by Rebecca West
Now that I saw the lamb thrusting out the forceless little black hammer of its muzzle from the flimsy haven of the old man’s wasted arms, I could not push the realization away from me very much longer. None of us, my kind as little as any others, could resist the temptation of accepting this sacrifice as a valid symbol. We believed in our heart of hearts that life was simply this and nothing more, a man cutting the throat of a lamb on a rock to please God and obtain happiness; and when our intelligence told us that the man was performing a disgusting and meaningless act, our response was not to dismiss the idea as a nightmare, but to say, ‘Since it is wrong to be the priest and sacrifice the lamb, I will be the lamb and be sacrificed by the priest.’ We thereby set up a principle that doom was honourable for innocent things, and conceded that if we spoke of kindliness and recommended peace it was fitting that afterwards the knife should be passed across our throats. Therefore it happened again and again that when we fought well for a reasonable cause and were in sight of victory, we were filled with a sense that we were not acting according to the divine protocol, and turned away and sought defeat, thus betraying those who had trusted us to win them kindliness and peace.
Thus it was that the Slavs were defeated by the Turks on the field of Kossovo. They knew that Christianity was better for man than Islam, because it denounced the prime human fault, cruelty, which the military mind of Mohammed had not even identified, and they knew also that their essential achievements in conduct and art would be trodden down into the mud if they were vanquished. Therefore, because of the power of the rock over their minds, they could not go forward to victory. They knew that in this matter they were virtuous, therefore it was fitting that they should die. In that belief they betrayed all the virtuous who came after them, for five hundred years. And I had sinned in the same way, I and my kind, the liberals of Western Europe. We had regarded ourselves as far holier than our tory opponents because we had exchanged the role of priest for the role of lamb, and therefore we forgot that we were not performing the chief moral obligation of humanity, which is to protect the works of love. We have done nothing to save our people, who have some little freedom and therefore some power to make their souls, from the trampling hate of the other peoples that are without the faculty for freedom and desire to root out the soul like a weed. It is possible that we have betrayed life and love for more than five hundred years on a field wider than Kossovo, as wide as Europe. As I perceived it I felt again that imbecile anxiety concerning my own behaviour in such a crisis, which is a matter of only the slightest importance. What mattered was that I had not served life faithfully, that I had been too anxious for a fictitious personal salvation, and imbecile enough to conceive that I might secure it by hanging round a stinking rock where a man with dirty hands shed blood for no reason.
‘Is this not a lovely old Albanian man?’ asked Constantine. Indeed he was; and he was the lovelier because he was smiling, and the smile of an Albanian is cool and refreshing as a bite out of a watermelon, their light eyes shine, their white teeth gleam. Also this old man’s skin was white and transparent, like a very thin cloud. ‘I think he is very good,’ said Constantine, ‘and he is certainly very pathetic, for he has guessed we are going to the Trepcha mines and he wants us to get a job for his grandson, who, he says, is a clever boy. I wonder if we could not do something about it.’ Constantine was always at his happiest when he was being kind, and this opportunity for benevolence made his eye shine brighter than we had seen it for many a day; but the cheek below was pouched and raddled like a weeping woman’s. Perhaps he had been weeping. The grey falcon had visited him also. He had bared his throat to Gerda’s knife, he had offered his loving heart to the service of hate, in order that he might be defeated and innocent.
‘Naturally,’ said Dragutin, speaking broken German so that the old man should not understand, ‘this one must be something of a villain, since he is an Albanian. The Albanians, having the blood-feud and being brigands and renouncers of Christ, are great villains. But this one is poor and very old, and whatever harm he does he cannot do for much longer, so let us do what we can for him.’ He shuddered, then laid his open hand on his chest and breathed deeply, as if he had thought of old age and was restoring himself by savouring his own health and strength. It would have been possible to take him as an image of primitive simplicity had he not, only a little time before, recited this subtle and complicated poem about the grey falcon, and had not that poem survived simply because his people were able to appreciate it. This is the Slav mystery: that the Slav, who seems wholly a man of action, is aware of the interior life, of the springs of action, as only the intellectuals of other races are. It is possible that a Slav Cæsar might be moved in crises by a purity of metaphysical motive hardly to be conceived elsewhere, save among priests and philosophers. Perhaps Stephen Dushan was not only influenced by thoughts of innocence and guilt, as all great statesmen are, but was governed by them almost to the exclusion of simpler and more material considerations. Perhaps he died in his prime as many die, because he wished for death; because this image of bloody sacrifice which obsesses us all had made him see shame in the triumph which seemed his destiny. He stood at his doorway in the Balkan mountains and looked on the gold and ivory and marble of Constantinople, on its crosses and its domes and the ships in its harbours, and he knew that he was as God to these things, for they would cease to be, unless he retained them as clear thoughts in his mind. He feared to have that creative power, he stepped back from the light of his doorway, he retreated into the blameless world of the shadows; and Constantinople faded like a breath on a windowpane.
‘Yugoslavia is always telling me about one death or another,’ I said to myself, ‘the death of Franz Ferdinand, the death of Alexander Obrenovitch and Draga, the death of Prince Michael, the death of Prince Lazar, the death of Stephen Dushan. Yet this country is full of life. I feel that we Westerners should come here to learn to live. But perhaps we are ignorant about life in the West because we avoid thinking about death. One could not study geography if one concentrated on the land and turned one’s attention away from the sea.’ Then I cried out, for I had forgotten the black lamb, and it had stretched out its neck and laid its cold twitching muzzle against my bare forearm. All the men laughed at me, though the Albanian was careful to keep a central core of courtesy in his laughter. I returned their laughter, but I was frightened. I did not trust anybody in this group, least of all myself, to cast off this infatuation with sacrifice which had caused Kossovo, which, if it were not checked would abort all human increase.
Kossovska Mitrovitsa I
The town lay on the limits of the plain, at the threshold of the warm, broken Serbian country that reminds Somerset men of Somerset and Scots of the Lowlands, a little town, a standard town, with barracks on a hill, some minarets, the main body of its houses round the bend in the river; some exquisite old Turkish houses, with their beautifully proportioned upper stories and intricately carved lattices, notably in the street where we found our hotel. ‘Go in, go in,’ said Dragutin impatiently, ‘do not look at the rat warrens left by the abominable, look rather at this hotel, which has been built since the mines at Trepcha were opened, and is fino, fino.’ Certainly the large café we entered was very clean and proud and well found, and entirely lacked the Balkan touch: that is to say, nothing in the place looked as if it had been brought from somewhere else and adapted to its present purposes by a preoccupied intellectual. But the people who were sitting there were Balkan enough. Four men were playing cards with their hats on, and a young priest was circling round them with a glass of tea in his hand, looking at their cards. He was supremely beautiful; his long hair and beard were wavy and blue-black, his eyes were immense and gentian-blue. At the sight of one man’s hand he flung back his head, cried out something mocking, sat down, and sipped his tea between gusts of silent laughter. ‘From his accent I think he is Russian,’ said Constantine; and indeed he had the spiral and ethereal air, as of one formed from smoke-wreat
hs, which I had noticed in some of the Russian priests and monks I had met in Yugoslavia. ‘Yes, he is a Russian,’ said the waiter; ‘there are people of all nations working in the Trepcha mines, and among them are many Russians, and this is the son of one amongst them.’
‘Now I have engaged our rooms,’ said my husband, ‘I must go and telephone to the people at the mines, to see if it will be convenient for them to let us go up and see them now.’ ‘Certainly, certainly,’ said Constantine, ‘I will tell the waiter to show you the telephone and get you the number.’ But when my husband came and told us, ‘It is all right, they sound very nice people, very Scotch, and they say they will be very delighted to see us, and that we are to come up at once,’ Constantine said with a sad smile, ‘I hope that you did not frighten your friends by telling them that you were bringing me with you, for I am going to excuse myself.’ ‘But why?’ exclaimed my husband. ‘They sounded as if they would really be so pleased to see you, it was not merely a matter of politeness. And I am sure you will be interested to visit the mine.’ Constantine shook his head and continued to smile. ‘I do not think they will really be very disappointed if I do not come with you,’ he said. ‘I understand the English too well to believe that. I think you and your friends will be happier if you are all English together and you can say what you really think of my country.’ He said it with Gerda’s accent. ‘And as for seeing the mine, I am a writer and I do not really need to visit a mine to know what it is like.’ He added, that I might not fail to note that he had let fly at me, ‘I am not a journalist, me. I am a poet.’
He was depriving himself horribly. If he had come with us there would have been new people to impress and charm; and his mind, which was actually not at all autokinetic, but which, like a New Zealand geyser, let loose its fountains only when some solid object had been dropped into it, would have been inspired to its best by the spectacle of anything so remote from his experience as a mine. But it was no use arguing. One by one he was closing the shutters of all his windows. We sat for a moment in silence drinking our coffee. A waiter came in with a plate of sweet cakes, slices of the Dobosh and Sacher Torten that in the Balkans mean sophistication and pride and contact with the West, and put it down by the card-players. The young priest took one and began to circle round the players again, eating it upwards instead of downwards, pressing it against the roof of his mouth with his tongue, as the bears in the zoo do when they are given a spoonful of honey. The upper half of the tall café windows nearly touched the projecting first floor of a Turkish house opposite. Two bare hands gripped the top of the lattice; we were being watched by a hidden face.
Dragutin walked through the café and Constantine called out, ‘Are you ready to take them to the mines in a minute or two?’ He answered, ‘Yes, indeed. I have put my head in a basin of cold water, and I am just as fresh as if I had just left Skoplje. And if I had not I should still be ready to go to the mines, for that place up there is fino, fino. There would I live if I were not the Ban’s chauffeur, and I say it seriously.’
Before Dragutin shut the automobile door on us, he cried again, ‘Fino, fino!’ and waved his arm in promise that we were going to drive to Paradise. ‘I wonder what it is that Dragutin considers fino, fino,’ said my husband, ‘I fear it may be something quite terrible in concrete.’ Looking out of the window, I said, ‘There are an extraordinary number of shops, and they sell excellent things, really quite excellent fruit.’ ‘I see that everybody moves quickly and lightly,’ said my husband. ‘This little place has a pride, as if it were somewhere like Bitolj.’ The road took us out of Kossovska Mitrovitsa, into a valley, hugging the base of steep hills covered with dwarf beechwoods and winding with the willow-hung course of a river, and brought us soon to a succession of prodigies alien from the idyllic character of the countryside, which suggested the more delicate type of folk-song, just a little more robust than the written lyric. There was a multiplication of railway tracks by the river-bank; and then there was a low hill, not a mound but a hill, square-cut and the colour of death. ‘That is waste from the mines,’ said my husband; ‘nothing can ever be done with it, nothing will ever grow on it.’ Then came a group of pale corrugated buildings, fantastic according to the whimsey of engineering, straddling high on stilts here, there dropping long galleries from third floor to ground like iron necks that want to drink, or lifting little tanks that stand on thin legs among the roofs like storks. ‘This is an immense place,’ said my husband happily. Then the river regained its peace and ran among its water-meadows again, and the road forsook it and swung up the southern incline of a steep hill. ‘Fino, fino!’ cried Dragutin, waving at the hillside; and he was perfectly right. The upper half of the hillside was unreclaimed from wild nature and wild history; above beechwoods and thickets, a slope of long grass harlequined with flowers ran up to a pinched peak confused with the ruins of a castle. This was lovely enough, but not so lovely as what lay below. The lower half of the hillside was entirely covered with villas of the Golder’s Green sort, standing in little gardens; and it was indeed fino, fino. I would not have thought so before I went to the Balkans, but now I knew it.
‘I never realized before,’ said my husband, ‘that a garden is a political thing.’ For weeks past we have never seen a country house which was not planned on the definite understanding that the people living in it were bound to be frightened most of the time, and for very good reason. Unless houses were in the centre of a town they turned blank sides to the road, and surrounded themselves with high walls, to halt the attack of the Turkish soldier, the brigand, or the tax-collector. But here we saw windowed walls freely exposed to the four quarters, their irises and their roses and green peas and runner beans left unguarded before every eye. Here nobody’s grandmother had been raped and hamstrung, nobody’s grandfather had had his entire crop stolen by brigands and been marched off by the disappointed tax-collectors to do a season’s forced labour for the Pasha and never been seen again. Some of the windows were brightly giving back the westering sun, and it seemed like a blast blown by a jolly trumpeter who had never known despair. ‘These houses belong to the chiefs,’ said Dragutin, ‘but the men also have beautiful homes. Look down in the valley! But let us go on, for the Gospodin Mac’s home is at the very top, and it’s the most beautiful of all!’ Thus we ascended to heights superior to Golder’s Green, to Chislehurst, to very Heaven, which is indeed what Chislehurst is, can one but see it for a second brushed clear of that dust which settles on institutions, not when they are disused but when they have been so long in use that they are taken for granted.
There was a gravel sweep, and beds of standard roses on each side of the front door, and Dorothy Perkins all over the white rough-cast walls, and a perambulator on the porch. An Aberdeen terrier waddled out to meet us, and we acclaimed him, since not for weeks had we heard a country dog bark so comfortably, with so palpable a mere feint of exasperation. But this dog had known no graver incident in its life than a moment’s uncertainty about the verdict of the judges at Crufts‘; he did not come of a line of dogs trained to take food only from their master’s hands lest his enemies should poison them. Within the villa there was English chintz, fatly upholstered armchairs and sofas, polished floors, and, as so often in an English home, a Scottish family. There was the Gospodin Mac, a Scotsman of the toughly delicate type, whose sharp features and corded neck and lean body looked as if the east winds that had blown on him in his childhood had twisted and wrung every part of him save the head and the heart. His wife was a sample of the other Scotland, the abundant Scotland, the one country which knows how to make its cakes rich enough, that scorns the superficial voluptuousness of icing and cream fillings and achieves the sober luxury of shortbread and Scotch bun. She was strongly built; Ayrshire-born, she used the deep soft speech of the Western Lowlands; and she moved slowly and confidently, as those do, no doubt, who work in the Mint. For she too had behind her a store of wealth, in her mother wit and powers of observation, her invincible curiosity, a
nd her unalterably high standards. There was a married daughter, who wrung my heart without knowing it by her resemblance to the dearest friend of my schooldays, whose angular grace and fine cheek-bones and clear colouring and sweet voice she had borrowed without the slightest excuse of a blood tie. These people instantly entranced us. I hung round them shamelessly, like a hungry dog at a larder door. We stayed with them too long that day, for we accepted when we were asked to supper, and did not go back to the hotel afterwards as soon as we should. Indeed, whenever I found myself in their presence I stayed with them exactly as long as I could, because they knew all sorts of things that I and my friends do not know, they were all sorts of things that I and my friends are not.