To Daville’s surprise, the friar seemed to be quite at home with the many different aspects of the struggle between the Pope and the Emperor. He knew in detail about the National Council which Napoleon had called in Paris the year before and about the resistance of the French bishops, just as he knew all the places the Pope had been banished to and all the various pressures to which he had been subjected.
Daville set out to defend and explain the French conduct (his voice sounded lame and unconvincing even to himself). With it he tried to guide the conversation to the current international situation, hoping to hear what the canon, and his brothers and the whole congregation with him, thought and expected of the immediate future. But the canon had no interest in generalities. He could only talk about things that were congenial to his passionate nature and his fanatical beliefs; as for the rest, he merely glanced down the table toward von Paulich, who was talking to Mme Daville, as if deferring to him. It was obvious that the canon had little use for either the French or the Russians. In that tart voice of his, which was strangely thin and strident for so hefty a man, he kept painting a dark picture of a nation that treated the Church and its anointed Head so poorly.
“I can’t say, monsieur le Consul, whether your army will march against Russia or against some other enemy,” Fra Ivo said to Daville, “but I do know for certain, and tell you so openly, that it will find no blessing anywhere, no matter where it marches, because treating the Church like that . . .”
Here followed a fresh series of accusations with quotations from the last Papal Bull against Napoleon about the “new and ever deeper wounds inflicted daily upon the Apostolic authority, the rights of the Church, the sanctity of the Faith, and upon Us personally.”
Seeing him so humorless, monolithic, and unshakable, Daville was struck by a thought that had crossed his mind off and on for many years and was as pertinent that day as it had ever been: that this man, for some reason, was filled up to his gills with chagrin and defiance, which spilled over with every word he uttered and gave an acid edge to his shrillness, and that everything he thought and spoke of, even the Pope himself, was only a handy, welcome excuse to get the gall and the spite out of his system and give it expression.
At the canon’s elbow sat the motionless young curate, a silent miniature of the parish priest and his exact duplicate in manner and attitude. He too kept the clenched fist of his right hand on the table, save that the fist was white and delicate and the red hair on it no more than a down.
At the other end of the table Mme Daville and von Paulich were in a lively tête-à-tête. Ever since she had first met him, she had been surprised and charmed by his genuine interest in everything that had to do with home and household and by his remarkable knowledge of domestic affairs and needs (just as Daville had been astonished and charmed with his fluency in Virgil and Ovid, and von Mitterer, in his time, had been amazed and intimidated by his versatility in military matters). Whenever they met, they talked long and pleasantly on these subjects. At the moment they were discussing furnishings and how to preserve and keep things in the peculiar climate of their present domicile.
The Colonel’s knowledge was indeed wide and inexhaustible. He approached each one of these topics as though it were the only one that interested him for the time being, and on each he spoke with the same cool and poised detachment untainted by anything personal or ambiguous. Now he was discussing the effects of humidity on different kinds of wood in furniture and on the sea grass and horsehair in the upholstery, and did so with the assured knowledge drawn from experience and also with a certain scientific objectivity, as though the subject were furniture in general and not just his own possessions or his likes and dislikes.
The Colonel spoke in a slow and bookish but choice French that was a refreshing change from the bastardized vocabulary and rapid-fire Levantine delivery which had been so jarring and discomforting in von Mitterer. Here and there Mme Daville helped him by furnishing a word he could not find right away. She was delighted to be able to talk with this courteous, precise man about the things that were foremost in her mind and around which her life revolved. In her conversation, as in her work and prayer, she was gentle and forthright, unwavering and free from prejudice, staunch and confident in her acceptance of heaven and earth and anything that time might bring or men might accomplish.
Watching and listening to all these people around him, Daville thought: they are at ease and content, they all seem to know exactly what they want, at this moment anyway, and I am the only one who’s confused and afraid of tomorrow, and tired and fretful, condemned to hide the fact and carry it inside me like a secret, anxious not to give myself away even by a sign.
His musing was interrupted by Fra Ivo who got up abruptly, as always, with a sharp reminder to his curate, as though it was his fault that they had sat around so long, and shouted that it was late and they had a long way to go and there was work waiting for them back home. This increased the chilly atmosphere of the gathering.
That same spring Travnik saw the arrival of the Metropolitan Kallinik and the suffragan bishop Joannike, who came on the business of the Orthodox Church. Wishing to find out what they thought about the events in prospect, Daville invited them to lunch.
The Metropolitan was a stout, lymphatic, sickly man, wearing thick-lensed spectacles that gave his eyes a fearfully distorted and shapeless look as if they were about to spill and trickle away at any moment. He expressed himself in the unctuous and suave manner of expatriate Greeks, and his comments on the great powers were tactful and conciliatory; he was careful to give each one his due. All told, he operated with a limited set of phrases which he applied to things and concepts alike, all of them favorable and affirmative without exception, and he used them apropos of anything that was said to him, by a sort of rule of thumb, not choosing them particularly, indeed sometimes quite out of context. The cynical overpoliteness, so often found in elderly clergymen, thinly veiled his utter indifference to everything that other people might be saying or to things that could usefully be said on a subject.
Bishop Joannike, on the other hand, was a different type altogether. He was a large heavy monk, with an overgrown black beard, a cross expression always on his face, and something brusque and military in his whole bearing, as if beneath his black cassock he wore a breastplate and heavy equipment. The Turks had long suspected this bishop of being implicated in the Serbian rebellion but had never been able to prove it.
His replies to Daville’s queries were short, but firm and candid. “You would like to know whether I’m for the Russians, and I tell you that we are for those who help us to stay alive and work in freedom. And you, at least, who live here, can see how things are and what we have to put up with. And so it’s no wonder . . .”
The Metropolitan turned to the bishop and gave him an admonishing look out of his expressionless eyes, watering hugely behind their thick lenses, but the bishop would not be stopped.
“The Christian states are at one another’s throats instead of settling their differences and working together to put an end to this misfortune once and for all. This has been going on for hundreds of years, and now you would like to know whose side we’re on . . .”
The Metropolitan stirred again and, seeing that a glance was not enough, spoke up quickly in a prayerful tone of voice: “May the Lord bless and uphold all Christian powers, which are God-sent and God-nurtured. We never cease to pray . . .”
Now it was the bishop’s turn to interrupt the Metropolitan, and that rather sharply: “We are for Russia, monsieur, and for the liberation of Orthodox Christians from the antichrist. That’s what we’re for, and don’t believe anyone who tells you otherwise.”
Here the Metropolitan broke in again and made some affable observation that consisted almost entirely of honeyed adjectives, doing so in bits and pieces, and not very accurately.
Daville watched the dour-faced bishop. His breath came in quick asthmatic puffs and his wheezing voice was unsteady and ragged
, with a distinct rasp in it, like the bursts of an obscure, long-suppressed fury that seemed to fill him up to his Adam’s apple and escaped from him with every word and every gesture.
Daville did his best to explain to the Metropolitan and the bishop the aims of his government and to place them in as good a light as possible, but his diffidence increased as he went on, for the look of angered slight did not leave the bishop’s face for a moment and the Metropolitan did not seem to care particularly one way or another; indeed he seemed to listen to all human speech as though it were a jumble of nonsensical sounds and gave all of it the same affable and vacuous inattention, the same honeyed insincere assent.
The prelates had come to the Consulate in the company of Pakhomi, the pale and haggard monk who looked after the Orthodox church in Travnik. This ailing bent man, with the pinched and sour face of a person who is never free from dyspepsia, seldom visited the Consulate and regularly declined all invitations, pleading ill-health or fear of the Turks. Whenever Daville met him and tried, after a friendly greeting, to engage him in conversation, he would double up even lower and twist his face, his eyes would sidle furtively (those Bosnian eyes Daville knew so well!), and he would shy away from his gaze and look up from under, obliquely, past one or the other of his shoulders. D’Avenat was the only person to whom he sometimes talked more freely.
Forced that day to accompany his superiors, he sat cramped and still, a burdensome guest, on the edge of his chair, as if planning to flee at any moment, and stared in front of him the whole time, not saying a word. But two or three days after the Metropolitan had left Travnik, when D’Avenat met him on the road and began to talk to him “in his own way,” the sallow and frail monk suddenly came alive and found his tongue. His eyes sparkled up and didn’t flinch away. One word led to another, the conversation grew livelier. D’Avenat tried to draw him out by saying that any people, regardless of religion, who expected something of the future, had better look to the all-powerful French Emperor and not to Russia, whom the French were sure to vanquish that summer, thus removing the last opposition to their “unified Europe.”
At that the monk’s large and normally tight mouth opened wide, displaying a row of white, regular, and wolflike teeth whose healthy ferocity one would not have expected in so small and delicate a face; the corners of his mouth dimpled away in a couple of surprising lines, new to D’Avenat, expressing a roguish, mocking sort of mirth; the monk threw his head back and roared a hearty, scornful laugh that flabbergasted even D’Avenat. It lasted only a moment. Immediately afterwards the monk’s face shriveled back to its old rumpled size and grew peaked, diminutive, and frail. Turning away a little, he glanced around quickly to make sure that they were alone, then brought his face close to D’Avenat’s right ear and said in a rich, fruity voice that would have gone much better with the earlier laughing expression than it did with the one he now wore: “Listen to what I’m telling you, neighbor. Knock that idea out of your head!”
Leaning over confidentially, the monk said this in a friendly indulgent tone of voice, as though he were making a gift of some value. Then, with a breezy greeting, he was on his way, steering clear of the bazaar and the main streets, as he always did, and taking the side alleys instead.
22
Things were fast coming to a head for these foreigners who had drifted in and become stranded in the narrow, damp valley and were condemned to live there for indeterminable stretches of time, under extraordinary stipulations. The unfamiliar conditions in which they found themselves had the effect of quickening the inner tendencies they had brought with them when they came, and drove each of them more decisively and mercilessly in the direction marked out for him by his own instincts. In the local alchemy of things, these drives took on a form and momentum which, under different circumstances, might never have come about.
Already in the first few months after von Paulich’s arrival it became fairly clear that relations between the new Consul-General and the interpreter Nicholas Rotta were strained and were bound to lead to a clash and, sooner or later, to a break; for it would have been hard to find two people more unlike each other and more predestined to misunderstand and foil each other.
The cool, laconic, and sober Colonel, who cast around him an atmosphere of sharp, crystalline frost and clarity, bewildered and irritated the vain and touchy interpreter by his very presence and stirred in him the old convulsive tangle of uncertainties which had lain dormant and quiescent up to that moment. It would have been inaccurate to say that the aversion of the two men was reciprocal, because, in fact, it was Rotta who quailed away from the Colonel as from a bleak and monolithic iceberg; even worse, by some inescapable quirk of fate, he kept coming back and lunging at it again and again.
It is hard to imagine that two such clever, self-possessed, and cold people would have a devastating effect on each other, but that was the case here. Rotta had worked himself into a state of inner despair and laceration in which this superior of his was bound to mean his utter ruin. The calm and all but inhuman impartiality of the Colonel could not fail to act as poison on the already poisoned interpreter. If Rotta’s chief had been someone soft and permissive like von Mitterer, or someone blustering, unpredictable, and given to human passions, even of the worst kind, he might still have held out somehow. With the former type he would have thrived on the softness; with the latter, his own dark and conflicting urges might have found a point of contact and reassurance in combat with the other man’s passions, and in this steady attrition and clashing he might have kept his balance. But against a superior like the Colonel, Rotta could only hurl himself like a frenzied creature against a wall of ice or an imaginary shaft of light.
In his very ideas, his methods and procedures, von Paulich represented a marked and grave change for the worse, as far as the interpreter was concerned. To begin with, Rotta was far less essential to him than he had been to von Mitterer, to whom he had long become indispensable. To von Mitterer he had been a kind of shelter from the roughest and most wearying chores of the service, a kind of glove for the dirtiest work. Then too in many ways, and increasingly so in the last few years, the interpreter had become a sort of Gray Eminence. Whenever, at times of family crisis or official troubles, von Mitterer fell prey to a momentary paralysis of the will, made acute by his exhaustion or liver ailment, Rotta had been there to hold him up, to take “things” in his own hands, and in doing so had given the flagging man a sense of relief and grateful dependence. As for “things” themselves, he had never had any difficulty in settling them, since, as a rule, they were not complicated; they had only seemed hopeless and unsolvable to von Mitterer, in his condition at that particular moment.
All this, of course, was quite unthinkable with the new chief. With von Paulich, all work was as plain and regular as a chessboard, on which he moved like a calm and deliberate player who ponders long and feels no anxiety before a move and no doubt after it, who needs no advice, support, or guidance from anyone.
Moreover, von Paulich’s conduct of business took away the last gratification left to the interpreter in his barren and unsuccessful life. His arid browbeating manner toward his juniors and office visitors, toward all those who either depended on him or could not retaliate, was for Rotta a pleasure, a wretched one it was true, but the last and only pleasure amidst the chaos and debris of his existence, a wan illusion of strength and a visible mark of that superiority for which he had vainly sacrificed his energy, his youth, and his soul.
After a dressing-down of this kind, in which, puffed up, red in the face, his legs astraddle, he had harangued and shouted down some wretch who dared not or did not know how to answer him, the interpreter would feel—for a moment it was true, but a thrilling moment—a delicious and heady satisfaction at having crushed something, having shattered and routed someone. He would stand over the silenced and humbled opponent and his own thrill of happiness would seem to lift him high above the earthly creatures, yet not too high either, just high enough for the
m to see him, to measure and feel his greatness. And now the Colonel took away from him even this mirage of spurious happiness.
His very presence now discouraged such behavior. Under the gaze of his cold, dark blue eyes no illusion could hold out for long and every self-deception would crumble and vanish in the void from which it had sprung.
Right at the outset, von Paulich had warned Rotta that there was a way of talking to people quietly and of getting their cooperation in a decent and civil manner. In any case, he did not want any member of the Consulate to use that tone with anyone, either in the building or in the town. The interpreter tried, for the first and last time, to influence the Consul and impose his own views. Rotta, with whom arrogance and bullying had become second nature, felt all but paralyzed in this man’s presence. His lips twitched at the corners, his eyelids drooped even more heavily on his tilted head, he clicked his heels together and said brittlely, “Just as you wish, Herr Oberstleutnant,” and with that he left.
Whether he forgot this or whether he wanted to test the stamina and quality of the new chief, Rotta went twice more against his explicit orders and gave his juniors a noisy and offensive tongue-lashing. The second time this happened, the Colonel summoned the interpreter and told him that if it occurred once more, even in the mildest form, he would immediately apply the clause in the regulations covering repeated grave breaches of discipline. As he was saying this, Rotta could see his blue eyes narrow and taper to a hard murderous light at the corners, a light that completely changed his look and the expression on his face from one moment to the next. From that time on the interpreter, thoroughly cowed, withdrew into himself and nursed his hatred of the Colonel out of sight and in secret, but with all the intensity and fury he had earlier wreaked on his victims.
Von Paulich, who treated Rotta’s case with the same cool equanimity he showed toward everything else in the world, tried, in turn, to use him as little as possible. He sent him as a courier to Brod and Kostaynitsa; he even hoped to see von Mitterer assigned to another job in which he might be able to use Rotta and ask for him. He himself made no move to get him out of Travnik. Ironically enough, it never crossed Rotta’s mind to leave this position which, as he realized himself, was not doing him any good; instead, like one bedeviled, he continued to circle and fluster around his cold and brilliant superior and clashed with him at regular intervals, each time more sharply, though all of it loomed bigger in his mind than it was in reality.