Bosnian Chronicle

  D’Avenat gained the bridge and crossed it. The furrow he had left in the mob behind him closed up again, but the men felt deflated and beaten, at least for the moment. They began to ask one another why they’d allowed the cocky infidel to ride through them unmolested, instead of squashing him like a bedbug. But now it was too late. The right moment had passed. The first gust had spent itself, the crowd had lost direction, it was at loose ends. It would have to start over again.

  Later, taking advantage of their momentary faintheartedness and confusion, D’Avenat made his way back to the Consulate in the same daring and deliberate fashion; this time, however, he did not shout, but merely glared around brazenly and shook his head in a dire and meaningful way, as though he had just settled the matter at the Residency and knew exactly what was coming to them.

  In point of fact, D’Avenat had tried to take a strong line with Suleiman Pasha and had met with little success. The Deputy Vizier refused to be shaken or intimidated, either by D’Avenat’s threats or by the riot itself. Just as on a previous occasion he had defended the Travnik winter before the Vizier, maintaining that it was no calamity but, on the contrary, a necessity and a gift of God, so now he spoke about the riot in the same way. It was nothing to be alarmed about, was the gist of his message to Daville. The rabble had got up on their high horse, the tide was running. It happened from time to time. They would shout and brawl, and calm down again, and noise never harmed anybody. No one would dare to touch the Consulate. As for the case of the boy Mehmed, that was something for the Moslem courts to decide; they would question him, and if they found him guilty he would have to give up the woman. If he was blameless, nothing would happen to him. Everything else would remain as before, in good order, in its proper place.

  This was the verdict Suleiman Pasha conveyed to Daville, speaking slowly in his mangled Turkish, which was heavily accented and laced with salty and obscure local idiom. With D’Avenat himself he refused to be drawn into a discussion, even though the interpreter tried hard to start one. He dismissed him like a Turkish servant, with the words: “There, remember well what I’ve told you and be sure to repeat it accurately to the good Consul.”

  Nevertheless the riot continued to spread. Neither D’Avenat’s arrogance nor Suleiman Pasha’s Turkish way of glossing over and minimizing had any effect on it.

  Toward evening of the same day, an even larger and more wanton mob came down from the hillside slums and poured into the bazaar, to the delight of shouting young hoodlums. During the night some shady characters came up to the Consulate building. Dogs barked and the Consul’s men kept watch. Next morning a crude hemp torch and a pail of tar were found, with which they had planned to set fire to the Consulate building.

  The following day D’Avenat, fearless as ever, demanded and obtained permission to enter the fortress and visit the arrested messenger. He found him tied up in a dark cell, known as “the Well,” reserved for those who had been condemned to death. The young man was indeed more dead than alive, as the Vizier’s chief of police, not knowing the actual reason for the arrest, had ordered a hundred strokes of the bastinado, in any event. D’Avenat failed to get the young man freed, but found a way of bribing the guard and so easing his imprisonment.

  To make matters worse for Daville, two French officers happened to arrive in Travnik at that time, on their way from Split to Istanbul. For although these officer missions had long ceased to be warranted and were, in fact, becoming harmful, and although Daville had for months implored Split not to send them, at least not via Bosnia, where their presence inspired hatred and odium among the people, it still happened from time to time that groups of two or three officers set out in compliance with some outdated order.

  The riot confined these officers, like everyone else, to the Consulate building. But being tactless, haughty, and impatient, they tried, right on the first day, to ride out into the surrounding country in spite of the riot.

  As soon as they left the Consulate and reached the streets of the poor quarter, they were greeted by a hail of snowballs. Street urchins ran after them, pelting them fiercely. Teenage riffraff sprang from every gateway, flushed with excitement, with hatred in their eyes, yelling and calling to one another.

  “There’s the Christian! Get him!”

  “Hit the unbelievers!”

  “You’ll pay for it, dirty Christians!”

  The officers watched them run up to the drinking fountain and dip the snow lumps in water, to make them harder and heavier. They were in a quandary. Spurring the horses on and galloping away would be almost as bad as fighting the kids or taking their savage pranks meekly. So they turned back to the Consulate, fuming and humiliated.

  And while the cries of the mob floated up from the bazaar, a major in the Army Engineers, pining in the Consulate, wrote as follows to his commanding officer at Split: “Just as well there was snow, otherwise these young heathens would have showered us with rocks and mud. I was beside myself with shame and fury, and when the grotesque situation became unbearable, I lashed out at the hoodlums with a stick. They dispersed for a moment and then re-formed again and started to go after us with still louder shouts. We barely got back to the town. The interpreter at the Consulate assures me that it was a lucky thing my stick did not hit a single child, as their elders would have made us pay for it with our lives, since they are no better than their children and surely put them up to it.”

  Daville tried to minimize the incident in front of the officers, but was privately consumed with shame at having Frenchmen witness his impotence and the humiliation in which he lived.

  On the third day the bazaar opened up again. One by one the shopkeepers came, raised their shutters, squatted down in their usual places, and resumed business. They looked even stiffer and graver than before, somewhat sheepish and pale, like men after a night on the town.

  It was a sign that things were quieting down. Idlers and urchins were still gathering, rambling around the town aimlessly, breathing on their frozen hands. Now and then someone would shout something against someone or other, but the cries got no response. As yet no one left the Consulate, except D’Avenat and a few servants on the most necessary errands; they were met with threats, snowballs, and an occasional shot fired in the air. But the riot had run its natural course. The French Consul had had a demonstration of what the people thought of him and how they felt about his presence in Travnik. D’Avenat’s hated messenger was punished. They took his wife away but did not return her to Bekri Mustapha; she was sent back to her family. Bekri Mustapha himself promptly fell from the bazaar’s grace. No one gave him another glance. As if they had just come to their senses, the people demanded to know who this drunken tramp was and what he was doing there. No shopkeeper would allow him to come near his platform or warm himself on his brazier. He wandered around for another few days and managed to get his brandy by selling, piece by piece, the clothes which the people had given him in the first flush of excitement. Then he vanished from Travnik forever.

  So the riot ended of its own accord. But the difficulties with which the Consulate had to contend did not diminish; on the contrary, they grew bigger and multiplied. Daville stumbled over them at every step.

  Mehmed the Whiskers was finally let out of jail, weak from the beatings and sullen over the loss of his wife. And while Suleiman Pasha, faced with Daville’s sharp protests, had ordered the chief of police to tender apologies to the Consul for the arrest of the messenger and for the offensive shouting against the French and the attacks on the consular building, the chief, a proud and obstinate old man, announced firmly that he would sooner resign from service, and if necessary give the head off his shoulders, than traipse to the French Consul and beg his forgiveness. And there the matter ended.

  The example of Mehmed the Whiskers struck fear into the rest of the consular staff. In the streets they were met with looks full of hate. The shopkeepers refused to sell them anything. Hussein, the Albanian kavass who was proud of his job, went through the
bazaar pale with rage and stopped in front of the shops; but no matter what he asked for, the Moslem shopkeeper on his platform would tell him darkly that it was not available. The goods in question would be hanging there within an arm’s reach, but when Hussein mentioned this to the shopkeeper, the man would either quietly inform him that the thing was sold or else growl: “If I tell you it’s not available, then it’s not available. For you it’s not available.”

  Staples and groceries had to be procured secretly, through the Catholics and the Jews.

  Daville could feel the hatred against him and the Consulate growing by the day. It seemed to him the time was not far off when this hatred would sweep him out of Travnik. It robbed him of sleep, immobilized his will, and lamed every decision before he ever made it. And the whole staff felt helpless against it, persecuted, thinly protected against the general hatred. Only their natural sense of shame and their loyalty to decent masters kept them from leaving the unpopular service of the Consulate. D’Avenat alone remained staunch and imperturbably cool. He was neither frightened nor thrown into confusion by the hate that was pressing closer and closer around the isolated Consulate. He remained unwaveringly faithful to his tenet: that one should cultivate, methodically and without scruple, those few who are at the helm of affairs, and treat the rest of the world with contempt and a firm hand, since the Turks were afraid of those who had no fear and shrank only from those who were stronger than themselves. Such a travesty of human life accorded entirely with his views and habits.

  9

  Worn out by the strain which the events of the last few months had thrown on him, chafing at the lack of understanding and the grudging support he received from Paris, from General Marmont in Split, and from the Ambassador at Istanbul, bewildered by the spite and mistrust with which the Travnik Moslems followed his every step and which, on the whole, summarized their attitude toward everything French, Daville felt a mounting sense of loss at Mehmed Pasha’s absence. Lonely and fretful, he began to see everything in a special light, from an unaccustomed angle. All things became somehow magnified, terribly important, unnaturally complex and beyond help, almost tragic. The recall of the late Vizier, “a friend of the French,” appeared to him not only a piece of bad luck affecting him personally but a proof too of the weakness of French influence in Istanbul, a conspicuous failure of French policy.

  Privately he regretted more and more that he had taken on this appointment, which evidently was so tough that no one else had wanted it. He was particularly sorry that he had brought his family with him. He realized that he had made a mistake and was left with a bad bargain on his hands, and that chances were this place would cost him his reputation and the health of his wife and children. He felt himself helpless and harried at every step and so, of course, could not be persuaded that the future held anything better or more comforting.

  All that he had so far heard and managed to find out about the new Vizier disturbed and alarmed him. They said that Ibrahim Halimi Pasha was a follower of Selim III, had even been his Grand Vizier at one time; but he had no great love of the reforms and was not a particular friend of the French. His utter and unconditional loyalty to Selim was well known, but that was the only thing that was known about him. Ever since the dethronement of Sultan Selim he too, they said, had been more dead than alive, and the new regime of Sultan Mustapha had first sent him to Salonica, as provincial governor, and soon afterwards to Bosnia, rather like a dead body being hustled out of sight. Rumor had it that he was a man of aristocratic origin and middling ability, left stunned by his recent fall from power and bitter over the unenviable post to which they were sending him. What possible good for the French cause, or for himself personally, could Daville hope for from such a Vizier, when even the clever and ambitious Mehmed Pasha had not been able to get anything done? So Daville awaited the new Vizier with trepidation, as one more piece of bad luck in the long spell of mishaps that his consulship in Bosnia had brought him.

  Ibrahim Halimi Pasha arrived at the beginning of March, with a whole crowd of retainers and a caravan of luggage. He had left his harem at Istanbul. As soon as he had settled down and rested, the new Vizier received the consuls in a ceremonial audience.

  Daville was the first one to be received.

  This time too his ceremonial passage through the town elicited some abuse and threats (he had prepared his young Chancellor for it), but they were fewer and milder than the first time. A few loud curses and some unfriendly or derisive gestures were the only demonstration of the popular hatred of foreign consulates. Daville could not help gloating a little when he was informed that his Austrian rival, who was received the following day, had not fared very much better among the Moslem common folk.

  The ceremonial that awaited Daville at the Residency was similar to the one arranged by the previous Vizier. The presents were richer and the service more opulent. The new Chancellor of the Consulate received an ermine coat, while Daville was again cloaked in sable. But what mattered particularly to Daville was that the Vizier detained him in conversation a good half hour longer than he did the Austrian Consul next day.

  In other respects too the new Vizier was a genuine surprise for Daville—especially in his manner and appearance. It was as if Fate had wanted to play a joke on the Consul by sending him the exact opposite of Mehmed Pasha, with whom at least one could deal easily and pleasantly if not always successfully. (Isolated consuls are only too apt to see themselves abandoned by their governments and harassed by their opponents, and to regard themselves as men whom destiny has, so to speak, personally chosen to be the butt of her special malice.) In place of the youthful, lively, and affable Georgian, Daville found himself confronted with a ponderous, stiff, and cold Osmanli, whose visage repelled and inspired fear. Daville’s conversations with Mehmed Pasha, even if they did not always yield what they promised, had nevertheless had a certain tonic effect on him, spurring him to further work and discussion. With this Ibrahim Pasha, it seemed to Daville, every talk was bound to leave one with a hangover of ill temper, depression, and quiet hopelessness.

  He was like a ruin on two feet—a ruin without beauty or grandeur, or, to be exact, with a certain mortifying grandeur. If the dead could move, they might perhaps inspire the living with more fear and amazement, but they could hardly inspire more of that cold horror that freezes a glance, stifles words, and prompts the hand to draw back instinctively. The Vizier had a square bloodless face that seemed formed around a few deep wrinkles; a sparse beard that was colorless in a way all its own, like grass that withered long ago, flattened and blanched in the cracks of a rock. The face gave an odd impression of beetling under the pile of the turban, which was pulled down to his eyebrows and over his ears. The turban was artfully coiled from the finest silk, white with blushes of pink, with only the suggestion of an aigrette, embroidered in gold thread and green silk above his forehead. It sat grotesquely on his head, as if a strange hand had stuck it, in a hurry, in the dark, on a dead man who would never again adjust it or take it off but was destined to take it to his grave and rot with it. All the rest of the man, from his neck to the ground, was one compact block from which it was difficult to separate the arms, the legs, and the waist. It was impossible to guess what kind of body lived under that bundle of expensive fabric, leather, silk, silver, and braid. It might be small and frail, and then again it might be large and powerful. And most amazing of all, this heavy bulk of clothing and ornament showed itself capable, in the rare moments when it was not static, of unexpectedly swift and decisive movements, the kind one would expect of an alert younger man. At those times his broad, prematurely aged, and deathly face remained quite expressionless and immobile, while the corpselike figure and the mound of clothing gave every appearance of being propelled from inside by unseen cogs and springs.

  All of which lent the Vizier a spectral aspect and inspired in his visitor mixed feelings of fear and aversion, of pity and discomfort.

  Such was the impression which the personality
of the new Vizier left on Daville at their first meeting.

  With time, as he lived and worked with Ibrahim Pasha, Daville would get used to him, in fact make a friend of him, for he would realize that under the strange appearance was hidden a man who was not without heart or intelligence, a man who, though utterly crushed by misfortune, was yet not incapable of all those nobler emotions which his breed and his caste knew and allowed. But for the moment, judging from his first impression, Daville took a dim view of his future collaboration with the new Vizier, who reminded him of a scarecrow, though a luxurious one, ill-suited for the barren fields of this land, intended rather to frighten birds of paradise of exotic hues and shapes in some fantastic region.

  In that hustle at the Residency, Daville also noticed a number of strange new faces. D’Avenat, who could no longer go in and out of the Residency as freely as during the regime of Mehmed Pasha—for he was now completely in the service of the French—nevertheless in time found new connections and ways of keeping abreast of things, of getting information about the Vizier, the chief functionaries, the relations between them, and the methods by which the more important business got done.

  Partly from innate zeal, curiosity, and boredom, and partly also from an unconscious desire to emulate the old royalist ambassadors whose reports he loved to read, Daville strove to break through the veil of the Vizier’s personal life, to glimpse the intimacy of his household and so, according to the notion of old-style diplomacy, learn the “temper, habits, passions, and inclinations of the ruler to whom we are accredited,” in order to gain influence more easily and advance his wishes and designs.

  D’Avenat, who regretted having to live in this Bosnian wilderness, instead of being in an embassy or in the service of some vizier in Istanbul, as befitted his talents and the opinion he had of them, was the ideal person to secure and deliver this information. With the audacity of a Levantine, the conscientiousness of a doctor, and the quick intelligence of a Piedmontese, he managed to learn and tell the Consul everything—dryly, matter-of-factly, and in full, with details which the Consul sometimes found fascinating, always useful, and often painful and disgusting.