Bosnian Chronicle

  Desfosses had managed to locate the testament of this Vizier and regarded it as an interesting document, typical of the people and circumstances. And now he was complaining that they wouldn’t allow him to inspect it and copy it.

  The conversation trailed off. In the short silence that followed, the deepening night outside gave voice to a drawn-out, indistinct song that was like a wail from some watery depth. It was a man’s voice; he sang as he walked, then paused, then took up the song again after a few steps. As he went away, his voice trailed away little by little.

  “Oh, that music! Heavens, that music!” moaned the Consul, whom Bosnian singing drove to distraction. With some impatience he rang the bell and ordered the candles to be brought in.

  The man he had apostrophized was Musa the Singer, who passed down the steep alley every night. He lived in one of a cluster of houses hidden in the precipitous gardens on the hill above the Consulate.

  Desfosses, who had informed himself about everything, also knew the story of that drunkard and good-for-nothing who went home every night along this same alley, lurching and wailing snatches of his hoarse, drawn-out melody.

  At one time, there had lived in Travnik an old man by the name of Krdzaliya. He was of humble origins and low reputation but very wealthy. He traded in arms—a business that paid very well, since those who needed arms didn’t ask the price and paid anything that was asked, so long as they got their guns at the right time and place. He had two sons. The older worked with his father, while the younger, Musa, was sent to school at Sarajevo. Then, suddenly and unexpectedly, old Krdzaliya died; he went to bed hale and hearty and in the morning they found him dead. Musa dropped out of school and came back to Travnik. When they divided the property, it came to light that the old man had left a surprisingly small amount of ready money. All sorts of rumors began to circulate about the death of old Krdzaliya. Nobody would believe—and indeed it was hard to believe—that the old man had had no cash, and many people began to look with suspicion on the older brother and to advise Musa to go to court and demand his rights. Moreover, as they were dividing the little property that was left, the older brother tried to cheat and shortchange the younger. This older brother was tall and handsome, but one of those cold people whose eyes remain dark even when he is smiling. While the settlement was still in progress and Musa was vacillating between his natural disdain for money and the advice of the bazaar, things took an even worse and graver turn.

  Both brothers fell in love with the same girl, a girl from Vilich. Both asked her hand in marriage. She was given to the older one. Then Musa disappeared from Travnik. There was no further talk of the dubious settlement between the brothers or of Krdzaliya’s death. The older brother minded his business and increased what he had. Two years later Musa came back, changed, bearded, sallow, haggard, with the bloodshot, wandering eyes of a man who sleeps little and loves to drink. From that time onward, he lived on his piece of property, which was by no means small but was badly managed and neglected. And so with the years the handsome youngster and rich man’s son, who had once had a beautiful voice and perfect pitch, turned into a haggard wretch who lived by his singing and only for drink, a silent, harmless tippler, whom children turned to look at. Only his famous voice remained unchanged for a long time. But now even this voice was cracking as his health gave out and his inheritance melted away.

  A servant brought in the lighted candelabra. Shadows played around the room briefly, then steadied. The windows suddenly filmed over with darkness. The voice of the drunken singer died away completely, as did the barking dog’s that had answered him. Once again silence closed over everything. The Consul and the young man waited, each thinking his own thoughts, each privately wishing he could be far away from this room and have someone else to talk to.

  Again it was Desfosses who broke the silence. He spoke about Musa the Singer and people of his kind. Daville interrupted him, saying that this noisy, brandy-swilling neighbor of his was not an exception but rather a true specimen of a society that was characterized mainly by brandy, idleness, and crudity of every kind. Desfosses denied this. There were such men in all communities, he maintained, and they performed a certain salutary function. People looked upon them with fear and regret but also with a kind of religious respect, much as the old Greeks revered enlysion, a spot that had been struck by lightning. And far from being typical of a community, they were considered to be exceptions, the lost ones. The existence of these outcasts and lone wolves, abandoned to their galloping ruin, served only to show how firm were the bonds and how implacably strict the laws of society, religion, and family in a patriarchal order.

  And that was true, Desfosses went on, both of the Turks and of the rayah of all faiths. In such communities everything was interconnected, closely dovetailed, and all elements mutually supported and controlled one another. Each individual kept an eye on the community, and the community kept an eye on him. One household observed another, one street watched over the other, because everyone was responsible for everyone else, and all of them for everything; each man’s destiny was bound up not only with the members of his own household and his relatives but also with his neighbors, coreligionists, and fellow citizens. In this lay the strength and also the slavery of these people. The life of a single cell was possible only in such a tissue, and the existence of the whole system only under such covenants. He who left the ranks and followed his own head and his own instincts marked himself as a suicide and came to grief sooner or later, beyond help and recall. Such was the law of these communities, laid down long before in the Old Testament. It was also the law of the world of antiquity. Marcus Aurelius had said somewhere: “No different from an outlaw is the man who shirks the obligations of a social order.” And that was the law against which Musa had sinned, and the violated law and the injured community were avenging themselves and punishing him.

  Once more Daville watched rather than listened to the young man, and he thought: “Well, tonight he seems bent on explaining and justifying all the horrors and ugliness of this country. Evidently he’s now reached this chapter in his opus on Bosnia and feels compelled to lecture me—or anyone else for that matter. Perhaps all this just blew into his head right now. There now, this is youth, I suppose, this thing I see in front of me. Glibness, self-confidence, trenchant exposition, and the heady stuff of conviction. There’s youth for you.” Interrupting his reverie and the young man’s discourse, Daville said: “My dear friend, I hope that we shall read all this in your book, but now let us see what happened to dinner.”

  At the table, the talk was confined to everyday things and happenings, and Mme Daville joined in with precise and factual comments. They talked mostly of cooking, which brought up memories of food and wine in various parts of France and comparisons with the Turkish style of diet; they regretted the lack of French vegetables, French wines and condiments. A few minutes after eight Mme Daville gave a short, muffled yawn. It was the sign that the meal was over, and shortly afterwards she withdrew and went to the children’s room. In another half hour the Consul and Desfosses said good night to each other. With that the day was ended. The nocturnal side of Travnik life was beginning.

  Madame Daville sat by the bed of her youngest child and knitted, nimbly and with concentration, in silence, with the intent air of an ant. It was the way she had eaten her dinner, and done all her other chores throughout the day.

  The Consul was back in his study, sitting at his small writing table. In front of him was the manuscript of his epic on Alexander the Great. He had started this work long before and had been at it for years; progress was slow and sporadic, but he thought about it every day, often several times a day, against the background of everything he saw, heard, and went through. As mentioned before, this epic had become for him a kind of second reality, a better and more pliable one which he controlled at will, and which offered no trouble or opposition; in it he found inspired solutions for everything that was unresolved and unsolvable in himself and around
him; in it, too, he sought consolation for everything that oppressed him and compensation for all the things which real life withheld or forbade him. Several times a day Daville took refuge in his “paper reality” and propped himself comfortably on some idea in the epic, like a lame man on his crutch. And conversely, as he listened to news of some new development in the war, or watched some incident or worked on some piece of business or other, he would often mentally transfer it to his epic. And by the simple expedient of pushing these things a few thousand years back in time, he would rob them of their bitterness and sting, so that, on the surface at least, they appeared easier and more bearable. This did not, of course, make reality any easier or advance the poem toward becoming a true work of art. But a good number of people have to lean on one kind of illusion or another, often stranger and more obscure than a work of poetry, with its clear-cut subject, its rigid meter, and its precise rhyme.

  This evening too, Daville set before him the fat manuscript in its green covers, like a man going through a motion that has become a habit. But ever since he had come to Bosnia and found himself enmeshed in consular dealings with the Turks, these evening hours had grown less and less productive, less and less satisfying. Images would not form, verses balked at the mold and emerged from it incomplete, rhymes would not spark one another, as they once had with a bright fire, but remained dangling, like some one-legged freak. Very often the green ribbons of the folder were not even untied and the manuscript served as a pad for little slips of paper on which the Consul jotted down his work program for the next day or something he’d forgotten to do during the day.

  In those moments after dinner, all that had been said or done during that day rose up in his mind again and, instead of rest and distraction, brought on fresh exertions, reopening the worries that had already been worried over to excess. The letters that had gone out to Split, Istanbul, or Paris bobbed up in their entirety before his eyes; and all at once he could see, with remorseless clarity, everything that he had omitted to say or had said clumsily and redundantly. Blood rushed to his head from excitement and dissatisfaction with himself. The talks he had had with people that day echoed in his ears again, down to the minutest detail, and not only the serious and important talks bearing on the business of service but also the trivial and niggling ones. He saw, clear as day, the person he had talked to, heard every undertone in his words; he saw himself too, and heard the poverty of his own words loud and clear, and also the enormous importance of the things which, for some baffling reason, he had failed to say. And there, on a sudden, appeared the cogent and forceful sentences which he ought to have spoken in place of the fey and bloodless words and answers he had in fact mouthed. So now he would rehearse them in solitude, knowing well that it was all in vain and too late.

  A poem could not take wing in such a state of mind. Sleep tarried in the wake of such thoughts, and dreams became nightmares, even if he managed to doze off.

  Tonight it was the buzzing of Desfosses’s voice that filled the Consul’s ears, talking as he did just before dinner. Suddenly he saw quite clearly how much youthful rant there was in those tales of threefold road layers from different centuries, of neolithic tools, of Karahodja and Musa the Singer, of the family and social order in Bosnia. Yet to all those flights of fancy of the young man, which, it seemed to him, would not stand up to the slightest touch of criticism, he had answered, like one paralyzed and spellbound, with a lame: “Yes, I see, I see, but . . .” What the devil did he see? he now asked himself. He felt ludicrous and humiliated, and at the same time cross with himself, for paying these meaningless rambles an attention they didn’t deserve. When all was said and done, what sort of an important talk was it? With whom had he talked? Not with the Vizier or von Mitterer, but with a brash tenderfoot! A mere chitchat to pass the time! Still, the thought kept pecking at him, it would not be fobbed off. And just as it began to seem as if he might finally push it from his mind, he would suddenly jump up from the table and wheel around in the middle of the room, addressing himself with an outstretched hand: “I should’ve replied at once to his half-baked lecture with, ‘The truth of the matter is as follows,’ and put the young man in his place. Even on trifles, one ought to express one’s opinion freely and fully, and then fire it away in the people’s faces—let them worry about it afterwards! One should not bottle it up inside and have to wrestle with it later, as with a vampire.” Yes, that’s what he should’ve done but didn’t; and he would probably not do it tomorrow or the day after or ever, not in his prattling encounters with the greenhorn or, for that matter, in his conversations with people of substance, for this kind of blazing revelation always hit him in the evening, after food and before going to bed, when it was too late, when the ordinary words of every day loomed as enormous and indestructible apparitions.

  Brooding like this, Daville came back once more to his small desk by the curtained window; and still his thoughts followed him. In vain he tried to shake them off; he was quite unable to turn his attention to anything else. “Even that beastly singing is a point of interest to him, and he’s quite willing to defend it,” the Consul groaned to himself.

  Aching to pursue his morbid hindsight and square his accounts with the young man, the Consul began to scribble hurriedly on the piece of white paper that should have been filled with a string of verses on the exploits of Alexander the Great. “I have listened to these people sing,” he wrote without a pause, “and found that their songs too show the same morbid, barbarian frenzy which is to be found in every other activity of their minds and bodies. I have read somewhere in a travel account of a Frenchman who visited these parts and heard these natives more than a hundred years ago, how their singing is more akin to the howling of dogs than to human song. Whether the people have since changed for the worse, or whether the good old Frenchman never really got to know the country properly, I can’t help feeling that the baying of a dog is much less sinister, certainly less savage, than the vocalizing of these natives when they are in a state of plum-brandy transport or simply seized by their furies. I have noticed how they roll their eyes whilst singing, and gnash their teeth and pummel the wall with their fists, so that it is hard to tell whether they are unhinged by too much brandy or simply venting a deep-seated primeval urge to yowl, wallow in self-misery, and flail about them blindly. And I have come to the conclusion that none of it has any connection either with music or singing, as this is understood by other peoples, but happens simply to be one of the ways in which they express their hidden passions and evil lusts, which otherwise, for all their wantonness, in the nature of things, they would not be able to articulate. I have also discussed this with the Austrian Consul-General. His soldierly indifference notwithstanding, he too has been horrified by this shrieking and ululation one hears nightly in the gardens and alleys and from the inns in the daytime. Das ist ein Urjammer, he said—and he translated it roughly as ‘a dirgelike atavistic cry from the bottom of a primeval soul.’ However, I can’t help thinking that von Mitterer, as usual, errs in overrating these people. It is quite simply the frenzy of a wild race that has lost its innocence.”

  The narrow slip of paper was covered with writing. The last word, in fact, barely fitted into the bottom corner of the page. The zest of writing and the spontaneous ease with which words and analogies had come to his fingertips, had warmed him up, so that he felt something not unlike relief. Tired out, careworn, overburdened with duties which that evening seemed to him beyond his strength, with only his indigestion and insomnia to keep him company, he was sitting motionless and brooding over his manuscript when Mme Daville knocked on the door.

  She was ready for bed. Under the white sleeping bonnet her face looked even smaller and more pointed. A moment before, she had made the sign of the cross over the sleeping children, tucked the blankets around them firmly, and had then knelt down and said the traditional evening prayer, asking God for a peaceful rest that night so that tomorrow she might get up alive and healthy “as I surely believe that
I shall rise from the grave on the Day of Judgment.” Now, with candle in hand, she put her head through the half-open door. “Enough for today, Jean. It’s time to sleep.”

  Daville smiled and waved his hand to reassure her, then sent her off to bed. He remained alone with his papers until his eyes gave out and the written lines began to swim, until, at last, everything flowed together and became a dark simulacrum of the reality which by day seemed clear and understandable.

  Then he rose from the desk, went up to the window, and, shoving the heavy drapes aside, looked out into the turbid darkness to see if the lights at the Residency or at the Austrian Consulate were still on, the last traces of that daylight reality. Instead, the misted windowpane confronted him with a reflection of his own lighted study and a blurred contour of his own face.

  If anyone out there in the darkness, glancing up through the fog and the whispering curtain of rain, had looked up toward the French Consulate and seen that crack of light, he would never have guessed the morose content of this vigil of the sober, grave Consul who by day refused to waste a single minute on anything that was not factual, useful, or pertinent to his job.

  The Consul was not the only one awake in that large house. Directly above his room on the first floor, three windows, curtained with Bosnian muslin, were alight. Here Desfosses sat over his own papers. His was another kind of vigil, inspired by reasons all its own; but he too was passing his night in a way he had not bargained for, one that was neither congenial nor pleasant. The young man was not fretting over what he’d said that day; on the contrary, five minutes after he had finished talking to the Consul, their conversation had dropped clear out of his mind. He was not feeling weary, or longing for peace, or worrying about the next day. But he was restless and choking with the unsatisfied desires of his youth.