Black Lamb and Grey Falcon

by Rebecca West

  The handsome young chauffeur, whose name was Dragutin, said farewell to his wife, a slender dark child who looked like one of the Russian ballet, by chance heel-bound. We rushed through the broad valley, past the ruined mosque, past poppies and poplars and the last fruit blossom, to the town of Tetovo, which stands among many apple orchards. It is famous for those apples; there are songs about them; you may know that the hem of the hyperbolic East has touched here when you are told that some of them are so fine that they are transparent and that when you peel them you can see the pips at the core. We went out and drank black coffee at a coffee-house in a dusty market-place, and the bald-headed man who kept it came up with a tray of cakes and said, ‘Did you expect to see Dobosch Torte here? Did you expect to see Pozony here? Did you expect to see Nusstorte here?’ and we said that we had not, and he said, ‘I will explain to you how this has happened. Once upon a time I had a very large bakery in Skoplje. I had many men working for me, and I backed the bill of a friend of mine for two hundred thousand dinars, and he ran away. So I had to sell all I had and start here afresh, and in a place that my wife hates, for she is a very cultivated lady, she comes from the north of the Danube. I have had to labour for five years like a convict, to face life with a clean forehead, and it is not even that I was foolish, for I was bound to back his bill, since in my beginning he had backed mine.’ He made us take some cakes for our journey, and a piece of sucking-pig. ‘For nowhere,’ he said, ‘will you find cakes as good as mine and there are few sucking-pigs like this. The whole of it weighed only eight pounds, and it is like butter.’ He mentioned food only objectively, but nothing is more certain than that he was a very greedy man. It was good to think that he had this consolation, living in such a remote place, in undeserved ruin, with a very cultivated lady.

  On the outskirts of Tetovo we passed a mosque on the edge of a river which had a strange and dissolute air, for it was covered with paintings in the same Moslem Regency style as the harem in the Pasha’s palace at Bardovtsi. Not an inch but had its diamond centred with a lozenge or a star, all in the most coquettish, interior decorator’s polychrome. It languished in the midst of a sturdy Oriental wall, with square openings in it barred by wooden grilles, very fierce and very rustic. Rain had begun to fall but this mosque was so curious a thing, so inappropriate in its contrast to its builders, that we sent a boy for the key and waited for it, though he was long in coming. On the other side of the river were ruins of a Turkish bath; about us faultlessly proportioned Turkish houses slightly projected their upper stories; a little way off the house of a Turkish merchant, painted periwinkle blue, stood in a garden great enough to be called a park, lovely enough to be called by the Midi name for a garden, un paradoux. Not a dog barked. The quarter was tonguetied with decay.

  When the key came we entered into an astonishing scene, for every inch of the mosque inside was painted with fripperies in this amusing and self-consciously amused style. There was a frieze of tiny little views, of palaces on the Bosporus with ships neatly placed in the middle of the sound, of walled gardens with playing fountains and trees mingling their branches as in agreement, and on the ceiling were circles containing posies or views of buildings, Persian in origin but as remote from their origin as is London of today, though they were all that nearer. The vaulting under the galleries was painted with roses which proved that there must be a Turkish expression meaning ‘too divine.’ It was like being inside a building made of a lot of enormous tea-trays put together, the very most whimsical tea-trays that the gift department of Messrs. Fortnum & Mason would wish to provide. In this erection a fierce people had met to worship their militant prophet. I understand nothing, nothing at all.

  Out of Tetovo we drove along a road between wide marshes trenched with yellow irises, lying between high hills where green terraces climbed to a blue barrenness, streaked by snow. Presently we came on the motor bus, which had broken down. We uncomfortably felt it our duty to stand by till it recovered. Gerda was standing with a Turkish woman in her late thirties, in widow’s weeds, who was fat in the curious way of beautiful middle-aged Turkish women. She did not look like one fat woman, she looked like a cluster of beautiful women loosely attached to a common centre, and she was multiplied again by her excess of widow’s weeds, which were enough for the bereaved of a small town. Her smile advertised sweetness under a thick layer of powder, like Turkish delight. She was, she said, the widow of a Belgrade actor, going home to see his parents at Debar. The bus started and we went ahead of it to Gostivar, which is another town shaped by the Turkish luxury that has departed. About the market square, which was edged with rickety shops and characterless cafés and one Regency Moslem house that might have been a summer-house designed in our day for a lady of title by some international epicene, men walked about holding squealing lambs in their arms. We left the town and climbed up the mountainside to the pass, and saw how the comitadji were able to carry on their warfare, for we saw for the first time the Macedonian beechwoods and limewoods, leafy and stunted and dense. Under their green mantle an army could have its being and be invisible a quarter of a mile away. We stopped on the heights to look down at Gostivar, now a pool of russet roofs dripping across the river to a lower shelf, with minarets and poplars planted by it cunningly, and at the valley that drives broadly back to Tetovo between snow-brindled mountains to the ultimate pure white peaks. Dragutin left his car and at once cried out, as if hailing a fellow-soldier, and pointed his hand straight above him. An eagle soared above us with a chicken in its claws. We went on and came to the pass, a marshy stretch where there was still winter, and the trees and bushes were bare. Cattle and horses grazed, and they were ornery; it is an American word but it was made for Balkan beasts. On the wetter patches storks stood on one leg, all facing one way.

  At an inn on which a stork sat immensely and superbly, as if not knowing that it was an inn, but thinking of it simply as what it sat on, we had a meal of excellent fish. Then the bus drove up, and Gerda came in. My husband, who was transfixed with horror at this turn his device had taken, plied her with fish and bread and wine, and asked her if she had had a comfortable journey. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘several people have asked me why I am travelling by bus when my husband and friends are travelling in a car, but I have explained that these are English guests and they had to have the most comfortable seats.’ My husband ceased to offer her anything at all, he retired into himself and suffered.

  Gerda ate in silence for a time and then she addressed herself to Constantine. ‘The Turkish widow,’ she said, ‘asked me if I had been to see Yovanovna, and I said that I had. She asked me if I considered her attractive, and I said yes, quite attractive. And then she said, but Yovanovna is more than quite attractive, she is very attractive. She must be, for she has had so many lovers. Then the woman asked me if I had ever heard of the famous poet called Constantine, and I said I had, and she said that all the world knew that he had been Yovanovna’s lover for many years.’ After a moment Constantine said sadly, ‘Ach, what a wicked woman to say that to somebody she has just met in a bus!’

  Just then the conductor put his head in at the door and said that he had lost time on the road, and he must start again at once. Gerda rose and went, and Constantine followed her. ‘But the Turkish widow must have recognized Constantine!’ I exclaimed. ‘Her husband was an actor and for years Constantine was a dramatic critic, and anyway everybody knows him from the caricatures.’ ‘Of course the Turkish widow knew him,’ said my husband, ‘but what on earth can Gerda have been saying to the Turkish widow to make her land such a good one as that?’ At this moment Constantine returned. He sat down and ate sucking-pig very pensively. ‘I have a very strong impression,’ he said, ‘that my wife would have liked to say something very disagreeable to me, but could not find what to say.’

  The road fell from the pass through a rocky gorge, sordid at first with rockfalls, which widened out into the valley that I had remembered as one of the loveliest things I had ever seen, where ste
ep hillsides, far apart enough to be seen, fell again and again into the shapes that Earth would take if she found pleasure in herself and what she grows. Voluptuously the beechwoods stretch up to the snow, the grasslands down to the streams, the crags with their poplars and ashes come forward like the elbows of a yawning woman. There is a village on these hillsides which I think the most beautiful I have ever seen, anywhere in the world. It is called the Sorrowing Women, a name which, in a countryside where tragedy has till now been the common lot, must mark some ghastly happening. White houses, bluish white, all built tall, like towers, and yet like houses, with grey-brown roofs, stand on a ledge below the snow and beechwoods, and around them grow ashes and poplars and below a lawn falls to the river. There is one minaret. A path winds down through the lawn. The village has a unity like a person, one is disappointed that it cannot speak, that one cannot enter into any relation with it, that one must go away and leave it.

  A few miles further on was a monastery that I had to visit for a special purpose. It was no hardship. The view from the monastery, which lies high, is one of the best in Europe, taking the eye the whole journey from the snowfields to the springing corn, over sculptured earth that it seems must have been composed with joy. Also the Abbot is one of the most completely created human beings I have ever met. When we went into the galleried courtyard he was coming down the staircase from the upper story, having heard our automobile as it wound its way up the hairpin bends through the limes. We knew he was on his way, because a servant standing in the courtyard looked up at the staircase and made a gesture such as might be used by an actor in a Shakespearean historical drama to announce the entrance of a king; and indeed the old man presented a royal though equivocal appearance, his face shining with a double light of majesty and cunning. He knew Constantine well, and gave him a comradely greeting, because he was a Government official. He himself had been appointed to this important monastery because he had been an active pro-Serb propagandist in Macedonia before the war and could be trusted afterwards to persuade to conformity such Albanians and Bulgarians as were open to persuasion, and to assist the authorities in dealing with the others. He faintly remembered me from my previous visit, and it crossed his mind that my husband and I might be persons of consequence, since we were accompanied on our travels by a Government official, and a child could have detected him resolving to impress us and charm us. But also the thought of the vastness of the earth, and the great affairs that link and divide its several parts, made his mind stretch like a tiger ardent for the hunt, because he knew his aptness for such business.

  We were taken up to the parlour, which was very clean and handsome, like the whole monastery. It had been a pilgrimage much beloved by various neighbouring towns which had been prosperous under the Turks because of their craftsmen, particularly in the eighteenth century, so the church and the monastery have been richly built and maintained. The servant brought us the usual coffee and some wine which the Abbot, though he was sparkling with good-will, poured out for us without any marked air of generosity, for which I respected him all the more. I had seen him roll his eye round us and come to the perfectly sound judgment that my husband and I were too Western to enjoy drinking wine in the afternoon, and he very sensibly regretted that he had to waste his good wine in this ceremonial libation. Then we settled down to a talk about international politics. He expressed confidence in England as the only country which had remained great after the war, partly because he wanted to please us, but partly because he had collected a certain amount of evidence, some of it true and some of it false, which seemed to him to prove our unique distinction. The part that Mussolini had played in financing and organizing Macedonian disorder made him regard Italy as a debauched and debauching brawler; and he had an insight into Hitler that came from his knowledge of the comitadji. He recognized that Hitler was one of those who preferred to send out others to fight rather than to fight himself, and that the Nazis were the kind of rebels who forget that the aim of any rebellion should be to establish order. ‘They are unrulers, Hitler and Mussolini,’ he said. A sudden thunder working in his eye, he said, ‘I am sure that Hitler does not believe in God’; and he added, after a minute, as if someone had objected that perhaps there was no God, ‘Well, what will a man like that believe in if he does not believe in God? Nothing good, it is certain.’ I think that in a single second he had boxed the compass, and passed from religious passion to scepticism and back again to faith, though now of a more prudential sort.

  I noticed all this through a haze of pleasure caused by the man’s immense animal vigour, and his twinkling charm, which was effective even when it was realized to be voluntary. His disingenuousness failed to repel for the same reason that made it transparently obvious. It was dictated by some active but superficial force in the foreground of his mind; but a fundamental sincerity, of the inflexible though not consciously moral sort found in true artists, watched what he was doing with absolute justice. All his intellectual processes were of a hard ability, beautiful to watch, but it was surprising to find that they were sometimes frustrated by his lack of knowledge. ‘France,’ he said, ‘is utterly decadent. It must be so, for she is atheist and Communist.’ ‘But indeed you are mistaken!’ I exclaimed. ‘I know France well, and the country is full of life, a sound and sober and vigorous life.’ ‘If it interests you,’ said my husband, ‘French literature has not for long been so generally inspired by the religious spirit as it is today; and France is not Communist but democratic.’ ‘But democracy is an evil thing,’ said the Abbot, assuming a sublime expression of prophetic wisdom, ‘it is always the beginning of Communism.’ To hurry past this occasion for disagreement he began to talk about Mr Gladstone and all that he had done for the South Slavs in their struggle with the Turks. This is a subject about which I never feel at ease, for I am not sure that Mr Gladstone would have retained his enthusiasm for the Balkan Christians if he had really known them. Their eagerness not to be more sinned against than sinning if they could possibly help it, which was actually a most healthy reaction to their lot, might have repelled his ethical austerity. But I forgot my embarrassment in wondering whether the Abbot knew that Mr Gladstone had been a leader of a democratic party. The answer was, of course, that he did not. His life had been spent in a continuous struggle for power, which had given him no time to pursue knowledge that was not of immediate use to him; and indeed such a pursuit would have been enormously difficult in his deprived and harried environment. But his poetic gift of intuitive apprehension, which was great, warned him how much there was to be known, and how intoxicating it would be to experience such contact with reality; and that perhaps accounted for his restlessness, his ambiguity, the perpetual splitting and refusion of his personality.

  The Abbot showed us the church, which was very rich, with a gorgeously carved iconostasis and some ancient treasure; and as he closed the door he said to Constantine, ‘Of course the English have no real religious instinct, but they approve of religion because it holds society together.’ He wagged his beard gravely, infatuated with his dream that it is negotiation which makes the world go round. As we crossed the courtyard he halted and called angrily to his servant, pointing to a broken jar that lay among its oil on the cobbles. My eye was caught by the grime on his hand, and I could no longer contain my curiosity. I asked Constantine, ‘How is it that the Abbot is himself dirty when the monastery is so clean, and he obviously has a passion for order?’ He answered, ‘He does it to be popular, because the older peasants think that a priest ought to be dirty if he is a really holy man,’ answered Constantine; ‘it is all the same to him, he would be clean if they wanted it.’ ‘What does she want to know?’ asked the Abbot. ‘She is wondering what you were before you were a monk,’ invented Constantine. The Abbot glittered with his memories. ‘I was all,’ he said.

  He took us out on a gallery that overhung the famous view. Under snow ridges the woods were a bronze and red mist, and lower down were green and shone like wet paint; then came t
he wide bosom of the terraced hillside, with its scattered villages white among their fruit trees and poplars. ‘How I would love to walk on that long snow ridge!’ exclaimed my husband. ‘The Englishman says he would like to be up there on the snow,’ said Constantine, ‘I believe he does that sort of thing in Switzerland.’ ‘Tell him I have been there many times,’ said the Abbot, ‘there is not a peak in these parts I have not climbed.’ He looked at them, snorting with the aerial voluptuousness of the mountaineer, and his pectoral cross stirred on his cassock and gave out brilliance from its jewels. ‘That is a fine cross,’ said Constantine, and there followed a conversation from which it emerged, though at first not at all clearly, that it was a kind of cross which could be worn only by a monk on whom the Patriarch had conferred a certain honour, and that the Abbot had earned that honour the previous year, by inspiring some peasants in the neighbourhood to rebuild a ruined monastery; but that the cross was not a new possession, since he had bought it years before, when he had first taken orders, in the anticipation of rising to great heights in the Church. He admitted it with a certain reluctance, as if he knew ambition was too strong in him, but went on to say that what he must do next was to reconvert certain Serb villages which in the last years of Turkish oppression had become Moslem and taken to speaking Albanian. He pointed to a village on the hillside opposite. ‘You see the minaret? It means nothing. Five years ago I made them see reason, and they turned the mosque into a church.’ There was the expertise of Tammany about him.