Black Lamb and Grey Falcon

by Rebecca West

  The first had been built in the early thirteenth century by a Patriarch named Arsenius, by order of St Sava, who felt that the seat of the Serbian archiepiscopate, Zhitcha, was dangerously exposed to Hungarian invasion from the West and Tartar invasion from the East, and told him to find a safer shelter for it in the South. Here the growing Serbian civilization had the centre of its spiritual life, and when Stephen Dushan was obliged to detach his Church from the domination of Constantinople this became the seat of the Patriarchate. It was to meet the needs of this increasing importance that two other churches were joined to it in the following hundred years. When the Turks came the independence of the Serbian Church was destroyed, and for a time the Christian Slavs were again subject to Constantinople. But in the sixteenth century there took place the drama of the Sokolovitch brothers, which we had already heard of at Grachanitsa, to which their complicity had added the great porch. One, known as Mehmed, was taken by the Turks as a child and reared as a Janizary, and had risen to be Grand Vizier, in which office he restored the Serbian National Church and made his brother, the monk Macarius, Patriarch of Petch with many privileges. It would be interesting to know how seriously the state of such a renegade as Mehmed was regarded: whether time and repetition rubbed down the crime till it was accepted as a legitimate ruse of Christian self-preservation, or whether it preserved its primal horror. Through this porch Macarius must have walked many thousand times, and either he was not glad, not sorry, child of a twilit age, where faith was grey with incrustations of compromise, or he believed that his brother must burn in Hell, and must have been sorely perturbed to consider that he could not give the saving bread and wine to his people had not his brother chosen damnation. But there exists no record of these people’s interior lives. As yet humanity has chronicled little more than its simpler and more agreeable experiences.

  In any case Macarius carried on his work efficiently; and he was succeeded by a number of able patriarchs until the Great Trek to the Danube in 1690, when the Patriarchate was transferred to its present seat at Karlovats, which we had visited among its lilacs from Belgrade. But that did not mean that the building was ever wholly abandoned. There was always some ecclesiastical activity here, even in the darkest days of the Turkish subjection during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This continuity of Christian worship resulted, as it often does, in destruction of the most valuable part of the Christian heritage. St Mark’s would be far more beautiful if Venice had not been prosperous enough to alter and adorn it for some hundreds of years after it had attained its perfection; and here in the three churches of Petch the most exquisite Serbo-Byzantine frescoes were covered over during recent times with pious trivialities paid for by peasants who wanted to mark their appreciation of the comfort they had received there throughout the long ages of their servitude. These are now, as at Neresi, being removed from the walls, so that one may see the old beside the new, and learn again the paradox by which the greatest tragic art has been produced. In the happy Austria of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries Mozart and Beethoven both looked into the dark springs of human destiny; in the petty and sordid Austria of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which every day carried the plot for the doom of itself and Europe a stage further, there was heard the clear ripple of the waltz and the operetta. Here at every ragged edge that joins the frescoes which were divided by from three to four hundred years it is shown that the free and fortunate subjects of the Nemanyas could bear to contemplate the mystery of pain, while the downtrodden Christian rayahs asked only to think of favour and of prettiness. The contrast was at its most positive where a charming fresco, visibly affected by what I have called the Turkish Regency style, depicting some bland and chic angels having a party at a table obviously arranged by someone with a modish sense of fun, before a window hung with coquettish muslin curtains, was being hewn asunder and flaked off to bring to light an enormous and merciless presentation of the relationship between man and his mother.

  All these early frescoes, though they range in date over two hundred years and show marked variations in style, are alike in being merciless. Here the angels sweep down like furies, the Holy Ghost is seen as a bird of prey, and at the Transfiguration the multitude is aghast, as well it might be at that demonstration that man is wholly deceived by the material world, and there is another one beyond for him to master. In the dome of one of the three churches there is a Christ Ruler of All, dressed in an amber robe and crowned with a golden halo against a silver background, confined by a whirlwind of angels, which puts before the eye, as some great music has put before the ear, the ecstasy of pain that comes from great gifts, great power, great responsibility. Sometimes this central core of harshness is disguised by the most delicious grace. One fresco represents the Mother of God feeding the infant Jesus at her breast while three women adore him and two angels stand in waiting, which recalls a Duccio or a Giunta Pisano, but shows an even greater refinement, an ethereal force very rarely present in Italian painting. It is as if the artist was working in a world where grossness and feebleness were almost unknown, or at least under the ban of the common consciousness. But even here there is a lack of mercy. The infant Jesus is not so much a baby as a reduced adult, a miscroscopic sage and ruler, and he is sucking his mother’s nipple with mature unsmiling greed, as if he meant to take the last drop and give her no payment of gratitude, although her body is a soft mass about him, protecting him as the pulp of a ripe fruit about its kernel. The resemblance between the Nemanyan and the Tudor ages is strong. So did the Elizabethan poets know that though Elizabeth was Gloriana and England glorious, God is not kind to man, not here on earth.

  But the most merciless of all these frescoes was the Virgin and Child that stared out through the angels’ tea-party. This is terrible, with a terror that makes the efforts at realism of later artists such as Rouault seem the fee-fo-fum of a child playing at ogres in the nursery. A vast Virgin is massive as a mother must seem to the child she picks up in her arms and carries where he has not wished to go, that is, unfairly massive; and she grips him with fingers of masonic strength, which are as ten towers, ten lighthouses, affixed to her huge palm. Her features are as gigantesquely marked as all adults’ must seem to a baby’s hand, and she appears unreasonably stern, as those yet unacquainted with the dangers of this world must consider their mothers. The love and kindness published on her huge face is as a huge army entrenched about its object. At her bosom the Christ child is poised like a tiny fettered athlete, his muscular legs bared by runners’ shorts, his glittering enraged face proclaiming revolt against this imprisoning benevolence and shining with the intention of flight to a remote and glorious goal which is his secret. A mind unaware of timidity had considered those questions, ‘Who is my brother or my brethren?’ and ‘Woman, what have I to do with thee?’ and had taken into account certain agonizing arguments he had heard in the world about him.

  They were still, it seemed, being carried on. Constantine turned his back on the fresco and took two letters out of his pockets, which he had already told us in the automobile he had received from Gerda and his mother that morning. He opened them both, stared at them in turn, and seemed to grow hot though the shadow of the church was cool about us. ‘You are worried,’ I said. ‘Why do you not leave us and go straight home to Belgrade?’ He answered in a whining tone, ‘But if I go home I will only have to take round a French woman journalist who is coming early next week to write about us barbarians. I do not like these political Frenchwomen, they are all the same; they are all like Geneviève Tabouis and Andrée Viollis, they drag round the world and disapprove of all that real men do.’ He looked up at the tremendous Virgin, his upper lip lifting from his teeth in a sneer; his eyes left her and stared apprehensively into space. ‘I have other ideas what women should do,’ he said weakly, as if he were very tired. We turned away and looked at other frescoes and the great marble tombs of the patriarchs, but he followed us restlessly, and we went out of the church.


  Outside I saw a monk, whom I knew to be the Abbot because he wore the broad scarlet sash of his office, standing under a very twisted old nut tree, talking to the old women who had passed us as we went into the church. Now that I saw them from a distance I noted, what I had not seen before, since my eyes had been fixed on their magnetic faces and their snowy sun-bright sleeves, that they wore not skirts but trousers of dark flowered material, gathered at the ankle into a black braided cuff, which seemed incongruous garments on women who might very well have been heads of colleges. They were speaking to the Abbot with a charming reverence which was due partly to their sense of his priesthood and partly to his special suitability for it; for they were looking at him with calm and chaste approbation of his extreme good looks. He was a tall man with a clear white skin and a dark wavy beard, like one of the Assyrians in the British Museum; everything about him spoke of quiet strength and good health. He must have pleased them by the proof he gave that their darling care, the race, was still sound. There was standing a little distance off a monk of very different appearance. He was extremely short and so round-shouldered that he was nearly hunchbacked, and his long hair and beard shone chorus-girl golden. The Abbot looked up and saw me coming out of the church with my husband and Constantine just behind me, and with a curious combination of a welcoming smile and an embarrassed gesture he moved towards us, joined by the small blond monk. He was glad to see us; he was a Serb from Serbia and knew Constantine’s name, and in any case he came of good Orthodox stock with its tradition of hospitality; yet he was not at ease. After he had greeted us he introduced the short blond monk, saying, ‘This is a brother from the monastery at Dechani who came over to help me at a special service we had this morning. I am afraid he will have to go at once, if he is to catch his motor bus back.’

  But the little creature pressed forward and with the pinched and dwarfish vivacity of a pantomime child shook his finger at us, crying, in a peculiar German, ‘I know what you are thinking about me!’ It was an intensely embarrassing remark coming from one so physically odd, but at once he continued, with a great deal of trilling laughter, ‘You are thinking, “How fair he is! How can he be so fair, being a Yugoslavian? He is fair as a German!” ’ We had, of course, been thinking nothing of the sort, for a number of Slavs, particularly Bosnians, are fairer than Germans, are as fair as Scandinavians. All that had struck us about his hair was the peculiar harshness of its colour. ‘I will explain the mystery to you,’ he tittered. ‘I am a Croat, yes, I am a Croat from Zagreb. But my mother, my beloved and saintly mother, she was a true German born in Austria, and she it was who gave me my golden hair!’ His little fists swept forward the curls that hung down his back so that they covered his eyes and became tangled in his beard. ‘Always when I was a child people stopped in the street and said, “Who is this child that is fair like an angel, that looks like a real German child?” and my mother would say, “It is a German child, and yet it is not a German child.” ’

  The creature reeled about in paroxysms of laughter, and the Abbot said, ‘If you do not hurry you will miss the motor bus.’ ‘Yes, yes,’ the little creature cried, ‘I must not do that, for I receive all the distinguished visitors who come to Dechani. I speak to them my mother-tongue, the beautiful German. This afternoon I must receive an Italian general, and his wife who is a princess; tomorrow morning I must receive a professor who is at the head of the greatest university in France. They will have to be shown round by me, for the other monks do not know German, it is only I who speak German.’ ‘The motor bus,’ said the Abbot. ‘Oh, isn’t it a shame that I must go! Well, good-bye, good-bye, good-bye!’ He ran away from us with tiny twinkling steps, smiling at us over his shoulder and undulating his outstretched arm, like an old-fashioned fairy queen quitting the stage of a pantomime.

  The Abbot took off his tall hat, blew into it, replaced it, and evidently felt much better. It was an odd gesture, but we all knew what he was feeling and sympathized. He had suffered acutely from this bizarre interlude, because, as we were to find out later on, he was primarily a country gentleman. That was why he had been made the Abbot here. It was his duty to restore the estate of the Patriarchate to order and productivity, so that the Christians of Petch might see how their God wished them to live in fair weather, when martyrdom was no longer required from them. In this he was succeeding admirably, for the monastery had that look of agrarian piety to be seen in many French and some English farms and market gardens. I do not think that the frescoes meant very much to him, but he spoke with great pleasure of the two visits that Bernard Berenson and Gabriel Millet had made for the purpose of examining them. He had his full measure of the countryman’s feeling for craftsmanship, and he could see that these people knew their jobs. Also, he explained with enthusiasm that he had derived great enjoyment from the handsomeness of Mr Berenson and his personal exquisiteness. ‘He is like a prince!’he said. ‘With his white hair, and his fine hands, and his slender body, and all his clothes so neat and clean, he is like someone from a great court. I hope that there are many pictures of him all over England and America.’

  He took us up to his parlour, which was sweet and clean, and we drank good coffee and ate crystalline spoonfuls of quince jam, while he talked of his work and the place. Yes, it was beautiful, though in winter the winds came down the gorge from Montenegro very bitterly, and there was a great deal of snow. The land was very good, though this monastery was far from being rich like Dechani, and he found the people who worked for it very pleasant indeed, particularly the Albanians. We noted again the liking that most Serbs now feel for the Albanians, who during the Turkish occupation were their most constant tormentors. His congregations, he went on to say, were very good and pious, and came many miles to the services. Yet the Abbot’s large handsomeness, which should have been as placid as cream, was dimmed by a cloud of perplexity and exasperation immediately he had given us an assurance of his satisfaction with the district. His dark brows drew together under his clear fleshy forehead, and his eyes, luminous as a peat stream, seemed to see something not very far off and not entirely gratifying, perhaps the main street of Petch as it would appear to eyes for whom nothing in it had the charm of unfamiliarity, a track, too wide for any traffic that could conceivably pass this way, with telegraph posts marching along it in full futility, bringing no useful messages to the town.

  We should have gone to Dechani that afternoon, but at lunch it was plain that Constantine’s fever had come back to him, so he telephoned to the Abbot and arranged that we should go the next morning instead. We sent Constantine to bed and tried to sleep a little ourselves, for we were both deadly tired. But I found it difficult to rest, because whenever my mind was not preoccupied by some new sight it was invaded by the recollection of some of the tremendous events which had been shown or explained to me during the last two months: the struggle of the Croat soul between its Slav self and its Western education, the outlawry of the Dalmatian Uskoks, the martyrdoms of Franz Ferdinand and Sophie Chotek and Princip and Chabrinovitch, the conflict between the Obrenovitches and the Karageorgevitches, the magical practices of Macedonian Christianity, the rites of St George’s Eve, the glory of Grachanitsa and the self-slaughter of Kossovo, the noble effort of Trepcha, and the nihilism of Gerda, with its demand that all these efforts of the human spirit should be set aside and that all the forces of the universe should be directed to the purpose of cramming her with whatever material belonged to others. When at last I slept a dream distressed me by its proof that the thing which stung Constantine’s hand was his wife. She did not want him to write any more poetry, because he was a Jew like Heine.

  My husband was awakened by the scamper of mice among our shoes, so we gave up and went for a walk on the hills overlooking the Patriarchate on the other side of the river, among budding woods and through meadows tangled with pale-purple and blue flowers. We met a good-looking young man who was stripped to the waist and carried a bright-blue shirt and wet bathing dress. He looked at
us very hard and then turned back, and asked if he might walk with us and show us one of the hermits’ caves which are so numerous in this district that they gave the town its name; for Petch is an old word for cave. He spoke a didactic kind of English which he said he had learned in America as a child, during a visit to an uncle, but which had the hollow ring of the propagandist printed word. ‘You may wonder why I approached you when my torso is nude,’ he said, ‘but I did so in full confidence for I am sure that you are people who have swept all unwholesome prejudices out of your minds, and are open-minded and receptive to such healthful ideas as sun-bathing.’ ‘How did you know that?’ asked my husband. ‘I watched you last night as you had dinner outside the hotel,’answered the young man, ‘and I am sure of it.’ ‘But what did we do as we dined that convinced you we’re in favour of sun-bathing?’ pursued my husband. ‘You are very polite to your wife,’ said the young man; ‘it is evident that you have conquered your animal instinct to oppress the female and have accepted intellectually and emotionally the point of view that by child-bearing she contributes as much to the state as the male by his characteristic activities. You talk together very intently also, so it is evident that you have raised her to your intellectual level. Yesterday I went back to my house and made my wife come out and look at you as an example, for she is of these parts, and she is not always sure that she ought to be advanced. She is dragged down by her early surroundings. But she is very beautiful and very good, and there is something special about her which would be difficult to describe. But besides your attitude to each other, you have the appearance of cultured people. I am sure you read many books. What sort of books do you prefer and why?’