by Ivo Andrić
Steadily observing the tall man beside him, Omer remembered similar encounters in other parts of the empire he had “pacified.” There too he had come across such prominent men and tribal leaders, stubborn and inaccessible people. He recalled in particular a man from Syria who, in response to the pasha’s flattering messages to come for a conversation, always responded from his mountain base in the same terms: “I should stoop down to the pasha? No, that cannot be. And what would we talk about? We have always known exactly what we have to say to one another. Tell the pasha I can converse with him only over the barrel of a gun.”
Yes, there had been such men, but nowhere had he ever come across an interlocutor quite like this one or this style of resistance. There the man sat, natural, apparently docile, saying as much as he had to and smiling as much as he needed to, but he gave nothing of himself nor did he wish to receive anything. You could not get close to him, let alone deceive, bribe or frighten him.
Omer observed all this with his dark, brilliant eyes, thinking about every detail, irrespective of the brief questions he posed and the still briefer answers he received. When it was clear the host had asked all the questions he wished to ask and the headman had said all he could or wanted to say, when those questions began to go round in a barren circle, and the pauses became increasingly long, complete silence fell. But the two men on the white divan seemed not to have noticed because beneath the silence their thoughts continued to seethe. Then suddenly Omer spoke again. It was clear to Zimonjić that the seraskier had not abandoned the siege but was preparing a new assault.
As if the subject had never come up, Omer returned to the previous conversation, only more specifically and intimately.
Now he spoke in a new, warm, low voice, again about the sultan and his plans to reorganize and regenerate his large empire, to make of it a family of happy peoples, in which everyone would know his duties and his rights, his tasks and his responsibilities. This meant there would be great changes in the empire, where those who had up to now been powerless and disadvantaged would have much to gain, regardless of their faith, name and language. The relationship between the rayas and the ruling Muslims couldn’t remain what it had been here either, as the popular saying has it: “as soon as our backs are turned, you get it in the neck.” Instead, Christians would have the right to defend themselves and be granted protection by the government and satisfaction in court.
All in all, the time had come for conditions in Bosnia and Herzegovina to change. Roads would be built, postal and telegraph services set up, commerce with neighboring countries would become more vibrant and freer, in the European manner, with no blackmail or unjustified taxes. This would be the way for the entire population, both baptized and not, to be dragged out of poverty and raised up, to give prominent and able men an opportunity to acquire property and wealth, in keeping with their position and abilities.
But for those people to be truly free, protected, in every respect equal to the Muslims, they must have—and here the seraskier suddenly raised his voice—their own leading men, headmen, vojvodas, their own rulers who would be under the sultan’s protection. They must be chosen from among those who have come to prominence through their honesty, intelligence and courage.
Here Zimonjić, who had been silent until now but at least ostensibly acquiescing through his fixed smile and regular blinking, abruptly stiffened, his head bowed, his eyes to the ground.
Then Omer Pasha stood up briskly, in a businesslike manner and, standing beside the motionless headman, continued ever more loudly. Zimonjić recovered his smile and shifted uncomfortably in his seat, evidently unsure whether he too should stand up. But at that moment the seraskier sat down again, close to him. He spoke virtually into his ear.
“You don’t believe me.”
Zimonjić moved the upper part of his body away, defending himself from such a thought, trying with a light wave of the hand and expression on his face to disabuse the seraskier.
“No, no, you don’t know who I am. That’s why you don’t believe me.”
Here he rose again. Slowly and hesitantly, Zimonjić also got to his feet. The small room was shrinking around him, filling with confusion and discomfort because of the unexpected and unusual turn the conversation was taking, as though it had been cast, all of a sudden, out of the complex of the vizier’s residence, out of every Turkish and Bosnian reality, into some unimagined world of new relations and possibilities. And in this world all was unforeseen, uncertain, all equally possible and equally dangerous and deceptive. His eyes kept wandering toward the window and the view that opened up out there.
Outside, under a clear sky, everything shone with the unusually strong afternoon sun of a warm autumn, in the distance, on the other side of the town, white houses and occasional glass windowpanes, and close by a slender stone minaret and next to it a tall, thin, yellowing poplar. One could see the strong wind bending the top of the tree, tugging from it and carrying off the yellow leaves that shone occasionally in the sun like small gold coins scattered from the heights.
The seraskier continued to pace the room with slow steps, as if counting them, first in one direction, then the other. Zimonjić slowly shifted on the spot, endeavoring to be always facing the seraskier. He was shaken as rarely before in his hard and troubled life, and he had to muster all his strength so as not to lose sight of who and what he was, where he was now, why he was here and with whom he was talking.
So these two men measured and weighed each other. One of them, Omer, wanted everything that a man can become and be, and that raised him in the eyes of the world, while the other wanted nothing other than to be and remain who he was.
From time to time Omer would repeat, provocatively, as if offended and disappointed:
“You don’t believe me or trust my word, do you?”
Zimonjić would greet this each time with a movement of the hand as if defending himself from such a thought, but the seraskier did not allow himself to be stopped, continuing in an ever more lively and exasperated voice:
“All right! Let’s pretend we never said or thought anything that has been said here. So be it! All right! I want nothing from you and ask nothing of you. But one thing I do want: that you believe me.”
Before the headman was able to find a word to say, the seraskier stopped in his tracks and, standing in front of his guest, with a slow, broad gesture, laid both hands on his chest.
“Listen, Bogdan, don’t imagine I am inwardly all that I appear outwardly.”
Zimonjić now heard his words as a muffled, distant sound, and all he saw were two yellow hands with fingers spread on the dark jacket of a general’s uniform.
And then that too vanished.
•
It was autumn. Donje Polje, gray and empty, and in it, as if drawn, a narrow winding stream, and the well-trodden path to Gacko. Once again he was riding along this path and once again, as last year in this season, just before Saint Mitar’s Day, he came upon Dervo Smajević, a malicious Turkish thug who rode his horse straight at him, blind with fury.
Before they were able to draw any weapons, they grabbed hold of one another and fell together in an embrace from their horses, breaking the tangled reins. Holding onto each other tightly, they wrestled and tossed about until they slipped down a steep slope, overgrown with dead autumn grass, and rolled, like one single huge ball of clenched muscles and bones, into a deep, narrow gully along the road. It was only here that he managed to get control and separate himself from the bulk of Dervo, who was lying unconscious under him. He quickly removed Dervo’s weapons and, bruised as he was, not knowing how, he clambered back up to the path where his horse was waiting for him, as though rooted to the spot.
And now, locked in a grip with an invisible opponent, he felt himself falling, like one body, down, down, for a long, terribly long time, into a bottomless gully.
•
That lasted for the blink of an eye, and when with a final effort he freed himself from the sensation of
falling, regained control and felt his legs under him, back again now on the brightly colored carpet of the seraskier’s room, Omer Pasha was standing before him, with his hands still on Bogdan’s chest, asking loudly, probably for the second time:
“Can we trust each other, Bogdan?”
“Yes . . .yes, we can . . .” he managed finally to respond, absently and mechanically, as with a paralyzed tongue.
“Well then, know that before you stands not Omer Pasha but Mićo Latas from Janja Gora. And since you don’t believe my words, believe this. . .”
Omer moved his hands off Bogdan’s chest, took off his heavy fez with its blue tassel and threw it theatrically onto the white divan, then he put three fingers of his right hand together, crossed himself, eyes lowered, in humble, short and practiced movements.
In the forty years of his life, Zimonjić had seen both Turks and his own people do many strange things, and in his headman’s family he had heard his fill of all that had been and all that could be. He knew well that a man could expect anything of another, and that one might well experience even what was thought impossible ever to see, but this was altogether too unbelievable and unexpected.
Seeing the great, renowned seraskier Omer Pasha bareheaded (and being without a fez was like being half naked), with tousled graying hair, crossing himself like a man of the church, Zimonjić winced and, for the first time in this long and unusual conversation, opened his eyes wide, which until then had only glinted through long half-closed eyelashes. Now large brown irises could be seen, pupils with a deep blue flare and wide whites clear as a child’s. The look in these eyes was not only astonished but truculent and furious, frightened and pitying, contemptuous and sorrowful, expressing everything that had been building up in Zimonjić, and that he had not said or been able to say in words or gestures. But that look was swift, like lightning, flashed and was instantly extinguished and lost under his lowered eyelids, between his cunningly smiling, half-closed lashes. After slowly and solemnly crossing himself, Omer raised his eyes and saw the same Zimonjić looking at him, a little embarrassed, smiling, with an expression of polite, cold curiosity, as if seeing the sign of the cross and a man crossing himself for the first time in his life.
Here Omer too gave a start and abruptly changed. Once again he was the imperial seraskier speaking to Zimonjić, pleasantly and cordially, but coldly and haughtily, once again about the border and the changes and concessions that were to be introduced with the new administration in Bosnia and Herzegovina. But it did not last long. At an imperceptible and soundless signal, the duty officer appeared. The supreme seraskier Omer Pasha graciously dismissed the headman from Gacko.
When he had detached himself from the duty officer who accompanied him right to the front door, Zimonjić hastened over the white cobbles across the spacious courtyard, but at the gate he caught sight of a guard of two well-dressed soldiers. He stiffened again, slowed his pace and lowered his eyes. One of the soldiers opened one side of the large double gate and closed it again after him. It was only here, in the quiet afternoon street, that Zimonjić drew himself fully upright again and, looking around, raised his right hand as if he too was about to cross himself, but then simply wiped his palm over his eyes. Then he lengthened his stride and set off more speedily toward the inn, where his companions were waiting for him.
WHAT A PAINTER IS
IN A WHISPER, people spread the news that a master craftsman had come “from Germany” to paint not only Omer Pasha, but, so they said, some other high-ranking officers, and would also instruct the pasha’s daughter in the mysterious art of painting. Among the rayas this provoked wonder mixed with fear, among the Muslims a new and still greater discontent, if that was possible.
“He’s being painted!” believers said softly to one another, never having seen a painter or a painted living being in their lives, but vaguely imagining something impure, some wizardry. “He’s being painted! He’s being painted!” the whisper ran through the town. Some people had come by specific details from special sources, then passed them on. In the residence a canvas “as big as the biggest embroidery frame” had been stretched. Omer Pasha sat facing it in his ceremonial uniform, medals on chest, every day for an hour or two or three, while the foreign craftsman transferred the pasha’s image line by line onto the canvas, the way girls do when they copy an old pattern onto their own embroidery frame. Omer Pasha sat there, they said, and “didn’t dare blink an eye or move a finger,” otherwise the spell would be broken, and who knows what then would have become of both the pasha and the painter. And as the days passed and the work progressed, there was more and more of him on the canvas. When the job was done, the pasha would be there on the canvas as if alive, perfectly duplicated.
At this, even the most easygoing people could no longer listen, they simply shook their heads and left, for them this one Omer was hateful and a burden, so the very idea that there could be two of him made the blood pulse in their temples and their heads spin.
To many people the whole business seemed too farfetched to be credible. But still, after everything they had seen and heard, they all felt that, where Omer Pasha was concerned, any marvel was possible. He had now been here for a whole year, “slicing and carving Bosnia like a watermelon” and “he knew nothing of God or the soul, faith or shame.” Besides, over the past six weeks, first in Travnik and then in Sarajevo, people had been able to see the craftsman with their own eyes as he wandered in his tight German clothes and some sort of red fez through the residential districts, staring at houses and mosques, stopping and sketching with a black pencil in his gray notepad men and women, animals and landscapes. People flocked to their windows, behind the shutters, pointing fingers at him as at an outcast, a combination of trickster, magician and criminal. Children followed at a distance, watching him at his strange work with hatred, fear and curiosity. In other times, those children would have thrown stones at the foreigner who brazenly stuck his nose into everything and “sprouted where no one had sown him,” they would have sprinkled his papers with water and dust, but fear of Omer Pasha meant even the children from the most notorious mahalas no longer dared to be what they were.
And so the unusual foreigner walked through the lanes freely as though it was his birthright, while men and women avoided him with superstitious fear and resentment, not wanting to be captured on his cursed paper. That was all they dared and were able to do.
The painter had recently moved from Travnik to Sarajevo because Omer Pasha had transferred his seat there, and he spent his time hanging around, waiting for Omer to receive him.
Here too the phenomenon of this stranger of odd appearance and dubious craft disturbed people and gave rise to various interpretations. All kinds of things were rumored.
Mullah Šaćir Sofra went around the shops and gardens, he sat with the more prominent citizens, drinking coffee, explaining in a deep voice and solemn prophetic tone the events and significance of past and present times, and hinting at the future. In truth, he never did anything else. He had a nominal post at a mosque, supported by its charitable foundation, but did not live off the uncertain meager income of this notional calling, rather from what the townspeople willingly gave him. He had once studied at a madrassa, with good teachers, but never took up any employment. He spent his time in reading and in mysterious and portentous retelling of what he had read. The more he advanced in years, the less he read and the more he talked. This mysterious quality of his, his portentousness, giving the appearance of a learned and cultured man, gave him both status and a position in Sarajevo, and he maintained that status through his way of dressing, his actions and bearing. He never used ordinary words or spoke about ordinary things but always about what busy people did not think about and in a way they did not speak. This raised his value in the eyes of the shopkeepers and tradesmen and gave him the reputation of a wise man. He was proud of this wisdom, and the citizens were proud of their wise man. So he lived, content with little, dignified and unwavering, firmly
believing in what he had once read and which, altered and magnified in his own way, he related countless times to others.
In his books, Mullah Šaćir had even found an explanation for the appearance of the foreigner. And now he interpreted painting and what a painter was for his fellow townsmen, coming right up to them and speaking in a hoarse whisper, without a pause, as if reading or reciting an incantation. It would be impossible to reproduce the mullah’s account without his way of breathing or expression; in short this is roughly what he told them:
This world, with all its riches, beauties and delights, is transient and temporarily given for the enjoyment of man, himself one of the most transient of creatures in the world, hardly more enduring than grass or dew. That is why after death eternal life awaits man in the other world. As God, One and Great, wished and ordained. But the devil, eternal enemy of all of God’s ordinations, weeps over this world with anger and fury that he cannot halt its transient forms, make them endure, chain and enslave man on this earth, and so forever close the gates of heaven to him. To paint this world is an attempt to abolish its transience and make it eternal. A mad, godless, dangerous endeavor. That’s why no one should paint or sculpt any such transient creatures, either human or animal, for it’s against God’s will and suits Satan’s aims and intentions. And whoever does this is an evil wizard and sorcerer, the devil’s accomplice and aide, and will reap what he sows. On the Day of Judgment, in the other world, he will be told, “Come, create, here and now, bring to life those whom you wished to preserve with your mortal hand on transient paper.” And as he will be unable to do so, he will be thrown into the fires of hell, together with his godless paintings; the paintings will be transformed into flame and ash, and he will be left to burn and suffer eternally, as he deserves.
The citizens listened to the mullah’s bleak, chaotic reflections, which they understood not at all, which therefore upset them and increased their already great hatred for Omer Pasha and everything about him, including the painter, whom they detested as one of Omer’s many sins.