly appreciated what trouble and what danger all those emperors, kings, viziers, and ministers really were, whose coming and going was not of our making, yet had the power of lifting us up and grinding us into dust, us and our families and all that we represented or possessed; as if, in fact, he were distressed at having had to leave his dark warehouse with its stacks of hides and climb up to this high and sunny place, to sit with gentry on unaccustomed fauteuils in luxurious rooms.

  Relieved that the problem of traveling money had been solved in this unexpectedly simple fashion, and wishing to give the conversation a more cheerful tone, Daville said half-jokingly: “I am really most grateful and shall always remember that with all your worries you found time to think about my predicament. And to tell you honestly, I am astonished to see that, after all that’s happened here, after all those fines you’ve had to pay, you are still in a position to lend anybody anything. The Vizier was boasting that he’d emptied your cashboxes to the last thaler.”

  At the menti
on of the persecution and ransom which the Jews had suffered at the hands of Ali Pasha, Solomon’s eyes took on a fixed, woebegone look of inexpressible sadness. “It has cost us a great deal and deprived us of very much. Truly our cashboxes are empty to this day. But I can tell you . . . you ought to know . . .”

  Here Solomon looked down in confusion at the sweating hands in his lap and, after a short silence, went on in a different, subdued voice, quite changed, as though he had suddenly decided to approach it from another viewpoint: “Yes, it scared us and cost us quite a bit. Yes indeed. The Vizier is a hard man, truly hard and difficult. But he has had to do with us once, whereas we’ve had to do with dozens of them. Viziers come and go . . . and each of them takes something with him, that’s true. They go away and forget what they have done and how they have treated us; and then a new one arrives and it’s the same thing all over again. But we remain, we remember, we keep a tally of all we’ve been through, of how we have defended and preserved ourselves, and we pass on these dearly bought experiences from father to son. And so our cashboxes have two bottoms. One is just deep enough for the Vizier to reach down and scoop clean, but underneath a little something always remains for us and our children, for the salvation of our soul, for helping ourselves and our friends when they’re in need.”

  Now Solomon looked straight across at Daville, no longer with those comically baleful and frightened eyes, but with a new expression that was direct and bold.

  Daville laughed heartily. “Ah, that’s good. I like that. And the Vizier thought he was so clever.”

  Solomon interrupted him at once in a lowered voice, as if to let him know that he too should speak lower. “No, I am not saying that he is not. They are wise and shrewd people, that they are. But you know how it is, our masters are fine and mighty gentlemen, they’re like dragons, our masters are, but they have to have their wars and fights and expenses. You know, we have a saying: big lords are like a big wind; they blow, they break things, they blow themselves out. And we lie low and keep on working and put something away for a rainy day. That’s why we last longer and always have something.”

  “Ah, that’s good. Very good,” Daville said with a nod, smiling as before and encouraging Solomon to continue.

  But now the smile caused Solomon to falter suddenly; he searched the Consul’s face more closely, again with that earlier woebegone and timid look, as if afraid that he had gone too far or said something he should not have; as though he realized that what he had said was not what he had wanted to say, although what that should have been he hadn’t the least idea. But still, something drove him to speak out, to complain, to praise and explain himself, like a man who, for a few precious minutes, had been given a unique opportunity to pass on an urgent and important message. From the moment he had left his warehouse and climbed up the steep hill where ordinarily he never went, and had sat down in this sun-filled room, surrounded by a beauty and cleanliness he was not accustomed to, it had seemed to him a rare and important thing to be able to talk to this foreigner who planned to leave town in a few days, to discuss things which, perhaps, he would never again dare or be able to discuss with anybody.

  As his sense of wonder and acute discomfort began to wear off, he felt more and more impelled to tell this stranger a few other things, about himself and his family, and other secret and pressing things, from this weasel hole that was Travnik, from the musty warehouse where life was hard and devoid of justice and honor, without beauty and order, without judge or witnesses; and he felt it ought to be some kind of message addressed to some vague but telling entity, perhaps to that better, more orderly, more enlightened world to which the Consul would presently return. Just once, he felt, he ought to say something that was not shrewd or cautious, not connected with gain or money, with haggling and workaday accounts, but rather with giving and spending freely, with the pride of generosity, with sincerity and secret pain.

  But the very desire that filled him so intensely all of a sudden, to convey and impart something more, some important and sweeping truth about his own life and situation and the indignities which the Travnik Atiases had had to endure all these years, prevented him from finding the right manner and the words needed to express, briefly and adequately, what now choked him and started the blood pounding in his ears. And so he began to stammer out, not the things he was so full of and which he longed to express—how they struggled and managed to preserve an invisible strength and dignity—but only the disjointed phrases that came to his tongue. “So you see . . . that’s how we keep going and how things are, and we don’t regret . . . for our friends, for the justice and good will shown to us . . . because we . . . we too . . .”

  Now abruptly his voice broke off and his eyes began to swim. He got up in confusion. Daville rose too, moved by an inexplicable feeling of warmth and friendship, and gave him his hand. Solomon grasped the hand quickly with a jerky and unaccustomed movement, and stammered another few sentences, begging the Consul not to forget them and to put in a good word for them wherever and whenever he could over there, about their life here and how they paid for it with trouble and suffering. But the words were disconnected and unintelligible, and they mingled with Daville’s expressions of gratitude.

  No one would ever know what it was that was choking Solomon Atias at that moment, that brought tears to his eyes and sent a shiver down through his whole body. Had he known how, had he been a man used to speaking his thoughts, he might have said something like this: “Monsieur, you have lived here among us for seven long years and have shown us Jews the kind of consideration we have never received either from the Turks or from foreigners. You have treated us like human beings, without discrimination. You may not even be aware how much decency this has brought into our lives. And now you are leaving. Your Emperor has had to fall back before overwhelming enemies. Your homeland is now the scene of wrenching upheavals and great change. But yours is also a noble and powerful country which in the end will turn everything to good account. And you shall certainly find your way there. The ones who are to be pitied are we who remain here, we the handful of Sephardic Jews here in Travnik, of whom two thirds are Atiases, since to us you have been a small and hopeful ray of light. You have seen the life we lead and have been as good to us as it is possible for a man to be. And when a man does good, everyone expects him to go on doing it. And that is why we take the liberty of asking one more thing of you: that you be our witness in the West, which once was our cradle too, and which ought to be told what has become of us. For it seems to me, if we could but know that there are some who realize and acknowledge that we are not what we appear to be, not the kind of people our lives suggest, everything we have to bear would be more tolerable.

  “More than three hundred years ago we were torn from our homeland, the unforgettable Andalusia, by a dreadful, insane, fratricidal storm which even today we cannot understand and which to this day has not understood itself. It has scattered us around the world and reduced us to a beggary that even gold cannot help. A few of us here were swept eastward, and life in the East is neither easy nor blessed for us; the farther a man travels and the nearer he gets to the Rising Sun, the worse it gets, for the land grows coarser and more barren, and men are creatures of the soil. It is our misfortune that we have not been able to give our whole heart to this land to which we are indebted for having welcomed us and given us haven, and have been incapable of hating the land which has unjustly driven us out and banished us like some unworthy progeny. We don’t know which is the greater grief to us: being here or not being there. No matter what part of this earth beyond Spain we might be in, we would always suffer, for we would always have two homelands. This much I know. But here in this place, life has been particularly harsh and degrading for us. I know that for a long time now we have not been the same, yet we no longer remember what kind of people we once were, we only know that we were different. Ages have passed since we first set out on our journey, and the journey itself lasted an age, and we strayed to this ill
-starred place and settled, and that is why we’re no longer even a shadow of what we once were. Like the blushing fuzz on a fruit that is passed from hand to hand, a man too first sheds what is finest in him. That’s why we are the way you see us now. But you know us better than that—us and the kind of life we lead, if it can be called a life.

  “We are wedged between the Turks and the Christian peasants, the poor downtrodden peasants and the terrible Turks. Utterly cut off from our own kind, we try to preserve everything that reminds us of Spain, the songs and the food and the customs, but the change within us goes on relentlessly, we can feel the erosion, the fading of memory. We still remember the tongue of our country, the very same one we took with us more than three centuries ago, which is no longer spoken even there, and we mangle the language of these poor peasants who are victimized as we are, and of the Turks who lord it over us. And the day is perhaps not far off when the only pure and decent speech left to us will be the language of prayer, which needs no words anyway. Isolated and few that we are, we marry among ourselves and watch our blood grow thinner and paler. We bow and scrape to everyone, we writhe this way and that only to survive—as they say, we make fire on ice. We toil, make a living, and save, and not only for ourselves and our children but, alas, for those too who are stronger and more arrogant than we, who threaten our lives, our self-respect, and our material security. That is how we have managed to keep our religion, the same one for which we had to abandon our lovely homeland, though we lost almost everything else in the process.

  “Fortunately, and to our sorrow too, we have never lost from memory the vision of this dear homeland of ours as it once was before, like a stepmother, it cast us out; and by the same token, we shall never stop longing for a better world, a humane and well-ordered world in which a man can walk upright and speak openly, without a shadow of fear in his eyes. This longing we shall never be able to suppress, nor the feeling that, in spite of everything, we belong to such a world, even though, banished and unhappy, we now live in another.