by Rebecca West
I turned, and saw that while I had been looking at an antique Germany, Constantine had been looking in the opposite direction at the actual Germany. At a round table behind me sat eight people, four men in open shirts and leather shorts, four women in dirndlish cotton dresses, all very fair and much overweight. ‘They look very harmless,’ I said. ‘You have not found the right word,’ answered Constantine, ‘for the oldest and tallest of the men is Altdorff, the chief German agent in Yugoslavia.’ ‘Well, surely he is being very harmless at the moment,’ I said; ‘he is evidently just having an outing with his friends.’ Constantine did not answer for a minute. Then he burst out, ‘I am not sure. I think he is doing more than having a Bummel with these pieces of raw meat. I believe there must be something with Albania. Why was that little one with the knickerbockers whom the monk did not trust waiting at Sveti Naum, which is the Albanian frontier? Why was there that fool who said he was a Dane at Petch, which is also on the Albanian frontier? Why is this Altdorff here in Podgoritsa, which again is on the Albanian frontier? It is certain that there is trouble to come in Albania, that the Italians are to do something frightful to the Albanians, and their friends the Germans, who do not so greatly love them, wait outside to see how it goes. I do not think you English know anything about Albania. For it is nearly Italian, they have their officials there, they control the whole country; some day they will have their army there too, and it will be as a pistol pointed at Yugoslavia.’ He shuddered violently and said, ‘Ils avancent toujours.’ He spoke as a Serb, as a Jew, as an inheritor of the French tradition.
Beams of sunshine, dancing with motes, struck the unstained wooden floor, the stiff coarse tablecloths, the emphasized faces and gestures of the players, who were so little confident in their natural endowment that they had brightened all that was bright and darkened all that was dark with cosmetics, who paid their kind the lovely tribute of living for their applause, the featureless, stockish spies, who were contented with their mission, who cared nothing for good opinion. There was a strong smell of fish, for all of us were eating trout. Constantine said, in a faltering voice, ‘My friend who is here rehearsing his play is not a true writer. He is a very rich man who would give his all to be a writer. But his plays are very, very bad, because he does not write them. He is a shrewd man of much appetite, he likes to eat and drink and to be with women, and he has so made himself much experience, and he is intelligent enough to understand what he does. But when he picks up a pen it is not himself who guides it, it is some little woman whom he has swallowed when he was yawning with his great mouth, and who now lives somewhere in him, say in his kidney, and chooses the time when he picks up a pen to have things her way. For his plays are so small, and so fade, and so weak, they are just what a nun would write for her pensionnaires.’
Lake Scutari
For an hour that afternoon we sat on a bouldered hillside, tufted with great blue flowers and peppermint, looking down on the plains about Podgoritsa which were cut into sections, slender as cake-slices in a genteel household, and tidily planted with maize and tobacco, apple orchards, fig trees, and full-foliaged mulberry trees. A puff of dust travelling rapidly along a straight road cut through this neatness showed that my husband had left his hat in the inn at Podgoritsa and that Dragutin had gone back to fetch it. It was warm now, with a clear blue sky overhead and some white mists lying like scarves on the plain. On a little knob of rock above us a white cloud stood like a toy. I strolled about picking flowers within earshot of the two men. ‘There is no equivalent in English,’ I heard my husband say, ‘for the French word banaliser.’ ‘That shows an insensitiveness,’ said Constantine, ‘for banalization is one of the most important processes in life. There are two sorts of banalization, the sort that comes from below, and the sort that comes from above. The first I have recognized when I have been successful. For I have sometimes been successful, more successful than anyone else in Yugoslavia. I have written plays which were so popular that people were crushed to death going into the theatre every night. I have written novels of which nobody in Belgrade has not talked of nothing else. In those days the papers sent many reporters to interview me, and I noticed always that they would take out of my remarks all that is characteristic of me, all that had made my plays and books successful. Often I have wished to ask, “But why do you think your editors sent you to interview me if it were not for that little thing I have which you have so cleverly removed from what I say? Do you not understand that it is precisely because I have that way of thinking and writing which is not yours that I am a favourite writer and you are a reporter?” But I did not, of course. That is why folly is immortal; wise men are too busy to correct fools.
‘Then, when I found I could not write fast enough to keep my wife and children, and I became a Government official, I learned of the other kind of banalization. For I had to write speeches for our Ministers, and I wrote them speeches which were not only good but magnificent, as nobody else in the world could have written them, great in themselves, very great, and always wonderfully appropriate to the occasion when they must be given. And to my stupefaction the Ministers altered them, every one they altered, just in the same way as the reporters altered what I said to them. They banalized them. When the speeches left my pen, they were wise and memorable and persuasive. When the Ministers delivered them, they were not as sensible as any grocer in a quiet little town, they must be forgotten one minute after they were heard, they would make nobody not change no opinion. Yet this kind of banalization was not the same as the reporter’s kind, though it looked the same. For that meant poverty and obscurity, this meant wealth and glory. It was something absolutely necessary to being a Minister. For sometimes a Minister came who did not alter my speeches, and who spoke them so that his audiences cheered again and again and said they would die for him; and always he fell and was disgraced. Now, that I cannot understand, that the way to be poor and the way to be rich should be the same. But here I am very comfortable, for there is nothing but the rocks and the sun.’
Dragutin was a long time away; and when he came back he was as pleased as a doctor who finds that a patient he suspected of anaemia has enough red corpuscles. ‘There’s still a lot of life in that town,’ he said, and with gusto showed us how a lawless Podgoritsan had attracted his attention by winking and folded back his jacket to show pockets stuffed with cigarettes that had never paid duty to the internal revenue. ‘Take one,’ said Dragutin, ‘they’re good. Oh, they’re not done, down there, by any means. But, houp la! If you’re to have a good look at Lake Scutari we must start now.’ We mounted to regions of rock washed by rain and baked by sun to surgical cleanliness. At a great cement cistern we stopped to take water for the engine and look at some girls who were sitting near by round the great trunk of a plane tree, their black and white sheep standing in the shadow. On this side of Montenegro the women have lost their Byzantine tensity and are Du Maurier duchesses, with the same numismatic profiles and uptilted, humourless dignity, and the same underlying simplicity and amiability and resolution in good behaviour. These girls needed only tie-backs and tennis rackets and little boys in sailor suits to be as familiar as any old volume in Punch.
‘Is it not one of the world’s wonders?’ asked Dragutin, when a few more turns of the road took us to a view of Lake Scutari; and indeed it was among landscapes what dragons are among beasts. Through a deep fiord, a thousand feet or so below us, a river flowed into the lake, slowly and without confusion of the two substances, as water from a dripping tap might seep into a cask of molasses. For this lake is not water, it is mud. It was green as a horse-pond on an English common, but the substance was not so liquid. It was nearly solid; the reflections it bears were not superficial images which a breeze will confuse and annul, but photographs imposed on a sensitive jelly. The forms that were photographed followed a strictly geometric pattern. The fiord described a curve, and between its green margins the river dragged the slow snake of its trail in the same curve. The rocky world that
framed the lake was hewn into triangles, great and small. The higher peaks lifted acute apices, the low hills and islands lay squat under obtuser apices. Under each of these triangles, except the high peaks, was the inverted triangle of its image, more solid, more dogged, more of a fact than reflections commonly are, because they were registered on this viscid medium. The archipelago at the mouth of the fiord looked like a fleet of overloaded ships, becalmed in a Sargasso sea; the light shone back from the lake between them a white opaque haze, as if it could not rise freely into the upper air. In this landscape there had happened to matter what happens to time when, as they say, it stands still. Mobility was not. There was this grey rock, its dwarf trees and bushes growing so low among the boulders that they were as if nailed to the mountainside; and there was this greenish jelly in which rivers and reflections and even light itself foundered and were fixed. It would have been appropriate to come on this inspissation through tropical heat, but as we looked down on it we were blown on by the freshest sort of airs, winds from the sea and the peaks. Here nature was at its most unnatural; and the scale of the scene, which was immense, as much as the eye could see from a great height, made this prodigiousness alarming. It was as if one learned that nightmares might fill not only a troubled hour after midnight but the whole of the night and the day, that a historical epoch might hold horror and nothing else. Yet it was beautiful, so beautiful that the appalled sight could not have enough of it.
‘There is a child looking at us from behind those boulders,’ said my husband. ‘Say nothing and she may come nearer,’ said Constantine, ‘but we must be very cautious, here even the little ones are shy and proud.’ It was ten minutes before the little girl came from cover, and then she had been joined by a friend. ‘Good day, little ones,’ called Constantine. ‘Please, can you tell me if that island with the two peaks is Vranina?’ They would not be discourteous. They came to us, though reluctantly. Perhaps they were ten years old, and they were clad in homespun linen frocks, multi-coloured woollen stockings, and sandals with upturned toes. They carried long withies, and below them their black and dust-coloured sheep spread in a munching fan over the mountainside. One was fair and the other dark, with the fine hair about the brows and temples sunburned to honey colour. Both were beautiful, with a thorough and careful beauty that attended to everything, making marvels of such matters as the arch of the eyebrows and the indentation of the upper lip. Both were sublimely dignified. Neither their features nor their limbs sprawled. They were as proud as good people would choose to be in the sight of strangers, revealing nothing ungentle and nothing too tender.
It could be seen that they were amused by the sight of Constantine. They thought that this little fat man with the animal muzzle and the tight black curls was a great joke. But they showed it not by sneering or by any breach of courtesy, but by grave fascinated smiles. They were as little princesses, trained never to fall from graciousness. A boy pushed up the hillside and stood beside them, indubitably a little prince. Another princess came, another prince. The five stood in a line of loveliness, and Constantine sat himself down on a boulder, and set himself to display the tried and potent magic he stored under those black curls, with spreading hands, pouting lips, rolling eyes, and voice that lifted and paused before the crises so that the hearers squeaked the delivering syllable. So, centuries before, one of his blood may have enchanted the market-place of ancient Asian towns. Soon the children were asking him breathless questions, sometimes they were choking with excited laughter, sometimes they made him go back and alter what he had said, because it had offended some fairy-tale convention.
I have no idea what story he told them. Usually he translated to us what passed in his wayside conversations, but this time he was too happy and spoke to us only twice. Once he spun round on his boulder and said, ‘They have a name for each of their sheep, very fanciful names.’ Then later, when another princess had scrambled up the path and joined the circle at his feet, a little girl who held her chin as if she stood before many judges, all despised, he greeted her, and told us: ‘This is very interesting. Her name is Gordan, which is as if you should call a child Proud. There must be some story there, for her parents to have called their child that name.’ As he spoke the children watched as if they understood, nodding faintly, their eyes bright with intelligence and hooded with restraint. Plainly they admired their companion’s distinction, whatever it was, and could have told the story behind her name, but would not talk of such things to strangers. So they put aside their gravity before it settled on them and clamoured to Constantine that he should go on with his story.
But the fair little princess who had been the first to come up the hillside did not give him her full attention, though at first she had been the most eager listener. She looked across at my husband and myself every now and then, with increasing uneasiness. We were not being honoured as guests should be. She tried to remedy this by giving us a sweet personal smile; but her conscience told her that this was not enough and would not let her settle down to listen. So she went down the hillside to a patch of flowers and began picking us a proper ceremonial nosegay, of the prescribed size and variety. This was a great sacrifice, and sometimes it was too much. She would catch a burst of laughter from the circle she had left, and she would run back and join the listeners for a moment or two. But her eyes would fall on us again, and she would pick herself up and go back to her task. When she had the nosegay she thought correct, she brought it to me at a leisured pace, curtsied, and kissed my hand. For a minute I could not bear to let her go; I put my arm round her shoulders, for to have this exquisite creature of remote and superior race so close was such luck as having a butterfly alight on one’s fingers. She bore my touch with good manners, smiling straight into my eyes and giving my husband also his share of greeting, but the minute I let her go she was back in a flash at the circle round Constantine.
I went to the automobile and fetched the cakes I had brought from Kolashin, and found Dragutin sitting on the automobile trying to teach a tortoise he had just picked up on the road to lick a piece of chocolate. ‘Why always grass, grass, grass?’ he was asking. I took the cakes over to Constantine, and put them under his nose so as not to interrupt him; and instantly they became part of his story. His eyes did not fall from the far towers and domes he was describing, his voice did not sink from the great billows which were washing heroes and giants and emperors’ daughters to this mountainside. With a wizard’s gesture he called the fair princess to him and handed her the cakes, bidding her give one to each of the children. ‘Now all of you kneel!’ he ordered. They went down on their knees. ‘Now the first bite!’ They all obeyed him. ‘Now the second! Now the third!’
He had told them, I think, that these were magic cakes, and that the first three bites would exempt them from some ill fortune or guarantee them some virtue, and they half disbelieved and wholly believed him. They gurgled with laughter as they ate, but between bites they eyed the cakes very solemnly; however, their tongues, which knew nothing about magic, but recognized good rich pastry when they met it, shot out and licked in the crumbs, and it was taste which dominated them in the end. They sat back on their little haunches, and slowly and delicately finished the last morsels while Constantine silently watched them, his elbow on his knee, his chin on his hand. Behind their loveliness the long high vista of Lake Scutari, with its grey pyramids of rock mounting towards the noon of the sky though ooze-bound in the adhesiveness of green jelly, was earth’s self-drawn ideogram, expressing its monstrosity.
Tsetinye I
Underneath the mountainside a town slept beside a river which was a mirror of woodlands. It was called by its name, Riyeka, which is to say, river: or, in full, Riyeka Tcherniyevitsa, the river of the Tchernivitches, the tribe inhabiting this slope of the Montenegrin fastness. While Dragutin sought some petrol we sat under the trees on the embankment, looking about us at an unbelievable prettiness. There was an old and asymmetrical bridge of enchanting camber; along our side of the r
iver lay rowing-boats curved like bows; on the opposite bank blossoming trees stood above their reflections. Behind us was a line of sober stone houses with handsome people sitting at open doors. In the nearest house three middle-aged women and an old one were superb. We were to notice then and later that the female Montenegrin is better to look at as a little girl or as an ageing woman than in the period of her sexual attractiveness, for then she presents a disconcerting blankness. Her face is like a niche designed for a statue it does not hold. Perhaps this is because there is part of a mature woman’s nature which must be filled by sexual love or a sublimation of it, or be sensibly empty, and the male Montenegrin has kept his liberty only by maintaining a continuous masculinist frenzy which prevents him from loving women or letting them forget lack of love in thought and work. This leaves the female Montenegrin no worse off than many women in the industrialized West whose men are bled white by invisible enemies more dangerous than the Turks, but her tragedy is made more dramatic by her marked physical appropriateness to love.
‘God be thanked,’ said Dragutin, ‘I have found petrol. We can be in Tsetinye in half an hour, for it is only sixteen kilometres straight up that mountainside.’ But when we went to tell Constantine he was not pleased. He had fallen in with three old men who at first had taken him for an ordinary tourist and had grumbled, ‘This is a ruined town; all is falling into decay, we are all poor as dogs and Belgrade does nothing for us,’ but became more cheerful when he retorted, ‘Well do I know why this town is ruined, and there is nothing Belgrade can do about it, nor should, you wicked old men. For if you were rich before the war it was only because this was a frontier town, and you were all smugglers. Yes, all of you offended against the law, and I do not know that I could bring myself to speak to such people were it not that I come from Shabats, from Shabats on the river Sava, that used to be on the Serbian frontier, and there we all of us smuggled from the day we were born, and I would like to know whether you are as clever as me at packing tobacco into a shoe.’ By now the four of them were old cronies, and Constantine turned a desolate face on us. ‘We cannot yet go to Tsetinye,’ he said. ‘I must take you across the bridge, for you must see Lake Scutari from the other side, and also you must see the ruins of the monastery of Obod, where the first Slav printing-press was installed in the fifteenth century, and was destroyed by the Turks, who destroyed all, in the sixteenth century. Many religious books were published there. That, very certainly you must see.’ In the automobile he groaned, ‘Up there in Tsetinye, Sava Militchevitch, my official, is waiting for me; up there it will be the world, it will be like Belgrade.’