On nights like these he was haunted by memories of women; and not just memories, but real women whose flashing smiles and white flesh would shatter the silence and the darkness like a cry and fill his spacious room. And he would remember too the great schemes, the bold and youthful schemes, with which he had set out from Paris and which were to take him far beyond this little provincial town in which he was now mired; he would see himself in some plush embassy or in Parisian society, in the kinds of places where one ought to be, cutting the sort of figure a man ought to cut.
That was how, night after night, his imagination teased his ambitions and his senses, only to betray and abandon him to the deathly Bosnian silence; and now the breath of this silence inflamed and tortured him. By day he could smother and elude it in work, in walks, and in conversation, but at night that was impossible except by struggle and effort, and these were becoming harder and harder, because the silence muffled, blotted, snuffed out, and overwhelmed even the little seeming life the town had; it swamped, engulfed, and saturated everything living and dead.
From the day he had left Split and had turned, on the heights above Klis, to have a last look at the gently rolling slopes down below and at the azure sea in the distance, he had not stopped feeling the clammy touch of this silence, or struggling with it.
He found it in everything around him: in the architecture of the house, which turned its true face to the courtyard and a mute, windowless back wall to the street; in the bearing of men and women; in their looks, which were eloquent because their lips were sealed. And even in their speech—when at last they condescended to speak—he got more sense from the pregnant pauses than from the words themselves. Both his ear and mind made him aware of how silence crept in between the words of their sentences, and between the letters of every word, like the ominous seeping of water through the bottom of a boat. He listened to their vowel sounds, so colorless and indistinct that the speech of little boys and girls sounded like helpless cooing that died away in silence. And even their singing, which sometimes rose up from the street or a courtyard, was no more than a long wail honeycombed with silence from the first bar to the last, so that the muted pauses were indeed an integral and most eloquent aspect of the song. And even the part of life that basked in the sun of daytime and could not be silenced or hidden away—a brief glimmer of physical beauty or a fleeting show of luxury—even that was sworn to concealment and silence and, with a finger on its lips, ran for safety and anonymity into the first doorway. Every living creature, even inanimate things, started at every sound, shied away from one’s glance, and died from fear lest someone compel them to speak a word or call them by their right name.
Watching these men and women as they shuffled along, bowed, shrouded, and perennially mute, without a smile or gesture, he felt a much greater curiosity about their hopes and private agonies than about their workaday lives which were flattened and deadened to such an extent that they were lives only in name. In the end, because he thought about it constantly, he began to see examples and proof of his theory in almost everything. In the coarseness of their society, which was quite marked, and in the violence that convulsed it from time to time, he saw a fear of straightforward expression, a kind of crude and special form of silence. And even his own musings about these people (Where do they come from? How do they maintain their race? What are their goals? What do they believe in? How do they love and hate? How do they age and die?), even these seemed to slip, before he’d had a chance to develop and express them, into that vague indescribable pond of silence that encompassed him so completely, that filled everything around him and strove to deaden him in every fiber.
Indeed, the young man felt more and more clearly how the silence was beginning to erode and infect even him; how it filtered into his pores, subtly paralyzing his spirit and chilling his blood.
And the nights were the worst of all.
Now and then, it was true, some brittle and unexpected sound would ring out: the sharp crack of a shot somewhere on the outskirts of the town, a dog barking at some untimely passer-by, or at his own dream. It would ring out for only a second, as if to make the silence seem deeper still; instantly the void would close over it like a flood of bottomless, uncompromising water. It was a silence that destroyed sleep as effectively as an orgy of sound, that forced a man to sit up and feel how it threatened to liquefy, crumble, and wash him out of the ranks of conscious, living beings. Every night, as he sat like this beside the fast-dwindling candlelight, he seemed to hear the silence talk to him in her tongueless voice: “You won’t be gadding about so footloose much longer, and look around you so proudly and flash your teeth and trumpet those fancy opinions and those loud, unequivocal words of yours. I will not have you here as you are. I shall break your back, drain the blood from your heart, force your eyes to the ground. I shall turn you into a bitter wild plant, vegetating in rocky soil on a windy height. Your French mirror, and the eyes of your own mother, will never again recognize you!”
And the voice that spoke to him was neither rasping nor mocking, but quiet and relentless; as it went on, he could feel it wrapping and shrouding him, as a foster mother wraps a foundling. It occurred to him that this silence was in fact another way of dying, the kind of death that took away a man’s reason for living but left him the husk of life to live in.
But no one surrenders without a struggle or perishes without some attempt at defense, least of all a man of Desfosses’s age, upbringing, and race. His youth and healthy nature sent out some fierce antibodies against this evil thing, as against some unhealthy climate. And even though it happened sometimes that the nights robbed him of strength and left his mind in a stupor, the morning would always rescue him, the sun would lift him up, water would refresh him, his inquisitive mind would sustain him.
This evening too he made a concerted effort and finally managed to wrest his thoughts from the silence and loneliness, to lift and rivet them to the living, audible, visible, and tangible aspects of everyday reality, and so protect himself from the quashing, smothering void that seemed bent on invading his consciousness, as it had invaded his room. He thumbed through his daily jottings, put them in order and amplified them. Slowly and laboriously his book on Bosnia was growing; made up almost entirely of “real reality.” Everything in it was supported with evidence, shored up with figures and illustrated by examples. Shunning eloquence and high style, staying clear of generalizations, the pages slowly multiplied, dry, smooth, direct, and simple, a protective armor against this cunning and seductive Eastern silence which blurred, muddied, jellied, raddled, and numbed all things, which gave them a double meaning, too many meanings, and sometimes no meaning at all, until they melted away somewhere beyond the reach of eyes and reason, into some kind of deaf limbo, leaving one blind, tongue-tied, and groping, buried alive and cut off from the world, even though still in it.
When he had organized and copied the notes he had taken that day, he found himself once more face to face with the silence of the slow-ticking night. And now he too sat with his arms folded over his manuscript, borne away on his “non-factual” reveries, until exhaustion glazed his eyes and the solid words of his sober prose began to dance on the paper like tiny phantoms in a mirage.
“Travnik! Travnik!” He rolled the word slowly over his tongue, like the name of a mysterious disease, or a magic formula that was hard to memorize and easy to forget. The more he repeated it, the stranger it sounded to him—two murky vowels, wedged between lifeless consonants. And yet the formula now encompassed more than he had ever dreamed the whole world could encompass. It was not simply a word, not just the cold dull name of a remote little town; it was not Travnik; it was now Paris and Jerusalem to him, the capital of the world and the center of life. So a man might dream from childhood on about great cities and celebrated scenes of action, but the actual and decisive battles for the survival of his personality, for the realization of everything he keeps instinctively hidden in himself, are fought wherever destiny happens
to toss him, in Lord knows what cramped, nameless trap hole, without glamor or beauty, without judges or witnesses.
The young man rose absent-mindedly and went to the window. He drew the edge of the curtain and looked into the darkness, not knowing himself what it was he wanted to see in the unlighted, soundless night.
Through the void, full of a mist which may have been either rain or snow, it was impossible to see the usual weak glow of light behind the draped windows of the Austrian Consulate. But in that large house candles were burning and there were people sitting beside them, bent over papers and over their own thoughts.
The Consul’s study was a long unpleasant room, sunless and airless, for its windows faced toward the high slope of the orchard. Consul-General von Mitterer had been sitting here for hours, beside a table littered with drafts and military manuals.
The fire in the stove was smoldering, forgotten; his long pipe lay on the table, burnt out; the room was cooling off rapidly. The Consul had thrown his service coat around his shoulders and was writing. Tirelessly he filled page after page of yellow draft paper. As soon as he had finished one sheet, he would warm his cold, numbed right hand over the candle flame and reach for a new, clean sheet; he would smooth it out with his palm, draw the first line, and then quickly fill it with the large angular writing that was typical of the officers and noncoms of the Imperial and Royal Army.
That evening after supper, as on many previous evenings and afternoons, Frau von Mitterer had wept, threatened, demanded, and implored the Colonel to write to Vienna to ask for a transfer from this unbearable wilderness. As always, the Colonel had tried to comfort his wife and explain to her that it was not as easy and simple as she imagined to ask for a transfer and run away from difficulties, that to do so might mean the end of his career, and not an honorable end at that. Anna Maria had overwhelmed him with reproaches, deaf to all his explanations, and had threatened in tears to take “her child” and leave Travnik, Bosnia, and him. In the end, to calm his wife the Consul had promised, as so often before, to write his application that very evening and, as so often before, had not kept his promise, for it was a decision he couldn’t make lightly. He had left his wife and daughter in the dining room, lighted his pipe and withdrawn to his study, not to write the application for which he had no stomach, but to get on with the work which gave him satisfaction and regularly filled his evenings.
For ten consecutive nights von Mitterer had been working on a long report to the military authorities in Vienna, describing the location of Travnik from a strategic point of view. Using a great many diagrams and sketches, figures and useful facts, he was now outlining the fourteenth position that would have to be taken into account by a hypothetical army advancing along the Lashva valley toward Travnik, which had every intention of defending itself. In his preface to the large work, he had already said that he was embarking on the enterprise in the hope of giving the Chief of Staff something of possible value, and also because he wanted to “shorten the long evenings of monotony to which a foreigner in Travnik is condemned.”
The evening indeed was wearing on, but very slowly, and von Mitterer wrote on diligently and without a breather. He described the Travnik fortress in the minutest detail, its origins, what was said and thought about it, its actual complement, the strength of its situation, the thickness of its walls, number of guns, arsenal stores, the possibility of supplying it with water and food. His pen scratched, the candles guttered, the lines of writing multiplied, regular and orderly, full of accurate figures and graphic detail, and the sheets kept piling up, the stack of them grew.
These were von Mitterer’s best hours and this was where he liked to be most. Beside his candles and filled sheets of paper, enveloped in silence, he felt as if he too were inside an impregnable citadel, sheltered and protected, safe from quibbles and misunderstandings, his task clear-cut in front of him. Everything from his handwriting and style of expression to the ideas he expounded and the feeling that inspired him, seemed to link him to the great Imperial and Royal Army, to something solid, permanent, and secure on which a man could lean, in which he could lose himself with all his private worries and doubts. He knew and felt that he was not alone, not abandoned to chance. Above him there was a long line of superiors, below him ranks and subordinates. That bore him up and sustained him. Everything was threaded and bound together with countless rules, traditions, and customs, all unified in a pattern, unchangeable, constant, more enduring than an individual.
In a night and in a place like this, where men sought oblivion in their illusions, there was no greater happiness or a finer way of forgetting. And so von Mitterer penned line after line, page after page of his great report on the strategic position of Travnik and its environs, a report which no one would ever read and which, under the dust of archives and some unknown clerk’s florid signature, would remain tied in its virgin file cover, unseen and unread for as long as the world lasted, as long as papers and writings lasted with it.
Von Mitterer wrote on. The night passed so quickly he could almost hear it soughing as it rushed by. The heavy service coat warmed his spine, his mind was alert, taken up with something that gave no pain and only calmed him, that sent the night hours flying, and left him tired but also with the quiet glow of a duty well discharged, and with a precious yearning for sleep.
Now, still writing, he hadn’t begun to flag yet, his eyes were not yet bleary, the words did not dance yet. On the contrary, it seemed to him that between his neat written lines other lines were coalescing: neat regiments of men stretching out to infinity, in their shiny imperial uniforms and fine equipment.
As he wrote, he felt quietly exhilarated, as if he were working in the presence of the whole armed force, from the commander in chief down to the last Slavonian recruit. And whenever he paused, he would gaze long at his writing, not reading it but simply gazing at it, and forget the Travnik night and himself, his family, and his other duties.
From this pleasant half-dream the Colonel was wrenched by a sharp tattoo of footsteps in the long passage, approaching like a distant squall. The door flew open suddenly. Frau von Mitterer rushed in, loud and excited. All at once the room was filled with an electric charge and the air rained with disjoined, passionate words which she began pouring out right at the door and which mingled with the tapping of slipper heels on the bare floor. As she came closer, von Mitterer rose slowly; when she reached his desk, he was already drawn up to his full height. His happy, intimate hour faded without a trace. Everything darkened and vanished, lost all significance, value, and purpose. The manuscript in front of him shrank to a meaningless heap of paper. The glittering armed legions fell back in a rout, dissolving in a pink, silvery cloud. The tug of pain in his liver, which he had forgotten, came back with a vengeance.
Anna Maria stood before him glowing. It was a look of fury that trembled but did not see, a tremor echoed by every part of her face, her eyelids, lips, and chin. Her cheeks and the base of her throat were spotted crimson. She wore a peignoir of fine white wool, open at the breast and tied around the waist with a sash of cerise silk. On her shoulders was a small light shawl of white cashmere, joined across her breast and pinned with a large amethyst brooch in a gold frame. Her hair was gathered up and tied with a wide band of muslin, above which the hair spilled over in a teeming fountain of locks and curls.
“Joseph, for God’s sake!”
That was how it always began: a preamble to a blustering fury and the tapping of heels all over the house, to shrill and ugly words that were unconnected and irrational, to baseless accusations, unwarranted tears, and morbid endless diatribes.
The Colonel stood with bated breath, like a cadet caught red-handed, knowing that the least word and slightest movement would only add fuel to the flames and bring on fresh outbursts.
“Joseph, for the love of God!” Anna Maria cried again, already choking with tears.
He did, now, move his hand feebly and with the best of intentions, and the storm broke over hi
s head, lashing the objects around him, the manuscript on the table, through the chilly air that reeked of his cold pipe. His wife was in a rage. The wide sleeves of her white peignoir gusted through the room with such force that the candle flame bent now this way, now that; at times her fine strong arm, naked to the shoulder, would slice the air with a white flash. As her light shawl slid around loosely, the amethyst brooch kept shifting from one breast to the other. Tufts of hair escaped from the muslin fillet and arched over her forehead as if charged with static.
She poured out a torrent of words, now stifled and incomprehensible, now loud and mangled by sobs and sputtering. The Colonel did not listen to them, for he knew them by heart; he merely waited for them to grow quieter and less emphatic, which would indicate that the scene was nearing its close. For nobody, not even Frau von Mitterer, could possibly summon up that many thousands of words a second time, for a fresh outburst. For the moment, however, the bluster and fury raged undiminished.
She knew, she told him, that he wouldn’t write the application for his transfer, even though, that very evening after supper, he had promised her that he would, for the umpteenth time. But she had come, all the same, to see this monster of a man with her own eyes, more cold-blooded than any hangman, more soulless than any Turk, to see him pore over his stinking pipe and scribble that stuff and nonsense which nobody ever read (and it was just as well they didn’t!), only to gratify his mad vanity, the vanity of a misfit who didn’t even know how to maintain and protect his family, his wife and child, who were pining away, dying a slow death, who . . . who . . .
But further outpouring was choked off by loud tears, accompanied by the fierce pummeling of two tiny but strong fists all over the table and the sheets of his manuscript.
The Colonel moved to put a gentle hand on her shoulder, but saw immediately that it was too soon, that the cloud had not yet discharged all it contained.