Omer Pasha Latas

by Ivo Andrić

  Mustaj Bey now listened more carefully, surprised. Could that be? Could anyone think and say such things about him, even if only as a lie and flattery? Muhsin carried on, ever more brightly. In the army too, he said, among the officers, everyone missed their good friend who knew how to give orders and organize things, to command and joke. They were all keen to have him back. And, who knows, perhaps behind half-open shutters some girl’s or widow’s eyes had once observed the seraskier’s handsome brother passing in the street, and were now waiting to catch sight of him again and be glad.

  Mustaj Bey listened, ever more attentively. And, he wondered, could that be? This Evet Effendi was indeed a doddering, crafty fool, but must everything he said be a lie? Couldn’t at least some of it, by chance, be true? In the end, even a person who lies and flatters, even he tries to make what he is saying as close to the truth and as plausible as possible. It is possible for lies and flattery, while remaining what they are, unwittingly to illuminate a thing. Here he was being spoken about like a living being. And all else set aside, that was what mattered. Why did the seraskier’s harsh words and all his black thoughts from this suffocating room have to be true and real, while all Evet Effendi said was lies and craziness? That brother of his, the seraskier, was in a position where he didn’t need to choose words and he didn’t do so, and for the most part he didn’t think about the person he was talking to or about what he was saying. His own greatness stood in the way. In the end, suppose he was the most unfortunate man who had not altogether stopped being Nikola, still less become Mustaj Bey! That might be true, but did it mean that it must always be so? It was true that tonight he couldn’t see a way out, but that didn’t mean that he would not glimpse one the next day. It was true that he was feverish and his voice hoarse, but were not other people sick and yet they lived, eminent and respected? Might not new possibilities and unexpected paths to continued life open up before a man who had looked into the abyss of suicide?

  Muhsin Effendi went on talking and embroidering, but Mustaj Bey was not listening any longer, he didn’t need him anymore, he was thinking ever more brightly that he would banish all his black thoughts and visions, apply himself to getting well, and step out among people where there was room for everyone, and presumably also for him. In the end, that’s how they parted. Muhsin, smiling and beaming, poured out his favorable predictions, while Mustaj Bey looked at him from a height and patted him protectively on the shoulder, while he had neither heard nor listened to his words, preoccupied with his own thoughts of how he would meet people, what he would say to whom, and what attitude he would take to each one personally, but especially to the seraskier who was after all his brother, of the same blood. And he felt the strength that had come to him from somewhere would be sufficient for this, and all he wanted now was to get started.

  SUMMER

  SUMMER, that good season, had begun. But the times were such that people found it hard to believe that in this, one thousand eight hundred and fifty-first year, in the confines of this small town, anything called summer could ever materialize.

  It was a whole year since the seraskier Omer Pasha had come to Bosnia and Herzegovina, with the army, to carry out the imperial reforms: to introduce a more modern administration, equality of citizens regardless of faith, order and security. And, as he himself put it, he had come with fire and sword to subdue and break all who had been resisting the reforms for years, secretly or openly, in every conceivable way. The summer was unusual and difficult. So unusual and difficult that even the Austrian consul general Atanacković, who believed that nothing could ever surprise him again, who thought that he knew Bosnia and its seasons and that nothing about them could amaze him, had to admit that he was looking at what was happening around him this summer with a new emotion in which there was a degree of both surprise and wonder. He observed the summer that was beginning to turn green and lush. It was, in turn, sunny and wet, which should have meant for Bosnia good and fruitful but was instead ghostly and silent; everything was turning green and growing, only people were suffering and dying, and even those who had been spared withdrew and shrank like wilting plants.

  He chanced to meet a man, a prominent leader. He greeted him and, considerately avoiding any other topic of conversation, said just a word or two about the rain or the fine weather and the prospects of a good harvest, but the man lowered his gaze and avoided a clear response.

  “Yes, promising. . .quite. . .”

  The man was so anxious and fearful that he would not say anything specific even on such a topic but did not dare say nothing. He struggled to find two or three words of which he was certain meant nothing and did not oblige him to anything but still cost him dear. These people had never been quick to speak or sincere when talking to a stranger, but now the time had come when it was impossible to speak even about the weather.

  What had been happening over the last year in Bosnia and Herzegovina had occupied everyone’s attention and stifled all other interests, worries and fears, even the most natural. No one took any notice of the season, or what kind of harvest was promised, but everyone listened or passed on in a whisper talk about the seraskier and his army, which was roaming through the country and not only crushing all resistance and any sign of revolt but provoking them even where there had been none, only to suppress them.

  The consul general was not exaggerating when, at the beginning of June, he wrote to Prince Schwarzenberg in Vienna that the town of Travnik where he was based resembled a prison. The consul was a man who feared nothing in life so much as being mistaken in his assessment of things, and shunned nothing so much as exaggeration and overblown expression. And, true to himself, in this judgment he was not exaggerating: the comparison of the main town to a prison, which did not in fact originate with him but with his interpreter Plehaček, was no picturesque phrase but a simple fact. Not only in Travnik but in several other larger Bosnian towns people could be divided into three groups, unequal in size, but sharing the same wretchedness: prisoners, those who pursued and guarded them and silent, impotent onlookers.

  When there was no longer any space for them in the Travnik fortress, the arrested beys, agas and members of the ulema were locked in the barracks, while the army displaced the citizens from their homes, so they were becoming somehow secondary and barely visible. In the old fortress on the hill, the prisoners were crammed into deep cells or else they slept, chained and guarded, on its stone courtyard. And during the day the fortress spilled out like an overflowing stone container, so the streets were filled with prisoners, the chains clanking on their legs as they cleaned out gutters and dragged stone for pavements or public buildings.

  Prisoners had worked in the town before, but there had never been so many of them and they were never of this kind. Previously the prisoners were people used to physical work, but they were now beys and members of the ulema, high dignitaries and prominent nobles. They worked with downcast eyes, moving in unaccustomed ways, in clothes unsuited to such a place or task. When they were arrested, many of them had put on the best clothes they had, heavy baize and fine fur, not knowing where they were being taken or where they would spend the winter, if they survived that long. And now they looked doubly pathetic as they dragged stone and dug earth, in their fleece-lined coats and thick baize trousers in the middle of summer. But they had to do that, because if they took anything off and moved just a step away, it vanished as if by magic. The Anatolians guarding them stole whatever they could, and no one dared ask any questions about what had gone missing.

  As is usually the case, people were attracted to the sight of fallen greatness and they would stop and watch in amazement as the former gentry heaved loads or dug, often setting their tools down, exhausted, and standing over them thoughtfully, as if not expecting to find the earth so hard or stone so heavy. Some observers mocked them, nudging one another and exchanging cruel jokes and comments, but they were not many. Most just stopped briefly, their faces revealing nothing—not whether they pitied the conde
mned men or approved of what was happening to them, they just looked, thoughtfully and in silence, at what could become of power and privilege when they were overwhelmed by still stronger forces and when might was overcome by greater might. And they moved away as fast as possible, full of silent wonder and vague alarm, wondering, if such a thing as this was possible, what else could be.

  And among the Muslim population, all those who were generally considered “better and more respected,” and who believed themselves to be so, but who had so far been spared or not yet felt Omer’s saber, withdrew into their houses or, if they had to go out into town, averted their gaze from the unprecedented sights. Merchants sat in front of their shops, rigid with fear, horrified, dumb with bitterness and sick with a disapproval they dared not express. It was only in the depths of their gloomy storerooms or in remote gardens behind their houses that they would exchange a few whispered words, just enough to relieve their hearts and feel they were not alone in the misfortune that had befallen them. And they all said the same thing. Many remembered that in this same Travnik, some thirty years earlier, the notorious Dželaludin Pasha had lured all the leading beys and town officials to his residence and slaughtered them like rams. That had been horrific and people still talked about it. But what was that compared to this? Death was easy and torture was nothing, that is how it seemed to them and that is what they told each other. But now the times were such that even those who had never so much as lit their own pipes must labor and dig, when those who had always shaped and applied the laws wore chains. This was a humiliation that could not be borne, and against which nothing could be done, which could have been dreamed up only by this convert from Lika, a former Austrian junior officer, a fugitive and servant, and now the commander, the seraskier and “saber in the sultan’s hand.” This was the end of the world.

  The dismay among the Christians, the rayas, was no less great, although it was different in nature. They watched what the imperial envoy was doing to the powerful but they could take no pleasure in it. They had heard that it was all supposed to improve their situation, but they saw that the seraskier’s army was no easier on them than any other Turkish army that had previously trampled over Bosnia and that his authority and power were far weightier and worse than that of the Bosnian beys and agas. They too reflected and whispered about what they saw and felt on their own skins each day. They thought: it can’t bode well for anyone when such a huge ancient structure is brought down in such a way. They whispered: Always hard for whoever’s caught in the crossfire.

  Meanwhile, Omer, with his staff of senior officers, for the most part Hungarian and Polish fugitives, converts like himself, had left Travnik, roamed over the whole of Bosnia, dispersed the still unruly rebel units, burned, cut down, shot, arrested, replaced local authorities, and then come back to the town, on his white horse, accompanied by the blare of trumpets and the beating of drums of his military band, dignified and gleaming with both Ottoman and Christian medals. And meanwhile, between two campaigns, he talked about his plans, openly and deliberately in front of those who he knew would spread the word. He said that he had divided all the disobedient and recalcitrant beys and dignitaries in Bosnia into three categories. The first consisted of those who had risen up against the sultan with weapons in their hands, and whose heads he would cut off “were they bigger than the biggest Bosnian mountain.” The second were all those whom he would send in chains to exile in Asia, even to the furthest eastern border, to travel a bit and see the extent of the power and the empire against which they had so stupidly and treacherously rebelled, to cool down there and come to their senses, if they could. The third group were the perfidious hypocrites who had secretly assisted the insurgents and who had slandered him and imperial power and expressed views they should not have. Such people would receive a hundred lashes, so that they would not be able to sit down for a month, and each slightest movement they made would tell them what a foolish head they had on their shoulders and remind them against whom they had rebelled.

  And he said this, not like the previous viziers, Ottomans, blustering furiously, but casually, calmly, self-important and smiling. All in all, he behaved as though the whole bloody mission he had been carrying out in Bosnia for a year now was something incidental and unimportant, only an essential preparation for the main task, which was yet to come. So he was sweeping aside upstarts and noblemen, pashas, beys, ulema and “strong” agas, as if they were long dead, and he had been sent simply to bury them.

  And, on top of that, he still found time for everything. He paid visits to the consuls and received them, with full pomp and according to all the rules of protocol. Each time he left town or returned, he held parades with marching troops, military music and cannon fire. He kept moving, changing and adding to his expensive stud, which consumed more than all the inhabitants of the largest Bosnian town. He brought whole caravans of furniture from Austria to Sarajevo to adorn his new residence in Fadil Pasha’s house, as if he was thinking of spending the rest of his days there, furnishing his apartment entirely “in the Viennese mode.” He moved his entire harem there. He brought his relatives, converts like himself, and those journeys were expensive and festive as though meant for the sultan’s sons. For his Romanian wife, a fine pianist, he dragged a piano to Sarajevo. The mere transport of that piano from Brod to Sarajevo, which took eleven days, was a source of anxiety, effort, expense and all kinds of trouble for the authorities and the people along the route. The piano was carried on a specially constructed cart by numerous horses, oxen and drafted labor. It was wrapped in hemp and battened down with boards and beams. This unusual and mysterious freight, which people guessed was supposed to make music in the residence but were unable to imagine its true shape or guess its purpose, was carried as if made of the finest glass, fearfully and anxiously, under stern threat of fines and beatings. And no one so much as brushed against that cart without secretly cursing the gentlefolk, with their incomprehensible requirements and whims, and that music, if it was music, and whoever was going to play it and those who were going to listen to it.

  So, through war-torn, terrified Bosnia, where detachments of soldiers and rebel bands, groups of refugees and chained prisoners roamed, a whole procession of people, things, horses dragged itself after the pasha, a kind of personal supply train, whose vast size and unusual nature still further provoked the already embittered, frightened, anxious people. And the pasha himself managed to pay attention to everything required to make his life more agreeable and more magnificent, his person brighter and more glorious.

  And people who had refused in the past to live at any price and under any conditions, now simply clenched their jaws and averted their gaze. That is all they dared and were able to do. And that was in such contrast to everything they wanted, that this difference oppressed them like an insupportable and shameful burden from which they could find no relief, even at night, in their sleep. The ruthless, blood-stained seraskier did whatever he wished and carried out whatever he intended, without taking the slightest account of them or their beliefs and feelings, apparently seeing them as nothing other than the object of his assignments and military operations. That was precisely why they felt that he sought out, deliberately and calculatedly, the most sensitive place in each individual and endeavored to strike them as hard as he could precisely in that place. It seemed to them that he had nothing else in mind but how to inflict maximum pain, offense and humiliation on them, both collectively and individually.

  Such was the summer that had just begun and that Consul General Atanacković was observing, in amazement. A quiet, festive summer that promised a fruitful autumn harvest, but what was the use since it was seraskier’s summer and when for the frightened and embittered people such fruit already tasted sour in their mouths.

  WIND

  A NOVEMBER night in 1851 lay over the sleeping town of Sarajevo. Rare lights showed how far the darkness had conquered the earth and sky. It seemed that every living thing was resting and sleeping. But it
only seemed so, for in times like these when people shut themselves in their houses and extinguished the lights, it did not mean they were all asleep.

  Consul General Atanacković was for one not asleep. There was still light in his house. Nor did that surprise anyone. His concerns and obligations were so many and of such a kind that an autumn day from morning to night was never enough. But still, anyone who presumed that he was now thinking about those concerns and obligations would be mistaken. In fact the wind blew in, tangled up and carried off his thoughts, as he sat over an open volume of Voltaire. This evening he was thinking only of wind and winds.

  Sarajevo is not a town of many or frequent winds. Generally speaking, there are just two. An oppressive, sickening south wind that rolls in across the valley of Sarajevo, falls into the town as into a trap and, finding no way out, it roars, crashes, flails, until it spends itself and abates. The other is from the northeast, an icy wind that drops from the heights and, in broad daylight, drives in the shadows and freezing shudder of mountain canyons and slopes. And the bitter cold or stifling heat that these winds bring lies for a long time in the town, persistent as an unwanted guest, until it weakens or is driven out by the force of the opposing wind.

  Sarajevo is not a town of many winds. But when darkness and solitude drive a man to observe and question himself and his immediate surroundings, including the winds, and when he is sitting alone in a featureless November night, he seeks and finds some sense and meaning in the capricious, stuttering gusts of wind. And then it may easily seem to him that reality is not only what it seems to be by day, but that it has another face: that it lacks clearly drawn limits, that it conceals other possibilities and probabilities outside phenomena established by experience and defined by name, and can momentarily and temporarily but genuinely surprise and confuse us.