by Ivo Andrić
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The boy had only just turned nine. Slender as a spindle, deeply tanned like a charred log, he was lying in tall ripening grass, on his back, seeing nothing but the blue sky above. On the canvas of that deep sky, seen from that unusual position, the upright stems of grass around his head formed a whole virgin forest of gigantic, densely woven trunks. That was how one ought to observe the world, and it was only from that perspective that he wished to observe it, and so lose sight of his home and the plot of land around it, forget the world that surrounded him. In that world, his father was a low-ranking military administrator, a Feldvebel, a taciturn and withdrawn man who did not mind a glass of something, with a meager salary and a house full of children watched over by his illiterate but bright and resourceful wife. Their house was in every way a peasant house, their smallholding negligible. In that world Mićo looked after Zekulja, the only cow the household owned, and, for the time being, that was his life. There was nothing else before or after, no memory or hope. And that was little, wretchedly little, offensively simple and unseemly. It was possible to submit to such a state of affairs, because that was the way things were, but it was not possible to be reconciled to it. That was why he resisted, seeking salvation in the unusual vistas that opened up as he lay stretched out on the grass, while the warm earth under his shaved head and the clear sky filling his eyes created broad territories for great exploits and a different life, the only one worthy of being lived.
This was the best way for the boy to escape from what was and get closer to what ought to be, but there was also every chance the cow would wander off and do some damage and he would be blamed and punished for it. That happened often. But then he would again seek to escape from his sense of guilt and the humiliation of punishment in those distant landscapes that only he knew, where there was no grazing and no cow, no guilt and no punishment, or rather, where others grazed cows, while he judged the guilty and meted out punishment. That escape was, of course, only temporary, because he felt that as long as he remained here, the way he was, he would always be both guilty and punished. That could not easily be changed. Which was why he had to escape from the world he was born into, the one surrounding him, and search for the real one, the one that suited him.
For the time being escape was possible only in one direction, through the “rain forest” of tall stemmed grasses with seed heads on their tips, which swayed above his face like palms—into the deep blue, distant expanses of the sky.
Often on these summer days, there is a thin, white wisp in the sky, the remains of a dance of night clouds. It is barely visible, but the boy senses in it an unintelligible sign or a mysterious letter. Perhaps this is where the key that will open up a different kind of life is hidden? That sign written on the sky must be saying something. It would be hard, hard and impossible, to accept the idea that this eloquent, mysterious pattern is not intended as a message, personally for him, that it means nothing at all, that its shape is the product of an aimless game of nature, and that it’s there by chance, like a tuft of wool left by a passing sheep on a bush by the road, or like a dark stain in white dust made by water spilt from an overflowing jug. No, no, that couldn’t be! It must mean something, and, if so, what? He’d learned to read by the time he was five and this summer he has also finished a German primer, but it seems that the alphabet he learned at school doesn’t have all the letters, and the missing ones are precisely the most important. And so he torments himself and loses himself in guessing and imagining all sorts of things. All his thoughts and all his attention are taken up by this. None of it brings a solution, but it completely erases, at least for a while, the family house on its barren land, along with all that lives within it, the few familiar, scrawny fruit trees, the same eternally gray, rocky vista everywhere. This enables him to think of all he has as a memory, to transform what he cannot remove into the past, and so free himself from its weight.
At other times these strange celestial vistas inspire him to free himself from that burden in another way. He bestows new names on all the living creatures and inanimate objects around him. Since he cannot alter their content, shape or place, he changes their names: the cow Zekulja, the horse Šarov, the village Janja Gora, and his little brother Nikola are liberated from their wretched, crude names and acquire new, enthralling ones which, at least for a moment, elevate them, transform them and make them worthy of the landscapes he is now looking at and the great, free and brilliant life that he lives in those landscapes. Those names have no connection with familiar, threadbare words: they come from a different language, from another world. They are new, fantastic combinations of syllables that constantly change their harmonies, their sheen and their patterns, and which he hides, like precious stones, not showing them to anyone under any circumstance, because he feels that in contact with people from the village they would be suddenly extinguished and silenced, and he would be left ashamed and humiliated.
For the boy these are all means and possibilities to distance himself from what is and come closer to what ought to be, which sooner or later has to be, but which is not yet here, and just might never be. For sadly, these means and possibilities are uncertain. Because it’s not possible to lie forever stretched out in the grass, and the sky isn’t always clear and blue, with cobwebby wisps of cloud like unusual letters and indistinct but important messages. The day clouds over or it gets dark or you are suddenly summoned and sent off on some other errand.
And when they call you—at least so it seems—it’s always at the most critical or the best moment. You are conquering a castle. As in a folk song or the stories in the Almanach. Shooting, smoke, trumpets blasting, shouting, cries of pain. Everything is going well. He knows the castle’s weak point, he’s been given a plan of all the fortifications. It’s only the tallest bastion that’s resisting, high and well defended, and unsuitable for full artillery fire. It’s at such moments that you have to take personal leadership. You leave your secure, elevated command position, go down among the infantry, becoming for a moment small and invisible. You mingle with your soldiers where the danger is greatest. You draw your saber and shout something that means “forward!” but sounds different, more beautiful, and is spoken only once in a lifetime anywhere in the world. And you set off in front of your men over the rock and rubble of the shattered bastion, through smoke and dust and the whine of bullets.
For just a moment, you’re alone, in front of all the others, but then immediately afterward the troops your word has set in motion catch up and overtake you. Now they’re carrying you, leaving you behind and, winged, flying, like an arrow you’ve released, aiming straight for its target.
And precisely at that moment you hear your mother’s voice, increasingly sharp and clear:
“Mićo! Mićo!”
The soldiers are on top of the bastion, they can be heard cheering; he leaps from stone to stone, catching up with them. The victorious cheers bear him on, but that other voice merges with them ever more loudly and clearly:
“Mićo! Mićo! Devil take you, can’t you see where your cow is?”
And that voice drowns out everything, totally destroys the defeated bastion, overwhelms the triumphant cries of his army and, in the end, scatters that army, along with its victory and all its equipment. Nothing can withstand that voice. Only the unfortunate commanding officer is still there.
Above him, he sees a little sky with a white sign that no longer means anything and the tangle of “rain forest” around him that has become again ordinary meadow grass. He doesn’t feel like getting to his feet and re-entering that hated life, but the voice keeps on cursing and calling. Not to hear it any more, the boy gets up.
Blinking in the sun’s glare, he saw his mother shouting from the highest point of their yard, calling him a coward and lazybones. Him! A seething anger shot through him so suddenly that it erupted from his mouth, nose and eyes. And standing in the grass up to his waist, he raised his right hand with clenched fist in the direction of the call, but n
ot looking that way, and furiously, bitterly, without word or sound, he cursed the life that was no life, that didn’t let him live. He lowered his head and set off, blindly, in the direction of the merciless shouting from the yard.
He felt duped, betrayed, insulted, humiliated. He had been robbed of his ultimate effort and achievement: his triumphant gaze from the captured bastion at his army shouting for joy from all the lower fortifications, waving their arms and rifles and throwing their caps in the air. As on a painting he had seen in the Almanach! Instead, he headed off to drive Zekulja out of their neighbor Stojan’s meadow. He walked with bowed head and would walk like that for the rest of the day.
His perspective was altered abruptly and completely. All he could see was what he didn’t want to see and didn’t care for: his house or school, familiar people and ordinary things. And he saw and heard them. Because faced with his home and village it wasn’t only battles, castles and victories that vanished, but also all those rich, daring new words, invented in moments of joy, they too now lost their sheen and power, becoming stunted, withering, merging with each other, sinking into insignificance and oblivion. They left behind nothing but mild shame and bitterness, and in their place came once again the names and designations to which the people and objects in the house and village were condemned for life, all those words, sickeningly familiar and humdrum, to which he would never feel close or reconciled, as he would not to the beings and things they denoted.
And so he is back again where he was at the start of his flight into the heights and distance, the boy he had always been, on the old, familiar and unbearable stage of his village life.
For a time he accepts this as inevitable, he acts and talks like everyone around him. That lasts for hours, for days. But during that time, bit by bit, his will to resist grows. He does not himself know how or when, but all at once he is resuming his rise, and, when he sees this, he realizes that it started long ago. He is crawling upward again like an insect on a stem. Whoever really wants to flee can turn anything into a means of escape. If there is no summer, no grass for the imagination to transform into a rainforest, nor clear sky with vague intimations of his real personage and future greatness, there is the night. The night, when everything is shrouded in darkness, when people move out of each other’s sight and, overcome with weariness, lie down, close their eyes and abandon themselves and their consciousness and all their hopes and tasks to sleep. Then it is possible to stay awake and, with closed eyes, build new pictures of a different life.
Perhaps the destinies of peoples and countries, the origins of many human joys and woes, are conceived here, behind the closed eyelids of youngsters like this one, in nights of burning sleeplessness.
What exploits and achievements there were in those nocturnal visions! When he was finally overwhelmed by sleep, those visions, whose main colors, gold and red, sprang from his own blood, would merge with images from his dreams, again all filled with flight and falling. And when he woke at last with the light of day and saw the people in the house around him, it took him a long time to come to himself, to recognize those faces, understand what they were saying and to utter a word that they could understand.
The school he attended on sufferance and which seemed to him for the first two years just as unappealing, shabby and empty as his own home, later became his best means of escape forward and upward.
An average pupil in writing and reading, the boy suddenly showed a gift for arithmetic. In fact, he put the teacher at a slight disadvantage. He solved every problem speedily and easily, and, still holding the chalk in his hand, looked the teacher in the eye, as though anticipating the real problems that had yet to come.
The teacher used him as an example, saying to the pupils who grasped things more slowly:
“Mićo will leave you all behind.”
This pleased him and it meant that he suddenly found school enjoyable. But not for long, for he quickly solved his own problems and those of his classmates, and then, with nothing to do, dissatisfied, he felt that it was not only his friends he was leaving behind, but the whole school, including the teacher. And having advanced a long way ahead, he would always have to come back, sit down at his desk again and solve problems that appeared from the outset clear and familiar, and which had nothing to do with the main thing: his appearance and bearing and his place among people where that would be decided, once his personage and position were finally formed.
All that was bitter and dreary and made him feel constantly not only bored and angry but worthless, that he was wasting his time.
Even so, for the time being this was where he found the best available way to create as much space and distance as possible between himself and his contemporaries, his fellow villagers. Through mathematics and geometry. The teacher would say, not only to his father, but to the whole village and anyone who wanted to listen, that it would make God Himself weep if this Mićo, a marvel of a child, remained in the village and could not continue his education.
“What he’ll be like otherwise, in character and behavior, I can’t yet say, I’m unsure, but in arithmetic and geometric drawing, this boy will go far, if only he isn’t held back by our prevailing circumstances.”
The tall, thin teacher, who spoke in a deep voice muffled by a thick moustache, existed for Mićo only because of his high opinion of Mićo’s talent, that and nothing else. Otherwise, he despised him as a part of everything that he must abandon in order to move far away, upward.
And he did abandon it all, but not until the second year after he completed elementary school, when his father was able, finally, to send him to the high school in the neighboring town of Gospić. He stayed there only one year, until he was accepted as a cadet on a scholarship in the military school in Zadar. That transition from Gospić to Zadar was the biggest step up in his rise to date. He abandoned the barren rock of his homeland, which would always remind him of his lowly, impoverished beginnings, replacing it with the ancient, important coastal town, where the administrative center and military command of the whole of Dalmatia were situated, and where rich and powerful people lived.
The sea, that bounteous, mysterious element, and the dignified, majestic architecture of the town, the pale-faced, proud beauties, daughters of Zadar patrician families, the mild climate and soft blue of the southern sky, all these had no meaning for him as such: they were all simply symbols of his rise, his flight upward from his lowly origins.
He mastered the language of Zadar society, Italian, with unbelievable speed, provoking admiration among his teachers and envy among his schoolmates. The envy of his contemporaries never worried him: it was a motivating force, the most favorable wind in his sails. He did not gradually acquire the language through instruction, like the other cadets, but suddenly spoke it. It was as if the dark-skinned youth, older and sturdier than his contemporaries, was simply recalling something he had once known perfectly rather than learning a foreign language from scratch.
The mathematics teacher, Captain Kramer, a misanthropic bachelor, his face lost in a short, bushy black beard, would stand in amazement before his student, as before a discovery, foreseeing a glittering career for him in the highest ranks of the military engineering profession.
In view of all this, he was not unduly bothered by the fact that he was the poorest of the cadets, almost the only one who didn’t receive any help from home, or gifts on festive occasions, but fed and clothed himself solely from the scholarship he received. Needless to say, the food was inadequate and it was clear that the “regulation” clothing, underwear and cutlery were not worthy of him. But he calmly observed his more fortunate companions buying cakes and fruit, wearing shoes and trousers ordered from the town tailors and shoemakers, using their own silver cutlery for their meals, wiping their noses with batiste handkerchiefs and soft towels sent by their genteel mothers, rather than the cheap, rough ones from the school store. He would not grace them with his envy, because he knew that it was temporary and that he would be compensated,
paid and repaid for it, when his day came to settle accounts with life, a day just as sure and certain as all these days of work and denial. There was something pleasant rather than painful in postponing that day which was becoming all the sweeter the more slowly it approached. But still, the young man did often feel hurt and bitter. Not to be left out of everything, he had sometimes to get into debt, to ask his father for a small sum, to demean himself by depending on those he despised.
He was already in the fourth year of his studies. A well-developed young man, with ascetic shining eyes, a hooked nose, and a black moustache over sensuous lips. Both self-aware and amiable, he was not only the best student in his year but he knew more about people and their relationships than could be expected of someone of his age and experience. He watched with calm indifference as his companions struggled with difficulties in their studies, which did not exist for him, but from which they would probably not be free even in later life. He listened distractedly to the monotonous and constant praises of his teachers. He no longer stood with fear and respect before either the architecture of the coastal town or before its patricians and their beautiful daughters. He now knew all he needed to know, and saw it as a landscape left behind at a turning on his path. Neither did his financial difficulties, of which there were ever more, alarm him. He now contemplated the rank of Fähnrich as the final step he must achieve as soon as possible.
And it was precisely then that he was dealt an unforeseen blow that knocked him back, to below the starting point of his rise.