Black Lamb and Grey Falcon

by Rebecca West

  Ochrid IV

  Gerda and Constantine looked quietly happy. ‘I did not make too much of my speech,’ said Constantine, ‘but this is Bishop Nikolai’s stamping ground, he must be allowed to do all the shining here. I was thinking that now your husband has seen the Bishop it would be a good thing if we went to the little monastery where we went with the poet last year. It has a very pretty view and it would be a good end to such a nice morning.’ I thought it was an excellent idea, for we certainly had to go somewhere, we could not stay where we were, and I remembered the monastery as a pleasant place in the hills behind Ochrid. We had gone there with a young poet of the town to find a place where he could read Constantine his verses without all his friends looking on, but it had not proved very suitable for this. A little dog in the cloisters belonging to a nun had howled incessantly because his mistress had gone into the town to do some shopping; and the priest, a sturdy old man of seventy with ten children, of whom either six or seven, he said, were sons, was distressed by the proceedings. He kept on muttering, ‘Verses, tut, tut! It’s all right to make up a song in one’s head; but to write it down, you can’t tell me that’s not a waste of time.’ The old man was relieved when the poetry-reading was finished and he could take us down to the village and introduce us to his mother, who was sitting on the edge of a fountain with several companions of her own age.

  Macedonia makes one doubt many things that one has previously believed, and in nothing is it more unsettling than in its numbers of immensely aged people. They must be old, though probably not as old as they say, but still very old, because one finds them living in the same house with five generations of their descendants. Yet Macedonians have shocking teeth. It is possible that dentists are such deceptions as Solomon said that strange women were, that our puritanism has persuaded us to go to the dentists because the drill hurts, and that what we need today is more dental caries.

  But when we got to the monastery the priest and his family had gone, and there was a new priest, a man in his late twenties from Debar, sensitive and a little sad, obviously not robust, and wearing spectacles with very strong lenses. He took us into the church and showed us the frescoes, which were very bad modern peasant stuff; there was a Last Judgment which represented the saved as fitted with hard little haloes like boiled eggs, the apotheosis of the good egg. We looked at Ochrid, lying beyond the green and crimson plains against the white silk of the lake, and then we would have gone away had it not been that the priest was so gently eager for us to stay. We did not want to eat for we had already had both breakfast and the church meal, which had comprised really a great deal of wine and lamb and fish and eggs and garlic, and it was not yet noon; but he hurried away with a shining face and got us some wine and sheep’s cheese and eggs, and took us up to his room to eat them. The room was bitterly poor. The mattress of his bed was laid not on a bedstead but on timber trestles, the towels were poor wisps of cotton, and there were no rugs on the floor and no books. He sat and smiled at us and asked questions about life outside Macedonia, of which he seemed to know very little. He spoke with something that was not quite curiosity, that was more tactile; the effect was as if a very gentle blind person were running his finger-tips over one’s features.

  Suddenly his face fell and we heard the clattering of feet coming up the wooden staircase, very fast. He put down his wineglass and drew his hand across his forehead. The door was thrown open and a nun hurried in, a woman of about fifty-five or sixty. She said, ‘Thank God you’re still here,’ and sat down on the priest’s bed and asked who we all were, panting for breath and fanning herself. ‘Well, well,’ she said, the second Constantine had finished introducing us, ‘you’re all very interesting people, but I’ve had an interesting life, you can’t say I haven’t, you wait till you hear it.‘ The priest uttered a low sound expressive of agony and fatigue. ’I am a Serbian,‘ she began after she had taken a full breath, ’I come of a very rich family of the Shumadiya, and I was married very young, naturally enough, for I was very beautiful and everybody in the world wanted to marry me. I was early left the childless widow of the eldest of four rich brothers, and all of them loved me very much, all my family and my husband’s brothers, I was their darling and I had everything a woman could want. So I was proud and I was beautiful, I was very beautiful.‘ I said to my husband, ’But this woman has never been beautiful.‘ My husband said in choked tones as if he were making a grave accusation, ’She is like a milkman’s horse.‘

  ‘And,’ said the nun, ‘I was very coquettish. See, I had one flaw in my beauty’—she tilted up her tall nun’s hat to show us what it was—‘I had a very high forehead. People used to say to me, ’You have the brow of a professor,‘ and I used to weep all night because I had this one fault, and then I took to covering it with curls, with little, little, fine curls which took hours to make. And I sang, and I danced, and I was cruel with those who loved me, and so the time passed. But once I dreamed—I dreamed a most wonderful dream.’ She caught her breath and stared in front of her. The priest made a gesture which made me recall those lines in which Coleridge fixed for ever the feelings of those who listen to a long tale when they want to do something else:

  The Wedding Guest here beat his breast,

  For he heard the loud bassoon.

  But she continued. We were as fresh blood in the vampire’s mouth.

  In her dream, she told us, the Mother of God had appeared before her, holding a most beautiful child, which she had put into her arms. She had felt the weight and warmth of the child as she held it and experienced a most wonderful glow of joy; and when she woke up she could not believe that it had not really happened. She was worried by this dream, and had told everybody about it, but nobody could tell her what it meant, though once her mother had said to her, ‘I believe that dream means that you will have this child, but it will not be yours, it will be called by another name.’ Some years passed and she went to a Christian Belief meeting and heard a young theological student make a speech, and as he spoke she had to grip her seat to prevent herself from falling unconscious on the floor, for she recognized him as the child of her dreams grown into a man. At once she sought him out, and as he was an orphan she adopted him as her son. Soon she found a rich girl for him to marry, and then there was trouble. He would not marry this heiress, for he had fallen in love with a poor girl, who was not only poor, but tuberculous.

  ‘I was very angry,’ said the nun, ‘but then a priest in a monastery said to me, ’Your son will marry the girl he loves, but it will last only three days,‘ so after that I did not work against his marriage, though I made him promise that he would not sleep with her, for fear he should get tuberculosis.’ Then, three days after they were married, the girl had fallen dead in her husband’s arms while they were standing together by a window. The nun’s attitude to this happening was that of a fisherman who pulls in his line and finds a very large fish on the end of it. A short while afterwards, while she was in Albania, staying with a friend, she had heard that the bereaved boy had announced his intention of becoming a monk, so she and the friend had immediately started for Belgrade and tried to prevent him.

  At this point in the story the nun stamped on the floor to show just how hard she had tried to prevent him; and the poor young priest went and looked out of the window, pressing his forehead against the glass. But it had been no use, she continued, her adopted son said that he had promised his wife that if she died he would become a monk. So she had said that she would become a nun, and had done so. And her friend from Albania had been so impressed by the proceedings that she also had become a nun. ‘Not,’ said this nun, ‘that that was much sacrifice, for she was over sixty and not at all good-looking. But I, who was young and beautiful and had everything, I was now to live on nothing, on what people gave me, on what my dog might have had when I was rich. Now did you ever hear such a story in your life?’

  One rarely had, for it was purely nihilist. It disclosed no amiable characteristics on the part of the
teller, it seemed to consist solely of a capacity for obsession; it disclosed no sense of anybody else’s characteristics, the other persons were faceless puppets, though certainly as she went on one had a curious fancy that the theological student talked to his adopted mother downward from the branches of a tree. ‘Did your English friends ever hear such a story?’ gleefully demanded the nun, looking into our faces and slapping us on the back. ‘Now you must come and see my room.’ Over her bed hung an immensely enlarged photograph of herself when young, which showed that she had indeed never been beautiful, that my husband had been right, she had always had the long-faced vivacity of not the best sort of horse. She must have rushed through life stamping and shouting and adopting people who were not of her kind and adopting careers for which she had no vocation, and preventing life from forming a coherent pattern.

  We went back to the priest’s room for a little while but it was useless. She sat and talked, her bony hand twitching on her lap with a desire for activity which had no relation to those movements which actually produce any result, to the movements one makes in playing a musical instrument or writing; and the priest watched her in a silence he would not have broken even if she had let him. He would have to live with this woman in this small monastery which was at least five miles from the town till his ecclesiatical superiors removed him.

  When we got into the automobile Constantine turned to us and beamed. ‘There is our true Slav mysticism,’ he said, ‘I am glad that you are not to leave Yugoslavia without seeing something of that side of our lives.’ ‘Yes,’ said Gerda, ‘she is like someone in Tolstoy.’

  Afternoon at Struga

  On returning to our hotel we found to our considerable distress that because we had pleased the staff in some way there was being prepared for us a specially fine fish risotto; this made our fourth meal during the last four hours. We ate in falsely smiling gratitude under the ash trees by the lake, and then sat in a state of distension, trying to dilute ourselves with coffee. There minced by a slim old woman with gallantly dyed brown hair puffed forward and pinned down into a kind of cap, and a high net collar held to her lean neck by whalebones, picking her steps and swinging her reticule in reference to some standard of gentility that was obsolete and ridiculous, though she was not to be ridiculed, so poignant was her grief, her gallantry. I said, ‘That might be a Russian general’s widow in a story by Tchekov,’ and lo, it was a Russian general’s widow, who played the piano in a café down the street.

  This set us wrangling about the Russian writers. My husband and I said we liked Dostoievsky and Turgeniev the best. My husband said that The Possessed seemed to him to cover every possible eventuality in moral life, and a great many of the particular eventualities of historical life which we were likely to face, and that in Turgeniev he found something that reminded him of Greek literature but without enough of effort or desire to make him feel that this was the world he knew. I said that I made my choice because all writers wanted to write the book that Dostoievsky had written in the Inquisitor’s Dream in The Brothers Karamazov, and because all writers knew that all books should be written like On the Eve. But Constantine said, ‘No, you are wrong, Tolstoy was the greatest of them all.’ This I found hard to bear; for surely Tolstoy is the figure that condemns nineteenth-century Europe, which never would have been awed by him if it had not lost touch with its own tradition. Otherwise it would have recognized that everything Tolstoy ever said that was worth saying had been said far better by St Augustine and various Fathers and heretics of the Early Church, who carried the argument far beyond the scope of his intellect. ‘But he was a great man, he was a great personality,’ said Constantine. ‘I remember reading that a Japanese had once come to see Tolstoy at Yasnaya Polyana, and, seeing him, had gone straight back to Japan, in order that nothing might diminish the intensity of his impression, though he had always longed to see Europe.’ ‘But what was his impression, and what happened to him afterwards?’ I asked, really wanting to know. ‘What does that matter?’ said Constantine. ‘It is a question of—’ His hand reverently described a huge empty circle. There opened a vision of a world without content, where great men spoke and said nothing, where the followers listened and trembled and learned nothing, and existence was never transformed into life.

  Dragutin strolled towards us along the edge of the lake, throwing in stones. He called out, ‘If we’re going to spend the night at the Monastery of Sveti Naum we needn’t start till five. Why don’t we go and spend the afternoon at Struga, the famous Struga?’ He began to sing the special song of Struga, which says that of all towns in the world it is the prettiest, which indeed is somewhere near the truth, as we had noted when we stopped there on our way from Skoplje. ‘Yes, let us do that,’ said my husband, and the others would not, so we went off alone.

  It is an enchanting little place, white and clean like a peeled almond. It straddles the river Drin, which runs out of Lake Ochrid as much brighter than water as crystal is than glass, and its houses are white and periwinkle blue, and everywhere there are poplars and willows and acacias. It is only a country town, it does not bear the stamp of a great culture like Ochrid, but it is pretty, pretty enough to eat, and the minutes pass like seconds if one stands on the bridge and looks at this extravagantly clear water running under the piers, visible just to a point sufficient to give pleasure to the eye.

  We walked about the town for a time and came on the church, with many people standing about in the churchyard and a multitude of gipsies sitting on the walls. Bishop Nikolai, they said, was holding a service inside, and there were sounds of ecstatic singing. We were told that when he came out with the procession the gipsies would get up and go into the church and worship silently, and then go home. They would not dream of going into the church while the house-dwelling Christians were still about. This confirmed my feeling of dislike for the gipsies, it was such a Puccini thing to do. But we had to linger for a few moments, for though they were all wearing Western clothes they had chosen them with such a valiant appetite for colour, laying orange by royal blue, scarlet by emerald, dun by saffron-yellow, that they outshone the most elaborate peasant costume, though there was not a garment amongst them which could not have been bought in Oxford Street.

  ‘Let us go and see the eels,’ clamoured Dragutin, ‘let us go and see the eels.’ So at last we went to see the fisheries, where they catch eels in a pen of hurdles sunk in the unbelievably clear river. The fishers drew two out of the crystal water, themselves black crystal, and bound them together, alongside but with the head of one to the tail of the other, so that they could wriggle in the long grass under our inspection without getting a chance of liberty. Dragutin cried out in pleasure at this device. He was always happy when there were animals about, just as people who have a great deal of the child in them are happy with children, and when he saw men exercising control over animals he used to cheer heartily but without malice, as a schoolboy might cheer if he saw a wrestler from his own house overcoming one from another house. ‘And look,’ he said, pointing over the water-meadow to some wooden bungalows standing under poplars in long grass among many little canals, ‘there’s the biological station. They’ve got a museum there, where you can see all the birds and beasts to be found in the district; you can go in if you like.’

  We left him playing with the eels. He liked living things, he said. But he would have recognized a brother in the old custodian who took us round the curious building, like a houseboat turned to scientific purposes, where stuffed animals, eagles and wolves, bears and wild cats, boars and snakes, stared glassily through a green dusk. He had precisely the same attitude towards animals. There was to him no greater division between himself and the beasts than there is between Serbs and Greeks, Bulgarians and Turks. When my husband said, ‘But this is an enormous wild boar,’ he explained that, in the no-man‘s-land between Yugoslavia and Albania, no hunting is allowed in the forests, and the wild boars take refuge there and grow fat on the acorns and chestnuts; and he grumbled
, ’Dort leben sie sebr gut,‘ just as a Cockney might say of the Lord Mayor of London and his aldermen, ’Turtle soup and port they ‘ave, they don’t live like us pore men.’

  He was glad that most of his charges were where they were, out of mischief, neatly stuffed, preserved for eternity by camphor balls in highly polished glass cases; but over one he mourned. This was a two-headed calf which was strangely lovely in form, it was like a design made for a bracket by the Adam brothers; its body had the modest sacrificial grace of all calves, and it was a shock to find that of the two heads which branched like candelabra one was lovely, but one was hideous, as that other seen in a distorting glass. ‘It was perfectly made,’ lamented the old man, ‘it was perfectly made.’ ‘Did it live after its birth?’ asked my husband. ‘Did it live!’ he exclaimed. ‘It lived for two days, and it should be alive today had it not been for its nature.’ ‘For its nature?’ repeated my husband. ‘Yes, its nature. For the peasant who owned it brought it here to our great doctors as soon as it was born, and here it did well. I tell you, it was perfectly made. But for two days did the beautiful head open its mouth and drink the milk we gave it, and when it came to the throat, then did the ugly head hawk and spit it out. Not one drop got down to its poor stomach, and so it died.’ To have two heads, one that looks to the right and another that looks to the left, one that is carved by grace and another that is not, the one that wishes to live and the other that does not: this was an experience not wholly unknown to human beings. As we pressed our faces against the case, peering through the green dusk, our reflections were superimposed on the calf, and it would not have been surprising if it had moved nearer the glass to see us better.