Omer Pasha Latas

by Ivo Andrić

  The temperature soared early that year. In the exhausting and irksome heat, the army moved and spread through the impoverished land like an octopus, whose tentacles, invisibly connected, lived each for itself. Thirsty and hungry but particularly greedy for women. Thirst and hunger could somehow be satisfied, at least for a while, but where could a woman be found for thousands of these young men, hardened and resentful, constantly on the move, anticipating slaughter and death, when everyone, from the smallest child to the oldest grandmother, hid as they approached? And while the heat blazed around them, their desire grew all the greater as the more the desolation and scarcity increased and the conflict with the rebels came closer. The clear Bosnian water intensified hunger, poisoned a man with craving. These were no longer desires that arose individually; they merged into a single wild frenzy.

  High overhead, on the dazzling waves of shimmering heat, parallel with the trudging of the marching troops, an enormous, diffuse woman’s body of voluptuous forms rose, stretched out, with infinite curves and hollows. It was everywhere: in the sunlit mountain passes, and over the cool shaded valleys; you could feel it everywhere, but nowhere could it be touched.

  Down below, the army swarmed along winding paths, through forests and mountains, over rocks and stony ground: infantry, dismantled field guns, meager rations. Sap oozed from the tall pines that grew in the rocks below and above the track; sweat dripped from men and horses; coarse oaths flew and hissed among the soldiers, and from time to time an angry spark would be struck on the rough ground under a horse’s shoe or a soldier’s metal-soled boot. Above all, the body of the immense woman kept spreading, undulating and shifting, like a burning, golden, dissolute cloud. They did not look at it, for they did not raise their heads, nor did they mention it, but it oppressed them, irritated and tormented them more than fatigue, uncertainty or the difficult terrain. And there was no cure or help for it.

  Sometimes an individual or reconnaissance party would catch up with and seize a woman lost or strayed from her path. But what good was that if her shriveled body could not quench their cursed hunger. It simply increased it. Such encounters with real women of flesh and blood, individually or in groups, sometimes ended comically, sometimes unpleasantly and pathetically, but always badly and uselessly. The story would then be told from unit to unit, with laughter or curses, the length of the marching army. But sometimes these incidents were such that even the coarsest Anatolian recruit preferred to pass over in silence and forget them rather than speak or hear about them.

  Near Zenica, just below the village of Raspotočje, where the highway passes between two tall, bare rock faces, amid green, undulating countryside, an infantry platoon had turned off the road to take a short rest in an enclosed meadow. Their commanding officer had been held up in Lašva. Here, beside a spring, they slaughtered two rams, which had, according to the cheerful cook, “joined the platoon.” On the steep slope above them, there were some wattle huts, abandoned, without doors or windows. In one of these, as they searched for dry twigs, the soldiers discovered a young Gypsy girl, an abandoned, mad creature. She was sitting by the hearth, staring distractedly into the ash of a fire that had long since gone out. A soldier stood blocking the doorway of that hut, which held no more than two or three. The woman did not defend herself. The soldiers now divided into two groups: some ran to the hut to wait their turn, while others, younger and more restrained, sat motionless by the fire, gazing steadily at the roasting meat, their backs turned on temptation. Meanwhile, the men at the hut changed places quickly, emerging one after another, disordered, their heads bowed, buttoning their tunics or brushing off ash, before making their way down to the spring.

  Here the spits creaked, sparks scattered and smoke rose from the tamped fires. The rams were taken from the spits before being properly roasted. Two of the soldiers, their sleeves rolled up, began cutting the meat, as the men who had been gathered round the fire pushed and shoved, and those who had been in the hut shouted and ran down to the fires not to miss out on their portion.

  At that moment, unexpectedly, their commander appeared on the upper road, with his equerry. He dismounted beside the hut from where the soldiers were still emerging. When he opened the door with the handle of his whip, he cast one glance inside and immediately turned his head away. It was a sight that could not be looked at for long. On the earth lay a thin, wretched woman’s body, twitching, with foam on her lips. Her wide trousers and shirt had been torn to shreds by the soldiers’ hands. He ordered his equerry to throw a spare horse-blanket into the hut and immediately set off down to the lower path, shouting loudly and angrily to the soldiers lining up to leave, on the path beside an almost dried up stream. Pieces of roast meat disappeared with miraculous speed into rucksacks and pockets.

  The officer ordered them to move off, but before they managed to get any distance, they all heard and saw the woman from the hut once more. She came out and stood in front of the door, the blanket wrapped around her, with the rags of her trousers hanging beneath it. She swayed like a scarecrow in the wind and, frothing at the mouth, out of her mind, sticking out her belly, she yelled in a screeching voice:

  “Where are you, soldiers, sons of bitches? Are there any more of you? Here, satisfy yourselves, a curse on your mothers’ heads! Devil take you all! Here!”

  But the platoon was disappearing behind the steep, high rock by the side of the road and the woman’s voice weakened and was lost.

  The army advanced.

  BY THE SHADY INN

  THE HIGHWAY that ran along the crest of a hill dropped abruptly and, following a steep gully, fell into a deep, narrow gorge at a place called Shady Inn. On the slope, the highway virtually disappeared, turning into a sharp, rocky track that looked like the bare spine of that ochre hill. In the gorge, it acquired once again the appearance of a main road and ran straight on, through the valley, along the stream, to the south of Shady Inn. Where the road reached the gorge, by the stream, an aging black inn rested in the bushes, tilting and unkempt, like a gigantic sick bird. Everything about it was worn out and dilapidated. The eaves were rotten, the windows and doors crooked, and inside it was dark. Even the large stone slabs covering the open ground in front of the inn could barely be seen, worn down as they were by former passersby and sunk into the earth with rain and the weight of years.

  Along this steep stone road down the hill came a cavalry squadron, a lively and apparently endless string of men and horses. The horsemen had all dismounted and were leading their horses, but the packhorses stumbled and staggered, falling and rising as if borne by water. Out of that dark, slow procession a weapon or part of a uniform would suddenly gleam in the strong sun and flash into the distance like a signal. The end of the procession was slowly disappearing into the narrow shady gorge as into an abyss. As each rider descended and reached flat ground, he would hurry, with his horse, straight to the stream they heard rather than saw flowing behind the inn.

  The army was exhausted and bad-tempered, the horses spent and drenched in sweat. They jostled, getting in each other’s way in that narrow space, as more kept arriving from the hill. The horses defended themselves in every possible way from the flies, but unable to find relief, they kicked and bit one another. The soldiers hit them with whatever was at hand and swore at them through clenched teeth.

  The greatest crush and noise was around the inn. Men banged on the door, shouted, cursed, called, but no one answered. Alarmed, a short-tailed cockerel scuttled out of a shed and disappeared into the bushes above the stream.

  The constricted space where the road and stream ran between the steep sides of the gorge kept filling with soldiers who poured like a slow waterfall from the bare sunbaked hillside and stretched out along the road. As each man came down onto the road, he pushed and shouted at those who had gathered around the inn, thinking mistakenly it was open and water or drink and food were being dispensed.

  Not a living soul anywhere. But then a human being did appear on the road. As though he ha
d sprung out of the earth, a thin, bent and poorly dressed man suddenly found himself in the midst of the crowd of horses and men. They overwhelmed him with questions about the tavern, the village, milk and bread. Then it became clear that the man was deaf and dumb and mad. Closing his eyes as if pleased to be in that press of horses’ rumps, glowing faces, shouting, and waving arms, the man defended himself with both hands as if beset by bees and laughed happily with his huge, toothless mouth wider than his thin face. Disappointed, the soldiers first swore, then they too began to laugh, making cavalrymen’s jokes at the expense of the madman and themselves.

  A tall, gray-haired lieutenant, a veteran soldier, on a huge old dapple-gray, was the only man not to dismount. Expecting the commander to reach the road at any moment, he gave out loud orders, endeavoring to impose some kind of discipline on the packed throng. He was the first to glimpse the roof of a building in the luxuriant greenery at the end of the gorge, and he headed in that direction, ordering two cavalrymen to mount their horses and accompany him.

  They had not ridden far along the narrow track under fruit trees that they had to keep ducking when they suddenly found themselves in front of a small, wooden mosque. Old and run-down, like the inn by the highway, with a tilting minaret and broken-down fence, squeezed into the depths of the gorge and surrounded by tall trees, it was condemned to constant shade and damp. The mosque had a small porch and appeared to be abandoned and shut. It was only when they got close that they saw an old man crouching or rather kneeling, sitting back on his heels on the porch with a dead body wrapped in a sheet lying in an open coffin before him.

  The horsemen stopped beside the mosque’s low fence. The man kneeling over the body had bowed his head, his hands clasped in his lap, and gave no sign of having noticed them. The lieutenant looked from one of the cavalrymen to the other, then he too bowed his large, bony head. They stood like that for a moment or two and then, without a word but as if by agreement, they turned their horses and set off back to the inn.

  By now Captain Reuf Bey, the commander of the squadron, had reached the canyon and was looking impatiently in the direction he had been told the lieutenant had disappeared. The captain was a young, fair-haired, brisk man, powerfully built, with a short stiff moustache. He had fled from Hungary to Turkey in the wake of an unsuccessful rebellion, joined the army and converted to Islam. As soon as he spotted the lieutenant returning at a funereal pace, he spurred his horse and went to meet him with a loud reproach. All three horsemen stopped dead.

  “What’s this? Taking a stroll, eh?” the commander shouted.

  The lieutenant bowed his gray officer’s head, on which in every situation and for any reason, as a matter of course, all responsibility and all disapproval inevitably fell, and said something in a low, grave voice. Not listening, the commander came right up to him, shouting:

  “What’s there? Any houses, living people?”

  “No. Just a funeral and a corpse.”

  “A corpse? What kind of corpse? You’re a corpse!”

  The commander waved his whip, spurred his horse and galloped off in the direction from which the lieutenant had come, while the latter turned his horse obediently and followed. The two horsemen, as though tied to him, did the same. The commander moved so fast they could barely keep up with him.

  When he suddenly found himself before the wooden fence of the mosque at the end of the gorge, at whose gate the one narrow path ended, the commander brought his horse to an abrupt halt. In front of the mosque, in the shadow, the scene was unchanged. The motionless, fully wrapped corpse and by its head, equally motionless, the old man bending over it. In fact, it would have been hard to say who or what kind of creature he was. As far as one could tell, the man was dressed in the threadbare remnants of what once had been rich garments. Seated on his horse, the captain was on the same level as the man on the porch and had to look him straight in the face. Face? Or rather what he saw showed what a human face was capable of becoming. It looked frozen, beaten, disfigured by spasms and incomprehensible pain, and petrified. With dark, sagging circles under them, the large, clouded eyes neither looked nor saw.

  The captain forgot his anger and why he had come here. For a few moments he could not take his eyes off the sight. And then he shuddered, as if ashamed. It was clear that there was no one here for him to summon, that the track had come to an end, that there was no chance of help or advice, that discussion was pointless and threats of no use. There was only one thing for them to do: get out of this gorge.

  At a slow pace, looking neither right nor left, the captain returned to the inn. There, in a subdued, husky voice, he gave the order to depart. He did not hear the horses fidgeting and resisting, or the soldiers soothing them as they mounted.

  He rode now at the head of the platoon. Staring at the narrow strip of sunlit land that at the end of the gorge looked like an illuminated window, he was thinking only of death and the dead, of his dead.

  IN THE EVENING HOURS

  ON THE left bank of the Miljacka River in Sarajevo, right behind the Sultan’s Mosque, where the steep slope leading to Bistrik Hill begins, there is a flat space on one side where the large, white Dženetić house stands. It is a fine, two-story building, consisting of a central section and two wings. Solidly built and well maintained, it shows what such a large, wealthy family needs and what such a family is able to achieve to satisfy those needs and enhance its standing. Although it rests at the foot of a high hill that keeps it in shadow for most of the morning, it looks cheerful and confident, with its numerous glittering windows facing south and west, where it awaits the afternoon sun. And, with its height and appearance, architecture and layout, it looks as though built precisely for the military power and vizier’s grandeur that now took up residence there.

  The Dženetić residence, known to every child in the town and held to be a model of urban architecture, good taste and solid wealth, began to change in the eyes of the citizens of Sarajevo. The seraskier moved into the house, with his harem, servants and entourage. In addition, several neighboring houses were taken over and emptied for his offices and personal guard. They were connected, on the other side of the Bistrik stream, to the old barracks and military academy with its storerooms.

  These buildings ranged around Dženetić’s house constituted something like a separate settlement and began to live a different life. A circle of silent menace and undefined danger soon spread from them. The familiar bright windows acquired a malign and ominous aspect. The single-story buildings and storerooms required by the rich Dženetić household now increasingly resembled prisons or places of torture. And, in the opinion of passersby, that is what they were. Anyone would swear to it. Otherwise why would grim-faced guards with rifles on their shoulders keep pacing in front? Imagination began to work, reality provided it with content, whispers fanned it, and fear supported and fanned whatever the imagination created. Tales abounded, elaborate and rich in detail as if they had been thought up long ago, lain buried somewhere, and had now been released. At the foot of the bright, gentle Bistrik a cursed part of town, a source of general dread, came into being.

  It would be hard to say when it began or who was the first of the passersby deliberately to avoid that complex of buildings. But suddenly it became clear that it was better and safer to skirt around it. And after a few days everyone was doing so. And not only because of general prejudice and a vague distaste for everything pertaining to the seraskier and the army, but because of a real, justified fear of being stopped by the seraskier’s men and forced to carry furniture or throw out garbage, as had indeed happened in the early days. The only people to pass here now were those who really had to or were being led in chains.

  And, for their part, the new inhabitants of the Dženetić residence and neighboring buildings looked with distrust and contempt at the citizens who shunned them and their houses and avoided the sultan’s representatives whenever they could. And when they could not help coming face to face with any of them, they pa
ssed them like cowards of unclear intentions and sly appearance. For soon the seraskier’s domestic servants and assistants, crammed into those few buildings, also began to succumb to the general malaise. In their eyes, it was only these buildings that offered proper human accommodation: the whole of the rest of Sarajevo was becoming increasingly dark and losing the appearance of a town, turning into a pigsty seething with the uneducated and impoverished, proud and stubborn Bosnian rabble.

  And so, invisible but firm threads of suspicion, distaste and fear were woven ever more tightly and densely between these two worlds crammed into the mountain complex, while both sides by the day found ever more justified reasons for mutual distrust and hatred.

  Between spring and autumn, the atmosphere grew so thick and dark that people felt it with all their senses. This drove them to make a bad situation worse. The seraskier’s men were increasingly rough and impatient, while the locals, embittered and superstitious, fearful of war and tormented by shortages, avenged themselves through gossip, invention and whispering, thus compounding their genuine misfortune with absurd stories and dismal imaginings. As if the evil they saw by day was not enough: processions of prisoners in chains, transports of sick and injured soldiers, caravans of horses loaded with food seized from the impoverished population—in their homes they said that, as soon as darkness fell, in the streets around Dženetić’s residence devils gathered to dance. And it was true that dry leaves from the chestnut trees would swirl here with a metallic sound, that the autumn winds would whip them up, spin and toss them relentlessly from one side of the street to the other. When a mass had piled up against a wall, you could see lone leaves scurrying after them across the cobbles, white in the moonlight, like delirious mice.