Omer Pasha Latas

by Ivo Andrić

  In those years the new Omer grew and took shape. A man trusted by the sultan, whose name endured as a fearful symbol in the regions he had subdued through his campaigns, but still more through bloody reprisals, deception and terror, torture and killings. Now he was able to give free rein to both his great passions and his trivial wishes. In the course of a few years, nothing remained of the humble, withdrawn, chaste and restrained officer from the military school. He no longer remembered those educated and pious people with whom he had associated in his first years in Istanbul and from whom he had learned so much, still less all that had preceded it. He cast it from him like a snake its skin. And now, borne by fame of a kind that only military successes bring, he strode through the bloodied country which, unpredictably and unexpectedly, was called Turkey but which entirely corresponded to the land of his childhood dreams.

  Greeted everywhere as a victorious conqueror, he acquired the habits of wealthy Ottoman potentates. And it happened rather suddenly, as though they had been slumbering in him and had now abruptly awoken. And just as at one stage in his life everything had simply been a step in his ascent, now all living beings, all wealth, all human institutions existed only as instruments of his power and reputation or sources of his pleasure. And that power, in all its aspects, and those pleasures of all kinds merged, inextricably woven into a single whole: the lordly life lived by at most a few dozen people in the highest echelons of this empire in decline. In that world of blood, force, risk and luxury, drink, hunting, debauchery, games, vanity and greed, he moved freely and boldly as if born to it and grown up in it, but without losing anything of his fresh energy, decisiveness and alacrity in military and political affairs, nor in the defense of his interests and position.

  •

  And when, two years later, in Istanbul, he was entrusted with the mission to subdue Bosnia and Herzegovina with military force, as he had subdued so many other regions, he felt a new and great excitement. It meant seeking the starting point of the triumphant circle he had traced in these last twenty-four years. A new success there would confirm once more his victory over his own destiny and his greatness, which no one any longer denied him. That thought made his heart miss a beat, and after a long painful pause, it began to pulse in an unpleasantly accelerated and hitherto unknown rhythm.

  Just such an uneven heartbeat roused him now from his recollections and jolted him out of his position of motionless model. Awoken, the seraskier heard the English nautical clock in the next room chime and he abruptly rose.

  “Enough!”

  He spoke the word curtly, like a military command, with that oriental lack of consideration that expresses in the briefest possible way what is wanted and required of others. The word was directed at all his abundant memories, bright and dark, at the insidious wild beating of his heart, and at the ticking of metallic hours; perhaps least of all at the painter in front of whom he was sitting and whom he had forgotten. But Karas gave a start, as if at a rough blow. Cast suddenly out of the trance in which he had been catching the wavy lines and tones of color on his model, he flared, inwardly, with a ready response: “You may have had enough, you blind Turkish saber, but then so have I, of you and of painting, and of this world. Enough!”

  He did not, of course, utter a word, but in that instant he finished his work with one last sharp and angry stroke of his paintbrush, which then, unexpectedly woven into the dark cloth of the seraskier’s uniform, remained forever in it as the expression of his impotent anger and the young man’s silent answer to the insulting “enough!”

  THE PICTURE

  THE PAINTER had caught sight of Hajrudin Pasha, the civil governor, only in passing on a couple of occasions, and only once seen him from close to and been able to observe his face for a few moments, but it seemed to him, when he closed his eyes, that he would be able to paint him with no difficulty, faithfully and fully. The picture was there, behind his closed eyelids. A white face, with no specific expression. A schematic human face, covered by a mask woven from dark shadows that moved with him. Sometimes hints of human emotions could be glimpsed on that mask—dissatisfaction, contentment, impatience—but at the same time it was so insubstantial that the pasha’s real face could be seen clearly through it, immobile as the face of a statue or a drowned man, lying in calm, clear water, in the moonlight. The pasha was in the habit of passing his left hand, in a short, slow, tranquil movement, over his chin, his forehead, or his whole face, so that it looked as if he was checking or adjusting that airy mask. And those were the only movements made by this tall, well-proportioned man with green eyes and gray beard and moustache. Otherwise, everything was done with little movement or speech. Just short, curt decisions, orders or judgments. The way they were applied or implemented was also as brief as possible, and once again followed by silence and oblivion. Then new orders. He was born to give orders and judge. That was the only way he knew how to live, that was the only way he could exist, through the power of his will and his ability to impose it on others.

  One could presumably meet people like this, the painter continued to reflect, among Ottomans, in the higher military and administrative positions. Centuries of waging war and giving orders had created such men, left them with that directness of thought, speed of judgment and lightning decisions, indisputable and unquestionable. Over the generations, the habit of commanding and judging must have passed into their blood, and it would endure as long as they did. In the current times and circumstances, all that briskness, hardness and cold pride had long since ceased to correspond to the power of the government they represented or general conditions in Turkey and the world. It looked like a bulky, old-fashioned costume, which these people were destined to wear, more as a mark of their weighty inheritance than proof of real power and genuine nobility. But still, it was not without a certain heavy grandeur, with which an individual had constantly to come to terms.

  Karas was able to read many such things and still stranger ones in Hajrudin Pasha’s face, which he now carried within himself and on which he saw everything down to the most minute details and most hidden traits. He saw it all so clearly and understood it so well that it was no longer the remembered face of a man but an already complete picture of that face, not on canvas, but in the half-light behind his closed eyelids. It already contained those charmed, precious elements, which at a given moment erased the differences between an object and its image, which are only gathered together and realized through exceptionally lengthy observation, great labor and effort. And that frightened and worried him. He knew from experience that it was a bad sign. For whenever, after even a brief observation, a “finished” painting of an object, person or landscape came into being for him, apparently perfect, finished and fully expressed, eloquent and vivid, so that he no longer felt any further need to work on it, it meant that he had been deceived and had strayed from his course, that every attempt to transfer that image onto canvas was doomed to fail and would never be created. On the other hand, when an object left a deep but indistinct impression on him, an incomplete and unfinished “dumb” picture that needed a lot more work before it would eventually come to life on the canvas, then there was hope that something would result, comprehensible to everyone.

  Unfortunately, as the years passed, there were ever more portraits that had come into being within him as of their own accord and that he now carried in the depths of his vision. He could summon them and look at them whenever he wished, and contemplate the destiny of those they represented. In short, he could do everything except return them to the state they had been in when he first laid eyes on them. And, most tragic of all, he could not make of them even an ordinary picture, still a less perfect one, that would be accessible to everyone.

  Strange and unnatural was that talent of his for apparent creation at lightning speed and premature realization, and also damaging and fateful for his life and work. These were not births but miscarriages. Something like an undiagnosed disease. And it kept happening: as soon as he took a bett
er look at a face or observed it for a slightly longer time, he saw through it to its depths, its core and origin, then he placed it, captured like that, encompassed and “read,” swiftly and impatiently in his internal gallery of pictures that was constantly growing. Nor was it easy to live with that ghostly collection of pictures that had come into being inside him, to drag around dozens, hundreds of faces, landscapes and objects that woke him at night, did not let him sleep and drove him to carry on long, confused conversations with them about people and their joys or torments, about the past or the present, or about future days and years, and the forms of life they carried with them. And they would often spring up before him during the day and confuse him in the middle of a conversation, so that in the eyes of the people he was talking to he sometimes appeared deranged and eccentric, which he was not.

  But at the same time, his studio was empty, with just a few paintings he had begun and left unfinished, while there was a far larger number of those, which, long since complete but invisible to the human eye, filled his “inner” gallery.

  So he carried within himself this unhealthy abundance of unreal creation, like a curse and a great, incomprehensible torment of his life.

  SAIDA AND KARAS

  WHEN HE was first led into Saida Hanuma’s apartment, in the pasha’s harem, the painter was surprised to find that most of the furnishings were European. The traditional copper dishes and oriental textiles looked like mementos of a journey to the East.

  After waiting for a while in an antechamber, he was escorted into a spacious room, where an even greater surprise awaited him.

  Saida Hanuma was sitting at a baroque writing desk in a sumptuous pale green silk dress in the Viennese style. From the wide crinoline the upper half of her body rose like a strange bouquet of fruit and flowers: slender waist, décolleté, perfectly sculpted shoulders, straight smooth neck, her face with a soft blush and the hint of a golden glow trembling over it like a smile; a fashionable hairstyle, with a center parting and her thick hair, from light blond to fiery red, caught up and skillfully entwined. Flowers on her breast and in her hair.

  All that, like the living bust of a china doll, turned itself slightly toward him and held him stock still in the doorway. What really held him there was the look in the woman’s eyes. At first hidden by their wide, pale lids, they appeared almost blind, but then the lids rose, not with a swift and habitual automatic movement, but slowly and solemnly, through a special, meaningful act of will, like two curtains lifting over a unique scene. Her eyes were revealed, with alternating flashes of a cold gleam and living fire, with a pearl of moisture on the surface and hard dry gold in their dark depths. Who knows whether those eyes really looked, whether they saw what was happening in front of them? But it was certain that, like an unexpected vision, they startled anyone seeing them for the first time.

  She offered him a seat on a delicate chair and called to someone in the next room in a strangely youthful, quivering voice. A thin woman appeared, also dressed in European style, leading a young girl by the hand. She was about twelve, small, pale and unremarkable, submerged in brightly colored Turkish clothes and jewelry.

  That is how it began. Anemic, moody and low-spirited, the girl accepted the painter’s instruction indifferently, but she made reasonable drawings of the cardboard geometric models he placed before her. She even displayed a genuine interest in moving on to free drawing. But she did it with disdainful calm, as if she wished to show the foreigner that none of it was difficult or important.

  While the girl drew, Saida Hanuma conversed with the painter. She asked him about Rome and the art galleries in Italian cities. Karas spoke animatedly, not taking his eyes off her face, which entranced him, at the same time thinking of his own insignificant, wretched appearance. And these two so contradictory but parallel states existed in him, oppressing him like an invisible, private burden. The more he trembled in fear and suffered, the more he felt the need to talk.

  He spoke enthusiastically and confidently about individual paintings and painters, sculptors and music, about buildings, parks and streets, citing details he had not been aware of until then, ideas and judgments which came to his head at that moment. And when he returned to his damp room, he shivered as in a fever, wondering when and how he had seen the Rome he talked about to the beautiful woman so eloquently as though reading it from her eyes.

  Throughout his life, he had never been able to assess his relationship to the people around him, clearly or at the right time. He was unable to determine or confirm either what connected him to them or what divided him from them. And even when he did manage it, he could not find the strength or decisiveness to draw any conclusions or to hold consistently to what he had once seen and decided. This gave rise to many difficulties in his life.

  The drawing lessons in the presence of Saida Hanuma became for him both a true heaven and the greatest torment of his life. Heaven lay in the warm, safe room in which a woman of great beauty sat and conversed with him. The unexpected realization of an enduring dream. And the torment was in the infinite distance that separated him from that woman, which was greater and more hopeless than the distance of one planet from another, though he refused to acknowledge this and kept forgetting it.

  None of this was new to Karas. It was an old game in a somewhat different form. He knew well this intoxication with beautiful well-born ladies with whom fate brought him face to face, in a closed, heady space, with an easel between him and the woman. It came on like an epileptic fit and, from the outset, he could see its course and its end. He had been through it several times, and always his self-deception resulted in shame, disappointment and loss, sometimes driving him to the brink of suicide.

  It was always a tangle of misunderstanding, deception and self-delusion. There was something about his appearance, his way of approaching people and engaging with them that attracted the wealthy and socially higher classes. They saw him just as they imagined an artist: harmless, awkward, nondescript and poor, but talented, capable of creating for them something that no one else could create, and that they needed. His presence was almost imperceptible, he was so gentle and self-effacing, yet he brought something strange and exciting into their lives. His work was conscientious and inexpensive. And at the end of it, this pitiful and interesting artist vanished at the appointed time like smoke, without a trace, leaving behind him something of enduring worth for the whole family—a valuable work of art, a splendid and true representation of the lady of the house or her daughter.

  But things did not always turn out that way with this painter.

  Through good fortune or the intervention of a patron he would be given the opportunity to paint a wealthy or noble woman, or her daughter. Grateful to his destiny, he began work, humbly and in a focused manner. But as soon as he had been alone with his model for a while, things would follow the same pattern. At first a feeling of terrible, cold distance and loneliness, which numbed his fingers and clouded his eyes. That did not last long. Slowly and steadily the atmosphere, and he too, would begin to change. With each stroke of his brush, an invisibly fine but strong, strange and close connection would be forged between him and his model, and with it grew his illusion, intoxicating and deranging. As though under the influence of a drug, the established, firm relations that divide people one from another would disappear. The painter forgot everything that was, seeing ever more clearly what was not and never could be, feeling it ever more forcefully as the only, enchanting reality. He forgot where he was, in what part of the world, in what part of town, in whose house; he forgot himself, who he was, what his name was and how he looked, seeing only the woman before him. She filled his entire field of vision, unique, irresistible. In one breath and flame, all the women of this world, either dreamed or real, vanished, leaving only this one, here, within his reach, sitting in front of him and at the same time taking shape on the canvas. As the painting progressed, it seemed to him that the woman opposite him was becoming ever closer and more beautiful, her stilln
ess like unconditional surrender. She existed and breathed only for him. She had no name or family, no past or future. All her outer and inner charms were revealed, ripening and growing here, before him, entirely and only in connection with his long-hidden needs and expectations. He was able to see through her as through air and to plunge into her as into water. An inconceivable miracle was being created: the woman, the painter and the painting he was creating—became one. He was all this, and it was his.

  With the last brush stroke, sometimes even before, the illusion was complete. And it was around then that its abrupt and definitive end came, with all the horror and shame in its wake. A senseless endeavor to take what was offered him, his inevitable clash with reality, and then: scandal, the fury and contempt of his all-powerful employers, the painter’s sudden sobering and flight from the sneering face of reality, as it returned vengefully to claim its rights.

  In this case, it was not a matter of painting the portrait of the beautiful woman, there was no prospect of that, but symptoms of the same sickness surfaced here too, in his conversations with the seraskier’s wife. Familiar, wonderful and terrible, the sickness was there at times, then it seemed to subside, while he defended himself desperately with the last efforts of his consciousness, though aware that his defense was just part of its inexorable victory.

  Saida Hanuma did not attend every drawing lesson and did not always stay from the beginning to the end. Whenever she did not come, Karas was overcome with such a sense of sadness and desolation that he wondered what he was doing there and why he needed the company of this young girl and her nursemaid who was so reticent she seemed dumb. But when Saida Hanuma appeared, everything would come to life and their conversation would take off along unexpected lines, full of bold images and fantasies, and unspoken, painful self-denial. But she came and went unpredictably and capriciously. She did not always dress as formally as on the first day. It might happen that she burst in quite unexpectedly, in a light-gray house-dress with long swaying skirts and sleeves, her thick hair loose like a penitent or a creature seeking and not finding a place for herself. She would sit for a while, her eyes lowered, her hands clasped and fingers clenched, then suddenly rise and depart like a fury, without a word of farewell, leaving behind her a cold wind and feeling of intense awkwardness.