Bosnian Chronicle

  In spite of the heavy robe weighing him down, Daville shuddered a little at the thought of having to ride once more between those worn shutters and jutting window grilles amid the cursing and contempt of the crowd; but, it seemed, his first public appearances in Travnik were to be full of surprises, even, sometimes, agreeable ones. True, the Turks in the shops along the way were sullen and impassive, their eyes conspicuously averted, but this time neither insults nor threats were heard from the houses. Arching against his will, Daville had a feeling that behind the wooden grilles many a curious and hostile pair of eyes watched him, although he heard no sound and saw no movement. It seemed almost as if the Vizier’s cloak were shielding him from the people, and he drew it instinctively tighter around him and sat up straight in the saddle and thus, with his head held high, he reached the walled courtyard of Joseph Baruch.

  When at last he was alone in his warm room, he sat down on a hard couch, unbuttoned his uniform, and took a deep breath. He was worn out with excitement and tired in every part of his body. He felt empty, blunted, and confused, as if he’d been hurled down from a great height onto this hard settee and couldn’t yet come to himself and grasp clearly where he was and what had happened. He was free at last, but had no idea what to do with his free time. He thought of resting and going to sleep, but his glance fell on the hanging fur cloak he had got from the Vizier a little while before, and all at once the thought came back to him, unwelcome and a little jolting, that he must write a report on all this to the Minister in Paris and the Ambassador at Istanbul. That meant he must live through the whole thing again and, moreover, paint a picture that would not be too damaging to his prestige but not too far from the truth either. This task now loomed before him like an impassable mountain that he must somehow negotiate. The Consul laid the balls of his palms on his eyes and pressed them. He sighed heavily a few more times and said under his breath: “Dear God. Dear God!” He remained sprawled like this on the settee, and there he slept and rested.

  3

  As happens to the heroes in Eastern fables, Daville encountered his greatest obstacles at the outset of his consulship. Everything seemed to pounce on him at once, as if to scare him and head him off the road he’d chosen. Everything he met with in Bosnia and all that reached him from the embassy in Istanbul, and from the military governor in Dalmatia, was contrary to what he’d been told when he left Paris.

  After several weeks Daville moved out of Baruch’s house into the building that was to be his Consulate. He furnished and fitted out two or three rooms as well as he could and lived alone with his servants in the large, empty house.

  On his way to Travnik, he had been obliged to leave his wife with a French family in Split. Madame Daville was expecting the birth of her third child and he did not dare to take her with him, in that condition, to an unfamiliar Turkish town. After her delivery, she had been slow to recuperate and her departure from Dalmatia had to be put off again and again.

  Daville, who was used to living with his family and up to now had never been separated from his wife, found the isolation particularly hard to bear in his present circumstances. Loneliness, disorder in the house, worries about his wife and children tormented him more and more as the days went by. Monsieur Pouqueville had left Travnik some days before on his way further east.

  Other things combined to give Daville a sense of being forgotten and left to fend for himself. Funds and equipment for his work and administration, which had been promised to him before he set out for Bosnia, or which he had demanded since then, turned out to be inadequate or else failed altogether to materialize.

  Lacking assistants and clerical help, he was forced to do all the writing, copying, and office work himself. Not knowing the language and being unfamiliar with the land and local conditions, he had no choice but to employ D’Avenat as full-time interpreter to the Consulate. The Vizier generously released his medical adviser and D’Avenat was delighted at the opportunity to enter the French service. Daville hired him with some misgivings and a certain private aversion, and decided to let him handle only those affairs which the Vizier could be allowed to know about. But he soon came to see how indispensable this man was to him and how great was his usefulness in practical matters. D’Avenat managed to get two reliable kavasses right away, an Albanian and a man from Herzegovina, and he took over the management of the staff and relieved the Consul of a good deal of petty and distasteful detail. Working with him day by day, the Consul was able to observe him and got to know him better and better.

  Having lived in the East from his early youth, D’Avenat had acquired many of the traits and habits of the Levantine. The Levantine is a man with no illusions and no scruples and without a face of his own—that is to say, a man of several faces, forced to put on an act of humility one moment and one of boldness the next, a man melancholy and bubbling by turns, for these faces are his indispensable weapons in the fight for survival, which in the Levant is tougher and more complex than in any other part of the world. A foreigner who is pitched into this bitter and unequal struggle founders in it and loses his true personality. He spends a lifetime in the East but never gets to know it completely, or else gets to know it one-sidedly—that is to say, only from the viewpoint of his success or failure in the struggle to which he is condemned. Those foreigners who, like D’Avenat, stay on and live in the East, acquire from the Turks, in most cases, only their bad and cruder characteristics, and are unable to see and assimilate any of their better and nobler qualities and habits.

  D’Avenat was a man like that in many ways. In his youth he had led a life of pleasure, and contact with the Osmanlis had not taught him anything good in this respect. People of this type, when their sensual life begins to blunt and burn out, become moody and bitter, a burden to themselves and to others. Exceedingly humble and servile in the presence of power, authority, and wealth, he was rude, brazen, and merciless to all that was weak, poor, and unfortunate. And yet there was something that redeemed this man and raised him above these faults. He had a son, a bright handsome lad over whose upbringing and well-being he worried constantly, and for whom he did, and was ready to do, anything. These intense feelings of fatherly love gradually cured him of his bad habits and made him better and more human. And as the boy grew, so D’Avenat’s life grew purer and clearer. Every time he did someone a good turn or refrained from doing something disreputable, he did so in the superstitious belief that “it will be repaid to the little one.” As often happens in life, this peccant and many-faced parent nursed the secret ambition to see his son grow up to be a man who lived honorably and respectably. And there was nothing he would not have done or sacrificed to realize this desire.

  Though motherless, the child received all the care and attention that it was possible to give a boy, and he grew beside his father like a young sapling tied to a drying but sturdy stake. The boy was good-looking, he had his father’s softer and gentler features, he was physically and mentally sound and showed no bad traits or distressing legacies.

  Deep in his heart D’Avenat cherished one secret wish, one ultimate aim: that the child should be spared his fate of being a Levantine lackey to all and sundry, that he might instead be sent to some school in France and afterwards be accepted into French service. This was the main reason that D’Avenat worked for the Consulate with such exemplary zeal and devotion, and one could believe that his loyalty was genuine and lasting.

  The new Consul also had financial problems and difficulties. Remittances were slow and irregular; considerable unforeseen expenses kept showing up on the ledger. The credits that had been granted him arrived late, and those he requested for fresh contingencies were turned down. Instead there came a spate of perfunctory and bewildering orders from the Department of Accounts and lengthy circular letters that made no sense whatever, and which struck Daville, forlorn and isolated as he was, as purest nonsense. In one of them, for example, he was directed to confine his social contacts to foreign diplomats only and to attend the reception
s of foreign ambassadors and envoys only when called upon to do so by his own ambassador or envoy. Another brought detailed instructions for the celebration of Napoleon’s birthday on August 15. “The orchestra and decorations for the ball which the Consul-General will arrange on this occasion will be at his expense.” Daville read it with a wry smile. The words called up an irresistible vision before his mind’s eye: Travnik musicians, consisting of three ragged gypsies of whom two were drummers and one puffed away on a small flute, who all through Ramadan and Bairam had split the ears of any European condemned to live there.

  He would always remember the first celebration of the Emperor’s birthday, or, more accurately, his misbegotten effort to organize festivities. Several days previously he had tried, via D’Avenat, to secure the attendance of at least some of the more respected local Turks; but even the few at the Residency who had accepted the invitation failed to put in an appearance. The Brothers and their fellow Catholics declined, politely but firmly. The Orthodox abbot Pakhomi neither accepted nor declined the invitation, but he did not come either. Only the Jews came. There were fourteen in all; and some, contrary to Travnik custom, even brought their wives.

  Madame Daville had not yet arrived in Travnik; and Daville, wearing his gala uniform and assisted by D’Avenat and the kavasses, acted the gracious host and served refreshments and a sparkling wine which he had obtained from Split. He even made a little speech in honor of his Sovereign, in which he flattered the Turks and praised Travnik as an important city, for he assumed that at least two of those Jews were in the Vizier’s service and would report to him forthwith, and that all of them together would carry his words up and down Travnik. The Jewesses, who were seated on the couch, their hands folded in their laps, fluttered their eyelashes and moved their heads now to the left shoulder, now to the right. Their menfolk looked straight in front of them, as if to say: “That’s how things are and they’ll never be otherwise, but we haven’t said a word.”

  They were all a little flushed from the sparkling wine. D’Avenat, who didn’t greatly care for the Jews of Travnik and translated their good wishes a little condescendingly, could barely attend to all of them, as everyone now had something he wished to say to the Consul. Then they began to speak Spanish, which suddenly loosened the tongues of the women, and Daville racked his brain to recall the hundred or so Spanish words he had once picked up soldiering in Spain. Before long the younger among them started to sing. Awkwardly enough, not one of them knew any French songs and they refused to sing Turkish ones. In the end Mazalta, Benzion’s daughter-in-law, sang a Spanish romance, puffing a little from excitement and premature stoutness. Her mother-in-law, a lively and earthy woman, caught the mood so well that she took to clapping her hands, swinging the upper half of her body, and pushing back her lacy headdress which kept slipping off on account of the sparkling wine.

  The unpretentious merrymaking of these simple and good-natured folk was all that could be improvised in Travnik to celebrate the mightiest ruler on earth. This both touched and saddened the Consul.

  Daville thought it best not to remember it, and in reporting officially to the Ministry on how the birthday of the Emperor was first celebrated at Travnik, he wrote coyly and with deliberate vagueness that the great day had been marked “in a style suitable to the circumstances and customs of the country.” Yet now, as he read the belated and pompous circular letter about balls, orchestras, and decorations, he felt a fresh pang of shame and discomfort and couldn’t make up his mind whether to laugh or cry.

  One of his constant worries was having to take care of the officers and soldiers who passed through Bosnia on their way from Dalmatia to Istanbul.

  The Turkish government and the French Ambassador at Istanbul had signed a treaty under which the French army was to place at the disposal of the Turks a certain number of officers, as instructors and engineers, gunners and sappers. A short time before, the English fleet had forced the Dardanelles and threatened Istanbul itself, and Sultan Selim had set about bolstering the defenses of his capital with the aid of the French envoy Sebastiani and a small group of French officers. The French were then urgently requested to send a certain number of officers and men, and Paris ordered General Marmont in Dalmatia to dispatch them right away in small detachments via Bosnia. Daville was instructed to provide their passage and secure horses and escort. He then had an opportunity of seeing how a treaty made with the government at Istanbul worked out in practice. Passage permits did not arrive in time and the officers had to sit it out in Travnik. The Consul did his best to expedite matters with the Vizier, and the Vizier in turn with the capital. And even if the permit had come in time, this would still not have been the end of the business, for fresh complications kept cropping up with annoying suddenness and the officers had to break their journey elsewhere and waste their time in obscure little Bosnian towns.

  The Bosnian Moslems looked with suspicion and hatred on the French occupation army in Dalmatia. Austrian agents had spread the rumor among them that General Marmont was building a wide highway down the entire length of the Dalmatian coast, with the object of annexing Bosnia as well. The advent of French officers to Bosnia confirmed the town in this mistaken belief; and these French officers, who had come as allies at the request of the Turkish government, were greeted already at Livno, just across the frontier, by jeering and abusive mobs, and their reception went from bad to worse as they continued into the interior.

  There were times when thirty or forty of these officers and other ranks were stranded in Daville’s house at Travnik, unable to go forward and not daring to turn back. In vain did the Vizier call together the leaders and notables of the town and enjoin them to treat these people as friends who had come at the invitation of, and with the full knowledge of, the High Porte. The thing was patched up and settled with words, as usual. The town elders made promises to the Vizier, the Vizier made promises to the Consul, the Consul to the officers, that there would be no more hostility from the populace; but when the officers set out again the next day, they usually walked into such a hornet’s nest in the next small town that they turned around and marched back to Travnik more indignant than ever.

  In vain Daville wrote to his government about the real sentiments of the local Turks and about the helpless attempts of the Vizier to restrain them and impose his will. Istanbul continued to demand new contingents, Paris kept up its instructions, and Split kept obeying them faithfully. Again fresh groups of officers would arrive in Travnik, one after another, only to loaf around embittered, waiting for further orders. Everything went appallingly wrong and made the Consul feel as though his head were buffeted from all sides.

  In vain did the French authorities in Dalmatia print friendly proclamations to the Turkish population. The posters, written in a high-flown, literary Turkish, were hardly read; and if anyone took the trouble to read them, he could not understand them. No appeal made any headway against the ingrained mistrust of the entire Moslem population, which had no desire to read or hear or look at anything and acted solely from its deep instinct of self-preservation and of hatred toward these foreigners and unbelievers who had advanced to their frontiers and were beginning to enter their country.

  Only after the May palace revolution in the capital and the deposition of the Sultan were the orders suspended for sending French officers to Turkey. But although new orders ceased, the old ones continued to be carried out blindly and mechanically. So it came to pass that, for a long time after, groups of two or three French officers would suddenly pop up in Travnik, even though their trip was now purposeless and nonsensical.

  But although the events in Istanbul freed the Consul of one kind of nuisance, they soon threatened him with another and much bigger one.

  Daville had come to depend on the help and support of the Vizier, Husref Mehmed Pasha. He had already, it was true, had many opportunities of observing the man’s limited power and his lack of influence among the Bosnian begs; many of his promises had gone blithely unfu
lfilled and many of his commands had died a quiet death, although the Vizier himself pretended not to notice it. At the same time, the Vizier’s good will was clear and beyond doubt. Both from natural inclination and from policy, he wished to be considered a friend of France and to prove it by his acts. And besides this, Mehmed Pasha’s happy disposition, his unshakable optimism, and the smiling ease with which he approached a problem and weathered every kind of mishap, acted as a pure balm on Daville and gave him courage to deal with the many niggling as well as real difficulties of his new life. And now he was faced with the possibility of losing this great and only help and comfort.

  In May of that year there was the coup d’état in Istanbul. The fanatical opponents of Selim III deposed that enlightened and reform-minded Sultan and shut him up in the Serai, installing Sultan Mustapha in his place. French influence in the capital declined and, what was still worse for Daville personally, the fate of Husref Mehmed Pasha became uncertain, since the fall of Selim had deprived him of support in the capital while in Bosnia he remained unpopular because of his friendship for France and his partiality to reform.

  The Vizier, it was true, never for a moment lost his broad seaman’s smile before the world, nor his oriental optimism that seemed to have no other foundation than his invincible inner self; but these things deceived no one. The Travnik Moslems, all of whom to a man were implacable foes of Selim’s reforms and hostile to Mehmed Pasha, said that “the Vizier’s feet were dangling.” A sort of vexed silence fell over the Residency. All hands quietly made preparations for a move that might take place at any moment; everyone was wrapped in his own cares and spoke little and looked straight in front of him. The Vizier himself was apt to be distracted and listless in his talks with Daville, though he tried with kindness and brave words to cover up his utter inability to help anyone or anything.