by Ivo Andrić
He did not ask himself how this could be or when it had begun. At first it was all new and straightforward; it seemed natural that desire should be followed by satisfaction. It was true that the girl refused to listen, that she avoided seeing him, but that would surely not be the end of it. Because it made no sense that this penniless Christian girl, whom her “aunt” had offered around the residence, was seriously resisting; in any case, her opposition could not last long. Ahmet Aga also assured him of this. And he consoled himself that it was so. But, time was passing, and she would not yield. It was incredible, but she would not! Other, better women offered themselves to the wealthy Kostake, but he cared nothing for them, while this one neither offered herself nor accepted offers. She simply wouldn’t. She didn’t want him.
“She doesn’t want me!” The words echoed in him often, and he was so full of that unintelligible, monotonous wail that it burst out of him against his will. At times he would suddenly pause in the middle of a room and say to himself and the dull silence around him:
“She doesn’t want me!”
At first, he spoke only in a whisper, but the cry was becoming ever louder, full of painful surprise and blind fury, and ever more frequent. Sometimes, in the middle of whatever he was doing or in the street, walking, he would stop with that cry on his lips, and at night too he would be woken from the deepest sleep by someone calling to him in a pitiless voice: “She DOESN’T WANT YOU!”
When he pulled himself together and with a shake of his head freed himself at least for a moment from the fire within and the mist before his eyes, he saw perfectly clearly. He did not care about the girl as such. At that moment he could not even remember her name. In fact, it was not her that he needed, but her consent. Here the fire flared once more and the spell took hold again, creating before his eyes a world he had no idea existed only a moment before. Just to master and defeat that “No!” Just to see her lying at his feet, fair-haired, vigorous and sturdy, but felled and delivered to him—and everything would be all right. Just that. But she refused.
He realized now that this strange game had started, it could not be stopped, and he was ready to increase his investment, to go to the end, to do anything. But nothing seemed to help! And that was what drove him mad, leading him to unexpected and incomprehensible thoughts and acts.
No one knew exactly what was happening to him, but it was clear he was in a state of confusion he himself could not understand. Everyone noticed that he was subdued, preoccupied, that he was beginning to neglect himself and his normal way of life, even his work. Suddenly lost himself, he began to lose more and more in the eyes of those around him. It appeared that he had abruptly sunk to the level of those beneath him at the residence, whom he had hitherto kept at a distance. Now anyone could approach him. And many did, spitefully and coarsely, exploiting his distraction, taking their revenge for his earlier arrogant bearing. They goaded him with indiscreet allusions, gave him unwanted advice, offered their services, imparted ostensibly well-intentioned information. While he, who had never wanted to converse with the “servants,” least of all about himself or his personal affairs, now received their comments, even sometimes responded to them, aware of how that demeaned him in his own eyes. Now he appeared to be dependent on everyone, while he himself was ever less necessary to others, steadily becoming the plaything of his whims and crazy chance. And his face was clearly changing.
Meanwhile, in the course of those five or six weeks, what the experienced Ahmet Aga had foreseen occurred: a buyer and master for the girl was found. Djordje the Greek.
Fadil Bey Šehović, one of the richest and most influential men in Sarajevo, who owned extensive property in land and houses, was also the collector of state taxes. His household included this Djordje Kalistrat, known as Djordje the Greek, as treasurer, the man to whom all the bey’s financial affairs were entrusted.
Officially, the post of Fadil Bey’s treasurer was held by a certain Salih Aga, a distinguished old man with a long gray beard, but his true adviser was Djordje the Greek. Born in southern Albania, a tall, handsome man of about forty, well-mannered and discreet, a spoiled gourmet, inclined to short-lived, passing affairs with women, whom he always chose carefully and paid well. He had sought out and obtained the vigorous beauty Andja. She continued to live as before with her “aunt” on Bistrik, visiting his house when he summoned her. Kostake knew about this, people at the residence made sure he did, but he still went on visiting Ivka, who accepted his gifts, keeping his hopes alive. And she really would have preferred the girl to go to him rather than Djordje, but she was powerless in the face of Andja’s obstinacy. Andja left the house whenever she knew that Master Nenishanu was coming.
Exactly the same scene would then be repeated. Ivka would intercept the girl in the doorway and grab her roughly by the arm with her scrawny fingers, hissing:
“Where are you off to, foolish girl? What harm would it do to sit with the man for a while? He won’t bite you. I’m saying this for your own good. Such a gentleman!”
But, with few words, the girl would defend herself, resisting impatiently and decisively, saying that the man had strange, mad eyes and she was afraid of him.
Ivka protested, pointing out that Kostake was a true gentleman in every way, a man of mild appearance and refined behavior, even with an old woman such as her.
“He wants one thing from you, and something else from me,” the girl replied, in her heavy, half-distinct way, and each time she succeeded in pushing her “aunt” away from the door and escaping in time.
And there was nothing for Kostake but to sit with Ivka in her damp ground-floor room, where the sofa was strewn with pieces of fabric, traces of the sewing on which the two women had been working until a moment before. The damp, the half-light, and the restricted, wretched outlook reminded him of his poverty-stricken childhood in Bucharest. And his conversation with Ivka had little connection with anything and made little sense, like a special kind of misery within the greater misery into which he had so unexpectedly fallen and into which he was sinking. Just enough for there not to be silence. Because as soon as they both stopped speaking, he had the feeling that the world was turning the wrong way up, that it had already turned, that everything in it had shifted and altered its position. And so he found himself again in his childhood from which he had spent his whole life laboriously and slowly extracting himself. He felt the full weight of his humiliation and a shamefully fatal self-pity and regret for the loss of everything he had been until recently as Kostake Nenishanu, of which there was now, by the day, ever less.
He made an effort to pull himself together, and saw Ivka sitting before him, with fingers like talons, sagging cheeks, and the pathetic, deceitful eyes of an old procuress. He talked with her pleasantly and indifferently, but it was precisely at that moment that he made a vague but firm and terrible decision as to how to get out of this whirlpool, into which he had been hurled by his chance meeting with the girl, and into which he was being dragged ever more deeply by what was happening in him and around him.
He stood up abruptly, took his leave briefly, embarrassed, and fled as if pursued.
As he went back down the steep, pot-holed Bistrik Hill, he stepped unusually fast; with last effort he forced himself not to walk faster, not to run like a man fleeing to save his life. Wherever he was and whatever he was doing, and particularly in the street, he experienced this town as a trap into which he had stupidly fallen and where all the exits were closed the instant he approached them. Then it became clear to him that the girl and his senseless need of her was not what was driving him to torment himself and do all that he was doing: it was Sarajevo, with its hills, its people and its ways. Had he been in some other town, that woman with whom he had not exchanged so much as a word would never have been able to block his path. But here, here everything seemed cursed, isolated, alien, malevolent and hopeless; and everything resembled an immense, unbelievable misunderstanding that stifled one and would stifle him before all was cle
ared up and explained and before he could regain his life with its real relations and proportions.
Seeking relief, he raised his eyes from the stony road to the bright sky in the northwest, but even here the view was closed by a bare, flat mountain that resembled a gigantic, prone female body, with naked hips, belly and breasts.
But it was as if the real torment began only once he reached home. His apartment, which he had once furnished with care and affection, which he had loved so much, now struck him as empty, blighted. Night fell, a time for sleep and rest, for those able to sleep. But either he could not fall asleep or he woke every hour, and as soon as he woke there was the “case” of the girl from Bistrik, like a tangled ball of string, and he began for the hundredth time to turn it over and over, to unravel it, but all he did was tie it ever more tightly and hopelessly.
First he asks himself a question, always the same one, coldly and collectedly: “Who and what is that girl from Bistrik to you and what do you have to do with her?” Then he tries to find a true and accurate answer, but while he is still examining the question, other things crowd into his mind, doubts, angry thoughts and unpleasant memories accompanied by a profound disgust with people and hatred of himself. And it all becomes embodied in living people and real scenes in which he has to participate, speaking loudly and making wild gestures. And, from time to time, the girl passes through that whole commotion the way she was when he first saw her at Ahmet Aga’s, in the coffee kitchen. Tall, sturdy and proud, with regular features, pale skin and thick fair hair, strong white hands and neglected un-polished nails, large greenish eyes and a gaze that bowed to no one, stopped at nothing but saw everything, and was hard and icy, unkind and merciless, as though it came from a place where kindness and mercy did not exist.
Without a word or a smile, calm and cold, yet mean and dangerous, she stands before him, so close that for a time she blocks out everything else that is happening around him, and then, just as slowly and imperceptibly she dissolves and is lost in the general bustle. But he still sees her before him, only her, and he talks over things with her without the slightest participation on her part, so that it seems she is not a real girl but a sickness he has long suffered, and which in moments such as this breaks away and attacks him like a wild animal that has at an evil hour crossed his path by mischance.
And once more, he begins to mull over his meeting with the girl, in an effort to make sense of the position he finds himself in.
It is not uncommon for people who hate one another profoundly, and spend years like that, growing old and facing death, running into each other daily, exchanging words and greetings, without ever coming into open conflict or discussing it. But it can also happen, as now with him, that you meet a creature of no particular interest or value, and you stumble against him as against a rock in the dark; and it is enough to spell utter and lasting disaster.
Well, that’s how it seems to him: until a few days ago he was happy and tranquil, and he could be again, if only this monster would vanish from sight, move out of his confused thoughts, cease to exist. But no. That girl is always there. He will not touch her nor will she touch him; even so, and without the slightest contact, she foreshadows certain destruction for him, because his having met her will break him into pieces and crush him into dust. He hardly knows her name yet never stops giving her, late at night like this, disparaging names and nicknames, all ugly, lewd words, repeating them, now silently, now at the top of his voice, until they get mixed up, entirely change their meaning and turn into cooing and desperate pleading.
Generally speaking, everything that happens to him during a sleepless night changes its name, appearance and meaning several times. Moods, too, change. There are unhoped-for and complete, almost unnatural, moments of relief that do not last long. At such moments, he can look at himself and what is pulling him apart and tormenting him through another’s eyes and see it as nothing new, or complex, or unusual. All it takes is a small effort of will: to pause for an instant, to pull himself together, to blink, and everything will disappear. That heavy female body will disperse like a tiny cloud in the summer sky. But he can’t do it. Precisely that. It would be easier, it seems to him, to dance over all the rocky mountains surrounding Sarajevo than find the strength for that life-saving blink. And so this enormous body—the body of a huge animal, sluggish but capable of unexpected and murderously swift movements—stands before him, blocking out the world and stifling his breath, preventing him, alive, from living.
And when, plagued by insomnia and endless debates, he does fall asleep, he finds neither peace nor rest. The sleep, which finally comes as deliverance, bears little resemblance to his sleep in the former good days. His everyday life is not extinguished or absent but simply shifted and distorted, so that it is doubly painful and hard to bear. He is not sure whether this is life or a bad dream or sudden, unnatural death. He dreams of a life in which an endless succession of tangled tasks and duties, demanding obligations and tight schedules stretches before him, no one helps, many hinder him, while everything is asked of him and all responsibility is his alone.
Tormented, he lies as if floating in the dark. There is space around but no place or position of his own. He has no head, or he does not know where it is, but within him someone is still thinking, for a thought whirls around him, though that thought is more opaque than fog lying low on the ground. And until just a few days ago, until yesterday, he knew a lot of things, he could grasp them, have an opinion about them, a desire to change them, perfect them or put them aside. But now, there’s nothing. Somewhere he has mislaid even his own name, indeed everything around him has lost its name and essence, form and meaning. He wants nothing now other than some trifle, different each time, a trifle characterized by being unattainable, while his life depends on it. The effort of reaching for it brings only pain. But it’s all there is, for everything else has ceased to exist.
So Kostake dreams, but the real anguish of those dreams lies in the fact that neither they nor the pain they bring belong to the world of everyday thoughts and feelings, aspirations and actions, where everything has its name, sense and justification, where the name describes something that has happened, is happening or could happen. But are his dreams worthy of a man?
For example, he dreams that he’s struggling with a window that will not close properly. However hard he shoves and shakes it, there is always a small crack of at least two or three millimeters, that’s all, but what matters is that it’s not entirely closed, and it ought to be, because a great deal, perhaps everything, depends on it. And that invisible crack lets in a thin but biting stream of cold air that cuts like a knife. He suffers for a while from both the cold and the painful thought that this isn’t as it should be and that he is the one unable to fix it and put it right because he is inept and incapable. Then he attacks the window again, sometimes with all his strength and sometimes carefully and slowly, as if wanting to outwit it, but nothing helps. Blood pounds in his head and he catches his breath, starting to choke, but the disobedient window, with its curtain of icy darkness, remains invincible.
On another occasion, he dreams that he’s going round kitchens, corridors and all ancillary rooms in the residence, just as he does on most days. All’s in order and as it should be. Fires are lit in all the stoves, luncheon is being cooked, all the servants are present and doing their work, only one thing is unusual: no one has been clearing the ash or carrying it out for several days now. This means that there’s ash all over the house, which the staff, as if blind, spread on their shoes, while a draught carries it from one room to another. Kostake is appalled by the carelessness and disorder. The serving lads, who generally endeavor to read the least of his moods from his face, and follow his every blink, are deaf to all reproaches and curses; they obey and do everything else but not this; and, with impertinent and mocking expressions, they show their all-powerful superior there’s something connected with the ash that he doesn’t know. Everyone knows, apart from him. That’s why he
is asking such a ridiculous and impossible thing from them. In a blind fury, he begins to brush and sweep, but the ash grows, shifts and escapes, like a living thing. He is frightened. This is a whole Sahara of ash, which people appear spitefully not to notice, before which he stands alone and in despair, with weary legs and arms drooping by his sides. And everything needs to be cleaned, and soon, because a lot, everything, depends on it.
The third time he dreams God only knows what, something completely mad and obscure, but the basis of these dreams is the same: a forlorn struggle with the unknown and powerful laws of matter and despair at his inability to master and vanquish them.
And when he wakes, the waking comes as salvation. Considerable time passes before he disentangles himself from such a dream and manages more or less to collect and calm himself. Then he sits for a long time on his bed and, wide-awake, with stomach cramp, gathering and reassembling the shipwrecked pieces of the previous day and, as earlier in his dream, has trouble recognizing himself. He cannot believe that he is the man who had gone to that steep, impoverished part of town, with its rutted cobbles, its dilapidated houses, that he had passed unruly tongue-tied children as they played between two rows of windows with inquisitive, brazen faces following his every movement as if they would have to bear witness the following day. He cannot believe he crouched sniveling in that damned room, in the company of that vile, repulsive old woman. And seething, he swears that the very next day he will settle accounts with himself and the gigantic girl looming up before him like a mountain, which he must either cross or bypass, even at the cost of his life.