by Ivo Andrić
It happened that he met one of the servants, who had been given a hiding by other lads in the residence the day before, and was now bearing the bruises, barely able to stand, but not daring to complain. From some distance, the uninformed Muhsin giggled: “Up early, boy! May you always be so well and cheerful!” The lad shot him a murderous glance and turned his back on him as fast as he could, but Muhsin did not notice or understand.
One day the wife of a young officer from the headquarters, a Tartar, died in childbirth, along with her newborn son. Everyone respected his pain in silence. Knowing nothing about it and not looking at the person he was addressing, Muhsin greeted him joyfully in passing: “Greetings, be well, and your mother happy!” The officer stopped dead as if from a blow or unexpected insult. His face darkened and his fists clenched. It looked as if he was about to flatten this windbag that rolled round the corridors, cackling greetings right and left. And who knows what would have become of the cheerful Evet Effendi had the duty officer, who happened to be passing by, not dragged him by the sleeve, hissing:
“Out of the way, you old fool, can’t you see he’ll do you in!”
But five minutes later, as if nothing had happened, Muhsin was spreading smiles and greetings and laughter around him, confirming everything that people were saying, though they had not said, or even thought it.
“It’s fine, my friend! May you be well and happy! It’s fine!”
And when he chanced to come across Omer Pasha, he would shield his eyes from a distance as from too dazzling a glare, then move to one side and, crossing both arms on his chest, with bowed head and in a low voice, say:
“The light of the sun shines from you! The sun’s, no less!”
The seraskier rarely stopped, particularly if he was accompanied by his entourage, but as he passed Muhsin, he would at least slow his step. He looked down on him from a height as at a rare and amusing animal. He waved his hand, rejecting such shameless flattery, but suppressing a smile. So it was on this day too.
“You go too far, Muhsin Effendi! But do you ever call on Mustaj Bey? Go and have a chat with him and cheer him in his illness.”
“I’m on my way. How could I not? But he is not ill—heaven forbid—just a bit of a chill, may you stay safe and sound!”
The seraskier moved swiftly on, with his entourage, while Muhsin, not noticing, continued to bow and repeat:
“It’s nothing! A cold. Hot sherbet, and . . . he’ll be right as rain!”
But when he looked up and saw that no one was there, that he was talking to the air, Muhsin grew serious and looked around him, hesitantly, with a lost and sorrowful gaze. He quickly pulled himself together and continued on his way through the residence. Spreading good cheer and waves of wheezing laughter, he went straight to the large ground-floor room where the seraskier’s brother Mustaj Bey lived.
•
His name was Nikola. He was five years younger and a head taller than his famous brother, pale, with a sunken chest, thick hair and a long, neglected moustache. In his younger years he had attended different schools, military and civilian, and taken on a variety of jobs, but he completed none and achieved nothing. Already married, he set off into the wide world, stopping in Moldova, where he got work managing the estate of a landowner. This seemed to be the right place for him and it seemed that he might at last settle there. But when Omer Pasha was stationed in Bucharest as supreme commander and word about his origins spread, Nikola sought his brother out. Omer Pasha had just reached the age when a person begins to look back, to remember his beginnings and think of those close to him by blood and birth. A month later, Nikola moved to Bucharest with his only son. His wife had died at around this time. Omer Pasha listened disdainfully and absentmindedly to the brother he knew all too well, but he watched his fourteen-year-old nephew with a kind of cold affection: he was unusually like his uncle in appearance. A real Latas!
In Bucharest both father and son converted to Islam, quietly and without particular ceremony. Nikola, now Mustafa, became a military clerk in the army supply service. The boy was sent to military school in Istanbul.
Mustaj Bey spent a couple of years strutting around in his officer’s uniform and boasting about his family, but at the same time proved to be what he had always been: an idle chatterer with a vivid imagination but limited intelligence. In company with other officers he also started drinking. His tuberculosis, which had been cured, flared up again and he began to decline, dragging himself after the seraskier from place to place, like a shadow. In Sarajevo the illness spread and reached his throat, so that he could now speak only in a hissing whisper.
Even so he would sometimes parade his Ottoman refinement through Sarajevo, sober and formal, greeting people in a military manner and asking about each one’s health in a hoarse voice and always in Turkish. He swelled with satisfaction that in the eyes of the Sarajevo shopkeepers he appeared like a man who spoke Turkish perfectly, had an excellent pronunciation and chose his words well. That went on for some weeks, and then all at once he would decide to shut himself up in his room, where he had previously placed a pitcher of brandy. He did not sober up for several days, not shaving or washing, eating virtually nothing, and sleeping like an animal, in short spells of a couple of hours when he felt drowsy, wherever he happened to be.
On those days, no one was allowed into his room. He took food and water rarely and only through the half-open door, that he locked immediately afterward, hanging a heavy blanket over it. He had stuffed the only window, looking onto the garden, with cushions.
So, completely cut off and surrounded by thick walls, after just the second glass, Mustaj Bey would start to sigh and pace the room, beating his head mercilessly with his hands, until he burst into tears. When he tired of walking between his four walls, he would sit down at the small round table where a candle was burning, next to his glass of brandy and a plate of food. Here he wiped his eyes, and sat upright and stiff. His face tense, his eyes wide, the expression in them insanely piercing and fixed. He crossed himself several times and as he did so pronounced individual sentences from a “Prayer of Praise” he used to hear as a child and had largely forgotten, so now he uttered only fragments, disjointed and distorted to the point of meaninglessness, but fervently:
“Glory to the Trinity: to God the Father, to his Son and the most holy Ghost . . . Glory to the holy and life-giving cross . . . Offering prayerful prayers, to the blessed, merciful, holy Mother-of-God, the pure queen, our holy virgin maiden Mary, to her honor and glory!”
Then he raised his glass in a Slav toast:
“Now, brothers, the first glass we raise to the glory of God who fears no one. Merciful God and the Palace of Heaven have mercy on us!”
He drank to each imaginary guest in turn, but when he came to the fifth glass and the fifth guest, he grew confused and stopped. He wept with frustration that his memory was betraying him. When he had calmed down a bit, he managed to connect the text, depending more on the rhythm of the sentences than their real order and sense:
“. . . And whatever we do, let us fend off all evil and torment! Let us fear God and commit no sins! Let us remember the living and speak no ill of the dead! Let us incur no hatred and bring no shame on our honor! Let us not beg from our enemies! Let us not exploit our servants, and God save them from making the meadow their bed and ash their coverlet! Where our brother is enslaved and sorrowful, may we know him by a star and not betray him, . . . rather come to his aid. Grant, oh Lord, that every captive and unfortunate man be liberated from the curse of prison and the tyrant’s hand . . . In God’s name!”
Here he stumbled again. His face reflected a great and vain effort, the glass in his hand shook, but he managed only to remember one of the final sentences, from near the end, and he pronounced it as loudly as he could, almost shouting in his broken voice:
“And I say: ‘Slender fir tree, stretch your branches high, grant, Lord, good health to all mankind!’”
After that he bowed at the waist
and beat his head against the table, whispering unintelligibly through spasms of sobbing. The candle on the table flickered and wavered, throwing tangled shadows onto the floor and walls.
He stayed in this position for some time, then stood up. He felt weak, but composed and light; his memory seemed cleansed and bright like a landscape after rain: everything was close and clear. Other songs and toasts came back to him, this time from a wedding. He heard people singing, he would have liked to join in the song, but as he had neither the voice nor the ear for that, he simply whispered after them:
The jay shrieks out cheerfully
From the priest’s hazel tree:
Harness your oxen, priest,
Let’s all plough the fields,
Let’s sow white waving wheat;
To marry handsome Grujica
To young and lovely Milica.
That song cheered him. He filled his glass and rose, throwing back his head:
“We’ve drunk our fill of yeasty beer, now we’ll down wine and good cheer. May our hills and valleys fine nourish the abundant vine; may the soil, rich or sandy, bring us draughts of finest brandy! Good health, Omer, who stands beside me! And all you others who abide me!”
Here he paused. One word stood out from the last sentence, soaring like a meteor. Omer. Mićo, who had altered imperceptibly, changed, grown wings and soared higher than a living man could have imagined, casting everything and everyone into shadow, and notably his brother Nikola. Omer, his terrifying brother, of whom for a long time no one knew his origin or kin, his roots or his name. But now both his origin and the path he had been treading were clearly visible. It was evident that he had been what he was now from the very start, and this was what he would remain to the end of his days. Omer. The two of them had listened to this same toast at village weddings together, only each had taken it in his own way. This meant that Mićo was already Omer at that time, and it was not only when he came to convert in Banja Luka, as a young man, that he chose the name: he had carried it with him from childhood. Just in case, along with everything else he had in his rich arsenal. That came from the devilish side of man! Which meant that it was impossible to get the better of him, his game was won in advance, and to play opposite him was the same as being from the very beginning a pathetic fool. And they had been conceived from the same seed, in the same womb, born in the same house, and he is called—your brother. However, in fact, even before your birth he had devoured your portion of the cake, called the world, as well as his own.
Here his thinking faltered, unable to explain. He must run away from this man or, if he cannot escape, fight him in a battle already lost, since the one who has always been called Omer, who is supposed to be his brother, devours the people around him, without measure or end, one after another, without distinction, a rival pasha and his own brother and nephew, a rebellious Bosnian bey and a nameless Anatolian soldier. He crushes and devours everything that breathes and exists, and he is ready for anything, capable of anything, apart from one single flicker of human understanding or compassion.
This all seemed clear to Mustaj Bey, at least at this moment as he stood in the middle of the half-lit room in which there was no longer either baptismal name or wedding, no songs or toasts from his childhood, nor the power and pride of these last, Turkish, years. At this final point there was nothing. He stood there like a man who had squandered all his prospects and potential and for whom there was no longer any place in any army, any faith or any country in the world.
And how could there have been after his recent conversation with his brother, in this same room? Three days earlier, while he was lying feverish and utterly dejected, the seraskier had burst in, dismissed his entourage and standing, looking not at him but at a bare branch through the low window, asked how he was. He had tried then for one last time to speak with this uniformed vision of fluent words and almond eyes, which saw everything and looked at no one, to speak like a brother and his kin, to “open his heart” to him, as he often put it to himself, to tell him the whole truth about himself, his situation, his feelings. All his earlier attempts to do so had rebounded off the seraskier and his cold, curt question: “All right, then, so what do you want?” And his powerful brother had then proved to him that he didn’t know what he wanted, nor could he have known, for he meant nothing whatever in the world and didn’t know how to do anything or be anything. He wasn’t suited to the plough, or the saber, still less to the pen; he knew neither how to be a Christian and a subject, nor how to become a Muslim and a master; he didn’t know how to stay wisely silent nor to speak intelligently; he had neither strength nor courage, neither patience nor cunning. He was a nonentity who was good for nothing. Not even the powerful protection of a brother like this in such a position had helped him. In a word, he was—nothing.
So his own brother had brought him to the verge of annihilation, the edge of a chasm into which he had only to leap.
And it had been the same this time, only worse. The seraskier had abruptly interrupted his confused outpouring of emotions.
“I don’t see what you want. Your son is well placed and on the right path.”
“The son! But what about me, the father?”
“You? Are we going to talk about you again? You are what you are and what you have always been. I thought that with me you might change and start to make something of your life, but the years are passing and you’re still the same. And now you’re ill.”
“So what am I to do?”
“That’s what I wonder too. And I keep thinking that it would be best if you ended it.”
“What?” cried the man as if defending himself against a powerful, cold-blooded murderer with whom, weak and feverish, he was locked in this room with thick walls.
“Well, either you get well, take yourself in hand and start to work, like everyone else, and with no complaints or mad stories or talking nonsense, like a true imperial officer, or you kill yourself like a man.”
That was the end of the conversation. Holding himself upright with difficulty, Mustaj Bey tried once more to say something about himself and his troubles, but the seraskier had already reached for the handle of the door behind him. The door opened at once. Outside, two officers were standing at attention.
“Well . . . look . . . things will get better!” muttered the seraskier and, with one foot over the threshold, he gave his brother a brisk wave of the hand, while the brother, eyes lowered and drenched in cold sweat, held himself as upright as he could.
•
As soon as he had knocked on the sick man’s door, Muhsin Effendi began to shout and coo:
“Open up, Mustaj Bey, my pride and joy, open up to your friend who wishes you well!”
Some time passed before Mustaj Bey opened the door. Had Muhsin Effendi been capable of noticing anything around him, he might have seen what someone looks like at a desperate moment, when he possesses nothing in the whole wide world but the ground under his feet. However, as he was blind and insensitive to everything other than the world of his sycophantic sweet-talking and the artificial but unshakable harmony he created around himself, he noticed nothing. He sprinkled the sick man with his flattery and congratulations on looking so well.
“Mashallah, mashallah! I’ve said this before. There’s no sickness here, just a chill. A chill, nothing more! And there, just as I said, that’s all it is. Thanks be to almighty God!”
Half-dressed, haggard, unshaven, with wild hair and no voice, Mustaj Bey was not really listening to this unstoppable rattle of constant praise and acclamation, he just looked, blinking, at the tubby, pink-faced, cheery little man out of whom it clattered. At times it seemed to him that neither he nor this Muhsin existed, that they couldn’t exist, the way they were, in this place, but it was all a strange dream that some third party was dreaming about them.
Choking with satisfaction, Muhsin kept on talking about Mustaj Bey’s good health, about the greatness and fame of the unique and sublime seraskier, about the harmony and be
auty of everything, not only in this residence, but in the whole wide empire, on the earth and in the heavens. Mustaj Bey only half heard all this, while strange thoughts rose and fell in him, with the irregular flow of his blood. Should he yell furiously and at the top of his lungs—ah yes, that! yell and scream!—and drive this ridiculous fool out of his room like a mangy dog? Or should he grab him by the throat and throttle him without a word or explanation? So Mustaj Bey should be remembered, at least for something. But when the surge of blood stilled in him, he saw this Muhsin as if through a fog and—he began to pay him a little attention. No, he wouldn’t shout, nor throttle him, he wouldn’t do that, nor could he, but he would burn up in a fever or finally put an end to it all, by his own hand, here in this room. All he could do for now, was listen to Muhsin’s talk in which neither this room nor Mustaj Bey existed.
Meanwhile, Muhsin went on:
“Just another day or two and you’ll be up and we’ll go into town, among people. They keep asking about you. Where’s that clever man, they say, with his fine talk and distinguished manner and bearing? We miss seeing and hearing him.”