Bosnian Chronicle

  The wind, soughing along the narrow valley twice a day, merely shifted the damp around and, by wafting sleet and a smell of wet woods as it went, brought in new waves of humidity; so the pools of dampness only nudged and overlapped one another and the raw, bone-chilling mountain mist merely replaced the stale, moldering kind in the town. The sod on both sides of the valley turned to bog, water welled out of the turf, rivulets gurgled downhill. Thin little streams, which till now had been invisible, swelled into torrents and roared tumbling down the slopes until, like a peasant crazed with drink, they bounded into the bazaar. And through the middle of the town the Lashva foamed and sang, high, silted, not to be recognized. There was no place one could hide from the din and clamor of all that water, or protect oneself from its cold sodden breath, for it reached into the inmost room and into every last bed; a living body could stave it off only with its own warmth. Even stone walls broke out in a cold sweat, wood became dank and slivery. Before this deadly, fetid onslaught everything shrank back into itself and tried to resist it as best it could; animal huddled to animal, seed lay quietly in the earth, trees dripped and grew numb with cold, bating their breath in the pith and down among the warm roots.

  The local people, hardened and accustomed to it, bore it all quietly. They fed and kept themselves warm, each according to his ability, habits, and experience, the resources of his position and status in the community. The well-to-do did not leave their houses unless it was absolutely necessary, but slept and spent their days in heated rooms, warming their hands on the green tiles of earthenware ovens and waiting—waiting with a patience that comfortably outlasted even the longest winter and the foulest weather by at least one day. Not one of them feared that he would miss something or that someone else might take advantage of him or steal a march on him, since all of them vegetated alike, at the same pace and in the same conditions. Everything they needed was close at hand, under lock and key, in the cellar, in the attic, in the grain room, or in the larder, for they knew their winter and had not been caught unprepared.

  With the poor it was the other way around. Days of this kind drove them out of the house, for they had not put in any winter stores. Even the man who in the summer was haughtily self-sufficient now had to go out and earn, borrow, or beg, to scrape something together and take it home. With their heads bowed, their muscles cramped, and their skin goosefleshy from cold, the poor wandered the streets for food and fuel; they covered their heads and backs with old burlap, folded at the top to make a cowl, and they wrapped, swaddled, and muffled themselves in odd rags, bundling their feet in leather, tatters, and even wood bark; they slunk under the house eaves and jutting balconies, walked gingerly around water puddles, jumped from stone to stone over the little runnels and shook the water off their feet like cats; they breathed into their chilblained hands or tried to warm them in their own crotch, chattering and moaning from cold. They worked, did errands, or begged, and the thought of food and fuel that these jobs might provide gave them the strength to endure every hazard.

  In this way the people of Travnik got through the grim winters, which had been part of their life from birth.

  But it was another thing for the foreigners whom chance had stranded in this narrow valley, which at this time of year was gloomy and full of damp and drafts, like a passage in a dungeon.

  At the Residency, which was normally as carefree and bustling as a cavalry barracks, the damp brought in a sense of marooned isolation, like a disease. The Vizier’s Mamelukes, for whom this was the first cold winter in their lives, shivered, grew sallow and listless, looking about them with the rueful and sickly eyes of tropical animals transported to a northern country. Many of them lay on their cots all day long, their heads wrapped in a coarse blanket, coughing and ill with longing for their distant and warm native land.

  And even the animals which the Vizier had brought with him to Travnik, the Angora cats, the macaws, and the monkeys, stopped moving and screeching and amusing their master; they moped around and sat silent and waited huddling in a corner, for the sun to warm and cheer them.

  The Secretary and the other worthies kept to their quarters, as if there were a flood outside. Their rooms had large earthenware ovens which were stoked from the corridor, and the servants now crammed them high with big logs of elmwood, which developed great heat and kept sizzling all through the night, so that in the morning fresh fires were built on the still glowing cinders of the night before. In these apartments, which were not allowed to cool off, it was pleasant, at daybreak, to hear the servants open the stove outside, rake out the ashes and pile in fresh wood, log after log. But even here, by the time the early dusk fell, a mood of pining spread and took hold. Men sought to throw it off by inventing games and diversions, by visiting one another, by conversation.

  The Vizier himself began to lose his natural good humor and initiative. Several times a day he would come down to the twilit divan on the ground floor, where the walls were thick and the windows few and small, as the airier and brighter upper divan had to be abandoned in the battle against cold and was neither heated nor opened during the winter. Here he would call in a few senior intimates and try to kill time in conversation. He talked at great length about unimportant things in order to stifle his memories of Egypt, his thoughts of the future, and his yearning for the sea which troubled him even in his sleep. A dozen times a day he would remark scornfully to one or another of his people: “It’s a fine country, my friend. A noble country! What sin have you and I committed to deserve it!”

  And they would echo him with some coarse and unkind comment on the land and the climate. “Dog’s own country!” the Secretary might say. “Enough to make the bears weep,” would be the plaint of Yunuz Beg, the keeper of the arsenal and a countryman of the Vizier’s. “I can see now they’ve sent us here to die,”—this from Ibrahim Hodja, a personal friend of the Vizier’s who would lace his face in wrinkles as if he were really about to give up his ghost.

  Vying with each other in their grousing, they managed to relieve at least some of their common tedium. And through all these conversations one could hear the babble of water and the hissing of rain, borne on a sea of damp that had been lapping at the Residency for days, seeping through every chink and crack.

  When they were joined by Suleiman Pasha Skoplyak, the Vizier’s Deputy, who made it a point to ride through the town several times a day, come rain or snow, they broke off their conversation and stared at him as if he were a freak.

  In talking to his Deputy, a tough, unprepossessing Bosnian, the Vizier assumed an even and circumspect tone, but in the end couldn’t help asking him in a half-joking manner: “In God’s name, man, does this town often go through this kind of calamity?”

  Suleiman Pasha answered gravely, in his accented Turkish: “It is not a calamity, Pasha, praise be to Allah. Winter has come as it should. When it is wet at the beginning and dry toward the end, we can count on having a good year ahead of us. Wait till the snow falls and the great frost takes over and the sun comes out. Then it’ll be hard and crunchy underfoot, your eyes will be dazzled by the shimmer. It’s a sweet and beautiful thing, as God made it and as it ought to be.”

  But the Vizier only shuddered at these new marvels, which his Deputy promised with so much enthusiasm as he rubbed his cracked, chilblained hands and dried his wet gaiters on the oven.

  “Ugh, don’t say that, my friend. Spare us a little if you can,” the Vizier said in mock horror.

  “But it’s not like that at all. It’s God’s gift, truly it is. What use is a winter that’s no winter?” The Deputy gravely stuck to his guns, impervious to the sly humor of these Osmanlis and quite unaware of their susceptibility to cold. He sat upright, cold and hard, among these shivering and chafing foreigners, who watched him with uncomfortable curiosity, almost as if he were responsible for the grim schedule of weather and yearly seasons.

  And when the Deputy got up, wrapped in his ample red cloak, and left them to go riding through the icy rain alon
g the soaking roads to his own quarters, they exchanged despairing and horrified looks; and as soon as the door closed behind him, they resumed their wisecracks and profanities about the Bosnians and Bosnia and the skies above it, until their abuse and cruel sarcasm brought some kind of comfort.

  In the French Consulate too, life grew quieter and more secluded. Experiencing her first Travnik winter, Mme Daville tried to turn everything to good advantage; she made mental notes for the future and found a remedy and help for every problem. Wrapped in a gray cashmere shawl, brisk and active, she went around the huge Turkish house all day long, ordering and supervising work, finding it hard to communicate with the servants on account of the language and the lack of skill among the local domestic help, yet always managing to impose her will in the end and achieving more or less what she wanted. It was in this kind of weather that the defects and shortcomings of the house really came to light. The roof began to leak, the floorboards gave, the windows would not shut properly, the plaster crumbled, the stoves smoked. However, Mme Daville succeeded eventually in having it all repaired, patched, and put in order. Her chapped, perpetually red hands were now blue from cold but didn’t pause a moment in their battle with waste, damage, and disorder.

  On the ground floor, which was light and warm even if a little damp, Daville and his young Chancellor sat in the office. They talked about the war in Spain and the French authorities in Dalmatia, about the couriers who either failed to show up or came at the wrong time, about the Ministry which ignored their requests and petitions; but, most frequently of all, they talked about the despicable weather and about Bosnia and the Bosnians. They talked in low voices, reflectively, as people do when they are waiting for the servants to bring in the candles or call them to dinner, until, imperceptibly, the talk veered to general questions and took on an edge of dispute and disagreement.

  It was the hour of the evening when the candles are not yet lighted and it is already too dark to read. Desfosses had just come back from a ride; for even in weather like this he seldom missed an opportunity to gad about the countryside at least once a day. His face was still flushed from the wind and rain, his short hair tousled and matted. Daville could barely conceal his displeasure with these outings which he regarded as dangerous to health and prejudicial to the dignity of the Consulate. Altogether he was irritated by this ambulatory and enterprising young man, by his lively curiosity and keen mind; while Desfosses, impervious to the harping undertone in the older man’s voice and his kind of sensibility, kept on talking warmly about his discoveries and experiences during his rides through Travnik and its environs.

  “Ah,” Daville said with an impatient flip of his hand, “this Travnik and everything for a hundred miles around is nothing but a desert of mud populated by two kinds of poor devils, torturers and tortured, and it is our bad luck to have to live among them.”

  Staunchly Desfosses tried to prove to him that although the country was shut off from the world and seemed numb on the surface, it was far from being an out and out wilderness—it was, on the contrary, a place of variety, eloquent in its own way, and interesting in every respect. The people, it was true, were divided by their faiths, superstition-ridden, groaning under just about the worst government in the world, and for that reason unhappy and backward in many ways; but at the same time their native intelligence was remarkable, they had interesting qualities of character and some fascinating customs; at all events, a closer look at the causes of their backwardness and misery was eminently worthwhile. The fact that Messrs. Daville, von Mitterer, and Desfosses, being foreigners, found life in Bosnia irksome and unpleasant, was neither here nor there. The worth and importance of a country were not to be measured by how the consul of a foreign state happened to feel in it.

  “Quite the contrary,” said the young man. “I think there are few parts of the world less desolate and uninteresting. You only have to dig down one foot into the ground to find the tombs and relics of bygone ages. Every meadow here is a cemetery, and many times over at that. It’s just one necropolis on top of another, an exact record of the birth and death of successive generations of various native races down the centuries, epoch after epoch, wave after wave. And burial mounds are proof of life, not wilderness. . . .”

  “Oh well,” shrugged the Consul, as if warding off a buzzing fly. The young man’s predilection for dramatic phrases was something he could not get used to.

  “And not only tombs, not only tombs! This afternoon, as I was riding out to Kalibunar, I came to a place where the rain had washed away a piece of the road. Down to a depth of about eight feet you could see as in a geological cross-section, layer upon layer of the earlier roads that used to traverse this very same valley. At the bottom there were heavy flagstones, remains of the old Roman road. Three feet above it was the cobbled crust of the medieval highway, and on top of that the gravel embankment of the present Turkish roadway, the one we use nowadays. So in this accidental profile I could read two thousand years of human history and three separate epochs that had buried each other. There you are!”

  “Yes, yes, if you choose to look at things from that point of view,” said Daville, merely in order to say something, for he was less interested in the words of the young man than in his cold, glittery brown eyes; as if he wanted to determine the secret of those eyes, the reason they looked at the world around them in that particular way.

  Desfosses then told him about the remnant of neolithic settlements on the road to the village of Zabilye, where, before the rains set in, he had picked up some flint axe-heads and crude saws which might well have lain in the clay for tens of thousands of years. He had come across them in the field of a certain Karahodjich, a sullen and pigheaded old man, who wouldn’t hear a word of anyone’s digging or exploring anything on his land but waited angrily until the foreigner and his groom got out of his field and rode off in the direction of Travnik.

  And on the way back to town, the groom had told Desfosses the story of the Karahodjich clan.

  Some two centuries or more before, during a period of incessant wars, they had emigrated from these parts and settled down in Slavonia, in the vicinity of Pozhega, where they had acquired large tracts of land. A hundred and twenty years later, when the Turks were forced to abandon Slavonia, they too had to leave their rich estate near Pozhega and fall back on their smaller and poorer lands at Zabilye. Their family still kept a cauldron, or copper kettle, which they had taken with them as a reminder of the lost estate and lost lordship when, bitter and humiliated, and led by their ancestor Karahodja, they came back to Bosnia. On this cauldron, Karahodja had sworn them to a pledge: that they would never fail to answer a single war call against the Austrians and that each of them would do everything in his power to get back the lordship they had lost in Slavonia. And if, by some misfortune or God’s design, the “Schwabes” dared to cross the river Sava, he swore them on oath to defend those fallow fields at Zabilye as long as they could, and, when they couldn’t any more, to withdraw step by step, even if it meant falling back through the entire length of the Turkish realm, to the outermost frontiers of the Empire, the uncharted regions of China and Cathay.

  As he was telling this to the young man, the groom showed him, in a plum orchard above the road, a small Turkish cemetery in which two slabs of white stone stood out. Those were the graves of the old Karahodja and his son, the grandfather and father of the old man who was still there by the picket fence, bristling angrily, sputtering something through his bared teeth, his eyes still flashing.

  “So you see,” Desfosses said, gazing at the dusk beyond the misted window, “I don’t know which was more fascinating to me, those Stone Age relics dating back to Lord knows how many thousands of years before Christ, or that old man standing guard over the legacy of his ancestors, not allowing anyone to lay a finger on his field.”

  “Yes, I see, I see,” Daville said absently and mechanically, amazed only at the scope of the young man’s imagination.

  Talking and pacing l
ike this about the room, the two men stopped by the window.

  Outside, the gelid twilight was closing in, but as yet no lights were burning anywhere. Only down at the bottom of the valley, beside the river itself, the glow from Abdullah Pasha’s tomb trembled faintly. It was the taper that burned day and night above the Pasha’s tomb; its weak flame could always be seen from the Consulate’s windows, even before the other town lights were put on, or after they had been put out.

  Standing here by the window, waiting for the darkness to grow deep and complete, the Consul and the young man had often talked about this “eternal light” and the Pasha whose taper they had come to accept as something familiar and permanent.

  Desfosses knew its history as well.

  This Abdullah Pasha had been a native of this country. He became rich and famous while still a young man. As soldier and governor, he saw a good deal of the world, but when they made him Vizier in Travnik, he died unexpectedly, still in his prime, and they buried him there. (He died, it was said, of poison.) Among the people, he left a memory of a mild and just rule. As one of the Travnik chroniclers described it, “During Abdullah Pasha’s reign the poor knew no evil.” Shortly before his death, though, he had willed his property to the imams of Travnik and to other religious institutions. He also left a considerable sum of money for the building of this fine mausoleum of good stone, while the income from his houses and tenant holdings was to ensure that a massive taper burned beside his tomb day and night. His vault was permanently draped with a green pall that bore the embroidered inscription in Arabic: “May the All-Highest light his tomb!” The sentence was composed by the learned imams, as an expression of gratitude to their benefactor.