by Rebecca West
It seemed incredible that in a city full of Moslems half a dozen pious workmen should not have joined together to put in order a place that had obviously been a centre of worship for many honourable families; and the place seemed to imply the decadence of a pithless people until we went out, and saw through an open door the home of the caretakers which was formed by partitioning off a space from the porch of the mosque. It was impossible to imagine a room that spoke more clearly of an established civilization, a society which took it for granted that to live in cleanliness and order is agreeable. The bare boards were ferociously clean, along the wall a bench made of old packing-cases was covered with cushions of hues chosen by an educated taste, and on the walls were pieces of rugs which, though they were stitched and faded, at least alluded to the finest aesthetic traditions of the East. On a little inlaid table stood a brightly polished ceremonial coffee-set and a little loom, where a fine linen towel was being woven in an exquisite design. ‘Good God,’ said my husband, ‘one can never be sure of anything in this country.’
It was market day. When we got back to Bitolj peasants from the mountains and the plains were sitting on the low walls that edge the river embankments, facing the shops, with their goods in little heaps at their feet. First of all the men sit in a line, with bundles of onions and garlic and baskets of early strawberries and tangled masses of hens tied together; and then the women sit with their lesser goods before them, basins of eggs and little handfuls of spinach and clusters of dark-red paprika, the sunshine pouring through the acacia branches and lying in bright diamonds on the white kerchiefs they wear on their heads. The goods brought by some of the women are so trifling that it can hardly be doubted they come to market not so much for commerce as for gossip, which is as animated here as it was in Sarajevo. When my husband photographed some of them and got involved with a donkey which poked its head over his shoulder, they all laughed and joked with us, quick in speaking and in taking up other speakers’ points.
While we were playing with a goat and its kid a man in an offensive suit came up and asked us in American what on earth we were doing in such an uninteresting town as Bitolj. He himself was a Macedonian, but he had early emigrated to Toronto, and was a shoemaker there, and had come back just for a holiday, and he thought this a Godorful place. We spoke to him of America, but after the fashion of his kind he knew nothing of it except cheap automobiles, road-houses, and radios. It cannot be too firmly stated that the average man who emigrates from one of the more primitive countries to America is lost to European civilization without being gained by American civilization. The subsequent generations he begets may acclimatize themselves to the new tradition, but the state of vacuity in the mind of the man who actually makes the transition cannot be exaggerated. He is removed from the economic Hell with which Europe punishes the people who perform the function most necessary to its survival and grow its food for it, and he is lifted to what is for him the economic paradise with which America rewards the people who help it to get into debt by making unnecessary manufactured goods. Therefore his primary needs are so astonishingly well satisfied that he believes himself contented; but he forgets everything that his own people have learned about birth and love and death. This would have happened to him just the same, of course, if he had emigrated to any really big city in Europe which was thoroughly remote from his tradition; but he is much more likely to go to America.
The state of idiocy which this transition had induced in this particular man can be judged from the fact that he winked at us, jerked his thumb over his shoulder, and said, ‘Going to the Paris Exhibition, hey?’ To get away from him we left the cattle market, and joined a small crowd centred round two men sitting at a table, who were all looking at a white pack-horse that was being led up and down. ‘I think this is the market where they sell the goods of the peasants who cannot pay their taxes,’ said Constantine. ‘If that is so, let us buy the white horse and give it back to its owner,’ said my husband. Constantine danced with joy. If he had been left a fortune he could not have been more pleased. ‘Do you mean it?’ he asked. ‘Do you really mean it?’ ‘Yes, I think it would be an agreeable thing to do,’ said my husband.
Constantine bounced through the crowd, crying to the officials, ‘Stop! Stop!’ as if he had ridden with Dirck and Joris from Ghent. He gave something to the occasion quite beyond our power. The officials acted up to him and received the news with great pleasure, and when they had ascertained that it would cost my husband three hundred dinars, which is about six dollars, and made sure that he would go to this outlay, they announced the news to the people round them, who behaved like a stage crowd, turning to each other and making gestures of surprise. The main person concerned turned out not to be there. The owner of the horse, his friends assured us, was running round Bitolj trying to find a moneylender who would let him have the money without security. But the details of the gift were not settled quickly, for the officials had to draw up a deed of gift, by which my husband returned the horse to the owner, and before he had signed it there was a scuffle at the back of the crowd and the people near me said, ‘Here he is! Here he is!’ I turned and saw a bearded man wearing a round fur cap and tawny homespuns, but I thought they must be mistaken, for he was showing no signs of pleasure, and was indeed baring his teeth in fury and lifting a club as if to strike a little group of people who had just been assuring us that they were the owner’s friends.
‘That cannot be he,’ I said, but a fattish young man in a saxe-blue sweater answered, ‘Indeed it is, but he does not yet understand. Are you Americans?’ ‘No,’ I said, ‘we are English.’ ‘English or American, you have done a good deed,’ he said sententiously, ‘but I hoped you were Americans, for I love America very much.’ ‘So do I,’ I said. ‘Are you going back soon?’ ‘No,’ he answered; ‘when I was in America I made a big mistake. All my people here have been smugglers, father and son. Before the war we were smugglers at Riyeka on the borders of Montenegro and Turkey, and since the war here in Bitolj, for the Greek frontier is very close. So when I went to America I thought that smuggling was there as it is with us, wrong but not very wrong, and I used to take liquor in over the Canadian border on a truck, and I did not think nothing of it. Then one day there was a bit of shooting and I was sent up for a stretch. But what I do not like is that afterwards I was deported. It is terrible,’ he said, as if he were singing a folk-song, ‘to be deported by a country which you love.’ He became scarlet, his eyes filled with tears. I found myself saying sympathetically, ‘Never mind, never mind, lots of my friends have been deported,’ though this is not true.
Gulping down his sorrow, the young man said, ‘But here is the owner of the horse; now he understands what you have done, and he wishes to thank you.’ ‘But what did he think at first that we had done?’ ‘When you looked at him before,’ explained the young man, ‘he was saying to his friends that they had done ill by him in letting you buy the horse, for anybody could see from the clothes of you and your husband that you would want an excessive rate of interest for the money you had lent him. He took your husband for a kind of moneylender we have here who have no homes and grow exceedingly rich by travelling from market to market and getting peasants into their power. He meant no harm. It is a mistake that anybody might have made.’ My husband said sadly, ‘We have been taken for itinerant moneylenders, my dear, and you have committed yourself to the curious statement that many of your friends have been deported from the United States. I think it is perhaps time that we left this town.’ But now the owner of the horse was standing in front of us, wringing my husband’s hand and sputtering gratitude out of a mouth full of long white wolfish teeth. ‘But what is he talking?’ asked my husband. ‘Surely it is not Serbian. Perhaps he is a Greek.’ ‘No, he is not talking Greek,’ I said, ‘he is talking tough baby. Listen.’ ‘Gee, I am really grateful to you,’ he was saying. ‘This will bring me luck, it sure will, and I’ll say it ought to bring you luck too. Now won’t you let me treat you to jus�
� a little whisky? No? Not just a shot?’ At my elbow the shoemaker from Toronto had appeared. ‘Is it true that you have bought this man’s horse back for him?’ he asked. ‘For crying out loud, why did you do it? Why did you do it?’
When we had left the crowd, no single member of which asked us for money, though it was proved that we had enough to be generous and some of them had probably not enough to eat, we went back towards the town and came by chance on a little street where a number of women, and women only, were sitting on the kerb. ‘They are selling dresses,’ I said with delight, and so they were: new dresses for such peasant women as had come into the town to work and had neither the homespun cloth nor the leisure to make their own clothes and were still shy of Western attire, and old clothes that had such fine embroidery on them that they would be worn again. All these dresses were of the standard Slav pattern. They were made of white or cream homespun linen and were embroidered lavishly on the hems and sleeves and more sparingly around the neck. Nearly all of these were serious works of art. That will not be believed by those who know only the commercial peasant art of Central Europe. The cross-stitched blouse of Austria and Hungary is tatty and ill-bred, rightly regarded by the aristocrat and the highbrow as vulgar and by the proletarian as funny. It fails because the themes of peasant art are so profound and its technique so intricate that it requires a deliberation hardly to be found elsewhere than in peasant life or in the sphere of scholarly and dedicated people not in the least likely to make blouses. Women distracted by the incoherent interests of the modern town, or working at the rate necessary to make a living anywhere in the orbit of a modern town, will not have the experience to form the judgements about life which lie behind most of these embroideries, nor the time to practise the stitches and discover the principles of form and colour which make them strike the eye with the unity of flowers. A precisely similar process of degeneration can be seen in Tin Pan Alley, where the themes that are dealt with by folk-song and by the lyric poets are swallowed by shallow people in a hurry and immediately regurgitated in a repulsive condition.
But these old women, who looked at once hearty and tragic, who were able to grin broadly because early and profuse weeping had made their faces unusually mobile, were dealing in uncorrupted merchandise. All the embroidery had a meaning. The first I picked up had a gay little border to its hem, a line of suns with rays, half an inch across, with trees in between them and stars dancing above them. The suns had black centres and rays, and their circumferences were alternately orange and green, and the trees were alternately green and blue, and the stars were green and blue and brown. The design stood on a black line of stitching, under which were two broken lines of stitches in all these colours, and then there was a corded edge oversewn with buttonhole stitches in black, deep blue, light blue, crimson, green, and purple, with the black predominating so that there was an effect of darkness stirring with the colours of creation. But the little suns and trees and stars would not take creation too seriously, it was as if fun was being poked at it. This significance was no fancy of our own, for the woman who sold it to me and her friends smiled as they spread it out for us, and looked grave as they showed us one that was my second choice. On this some woman with a different temperament had given up her mind to thought of the majestic persistence of nature and its untender character, and had fixed on the linen a number of dark upright trees, breaking into aloof flowers, harbouring indifferent birds. The design was so highly stylized as never to tempt the eye to mere gaping by its representation of fact; it refused to let the trees be more than the symbols of a mood.
I found yet another design that was purely abstract. Bars and squares of black with raised designs and touches of purple in the solid background depicted no natural object whatsoever, yet evoked certain exaltations. It appears doubtful whether Tolstoy ever saw a peasant. In the imbecile work What Is Art? he asserts that peasants appreciate only pictures which inculcate a moral lesson, such as, for example, a picture of a woman giving food to a beggar boy, and that only a person perverted by luxury can care for art which was created without a specific didactic aim. If he had put his head out of his window and looked at his own village, he would have seen—for embroidery of this kind is done, with varying degrees of merit, all the way up Eastern Europe from the Black Sea to the Baltic—that peasants, more than any other class in the modern community, persistently produce and appreciate art which is simply the presentation of pleasing forms. It was not improbably because Tolstoy was a bad man that he wished art to do nothing but tell him how to be good, and perhaps these peasant women can permit themselves their free and undidactic art because their moral lives are firmly rooted. They had been trodden into the dust by the Turks, condemned to hunger for food and to thirst for blood, but they had never forgotten the idea of magnificence, which is a valuable moral idea, for it implies that the duty of man is to make a superfluity beyond that which satisfies his animal needs and turn it to splendid uses. I bought here a wedding dress perhaps twenty or thirty years old. It was a composite of eight garments, a fine chemise, a linen dress embroidered round the hem and sleeves till it was almost too heavy to be worn, a purple velvet waistcoat braided with silver, a sequin plastron to be worn over the womb as a feminine equivalent to a cod-piece, and a gauze veil embroidered in purple and gold. It was a memory of Byzantium and the Serbian Empire; solemnly it put sequins where the emperors and empresses had worn precious stones, it made of its wool and its flax and what it could buy from the pedlar something that dazzled the eyes a little as the Byzantine brocades had dazzled them much. Even so in the folk-songs of these parts do they sing with nostalgia of gold and silver, not as wealth, not as mintable material, but as glory to be used for shining ornament.
That they should remember glory, after they had been condemned for so long to be inglorious, is not to be taken for granted, as an achievement within the power of any in their place. A tradition is not a material entity that can survive apart from any human agency. It can live only by a people’s power to grasp its structure, and to answer to the warmth of its fires. The Churches of Asia became extinct not because Islam threatened them with its sword, but because they were not philosophers enough to be interested in its doctrine nor lovers enough to be infatuated with the lovable throughout long centuries and in isolation. But these Macedonians had liked to love as they had been taught by the apostles who had come to them from Byzantium, they had liked the lesson taught by the emperors that to wear purple and fine linen encourages human beings to differentiate themselves in all ways from the beasts, they had liked, even inordinately, the habit taught them by Byzantine art of examining life as they lived it and inquiring into their destiny as it overtook them; and since they had still their needles they turned to and managed to compress those strong likings into these small reflective and hieratic designs.
The old women were pleased at our enthusiasm. They are of course not fully conscious of the part their embroideries play in the preservation of their ancient culture: when an Englishwoman plays a sonata by Purcell she is not likely to feel that she is maintaining English musical tradition. Yet these women are certainly aware that they are about some special business when they sew. I am told by an Englishwoman who has collected such embroideries for twenty years and knows their makers well that it is an esoteric craft, those who are expert in it do not give away their mystery. Many of the themes which often reappear in the designs have names and symbolic meanings which are not confided to strangers, and a woman will sometimes refuse to discuss the embroidery she has worked on a garment made for her own use. When they marry they make caps for their bridegrooms and about these they are always resolutely reserved. Here is, indeed, another proof of the impossibility of history. There cannot be taken an inventory of time’s contents when some among the most precious are locked away in inaccessible parts and lose their essence when they are moved to any place where they are likely to be examined carefully, when their owners are ignorant of parts of their nature and keep secret
such knowledge of them as they have.
I bought several dresses and jackets and hung them over my husband’s obliging arm while I sought for more; and he would not let me take any of them from him when we turned homeward towards our hotel. We stopped as we came to the bridge over the river, and looked for the last time at the lovely line of women sitting in the shadow of the white acacia trees, their veiled heads dappled with sunlight. ‘We must come back again,’ I said, ‘again and again to the end of our lives.’ ‘Yes, indeed we must,’ said my husband, ‘but just see what is happening here.’ A couple of peasant women had stopped and were turning over the dresses on his arm with some expressions of approval. ‘Well, they evidently think we’ve got good taste,’ he said complacently. But they began to name a sum, first in Serbian, and then, as we made no response, in Greek and in Vlach; and Constantine, who was still glowing with happiness over the business of the white horse, now became happier still. ‘They think that you are carrying those dresses over your arm because you are trying to sell them,’ he cried joyfully. ‘Do you see, they cannot conceive a state of affairs in which a husband would carry anything for his wife, and the only people they know who wear Western clothes and concern themselves at all with peasant things are shopkeepers, and so they do not realize at all that you are English and very grand, no, not at all.’ ‘My dear,’ said my husband, ‘it is not twelve o’clock in the day and we have already been mistaken for itinerant moneylenders and second-hand clothes dealers. But I think that the curious statement you made about all your friends having been deported will do us the most harm in the end. Who in the world will they think we are? Mr and Mrs Al Capone en vacances? But doubtless Bitolj will turn it all to favour and to prettiness.‘