by Rebecca West
‘I believe the audience was very kind. But I really knew nothing of what was happening, for I was caught up into an extraordinary state. I felt as if my mind was gagged, as if there was a bar preventing my feelings flowing in the natural direction, which was of course, for a child in such a situation, hatred. What was holding me back was the sight of my father in the audience. He was sitting far back, of course, because naturally as a patriotic Serb he would not sit in front where the Austrian and Hungarian functionaries would sit, but he sat in the front of the seats where the townspeople were, because he was much respected. So I could see him distinctly, and I could see that his face was alight as I had never seen it before, with a sense that at last, just for once in his troubled life, everything was going well, his daughter had wanted something sensible, and he had granted her desire, and added more to it, so that from then on he might be sure of getting more of that gratitude and obedience he craved. I could not love him, but I could not hate him. Oh, the poor dear, the poor dear!’
She burst into distressed and loving laughter; and her fingers, as if without her own knowledge, turned over the photograph of her mother, laying it with its face down, as if to protect the dead woman from the ancient enemy whose personality was being evoked by these memories. ‘My father had so many funny ways,’ she went on. ‘You have perhaps noticed how greatly our people, however poor they are, love to be photographed. It was so with him also. Whenever things seemed to be going well he wanted to take us all to the photographer’s and be photographed in the midst of his children. But then when he quarrelled with any of us he would go round the house cutting our photographs out of the groups. But he would never destroy them; perhaps he was too much of a peasant, with primitive ideas of magic, and to burn the images of his children or to throw them into a waste-paper basket would have seemed too much like killing them. He kept them in a box, and when he took us back into favour he would paste them back into the group, so that some of our photographs presented a most extraordinary appearance. I would see one day that my little sister had gone, and then she would be back, and then she would be pasted in again—oh dear, oh dear, the poor man!’
Again she laughed into her hands; and again her husband said, a smile on his sane and handsome face, ‘It was extraordinary how it had never occurred to him that family life might be conducted agreeably. Once in Belgrade, long after the war, he came in and found me sitting in the cafe we frequented, and he asked me where my wife was. I said, ’I had an appointment to meet her here at six and she has not come yet.‘ He said, ’But it is already half-past. Tonight you must box her ears for this.‘ Then I said, ’But I married your daughter precisely because I know that she would never keep me waiting except for a very good reason, and in any case I am quite happy sitting here reading my papers and drinking my coffee, and furthermore I do not like striking women, particularly when I love them. So why should I give your daughter a box on the ears?‘ That horrified him. If I had said something really nasty, something really cruel and base, I could not have upset him more. He felt I was striking at the foundations of society.’
‘Yet, do you know,’ said the dentist, ‘in his last years he accepted everything. He used to talk of my whole life, of my profession, and even of my marriage as if it were something for which he had worked and planned.’ ‘Yes, indeed,’ said the doctor, ‘some months before he died we went out and had a meal alone together as my wife was away, and he said to me, “Well, you know you have reason to thank me. I have brought my daughter up so that she is a good sensible girl, not just interested in foolishness as so many women are, and now you have a wife with a professional standing you can be proud of, whom you can treat as an equal.”’ ‘Now what do you think of that?’ said the dentist happily. But her face changed. She held up her forefinger. ‘Is not that one of my little ones?’ ‘Yes,’ said the doctor, ‘I believe I heard a cry a minute ago, but I was not sure.’ ‘You might have told me,’ said the dentist, in a tone that was a little sister to reproach. ‘Would you care to see our babies?’ she asked me, and as we went along the passage she explained to me, ‘They are not really our babies. My sister, the very lovely one who has her head against my mother’s shoulder in that photograph I showed you, married and had four children, and recently died. So, as her husband has to live in the town and has to work very, very hard, we have adopted them.’
The children were lying in two beds in a large room, with their four bright heads pointing to the four quarters of the compass. The little one had her feet right up on the pillow and her head down on her sister’s stomach. They stirred and fretted a little as the dentist turned on the light, but they had the more than animal, the almost vegetable serenity, of well-kept children, which Tennyson described when he wrote of ‘babes like tumbled fruit in grass.’ As the dentist put them right way up and tucked them in, she laughed; and she said, after she put out the light and we were tiptoeing along the passage, ‘It is such a joke, you know, to have a ready-made family like this. To have the four children, that is grave and wonderful, but to have all of a sudden four little toothbrushes, and four little pairs of bedroom slippers and four little dressing-gowns, it is all like a fairy-story.’ She came back into the living-room much more placid than when she had left it. ‘Now you will hear some Bosnian songs,’ she said, her voice soaring as if it were glad that her mind were giving it liberty to sing.
Yaitse (Jajce) III
When I awoke and saw the sun a pale-green blaze in the tree-tops below our windows, my husband was already awake and pensive, lying with his knees up and his hands clasped behind his head. ‘That was interesting last night,’ he said. ‘She loved her brother, but still to her the important person was the brow-beating father. She had to talk of him because he seemed to her the prime cause of everything in the house, and even the Sarajevo attentat seemed to her simply a consequence of him.’ ‘I remember there is an odd passage in the trial which shows that her brother was of the same opinion. Here, pass it, it is lying on the chair.’ I saw, for we had taken with us Mousset’s French translation of the court proceedings. ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘it is right at the end. The father makes a few dreary contentious appearances in the evidence of other people, bullying, raging, having his son shut up in the police station because he had offended a pro-Austrian servant in their house and had refused to apologize, and so on. Then at the end they read a deposition made by the father, notably certain passages significant as regarding the father’s opinion of the son. He complained of his children’s ingratitude, and he expressed the hope that they in their turn might be treated in the same way by their own children.’ I thought of the plump children I had seen the night before, deep in their contented sleep in the airy bedroom, and shuddered on behalf of the dead. ‘The president of the court asked Chabrinovitch, “Do you see what an ungrateful son you are?” and Chabrinovitch made rather an astonishing answer. He said, “I do not wish to accuse my father, but if I had been better brought up, I would not be seated on this bench.” It was an odd thing for a man to say whose case it was that, granted the annexation of Bosnia, it was inevitable that he and his friends should murder the Archduke. It is the fashion now to sneer at Freud, but nobody else could have predicted that in the mind of Chabrinovitch his revolt against his father and his revolt against the representative of the Habsburgs would seem one and the same, so that when a question was put to him in court that associated the two revolts, he answered not with the reason of an adult, but with the excuse of a defiant child. How exactly this bears out the psychoanalytic theory that they who attack the heads of states are not acting as a result of impersonal political theory so much as out of the desire to resolve emotional disturbances set up by childish resentment against their parents!’
‘But wait a minute, wait a minute,’ said my husband. ‘I have just thought of something very curious. It has just occurred to me, does not Seton-Watson say in his book Sarajevo that Chabrinovitch was the son of a Bosnian Serb who was a spy in the service of the Austro-Hungari
an Government?’ ‘Why, so he did!’ I exclaimed. ‘And now I come to think of it, Stephen Graham says so, too, in St. Vitus’ Day.’ ‘This is most extraordinary,’ said my husband, ‘for Seton-Watson is never wrong, he is in himself a standard for Greenwich time.’ ‘And Stephen Graham may slip now and then, but in all essential matters he is in his own vague way precise,’ I said. ‘Yet all the same this cannot be true,’ said my husband; ‘this girl was talking under the influence of a memory so intense that it was acting on her like a hypnotic drug, I do not think she could have lied even if she had wanted to do so. And she never mentioned it; on the contrary she mentioned several things that were inconsistent with it, and she showed us that photograph of her father standing among the banners of a Serb patriotic society, which if he were a police spy would be a piece of Judas treachery such as the sister of Chabrinovitch could not bear to keep in her home, much less show to strangers.’
‘No, indeed,’ I said, ‘I do not believe that if she had known him to be a police spy she would have mentioned him to us. But there’s something else than that. Chabrinovitch was a youth without reticence, and in the court at Sarajevo he did not care what he said against the Government. If his father had been a Government agent I believe he would have denounced him to the world, just as a young Communist would have denounced his father as a counter-revolutionary. Yet never once in all the pages of Chabrinovitch’s evidence, and in any of the countless comments he made on the evidence of other witnesses, did he say, “My father was a traitor to the Slav cause!” He says that he complained that his father hoisted both the Serbian and Austrian flags on his house, but that was not an individual act on the part of his father, it was a matter of conforming to a police regulation, which we know most people in Sarajevo obeyed. But there is no other act of his father’s that is denounced by Chabrinovitch.’ ‘Could they perhaps not have known?’ proceeded my husband. ‘The dentist at least must have considered the question,’ I said, ‘for if Seton-Watson and Stephen Graham spread this story it must be because they have heard it on good authority and from several sources. It must have come before her notice some time.’ ‘It is a mystery,’ said my husband; ‘but let us get up, once we get downstairs we will find Constantine and probably he will be able to clear up the mystery.’
We found Constantine downstairs having a breakfast which was as admirable as the dinner. ‘You have stumbled upon something very intriguing, and very disgusting, and very frightening,’ said Constantine, ‘and lovely too, because it is the instrument of the martyrdom of a saint. But may I ask you, do you not find the coffee and the bread excellent?’ ‘Yes, yes,’ we said. ‘My people know how to live,’ he purred, and continued. ‘It unfortunately happened that after the war we were all running hither and thither, and we had many other things to do besides write down what we had been doing. So the writing of the history of what happened at Sarajevo fell into the hands of a few who were clever enough to look to the future. Now, because there were no papers, because the reports of the trial were then lost to us, there was nothing for serious historians to work upon, and the field was free to anybody who had been in Bosnia at the time of the attentat and had come in contact with the conspirators. One of these was a young man who had certainly known the attentateurs, and who had himself been involved in the revolutionary movements of the students. It cannot be denied he has studied the subject very fully, and all foreigners who are writing about the attentat come and consult him. But unfortunately it happened that soon after the war this young man met Chabrinovitch’s sister and fell madly in love with her. Many men have felt so about her; it is her voice, that makes one feel as if she was a vila,’ (the Serbian fairy, a kind of wood nymph) ‘and would dance with one for ever in the glades. But she could not love him, already she would marry with the doctor whom you saw last night. Long, long this other young man tried to change her heart for him, but it could not be done. So he went away, and then it appeared to him that the whole family of Chabrinovitch was not so wonderful, and he wished to destroy them with his scorn. So in everything he writes and tells, Chabrinovitch seems not such a hero after all. Just a little shade of scorn here, just a little touch of impatience there, and he spoils Chabrinovitch.’
‘I recognize that you are telling the truth,’ I exclaimed. ‘I can see that the descriptions of a jerky, fretful, loquacious, hysterical Chabrinovitch might be a jaundiced view of a vivacious, temperamental, and fluent personality such as his sister.’ ‘Yes,’ said Constantine, ‘there has been nothing grossly untrue said about Chabrinovitch, but it has all been made a little nasty and puny, and to this same cause I put down the story that Chabrinovitch’s father was a police spy. I do not believe it, for I know that his daughter has heard it, and I know that she is such a good and true woman that she would not deny it unless she had investigated it and found it baseless, and if she had not found it baseless she would never have spoken his name again.’
‘What a cruel lie!’ I exclaimed. ‘Oh, it will not be exactly a lie,’ said Constantine. ‘I do not think that this man would deliberately tell a lie. But he loved this woman, and because she does not love him he wants to prove that she and everything about her is worthless, and in this state of mind he thinks that facts bear a significance which he would certainly not see in them had he gained what he wanted. Here, I imagine, he has simply misinterpreted some incident, or rather given it greater weight than it merits. Think of Chabrinovitch’s father. He was a monstrous egotist, ein Subjektivist without limit or restraint; it appeared to him that every part of the universe which was not him had shown the basest treachery by separating itself. We have seen how his children, who as you see from this specimen I have shown you (as I will show you all, all in my country) were really extremely serious, seemed to him ungrateful and unnatural. It is not to be imagined that when he was in a patriotic society, his comrades would not sometimes, and perhaps often, seem to be conspiring against him and their common cause, simply because they disagreed with him on some minute point of policy. It might quite well then happen that as a threat to his comrades he declared that he might leave the whole of them in the lurch and go off, and inform against them at the local police office. This threat may have been taken in earnest by some simple people, who might be misled by subsequent happenings into believing that he had carried it out, though he never did so. Other people, not simple but malevolent, may have spread stories that he had done so; for it cannot be expected that such a man would not make many bitter enemies. Moreover, it may have happened, perhaps just on one occasion, that Chabrinovitch’s father may have denounced to the police some man in the Bosnian revolutionary movement whom he thought a danger to it. This is a method that was very often used by the revolutionaries in Russia under the Tsardom, to rid themselves of comrades whom they considered undesirable, on account of indiscretion or some form of indiscipline. Here amongst our people it was very rarely used; but remember this man was an exception, he was a law unto himself, it is just possible that he may have done it. Still, that he practised any sort of conscious treachery against his fellow-Serbs, and that he was in receipt of payment from the Austro-Hungarian authorities, that I do not believe.’ ‘What a shame that such a story should be told!’ I said. ‘No, not a shame,’ said Constantine, ‘it is something that could not be helped. For if a woman does not do a man the little favour of handing him over her body and her soul, regardless of whether she likes him, it appears to him the unvarnished truth that she is a leper, that her father is a hunchback who sold his country, that her mother was a cripple who nevertheless was a whore. Besides, I think between this man and Chabrinovitch there was to start with a little bit of dislike. I think he either gave evidence or made a deposition, and that Chabrinovitch commented on it in a way that makes one feel there had been a lack of sympathy —’
But at this point our table was approached by one of those pale persons in subfusc Western clothes, closely resembling the minor characters in a Maeterlinck drama, who carry messages in the Balkan countries.
He said something to Constantine which made him burst into happy exclamations, and gave him a note. ‘Drink up your coffee, you English people are always eating,’ cried Constantine. He had been oddly showing his delight at the note by tearing it up into small pieces. ‘My two very good friends who are chemical manufacturers here are eager to see me, and they ask us to go down to the Temple of Mithras, so that they may show it to you more properly, but of course it is me they want to see, for we were very great friends when we were young in Russia.’ He hurried us out to our car and to the chemical factory, which stood among the grass and orchards on the outskirts of the town, incongruously urban, built with a gratuitous solidity that was considered appropriate to industrial architecture in Central Europe during the nineteenth century. But the two managers were not there, and Constantine stood, in an ecstasy of disappointment, crying, ‘But they told me to come here,’ and searching in his pockets for the note he had received. ‘You tore the note up at the hotel,’ I said. ‘You English are fantastic,’ said Constantine. ‘Why should I have done that?’ By good fortune there drove up at the moment a large car, out of which there bounded, almost vertically, two huge men who fell upon Constantine and kissed him and smacked his bottom and cried out lovingly with voices such as loving bears might have. They paid no attention to my husband and me for some time, so delighted were they with this reunion with one whom they had evidently looked on as a little brother, as a fighting cock, and as a magician. They turned to us and cried, ‘Such a comrade he was, in Russia! Ah, the good little poet!’