Bosnian Chronicle

by Ivo Andrić

  All at once, his apparent calm left Daville. Once more there surged through him that morning’s feeling of dread, the sense that here, in his close proximity, impinging on his work as it were, and therefore involving him too, a crime had been committed in which his interpreter might well be a bribed and sordid accomplice. The horror of it swept him like a flame. Was anyone living here safe and protected from crime? And so he stood rooted, between the candles that were flickering on in the room one by one and the dimming light on the steep slopes beyond the window.

  The evening came, heralding the onset of one of those insomniac nights with which he had lately become so familiar at Travnik, in which a man could neither sleep nor think properly. And even when he managed, for a moment, to doze off fitfully, there passed before him, unbidden and spectral, a restless succession of images that changed, blended, and overlapped without pause: Mehmed Pasha’s broad pleased grin of two days before, the slender wiry arm of the emissary with its broad scar; the dark and incoherent D’Avenat, quietly mouthing the words: “A very, very sick man indeed.” There was no order or logic to any of it. Each picture seemed to have a life of its own that had no connection whatever with the others, as if all certainty and decisions were suspended, as if the crime were entirely possible and then again might even now be prevented. In this tormented half-sleep, Daville hoped with all his heart that the murder would somehow go uncommitted, and yet couldn’t help feeling, somewhere in the depths of his consciousness, that it had been carried out already.

  Often an oppressive, fevered night of this kind sums up an entire experience and shuts it off forever like a soundproof iron door.

  In the days that followed, D’Avenat came to the Consulate as usual. He was quite unchanged. Nor did the sudden death of the Sultan’s emissary cause much disaffection among the Moslems of Travnik; the voices of suspicion, the finger-pointing lasted but a short time; the fate of the Osmanli did not seem to interest them a great deal. They saw only one thing, that their detested Vizier was going to stay on in Travnik, and had even been rewarded. They gathered from this that the May revolution in the capital had left things pretty much as they had been. Accordingly, they relapsed into disillusioned silence, gritted their teeth and lowered their eyes. It was plain to them that even the new Sultan was under the influence of unbelievers and had surrounded himself with bad and corrupt advisers, and that victory of the good and just cause had once again been put off. All the same, they continued in their unshakable belief that the true and pure faith was bound to triumph in the end and that this was only a matter of waiting. And no one could wait like the Bosnian Moslems, for they were people of stolid faith and a granite-like pride, who could be as impetuous as a spring torrent and as patient as the earth.

  Once more Daville felt a recrudescence of his dread—a pang of sick, cold fear in his innards. This was during the first audience following the emissary’s death. Twelve days had gone by. The Vizier was unchanged and cheerful. He spoke of his preparations for the campaign against Serbia and agreed readily to all Daville’s plans for Turco-French collaboration on the frontier between Bosnia and Dalmatia.

  With studied calm and straining to appear as natural as possible, Daville had, toward the end of his talk, incidentally, as it were, expressed his sincere regrets over the death of the imperial envoy and Vizier’s friend. Even before D’Avenat had finished translating the words, the Vizier’s smile vanished and his black mustache covered the flashing white teeth. His face with the slanting almond eyes grew somehow wider and more compact and remained like that until the interpreter finished conveying Daville’s expressions of sympathy. The rest of the interview was again conducted with the old smile.

  The general indifference and short public memory of the event helped to calm Daville. Seeing that life went on unchanged, he said to himself: Evidently this is how things are. He stopped talking to D’Avenat about the crime at the Residency. His time was pre-empted by duties. Day by day he shook off a little more of that unexplainable turmoil of conscience and his first sense of bitter dismay, and let himself be carried along by the stream of workaday life, submitting to the laws that govern all living things. True, he would never again, it seemed to him, be able to face Mehmed Pasha without remembering that he was the man who, in D’Avenat’s words, “was the quicker and craftier and had outsmarted his opponents”; yet he would work with him again and talk with him on every subject, save this one.

  It was about this time that the Vizier’s Deputy, Suleiman Pasha Skoplyak, came back from the river Drina, after having thoroughly routed the insurgent Serbs—or so it was said at the Residency. Suleiman Pasha himself used more restrained and less definite language on the subject.

  The Deputy Vizier was a Bosnian and came from a leading family of begs—Moslem landed gentry. He owned large estates in Skoplye on the river Kupres and some ten houses and shops in Bugoyno. Broad-shouldered, tough, slender-waisted despite his mature years, with piercing blue eyes, he was a man who had seen many wars and piled up a fortune and become a pasha without having to flatter or bribe his way. He kept peace with a firm hand and was cunning in war, he was greedy for land and not particularly subtle in his method of getting it, but he was also incorruptible, forthright, and free of the usual Turkish vices.

  It would be too much to say that this half-peasant pasha of fierce visage, with the keen eye of “the best sharpshooter in the whole of Bosnia,” was a pleasant or attractive person. In his dealings with foreigners he was, like most Osmanlis, mistrustful and procrastinating, wily and stubborn, as well as brusque and coarse in his speech. For the rest, he spent the greater part of the year either in punitive expeditions against Serbia or on his estates, and lived at Travnik only during the winter months. Now his presence in the town signified the end of the campaign, at least for this year.

  Life became more settled and orderly as the months passed. Autumn came: first, the early autumn, with its harvests, weddings, bustling trade, and swelling profits; and then the late autumn of rains, coughing, and worries. The mountains turned impassable, the people less enterprising and more inclined to stay put. Everyone prepared to spend the winter where he happened to be, figuring how best to get through it. It seemed to Daville that even the vast machinery of the French Empire was ticking ever more slowly, more softly. The Congress of Erfurt had come to an end. Napoleon was turning his attention toward Spain, which meant that for the time being the whirlpool was sweeping westward. Couriers were few, instructions from Split less frequent.

  The Vizier, on whom Daville counted most of all, would remain, it seemed, at his post; once again he put forth his brightest smile. (The counterstrategy of his friends at Istanbul seemed to have been eminently successful.) The Austrian Consul, whose coming had long been talked about, had still not arrived. Paris informed Daville that, before the year was out, they would send him a career officer who spoke Turkish. In those difficult days D’Avenat showed himself resourceful, dependable, and devoted.

  The onset of autumn brought Daville his greatest joy of all. Quietly and almost unnoticed Mme Daville arrived with their three children, the sons Pierre, Jules-François, and Jean-Paul. The first was four years of age, the second two, while the third had been born a few months before in Split.

  Madame Daville was blond, petite, and slender. Under her thin hair, which was gathered up in a style of no particular fashion, there was a small lively face with a healthy complexion, delicate features, and blue eyes of a high metallic sparkle. Behind an exterior which at first sight was plain and unremarkable was a clever, sober, and versatile woman of strong will and a robust constitution; one of those women of whom one says, “She’s nobody’s fool.” Her life was one long fanatical but sensible and patient service to her family and home. To this service were dedicated all her thoughts and feelings; her slender, always red, and seemingly fragile hands were never still for a moment and grappled with work as if they were made of steel. Of a good bourgeois family that had lost everything in the Revolution, she had
grown up in the house of her uncle, the Bishop of Avranches, and was imbued with that special French piety that was both staunch and thoroughly human, that never wavered and was yet free of bigotry.

  As soon as Mme Daville arrived, a new era began in the huge and forlorn house of the French Consulate. Saying little, uncomplaining, asking no help or advice from anybody, she worked from early morning until all hours of the night. The house grew clean and orderly; a good many changes were carried out, to make it as suitable as possible for the new inmates and their needs. Rooms were partitioned off, doors and windows were walled in, new ones opened up. For lack of cabinets and furnishings, Turkish chests, rugs, and local fabrics were used. Curtained and rearranged, the house looked quite different. Footsteps no longer sent up a hollow echo as before. The kitchen was done over from scratch. Little by little everything took on the stamp of French daily life, frugal and sensible but rich in true satisfactions. The following spring would find the house and its inmates and surroundings utterly transformed.

  On the flat ground in front of the dwelling there would be two cultivated plots whose design and flowerbeds would be a modest imitation of a French garden. In the rear there would be a barn, a storehouse, and a woodshed. All this work, planned by Mme Daville herself, was now started under her supervision.

  The Consul’s wife had to contend with all kinds of difficulties and especially with the servant problem. It was not the usual servant problem about which all the housewives the world over have always complained, but a real dilemma. At first no one wanted to serve in the Consul’s household. Turkish servants were out of the question. The few Serb-Orthodox families wouldn’t let one of their members enter the house; while the Catholic girls, who were sometimes found working in Turkish homes, did not at first dare to come near the Consulate, because the friars had threatened them with damnation and dire penances. Presently the wives of some of the Jewish merchants managed to talk a few gypsy women into working at the new Consulate for good wages. It was only when Mme Daville, after frequent visits and donations to the church at Dolats, had demonstrated that she was a good Catholic in spite of being married to the “Jacobin Consul,” that the Brothers relented a little and grudgingly approved of women working for the French Consul’s wife.

  In other ways too Mme Daville did her best to cultivate and improve her relations with the parish priest at Dolats, with the Brothers of Gucha Gora, and their congregations. And despite all his troubles, the ignorance and the mistrust with which he was surrounded, Daville hoped that before the Austrian Consul came to Travnik he might at least succeed, with the help of his devout and clever wife, in securing for himself some influence with the Brothers and the Catholic community at large.

  In short, the first days of autumn brought with them a pleasant sense of calm and purpose, reflected alike in the Consul’s home and in his work. A feeling persisted in Daville, clear and reassuring, that everything was falling into place and taking a turn for the better, or at least was beginning to seem easier and more tolerable.

  A pale autumn sun shone over the streets of Travnik, and in its light the rain-washed cobblestones stood out clean and spanking. Bushes and woods changed color and grew thinner, more transparent. The river Lashva ran swift and clean in the sun, straight and narrow in its bed, humming like a plucked string. Paths were dry and hard, with here and there a trace of squashed fruit that had dropped out of somebody’s market basket, and with wisps of hay hanging from the shrubbery and the fences along the roadside.

  Daville went out for a long ride every day. He rode up over Kupilo along a straight footpath under towering elms and looked down over the dark-roofed houses enveloped in blue smoke, over the mosques and scattered white graveyards; and it seemed to him as if all of it, the houses, the alleys, and the gardens, were blending into a single hue that was slowly becoming more familiar and recognizable. An air of ease and respite spread out on every side. The Consul breathed it in with the autumn air and felt like turning in the saddle and confiding it, if only by a smile, to the groom who rode behind him.

  In reality, it was only a pause for breath.

  4

  In his official reports during the first few months Daville complained about all the things a consul in his circumstances could possibly complain about. He deplored the malice and the spite of the local Moslems, the feebleness and dilatory tactics of the authorities, his meager pay and insufficient credits, the leaking house roof and the climate that made his children sickly, the intrigues of the Austrian agents, the lack of understanding he encountered from his superiors at Istanbul and Split. In a word, everything was difficult, half-done, topsy-turvy, and everything gave fresh cause for plaints and indignation. Most of all, Daville regretted the Ministry’s failure to send him a reliable assistant, a career official with a thorough command of the Turkish language.

  He could use the interpreter D’Avenat in an emergency, but he was unable to trust him completely. The unquestionable zeal of the man still had not dispelled the Consul’s doubts. Besides, although D’Avenat spoke French, he could not do official correspondence in French.

  For information work among the general public Daville had hired Rafo Atias, a young Travnik Jew who preferred the job of interpreting the “Illyrian” language to the rolling and stacking of tanned hides in his uncle’s store. He could be trusted even less than D’Avenat. In every report, therefore, Daville begged for an assistant.

  At length, just as he was beginning to lose all hope and was getting used to D’Avenat and gaining confidence in him, a new secretary and interpreter arrived, young Desfosses.

  Amédée Chaumette Desfosses was of the new generation of Parisian diplomats, the first crop of those who, after the turbulent revolutionary years, had received proper schooling in a climate of comparative calm and were specially trained for service in the East. He came of a banking family that had managed to keep some of its old established wealth both during the Revolution and under the Directory. At school he had been a precocious youngster and had amazed his teachers and schoolmates with his memory, bright judgment, and the ease with which he accumulated all types of knowledge. He was tall, of an athletic build, with a rosy face and large brown eyes that glowed with curiosity and restlessness. Daville saw at once that he had before him a true child of the new epoch, a new kind of Parisian youth, bold and poised in his speech and movements, carefree, close to reality, with boundless faith in his own strength and knowledge, and inclined to overrate both.

  The young man handed over the mail pouch and made a brief and concise report, not hiding the fact that he was cold and tired. He ate heartily and generously and let the Consul know, without too many excuses, that he would like to lie down and rest. He slept all night and through the forenoon of the following day, then got up fresh and invigorated, radiating a sense of well-being that was as natural and spontaneous as the exhaustion and drowsiness of the day before.

  By his directness, his assurance, and his relaxed tone of voice, the young man caused a stir in the little household. He seemed to know right away where to go and what he wanted, and he asked for it without hesitation or too many words.

  Several days and conversations later, it became clear that between the Consul and his new officer there were not, nor could there be, many points of contact, much less close rapport. However, each of them understood and accepted this in his own way.

  To Daville, who was at the stage of life when most things easily turned into a problem of conscience and a burden to the spirit, the coming of young Desfosses brought new complications instead of relief; it opened up in his mind a string of fresh difficulties that could neither be solved nor brushed aside, and which tended to deepen his isolation and loneliness. To the young Chancellor, on the other hand, nothing seemed to be any trouble or presented any obstacle too big for him to overcome—in any case, not his superior, Daville.

  Daville was getting on to forty, while Desfosses was barely twenty-four. In other times and circumstances this gap in their ag
es would not have mattered too much; but a period of great and stormy changes and social dislocation creates and deepens an unbridgeable chasm between generations and, in fact, makes of them two different worlds.

  Daville could remember the ancient regime, although he was only a boy at the time; he had experienced the Revolution in all its aspects, as part of his own destiny; he had met the First Consul and had become a supporter of his government with a zeal in which there was both suppressed doubt and boundless faith.

  He had been twelve years old when, lined up with the other children of bourgeois families, he had watched Louis XVI visit their town. It was an unforgettable event for the imaginative and spirited boy who was always hearing at home that the whole family lived in fact on the King’s bounty. Now this King passed before him in person, an embodiment of everything grand and beautiful that life could possibly offer. Through it all, unseen bands were playing, cannon were thundering, and the town’s bells were pealing all at once. Dressed in their finery, the people almost broke the police cordon in their enthusiasm. Through his own tears, the boy saw the tears in the eyes of others, and in his throat a knot tightened that he would always associate with moments of great emotion. The King, himself moved, ordered the carriage to go slowly, took off his wide-brimmed hat in a gallant gesture, and, in answer to a loud chorus of “Long live the King!” cried in a clear voice, “Long live my people!” All this the boy saw and heard as if it were an impossible dream of paradise, until the ecstatic crowd behind him pushed his brand-new and somewhat foppish hat over his eyes so that everything was suddenly plunged in a blind mist of his own tears, streaked over with golden flashes in a dappled swarm of blue spots. By the time he managed to pull the hat up, the procession had gone by like a mirage and only the shoving throng remained and a sea of flushed faces and shining eyes.