by Ivo Andrić
Whenever people find themselves oppressed, frightened, anxious about circumstances and events, the idea of sin and the need for such an idea comes to them. Sin, what we call sin, is meant to explain sufferings for which people cannot find a real explanation. And so the innocent and penniless painter from Zagreb, wandering through the Sarajevo streets like a lost soul, was in the eyes of many citizens the embodiment of ugly, mysterious sin.
People saw that man of unusual appearance and baffling occupation as yet another incomprehensible tool of Omer Pasha’s. Because most of those who swarmed through the Sarajevo streets past the strange foreign painter were anxious, embittered and unhappy, condemned to play a part, albeit passive, in a great drama for which they could see no reason or purpose, nor could they perceive an end or limit to it. And such people experience everything with fear and disbelief and see evil and damage, or the danger of evil and damage, even where there is none. So, naturally, no one was able to imagine that this stranger, a painter from Croatia, was himself an unhappy man, a shipwrecked man who, through the complex laws of artistic destiny, had come here, to this rebellious, exhausted and devastated land, to seek a way out, not himself knowing what, and salvation that does not exist.
Three weeks earlier, in the dawn of a spring day, Karas had arrived at the ferry crossing on the Sava River just as a huge cold sun emerged out of the invisible and misty land of Bosnia, like a distant fire. Among the travelers on the ferry, for the most part tradesmen in wood and livestock, the painter stood out in both behavior and appearance.
Small and puny, with a thick brown beard in which the ends of a somewhat lighter bushy moustache were lost, with long hair barely covered by his “Illyrian” cap, a shallow red fez with a long blue tassel, the man wore a dark brown Illyrian jacket, wide trousers of Italian velvet in the same color and heavy traveling boots. Beside him lay his modest luggage, most of which consisted of his painter’s easel and a battered yellow case of painting equipment.
His whole appearance was light and transparent, dry as a fakir, suggesting that under the wide fez, behind the thick hair and beard, in the loose-fitting clothes and heavy boots was hidden a thin body with small bones, inwardly troubled, but which, despite that or precisely because of it, moved nimbly and briskly.
While still on the ferry, the painter had taken out his notebook and begun sketching the landscape, and under the sketch, as a reminder, he had noted the beginning of a letter he intended to send to Zagreb as soon as he reached Travnik: “This morning the gateway to the East opened for me.”
Such unreal gateways often open before weary, ailing people as a great illusion that helps them live and work a little longer, even when the possibilities of life and work are reduced to a minimum. So it was with Karas.
Born in Karlovac, the son of a poor tailor with a large family, he had shown artistic gifts while still a child that attracted the attention of his fellow citizens. Several sponsors among the wealthy townspeople and lesser nobility of Zagreb and Karlovac raised enough money to send the young man to Italy. Collections were organized for him to continue his studies there. In the prevailing enthusiasm of the Illyrian national awakening in Croatia, things looked good, too good. The journal The Illyrian Daystar published an invitation for all Illyrians to help “the first Illyrian artist of talent.” A poem was even published about the young painter, full of great hopes:
Illyria glorious and good
Help your son’s worthy oils
Spread their wings through the world
Like immortal Raphael’s.
But those Illyrian hopes were dashed in the most unexpected way.
In all, young Karas spent nine years in Rome and Florence. To begin with, things went well. He sent back sketches and small paintings showing great progress. People said that the young Croat had been granted the favor and patronage of the Austrian ambassador in Rome, who gave him a studio rent free in the Palazzo Venezia in the tower that rises above the massive red building of the embassy. It was also said that the German painter Overbeck and the Danish sculptor Thorvaldsen, highly regarded in Rome and internationally at the time, had made very positive comments about Karas’s work. From the letters Karas himself wrote to his benefactors, one could tell that he was working enthusiastically and conscientiously. But with time, his letters became less frequent. The young painter was working, but at the same time distancing himself more and more from other people, losing from sight both people and any need to connect with them. It seemed that as time went on he simply forgot why he had come to Rome and who had sent him there. This offended his sponsors. And besides, instead of the large paintings for altars and brilliant portraits of prominent figures they were expecting, what reached them were fine female figures or unusual Italian landscapes, the small, light reflections of incomprehensible dreams and curious reality. It was all meager and inadequate in the eyes of his sponsors who, in return for their donations, had expected the first painter, the “son of the homeland,” to send glittering substantial works in keeping with their concepts of taste and beauty. But Karas’s colors were becoming ever darker, the objects in his paintings ever more modest and discreet. His sponsors attributed this to the negative influence of the Dutch School (Karas studied in Rome with a Dutch master), as they believed that every change must be ascribed to a school or influence, and not to the eye, thinking and feeling of the student. They could not imagine that this “first Croatian” painter was trying vainly to find himself even as he was gradually losing his way in the wide world, in a struggle with no prospects or way out, and that, as is often the case with pioneers of any kind, he was destined to be sacrificed.
During this time, Karas also studied music, singing, flute and composition, and he learned the “skill of living on bread and water,” increasingly lost, like a weak swimmer in a boundless sea, in the world of art that he understood well and had a good feeling for but was unable to grasp or master.
Little by little, Karas grew used to considering himself a lost soul, who neither knew how to find the right approach to the society he lived in nor had the strength to fight against it, or as “a man permanently at odds with reality,” as his friend in Rome, the Viennese painter Karl Mayer, used to say with fond, friendly reproach. But it seemed to him that he experienced this reality like no one else, loved it, delighted in it and suffered over it to the point of tears, rapture and pain, but as soon as he had to choose a specific part of that reality and reproduce it, reality would cloud over, become blurred, slip away from his consciousness and his fingers, turning incomprehensible, unbearable and, instead of appearing as a specific picture of lines and paint on the canvas, it was transformed into diluted colors and unlimited lines, then into mere tones, a disturbing melody without end, and finally into extraordinary, elusive ideas about all of that and about himself.
After such raptures, sketches on cardboard or sheets of music paper with feverishly flung down notes were left strewn around, as if after an invisible orgy, but rare was a complete sketch and even rarer a musical composition. And along with sketches, the great intoxication left behind great disenchantment, like a bad hangover, profound self-doubt, fear of everything around him and a desire to flee from the house, the city, and from life.
And he did flee, whenever he could, not choosing the routes of his flight, seeking salvation, like so many weak, sick people, in a glass of wine, or in conversations about politics, national aspirations and general questions that had nothing to do with his inner torment. He was so sensitive to alcohol that even a glass of Frascati went straight to his head, loosening his tongue. And conversations about politics, which is to say about the fate of nations, the treatment of national leaders and statesmen and reporting in newspapers—empty, barren but vehement, enraptured conversations—gave for a moment the illusion of importance and greatness. But after the drink came the hangover, and after the empty conversations, a still greater emptiness. And after each attempt at flight, the painter would find himself again in front of all the unansw
ered questions of his work and progress, only each time with less strength or will to resolve them. For wine does not cure, and conversations do not help.
As the years went by his situation became steadily worse, with frequent crises taking acute forms.
Strength was ebbing away from the young painter, while his sponsors were losing their short-lived benefactor’s patience. And with the unsettled years of the mid-nineteenth century, times of uncertainty and rising prices, Karas was obliged, after a stay of nine years, to abandon Italy and return to his country as “a man who had failed,” who had not fulfilled the patriotic hopes invested in him or the sacrifices made on his behalf. But he could not explain the true causes of this failure even to himself, let alone to his fellow citizens, who typically asked little of themselves but a great deal of others and expected a hundredfold return from each of their invested coins.
In Zagreb he obtained a position as drawing teacher in a school, but soon lost it because “he gave no satisfaction” there either. He lived in poverty, painting portraits for little money, tormented by everything, but above all by the sense of leading an undignified and empty life. One day he was invited to visit Ivan Kukuljević, vice president of the cultural society Matica ilirska and chairman of the Croatian Historical Society, who had always been well disposed toward him. He suggested that Karas travel to Bosnia to draw historical monuments there and perhaps paint the portrait of Omer Pasha Latas, the famous convert about whom the papers had written a lot that year and who had expressed the desire for a painter to be sent from Zagreb. Karas immediately agreed and as soon as he received his papers and travel expenses, a sum that seemed huge to him and that he thrust into his pocket without counting, set off on his journey.
For the last three weeks he had traveled through Bosnia from Brod to the capital city, roaming around Travnik and Sarajevo, the whole time in a kind of trance.
Before he left Zagreb, people had given him only negative reports about Bosnia, the terrible roads and uncomfortable inns, the strange people and unusual circumstances, which had become still more difficult and even stranger since Omer Pasha launched his campaign against the landowners. Now that he was traveling through Bosnia and living there, he could both see and not see all of that; most importantly, he did not feel it. Ever since he had set foot in this country, he had been as though reborn and liberated from all that had oppressed him in Rome and sapped his strength in Zagreb. His head was clear, his feet danced under him, nothing was too difficult or too far. When he thought properly and looked soberly around him, everything people had said was true, or worse. He could see it all, but forgot it at the very same moment. It was true that life was coarse and hard, that unexpected obstacles sprang up at every step, but Karas overcame them with an ease he had never known before.
On the surface, rebellion, violence and fear, and beneath it age-old poverty, the meager existence of the small man and the quiet, unstoppable decay of institutions and families, of everything that had been or was held to be reputable, powerful and rich. People worked only as much as their hunger required of them or the authorities drove them. Nothing was being built, and every public building, when you looked closely, was either unfinished or had begun to collapse for lack of repairs. The lines of the hills too and the forests on them appeared broken up, unfinished.
And the people were, it is true, unusual, crude and cantankerous, and their clothing, speech and gestures often unpleasant; the eyes of many of them expressed the darkness of forests and a vague menace; even when good-looking or well dressed, their fine appearance was provocative, stormy, and seemed to bring no joy either to themselves or to those observing it.
The landscape too, in its exceptional beauty, had something about it that inspired awe, almost fear. Next to every small Bosnian town, including those that otherwise had a fine aspect and open vista, was one hill that loomed and cast a shadow over one’s mood. This appeared to be an essential condition for the development and survival of every town in Bosnia, indeed for its very origin.
Yes, all that was true, but Karas walked through it as if under an anesthetic. Nothing frightened him, nothing repelled him. He stepped out easily and freely, a man no longer afraid of any unpleasantness. And he was more sensitive than ever to the beauty of the landscapes. He lost himself in them, wanting to be part of every lovely sight that met his eyes, and there was beauty all around, at all times of day. He saw it and felt compelled to capture it on canvas. And there was so much that two eyes and one hand were not enough. He would have liked to hold onto everything, forever: the shadows that were longer and deeper than in other places, the violet twilights, dark hills and sweet open spaces, the trees on the gray rock that seemed even in the midst of the hottest summer day to trail a little mist around them, the Muslim graveyards, clean, white and joyfully scattered over the slopes like flocks of sheep—he wanted everything but was unable to decide on anything; it was only in his thoughts that he struggled with the beauty he ought to be painting but where he was in fact losing himself.
•
The days passed. And despite a clear contract and firm promises, Karas had not even been granted an audience with Omer Pasha, let alone begun to paint. It seemed that this seraskier was an invisible, unapproachable being. Everyone knew he existed, but he was nowhere to be seen. It was impossible to know where he was. At times Karas was told that he was traveling, then again that he was here but had no time for anyone, and sometimes they said nothing at all. Living in anticipation of his main task, he often forgot the task and the anticipation and became absorbed in observing everything around him, roaming through the town and its surroundings. His sketch pad filled with drawings of bridges, gravestones, solitary trees bending over water, human figures in lethargic poses or oddly interrupted gestures.
There was another thing that eased his waiting: meeting the Sarajevo parish priest Friar Grgo Martić, to whom Kukuljević had given him a special letter of introduction. The priest invited him frequently to lunch or dinner. Here, for the first time since he had been in Bosnia, he met people with whom it was possible to talk, friars, townspeople, a handful of officers from the seraskier’s army, Hungarians and Poles by nationality. Here for the first time he came across good wine. The host himself was interesting and agreeable though Karas found his strange mixture of warmth and cool, practical directness puzzling. In the middle of a cordial conversation about art or the future of the nation, he would suddenly interrupt:
“You’re a good man, and worthy, and I like you, but there are two things about you, my friend, that aren’t good for this country or for our Bosnian people. First, you enjoy wine more than you should; secondly, you don’t care what you say or before whom you say it. Mark my words, now: always add a little water to your wine, and what you have to say, say it in paints on canvas rather than in words.”
That embarrassed Karas and slightly offended him, but he soon got used to it. His visits to Friar Grgo’s house cheered him, they were a distraction, made the waiting to which he was condemned more bearable. And he was able to learn something about the meaning and purpose of waiting in this country and about the people who were making him wait.
Others talked, seriously or joking, while he remained silent, listening.
No one in Turkey not prepared to wait will ever achieve anything, however able he is, he will only fray his own nerves, exhaust his energy quickly and pointlessly, lose his last friends and protectors—and founder, with no benefit to himself or others. On the other hand, a man without wit or value who knows how to wait, who has the passive, dull animal stamina to hang about, dozing while slyly watching, such a man will almost always achieve what he wants, and undoubtedly sooner than the enterprising and talented people who lack that ability.
Here, it seems, waiting is a kind of examination, a test. Something like the trials and obstacles that heroes in ancient legends have to overcome before reaching their life’s goal. Whoever withstands the test of waiting is the victor; he can calmly enjoy the fruits of h
is victory and let others wait.
As Karas listened silently to what the others were saying, he began to understand more clearly the nature of authority and dependence on it, and what it meant to be a man like Omer Pasha, rising to the highest positions and becoming “the sultan’s man,” executor of the sultan’s will, a judge with limitless powers and lord of lands and their peoples. Everything served him and everyone sheltered behind his might and will. Indeed, the whole incomprehensible web of lies and ceremonies, interests and vanities through which one had to pass in order to approach such a powerful person, was just one of the hundreds of ways for a high-ranking dignitary to make himself still more exalted and more terrible, and his officials and servants more important and indispensable in the eyes of those who depended on them. Without doubt quite the worst thing was that knot of officials, courtiers and servants of varying ranks and every sort, woven round the high-ranking personage and serving as essential intermediaries to everyone who sought to approach him. Friar Grgo called the people round the pasha “hangnails” and told Karas jestingly: “You can get by with the pasha one way or another, but you don’t stand a chance with the pasha’s underlings!”
For Karas, one such intermediary was Ahmet Aga, Omer Pasha’s kavedžibaša, overseer of his coffee kitchen.
The position of an imperial marshal with special powers gave Omer Pasha the right to a large retinue he took with him to each of his residences. In addition to a hodja and his assistant, he had a bodyguard of four adjutants, two with the rank of major, six junior officers and a bandmaster; then administrative staff, a secretary, scribes, a treasurer and his assistants, whom the pasha’s physician Dr. Schram called “licensed thieves”; then coffee makers and pipe-bearers and their assistants; and numerous cooks and kitchen boys, along with the chief supply commissioner and his suppliers, then the overseer of horses, his grooms and stable boys. And, in addition to all the above, the harem, with its keeper of the harem, the haremćehaja, eunuchs and both white and black slave girls.