by Rebecca West
Mehmed is a Herzegovinian Moslem, a descendant of one of the Slav landowners who became Moslem in the sixteenth century rather than abandon the Bogomil heresy. His father was an imam, a Moslem priest, and he was very pious when he was a boy. It was his ambition then to win the tittle of bafiz, which is given to a man who knows the Koran by heart, but he had only mastered half of it when he was caught up into the tide of the Bosnian and Herzegovinian nationalist movement. He was the leading spirit in the Mostar counterpart of the revolutionary cell in Sarajevo to which Princip belonged. For a summer he worked as a comitadji in Macedonia, and later joined the Serbian Army during the Balkan wars. After that he went to study law in Vienna and became a leader of the disaffected Slav students of Austrian nationality. At the outbreak of war in 1914 he escaped to Belgrade and fought with the Serbian Army. He was in a position to know how little the Serbian Government had wanted war at that time, for he found himself fighting in battle after battle that would have been a decisive victory had he and his comrades not been hamstrung by lack of munitions. He took part in the retreat through Albania, and in Corfu was invalided out of the army. Still a boy, he had behind him five years of almost continuous military service, irregular and regular. He spent the rest of the war years taking a degree in Oriental studies in the Sorbonne, and is a scholar of Turkish, Arabic, Persian, and Sanskrit. After the peace he returned to Herzegovina, and, without making an effort to protect his own interests, assisted in the land scheme which broke up the big estates belonging to the Moslem landowners and distributed it among the peasants. Through all the intricacies of post-war Yugoslavian politics, in spite of the temptations they have offered to passion and acquisitiveness, he has urged the importance to the state of fundamental virtue, of honest administration, and of justice towards all races and classes. In fact, experiences which should have turned him into a wolf have left him unchangeably mild and inflexibly merciful. He was suffered the shipwreck of his political ambitions during the last years, for under the dictatorship of Stoyadinovitch all such democrats as he have been driven out of politics. But he is still unembittered, laughter is always rolling up from the depths of his full-bodied Bosnian handsomeness.
Militsa and Mehmed have a special value to me not only because of what they are, but because of where they are. Twice I passed through Skoplje before I stopped there. After the first time I said to some people in Athens, ‘I saw from the train a place called Skoplje which has a most beautiful fortress. Would it be worth while going there?’ They were anti-Slav and answered, ‘Worth while going to Skoplje? What an idea! It is just a dreary little provincial town; there’s nothing there at all, not an intelligent person.’ So the second time I went through the town, on my way back to Belgrade, I looked out at it and conceived it as full only with emptiness. My eye travelled over its roofs and I thought of dull rooms underneath them, with dull people eating and drinking and sleeping, with only the drabbest connective tissue of being to bind these functions together into a day. And all the time there was the flat on the Vardar embankment, lovely with old furniture brought from Novi Sad that told of the best in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, that spoke of the Vienna of Mozart and Schubert, and there were Militsa and Mehmed, always in motion, yet always steady. Militsa runs from room to room, from the library to the kitchen, from the kitchen to her bedroom, to find out what Shelley said of Chatterton, to see if there are any bubbles rising in the last lot of preserved peaches, to try on a hat she has bought from the Polish milliner in the High Street; Mehmed sits in conference with a group of grave old Moslem priests, so old that the white bands round their fezes have become blue with many years’ washing, and after they have said their slow ceremonial farewells he rushes downstairs to the garden to play with his gun-dogs, and is back again in no time to give restraining advice to some university students who have called to tell him about a meditated demonstration against Mr Stoyadinovitch, Yet these two are steady as pillars. They are pillars supporting that invisible house which we must have to shelter us if we are not to be blown away by the winds of nature. Now, when I go through a town of which I know nothing, a town which appears to be a waste land of uniform streets wholly without quality, I look on it in wonder and hope, since it may hold a Mehmed, a Militsa.
St George’s Eve: I
When I arrived at the apartment of Mehmed and Militsa to go with them on a tour round the country to see the various rites that are carried on during St George’s Eve, I found her receiving a call from two ladies, and while Mehmed and Constantine and my husband talked politics I listened to them discussing a friend of theirs who had roused Skoplje’s suspicions by going to Belgrade for a prolonged visit without her husband. ‘I think indeed that this is just foolish talk,’ said Militsa. ‘Yelena has not left her husband for another man, she is always a little discontented because her husband gives her no freedom, and she wants a little time to be alone and enjoy the poetry of life.’ ‘That may be so,’ said one of the ladies, ‘but if all she wanted was a little time to be alone and enjoy the poetry of life, it seems funny that she went all the way out to Mrs Popovitch’s new house a week before she left to borrow a copy of Die Dame that had some pretty nightdresses in it.’ They soon left and we turned from tea to rakia, and Militsa stood for a time discussing neo-Thomism with my husband in an attitude she often adopts when engaged in intellectual conversation. She stands by the tea-table with her old wolf-hound some feet away, and a glass of rakia in her hand, and every now and then she raises the glass and whips it down so that a lash of liquid flies through the air, and the dog leaps forward and swallows it in mid-air. ‘We must start,’ said Mehmed. ‘That is not the philosophic air I breathe easily,’ said Militsa, ‘and religion is for me not there at all. But I have never found it for me anywhere but in Greece, in the days when God was not considered creator, when He was allowed to be divine and free from the responsibility of the universe.’ ‘Whee!‘ went the rakia. ’Woof, woof!‘ went the dog. ’We must start,‘ said Mehmed. ’I will be ready in a minute,‘ said Militsa, and took the last drop of rakia herself. She looked at her husband and mine and nodded approvingly. ’Alas for poor Yelena,‘ she said, ’her husband is very fat, he has always been too fat, and her lover in Belgrade is quite an old man.‘
At last in a cold grey evening we three drove off to see St George at work. This was a more diverse spectacle than one would have supposed. St George, who is the very same that is the patron saint of England, is a mysterious and beneficent figure who is trusted to confer fertility for reasons that are now completely hidden. Pope Gelasius, as early as the fifth century, tactfully referred to him as one of those saints ‘whose names are justly reverenced among men, but whose actions are known only to God.’ Gibbon’s description of him as a villainous Army contractor is nonsense; he was confusing him with a rascally bishop called George of Laodicea. The other story that he was a Roman officer martyred during the persecutions of Diocletian has, in the opinion of scholars, no better foundation. But they believe that he really existed, and that he was probably martyred about forty miles east of Constantinople some time during the third century. He was apparently a virtuous and heroic person who had some extraordinary adventure with a wild beast that made him the Christian equivalent of Perseus in the popular mind. Whatever this adventure was, it must have taken the form of a powerful intervention on behalf of life, for his legends represent him as raising the dead, saving cities from destroying armies, making planks burst into leaf, and causing milk instead of blood to run from the severed head of a martyr. He himself was three times put to death, being once cut in pieces, once buried deep in the earth, and once consumed by fire, and was three times brought back to life. In Macedonia he is said to cure barrenness of women and of lands, both by the Christians and the Moslems; for since he had three hundred years’ start of Mohammed he was not to be dug out of the popular mind.
We saw some of his work as soon as we left the house. We had crossed the bridge and were driving along the enbankment, and Militsa
was saying, ‘In that house with the flowers in the balcony lives the girl who was Miss Yugoslavia some years ago, and it is a great misfortune for her, because to marry well one must be correct and not do such things as enter beauty contests, and she is quite a good girl, so now she is unmarried and very poor,’ when I saw that a stream of veiled women dressed in black was passing along the pavement beside the river. It was as if the string of a black necklace had broken and the beads were all rolling the same way. ‘Yes,’ said Mehmed, ‘always on St George’s Eve they come along to this part of the embankment where these poplars are, and they stand and look down into the river.’ That is all they were doing: standing like flimsy black pillars and looking over the low stone wall at the rushing Vardar. It was the most attenuated rite I have ever seen, the most etiolated ceremony; it was within a hair’s breadth of not happening at all. Of course, if one cannot show one’s face, if one is swaddled by clothing till free movement is impossible, if negation is presented as one’s guiding physical principle, this is the most one can do. The custom obviously bore some relation to the nature worship which is the basic religion of the peoples in this part, with its special preference for water. But it had none of the therapeutic properties of worship, it gave the worshippers none of the release that comes from expressing reverence by a vigorous movement or unusual action, nor did it give any sense of contact with magic forces. They were merely allowed to approach the idea of worship and apprehend it dimly, as they apprehend the outer world through their veils. ‘Why do they come to this particular part of the embankment?’ I asked Mehmed, but he did not know. Yet I think he was fully acquainted with all the local superstitions held by male Moslems.
Soon we took to a bad road that lurched among the bare uplands at the feet of the mountains. It was as if one left the road in the valley that runs from Lewes to Newhaven and tried one’s luck over the fields and downs. Beautiful children in fantastic dresses watched us staggering from side to side of the rutted track, courteous old men in white kilts shouted advice over bleak pastures. Someone was leaning against a stunted tree and piping. After two hours or so we came to a great farm that glimmered whitish through the twilight, among the leggy trunks of a young orchard, and Mehmed said, ‘This is where we are going to stay, though the owner does not yet know it.’ I felt shy at being an unannounced guest; I strolled nervously in the garden, dipping my nose to the huge flowers of the lilac bushes that were black in the twilight. Then a voice spoke from the house in beautiful English, English that would have been considered remarkably beautiful even if it had been an Englishman who had spoken it, and a handsome man with fair hair, square shoulders, and a narrow waist came out and welcomed me. He looked like a certain type of Russian officer, but his face was more distracted, being aware of all sorts of alternatives to the actions for which his body was so perfectly shaped. In the porch there stood his wife, a lovely girl in her middle twenties, and her mother, a still lovely woman with silver hair, who were talking to Militsa and Mehmed with that candid appreciation of their friend’s charm which makes Slav life so agreeable.
The perfect note for a visit had been struck at once; but when our host heard that we had come to see the rites of St George practised in the neighbourhood he started up and said that we must go at once, for if we left the journey till full darkness it would be impossible to make the journey there and back before midnight. We got back into the car, and with him as our guide we bounced along a dirt-track till we came to a cross-roads with some hovels glimmering through the darkness. ‘It is here, the Tekiya,’ said our host. ‘Yes, this is the Bektashi village,’ said Mehmed, ‘I recognize it, I have been here before.’ I had not before shown any great curiosity as to what we were to see that night, for the reason that I had always found it a waste of time to try to imagine beforehand anything that Yugoslavia was going to offer me. But I knew that Tekiya was the Turkish word for a sanctuary and that the Bektashi were an order of dervishes, that is to say monks who exist to supply the element of mysticism which is lacking in Orthodox Islam. This particular order was founded by a native of Bukhara named Haji Bektash about six hundred years ago, and it was the special cult of the Janizaries, who spread it all over the Balkan Peninsula. It is said to preach an ecstatic pantheism, and to pronounce the elect free to follow their own inspirations regarding mortality. I stepped out of the car into the kind of twilight that is as dazzling as brilliant sunshine. The white houses glared through what was otherwise thick darkness, the last light shone like polished steel from pools in a road that could only be deduced. Towards us came some men in fezes, their teeth and the whites of their eyes flashing through the dusk. They greeted us with the easy and indifferent manners of the Moslem villager, always so much more like a city dweller in his superficial contacts than his Slav neighbour, who is more profoundly hospitable and indomitably inquisitive, and they led us to a little house that looked like any other. It disturbed me, as I stumbled towards it through the palpitating dusk, and made travel seem a vain thing, that I could no more have deduced that it was a Moslem sanctuary by looking at it than I had been able to deduce Militsa and Mehmed by looking at Skoplje.
Within, it was a square room with a wooden vaulted ceiling, imperfectly lit by a few candles set in iron brackets waist-high on the plastered walls. Our tremendous amazed shadows looked down on a tall black stone standing in the middle of the room, about seven feet high. There was a small flat stone laid across the top of it; it might have been wearing a mortar-board. A string was tied round it, and from this hung flimsy strips of cloth, and beside it lay a collection box. Soon our massive, clear-cut, stolid shadows were brushed across by more delicate shades, and four veiled women were among us. Four times there was the fall of a coin in the collecting-box, four times a black body pressed itself against the black stone, four times black sleeves spread widely and arms stretched as far as possible round its cold girth. ‘Tonight if a woman wishes while she embraces this stone,’ one of the men explained to us, ‘and her fingers meet, then her wish shall be granted.’ ‘Is that really what they believe?’ I asked, and Mehmed and our host confirmed it. Yet it was quite obvious that that was not what the women believed. They were quite unperturbed when their fingers failed to meet, and indeed I do not think I have seen half a dozen women in my life with arms long enough to make the circuit of this stone. The men’s mistake was only more evidence of the pitiful furtiveness of the Moslem woman’s life, which necessarily defends secrets almost unthreatened by the curiosity of the male.
The women’s belief, it could be seen by watching them, lay in the degree of effort they put into the embrace; they must put all their strength, all their passion, into stretching as far as possible, and take to themselves all they could of the stone. Then they must give it their extreme of homage, by raising their veils to bare their lips and kissing it in adoration that makes no reserves. It struck on the mind like a chord and its resolution, this gesture of ultimate greed followed by the gesture of ultimate charity and abnegation. Each woman then receded, fluttering backwards and bringing her whispered prayer to an end by drawing her finger-tips down her face and bosom. They drew tremulously together and then our crasser shadows were along the walls, though none of us actually saw them go. It might be thought that these veiled women who had come to seek from a stone the power to perform a universal animal function for the benefit of those who treated them without honour, who were so repressed that they had to dilute to as near to nothingness as might be even such a negative gesture as leaving a room, would be undifferentiated female stuff, mere specimens of mother ooze. Yet these four had actually disclosed their nature to the room and its shadows, and each of these natures was highly individual; from each pair of sleeves had issued a pair of hands that was unique as souls are. One pair was ageing and had come near to losing hope; one pair was young but grasped the stone desperately, as if in agony lest hope might go; one pair grasped the stone as desperately but with an agony that would last five minutes, or even less, if she saw someth
ing to make her laugh; and one pair made the gesture with conscientious exactitude and no urgency, and would, I think, have been happier joining the Orthodox Moslems of Skoplje in their unsubstantial rite down by the river than in this Bektashi traffic with mystery.
As we went out three other veiled women slipped past us into the holy room. They would come all night on this mission, from all villages and towns where the Bektashi order had its adherents, within an orbit of many miles. We drove on through the pulsing and tumbled darkness dispensed by a sky where thick clouds rode under strong star-light. ‘Now we are going to the tomb of St. George,’ said Militsa. ‘There too are many women who want children. Tell me, what did you wish for?’ For we had both kissed the stone. The Moslems had suggested it with a courtesy which meant, I think, that because this was a woman’s rite they did not feel it to be truly sacred. ‘For myself,’ said Militsa, ‘I wished for something really terribly drastic politically.’ I would not have given a penny for Mr Stoyadinovitch’s life if the stone was functioning according to repute.
On a little hillside we saw a glimmer of murky brightness and headed for it. We stepped out into a patch of Derby Day, and saw what one might see on Epsom Downs on the eve of the race, when the gipsies are settling in. On a grassy common people were sitting about, eating and drinking and talking as if there had not yet been established in their minds the convention that associates night with sleep. If one shut one’s eyes the hubble-bubble sounded astonished, as if an elementary form of consciousness were expressing its amazement that it should not be still unconscious. A gipsy band thrummed and snorted; lemonade sellers cried their livid yellow ware; the gallery of a house overlooking the common was filled with white light, and many heads and shoulders showed black against it. We took a path up the hillside to a little chapel and joined the crowd that pressed into it. It was a new little chapel, not interesting. At first nothing took my eye save a number of very vividly coloured woollen stockings, knitted in elaborate abstract patterns, which were hanging on the icons and on a rope before the altar. But the crowd bore me forward and I saw in the centre of the floor a cross, and about it a thickening of human stuff. ‘The cross is over the tomb of St. George,’ whispered Militsa, ‘and look, oh, look! It is not to be believed! This is the Greek rite of incubation, this is how the Greeks lay all night on the altar of Apollo, so that they could dream themselves into the minds of the gods and know their futures.’