by Rebecca West
There was one Serbian among them, a doctor, a jolly soul with reddish hair and a face that had begun to wrinkle not because he was older than his age but because he still loved to laugh like a child. When we said we had been in Bitolj he told me he was a native of that city, and we talked for a little about the place, its mosques, its lovely girls, its acacias, and the rich civilization that lay under its surface. It was his belief that the town, though so much poorer than it was when it was the capital of Macedonia, was still enormously rich. ‘Many, many of the women that shuffle about the little shops by the river in the morning, in their cotton wrappers,’ he said, ‘have more gold round their necks and their wrists than five hundred Viennese ladies who wear silk dresses ever see in their lives. I tell you the city is full of gold, is stuffed and crammed with gold.’ He spoke, too, with Balkan gusto of a perilous childhood. ‘My father was a schoolmaster,’ he said, ‘he was the head teacher of the first Serbian school that was ever in Bitolj. The Bulgarians had their schools and the Greeks had their schools, but we Serbs had none. So my father, who was a Serb from the Shumadiya, came down and taught his own people. So my mother was always very nervous, for of course any day he might have been killed, whether by the Turks or the Bulgars or the Greeks, she did not know.’ ‘But why should he be killed because he was a schoolmaster?’ asked some of the engineers. ‘And why was Bitolj such a rich city?’ They knew nothing of the tradition of the Turkey in Europe which had shaped the land in which they lived.
They were ignorant too of something which was more recent, and had been commemorated in print, for even the English to read. I said to the doctor, ‘And what happened to you during the war?’ and he answered, clapping his hand over his laughing mouth, ‘You will never guess! Do you know, I went with the retreating Serbian Army through the Albanian mountains down to the sea. You see, I should have gone with my mother and my brother and sisters in the refugee train to Salonika, but I was sent with a message to an old grand-uncle of mine in another part of the town, and on the way home I began to worry about a little boy I liked very much, so I went to see what he was going to do, and by the time I realized I could not find him I was too late to catch the train. So I joined some soldiers whom I saw walking in the street, and I went off with them to Ochrid, and away into the Albanian mountains. And, do you know, it was not so terrible. Yes, all you have heard is true. There was snow and ice, and very little to eat, and the Albanians sniped at us from the rocks. But I felt very grown-up, and all Serb boys want to be grown-up and to fight, and the soldiers made a great pet of me. When we got up into the mountains, they took a coat off a dead soldier and put it on me, and of course it was far too big for me, it came right down to my feet, so they called me “General Longcoat.” They were really very kind to me; when there was any food I always got the first of it. So, when we got to Corfu and they found my family was at Salonika, and sent me off to find them, I really was not so pleased. Think of being told to go to bed when you had been through all that!’
It was as astonishing as if one day a fellow-guest announced that he had been to Moscow and back with Napoleon; but it was not less astonishing that most of the Englishmen who were listening had never heard of the retreat through Albania, and not one of them had ever heard the folk-song which commemorates that agony: ‘Tamo Daleko, Daleko od mora. Tamo ye selo, Tamo ye Serbiya.’ Yonder, far yonder, far from the sea, is my village, my Serbia! It meant that they could not know Yugoslavia; or rather that they could not synthesize all the valuable information they held regarding her into any valid picture of her. It seemed to follow from this that they were a danger to the state, because they would not be controlled by regard for her interests of which they were ignorant. Such would have been the opinion of Brigham Young, who was one of the few really great statesmen of the nineteenth century. He always regarded as enemies of the state the prospectors and miners who came to Utah in search of her mineral wealth. They were not part of his people, and therefore would not serve its interests. That was his theory; but in this mess-room above the mines of Stan Trg it emerged that there was nothing in it so far as this part of the world was concerned.
These men were not free to turn against their fellows. A force bound them. They fell to recounting tales of their beginnings; all, it seemed, had gone into strange lands as youths, it might almost be said as children, and had been assailed by climates that were torturing misconducts of the sun and snows, and events that were monstrous births that should have been kept in bottles in the Surgeons’ Hall of circumstance. They had, however, not been perturbed. They had been, and were still, sustained by a code. They believed ... what did they believe? That one must be clean in body; that one must not tell lies, or suffer lies to be told to one; that one must do whatever work one was paid for doing, and do it well; and that one must not cause pain in other people, and must let them make their own souls as far as possible. This is the ethical tradition built into the English and American mind by Protestantism, and it is easy to deride it. There is indeed positive need that it should be derided, since it is an insufficient prop, and worse, for people who are prosperous; it is to them actually a prescription for ruin. Any Englishman of the upper bourgeoisie and the classes above it finds no difficulty about being clean; he can persuade himself that what he says is true, and can compel his economic inferiors to tell him the truth; he has probably chosen work that makes no great demands on his powers; and the duty to leave others in peace may be construed as permission to indulge in the pleasures of indifference. But this same code, applied by such as these mining engineers, was a discipline that can even become an instruction in mysticism. To be clean in lands where nature intends one to be sweaty and unkempt; to tell the truth and exact it in circumstances so difficult that cautiousness cries out to let all be glossed over; to do work well, far away from criticism, and in fatigue of the flesh and spirit; to respect the rights of alien people, who are uncomprehended and therefore terrible: this rule makes no man an enemy of the state. There are, of course, mining engineers who follow this discipline imperfectly or not at all. But since these in this mess were chosen by the Gospodin Mac, who was himself that discipline made visible, they were not of that sort. Though the West has again and again infected the Balkans with corruption, it seemed probable that this contact was innocent.
In the afternoon we drove away from the mines, down the valley to the town and the pale sprawling buildings where the ore was milled; about us conveyor belts went on their endless journeys to nowhere and puffs of smoke at escape-valves registered the culmination of a process which, so far as I, with my mechanical incompetence, was concerned, had never begun.
‘It is no use whatsoever for you to explain these things to me,’ I told the Gospodin Mac; ‘to me it is all magic and nothing but magic.’ ‘It is funny you should say that just here,’ he answered, ‘for that’s exactly what these particular machines are to me, and to everybody else in the outfit.’ We were standing among a number of tanks, all filled with a seething solution of ore, but each bubbling in a different tempo and stained to a different shade of grey. ‘These machines are the most valuable we have,’ he continued. ‘They’re the last word. They’re wizards. In each bath the ore throws off one of its constituents, either silver or magnesium or sulphur or whatever, so that by the time it’s got through this room all the goodness has been taken out of it and we’ve just to collect the various minerals from the baths. But I can’t understand the theory on which these machines work, nor does anybody else here that I know of. I don’t mean that we can’t mend them when they break down. We can, just as you could correct the faults of grammar in a book of mining, though you wouldn’t be able to make the sense of the book. But the principle of the things is far beyond me. The chaps who brought them over from America understood them all right, and they stayed here for a bit. But the machines were their life-work, they’d specialized on those lines, and we’re general-purposes fellows who have to get on with the business of running the mine.’ ‘Do you mean
that in mining also there is too much to be known?’ I asked. ‘Much too much,’ he said, ‘for any one man.’ There is no escape from mystery. It is the character of our being.
But this man was not perturbed. We stood on the bridge that crossed the railway line, running from the mill to the high-road. On our left was the rope-way, striding across the hills up to the high mines; on our right was the steep wooded peak, crowned with the fortress. The afternoon was golden on these heights, but the Gospodin Mac looked before him at the square-cut hill of waste which in the sunshine was the colour of something deader than death, of death without the hope of wholesome putrefaction and dissolution. ‘That worries me a lot,’ he murmured. ‘So far as we can see, nothing will ever grow on that, not to the end of time. Well, it’s an eye-sore. And this was a bonny place before we started on it.’ On the line below us a dozen men were digging a pit, Albanian Moslems in their white fezes and linen tight-waisted shirts and trousers. I levelled my camera on them, and one looked up and saw me. Instantly he was transformed, and so, the instant after, was the whole group. Gallantry ran through their bodies, turning their heads to a provocative angle, setting their hands on their hips; their eyes and teeth flashed through the distance. Perhaps they could not see that I was no longer young, or perhaps their romanticism forbade them to notice it, so that they could go through the day with the idea that they had attracted the admiration of a beautiful Englishwoman.
The Gospodin Mac brooded over them as over his children. ‘I tell you they’re fine, these Albanians,’ he said. ‘And I think this lot have got over the blood-feud. That’s the curse of Albanian life. But they say they’re dropping it. It stands to reason they will. Give a man a decent job and a house and a garden he likes, and he’ll think twice about trapesing off to kill the uncle of a man who killed his second cousin, particularly if he knows he’ll go to jail. That blood-feud, you know, it made everything impossible. When the Yugoslavs took over this country after the war, it was hard to get the roads safe for travelling. Under the Turks, people simply did not travel, unless they were rich enough to have an armed escort or unless they had to for some reason. There were whole villages up in the hills where every single family was in the brigandage business. You couldn’t blame them. They’d been pushed into it. Maybe they’d fallen foul of the authorities at some time and got driven on to the land that can’t be cultivated. Or maybe there’d been a strong character born who’d turned the whole lot of them wrong. Anyway they used to sweep down on the roads round here and rob and murder. It had to be stopped. And the only way the gendarmes could stop it was by going up into these villages and killing every man, woman, and child. Mind you, nothing less would do. If they’d let one child get away, as soon as it had grown up it would have had to carry on the blood-feud against the gendarmes, or the people who were supposed to be responsible for the gendarmes’ attack. And that was a cruel hard thing, not only on the villagers but on the gendarmes, who are usually very decent fellows; and it was hard on the whole people. It lowered their standards. If you made the gendarmes as tough as that they were as tough with everybody. But settling down, it was just a phase....’
So it went on, this living exposition of the trials of a state engaged in resurrection, and therefore ravaged by the pangs of both death and birth.
When we went back to the hotel we were still glowing with satisfied listening, and we hushed each other as we caught sight of Constantine, sitting florid and miserable in the café, alone among the White Russians, a newspaper spread out on the table before him. ‘May we sit down with you and have coffee?’ I said timidly. ‘Certainly, certainly,’ he replied, but once we were seated, imposed on us hurt and smiling silence. My husband cleared his throat and asked, ‘Did you have a good day in the mountains?’ ‘I did not go. I did not care to go.’ Constantine answered shortly, and the silence fell again. At last he asked, ‘And you, I suppose you have had a charming day with your friends in the mines?’ With an air of guilt, we admitted that we had. ‘I am very glad,’ he said, ‘I am exceedingly glad, for maybe it will not always be so happy for you and your countrymen up at the mines.’ He tapped on the newspaper that lay before him. ‘It is all written here.’ ‘What is it?’ asked my husband. ‘An attack on the British company’s title to the mine?’ Constantine grimly nodded his head. ‘Yes. The concession was given as a reward to one of our great statesmen, and his son sold it. But he was perhaps not very clever; and all the world knows that to do business with the English one must be very clever indeed, perhaps more than clever.’ He raised his eyebrows and shrugged. ‘So perhaps a wrong was done, and perhaps it will be righted.’ ‘But the deal cannot have been crooked,’ said my husband. ‘I know the chairman of the company and what is more important I know his reputation in England and America, and the reputation of the company and its associates, and that’s not how they behave. Besides, it would have meant taking an immense risk. The company put a million pounds of their money into the mine before they got a penny out. If they did that on a property out of which they might be kicked at any moment because they had stolen it, they wouldn’t come out of it so well.’
Constantine shrugged again. ‘You are a city man,’ he said, ‘a man of the city of London. No doubt all your countrymen do looks well to you. But we are a simpler people. We see things from a different angle, and perhaps on what we see we shall some day act.’ A silence fell. We sadly drank our coffee and would have risen to go had not a young man, dressed rather in the style of a French romantic poet in the nineteenth century, paused before our table. ‘Good evening, Monsieur Constantine,’ he said in French, giving us a side-way look, ‘Monsieur Constantine, who was a poet, who is a Government servant.’ We saw that here also there were young intellectuals, as there had been in Belgrade and in Sarajevo and in Zagreb, who could not forgive Constantine for having left the opposition, who said of him quite unfairly, ‘Just for a handful of silver he left us, just for a ribbon to stick in his coat.’ ‘Good evening,’ said Constantine, and he explained to us, ‘This is a young writer who works by day in the laboratories at the mine. I know him well. All people are my friends everywhere.’ The young man continued, ‘Why are you sitting with that abominable rag in front of you? You know that it is full of the most abominable lies. These people at the mines are part of the filthy capitalist system, but they are as good as they can be in that condition. And it is all nonsense, it is galimatias, it is Quatsch, about the title to the mine. You know all that quite well, and you know that these papers are financed by German money, simply so that the Nazis can get their claws into our country. But you and your accursed pack of gangsters in Belgrade, you let the blackguards bring out these lying papers and threaten one of the few decent institutions in our unhappy country.’ ‘We do not,’ cried Constantine, ‘we suppress them as soon as we find out they are being published! Again and again the miserable things appear, and always we send out our forces after them and we destroy them, we stamp them into the dirt as they deserve!’ He looked miserably round at us, realizing as he spoke that he had contradicted himself; and he was now so disintegrated that he could not take any of the obvious ways out of the situation, he could not laugh at himself or pretend, as his talent for sleight of mind would have enabled him to do better than most men, that there was some subtle consistency behind his apparent inconsistency. There was nothing for us to do but rise and say good-night.
Kossovska Mitrovitsa II
We stayed another day in the town, but we never got Constantine near the Gospodin Mac, whom he would have been bound to like and to love, both because of his connoisseurship of greatness, and because of their common love for Yugoslavia. So that afternoon, while the Gospodin Mac and my husband indulged in some last orgies of technicalities in the mill, I sat alone with Mrs Mac on the terraces of her garden, overlooking the hills and the valley where the river ran, reflecting willows, between the sweet green pastures. I was a child who had been left alone with a honeypot, for this woman, like so many Scotswomen, had all t
he essential gifts of the novelist. She had been long an exile, and was homesick: half her talk made a palimpsest of the scene before us, overlaying old Serbia with Ayrshire, coloured as it lives. Touch by touch she built up a picture, harsh and honest like the portraits Degas painted in his youth, of the terrific ceremony that was performed every time her mother, a widow in the Scotland of forty years ago, arrayed herself in her weeds to leave her house: I saw and smelt again the thick black blistered crape, and felt the cutting edge of the starched white collar, and was awed and perplexed by the drugged and thickened expression, characteristic of widows in those days, which suggested that their state had about it some joyless and degrading satisfaction. Soberly but with the feeling she described flowing as fresh through her words as when it had first gushed from her eyes and heart, she told how the character of her youth had been changed, to something precious but less gay than youth should be, by her long engagement to Gospodin Mac, who was then seeking his fortune abroad, and who had been too unsure of himself to make their betrothal more than a matter of murmured vows. All her spring days had been clouded by heartache: ‘It’s not good, running for the post, year after year.’ Often she had felt that people thought her dull and a failure, and she had longed to tell her secret; but that would have been to tempt the gods by speaking of what she desired to happen as if it were already happening. Her story had the depth and vigour of early Scots poetry, of William Dunbar and Douglas’s Æneid.
This woman, with her masterly power of observation, with her inflexible standards, had been married nearly thirty years to the Gospodin Mac, and marriage is not so much a mystery as a microscope; but he had survived all her scrutiny, he had passed all her tests. Now he was the test she applied to life. She spoke constantly of Dad. ‘You see that big square white building at the foot of the hill facing this one? That’s the school the company gave the district. They were delighted with it and there was a tremendous to-do when the foundation stone was laid. And will you believe it? There was a priest, and we thought he had just come to say a prayer and give the place his blessing, but suddenly they upped with a lamb and he cut the throat of the poor wee thing all over the foundation stone. That’s nothing to do with Christianity, I thought. But it’s their own place. That’s what Dad always says. It’s their own place. They must do things their own way. They’re funny, mind you. They built the school too big. That’s one of their weaknesses. They build everything too big. They’re building a town hall down in Mitrovitsa. You’d think the place must be the size of Glasgow to look at it. But Dad says it’s no use raging at them for it. Just reckon with it on your side, and see that when they get in trouble on their side that they understand just how they caused themselves the trouble.’