Bosnian Chronicle

by Ivo Andrić

  As he went deeper and deeper into the barren mountain country, he noticed the huts and shepherd girls by the roadside, lost among rocks and clumps of thornbush, clutching wooden distaffs in their hands but no flock beside them that he could see. Observing it all, he asked himself if that was the worst he could expect, just as a man going through an operation asks himself over and over whether his pain has reached the highest point they had warned him about, or whether he is to brace himself for more and greater pain yet to come. But these were no more the usual fears and trepidations of youth. In reality, he was ready for anything and knew that he could go through with it.

  Some miles farther on, as he paused on the stony heights above Klis and looked at the bare wilderness yawning ahead and at the blanched stony hillsides spattered here and there with thin flecks of olive-hued vegetation, there wafted up toward him, from the Bosnian side, the silence of a new world such as he had never known. The young man shivered and shook himself, more from the silence and desolation of the view than from the cool breeze that ruffled the pass. He drew his cloak around his shoulders, tightened his legs around the horse’s flanks, and plunged down into that new world of silence and uncertainty. Bosnia, that muffled land, was in the air, and the air itself was already impregnated with a chilly anguish that was wordless and not to be explained.

  They passed Sinj and Livno in good order. On the Kupres Plain a blizzard blew up unexpectedly. The Turkish guide, who had waited for them on the frontier, managed with an effort to get them to the first khan, a resthouse. There, exhausted and cold, they slumped around the fire, where several people were already warming themselves.

  Although tired, chilled to the bone, and hungry, the young man sat upright and put on a cheerful air, bearing in mind the impression he might leave on these strangers. He refreshed his face with toilet water and did a few of his customary exercises, while the others watched him out of the corner of their eye, as if he were doing a ritual prescribed by his law. Only after he had sat down did one of the men by the fire speak a few words in Italian, explaining that he was a Brother from the monastery at Gucha Gora, that his name was Fra Julian Pashalich, and that he was traveling on business for his monastery. The others were team drivers and muleteers.

  Making the best of his poor Italian, Desfosses told him who and what he was. The friar had beetling eyebrows and thick bushy whiskers, behind which, as under a mask, a smiling young face was hidden; when he heard the words “Paris” and “Imperial French Consulate-General at Travnik,” his face darkened at once and he fell silent without any further ado.

  For some minutes the young man and the cleric observed each other mutely and with suspicion.

  The Brother was very young but a giant. He wore a thick black cloak, under which one could dimly see a dark blue cassock and a leather belt with some kind of weapon in it. Desfosses gazed at him incredulously, asking himself, as in a dream, if this could possibly be a churchman and a member of a monastic order. And the friar, in his turn, watched the foreigner, the slender, fresh-faced young man of fine, proud, and carefree bearing, and he did so wordlessly and rather sternly. He did not hide his disapproval when he heard what country he came from and what government had sent him.

  To break the silence Desfosses asked the friar whether his vocation was a hard one.

  “It’s like this, monsieur,” the other replied. “While we here, in the face of truly great difficulties, try to keep up the prestige of our holy Church, you over there in France, living in complete freedom, persecute and destroy it. It’s a shame and a sin, monsieur.”

  Desfosses already knew from his talks in Split that the friars and the entire Catholic community in these parts were opposed to the French occupation authorities, believing them to be godless “Jacobins”; still, he was astonished at this opinion and asked himself how a consular official of the Empire was supposed to proceed in a delicate situation like this. He met the friar’s frank and questioning gaze and bowed lightly. “It is just conceivable that Your Reverence is not too well informed about the affairs of my country.”

  “May the Lord grant it,” the friar said. “But from what one hears and reads there was much harm done, and it is still being done, to the Church and her leaders and followers. That sort of thing never did anyone any good.”

  The friar was hard put to find appropriate words in Italian, and his mild and carefully chosen phrases were in sharp contrast to the upset, almost bellicose expression on his face.

  Their dialogue broke off when the servants brought plum brandy and the supper began to sizzle on the fire in front of them. In offering each other food and drink, the friar and the stranger were forced to meet each other’s eyes from time to time and slowly warmed up, as two frozen and hungry men will under the influence of fire and food.

  Young Desfosses was beginning to feel rather hot and drowsy. The wind howled in the high, blackened smoke vent; on the roof hail beat a tattoo that was like pebbles falling. The young man’s head went around and around. “Well, my job has started,” he thought. “So these are the woes and hardships one reads about in the memoirs of old consuls in the East!” He tried to view his predicament objectively: he was somewhere in Bosnia, under several feet of snow, and forced into an extraordinary argument in a strange language with a strange kind of friar indeed. His eyes were drooping, his brain exacted a disproportionate effort in return for sluggish service, it was all like a complicated dream in which the dreamer is put to difficult and unsporting tests. He only knew that he must hold up his head, which was getting heavier all the time, and keep looking at the other man, so as not to let him have the last word. He was a little bewildered and also rather proud that in this unexpected place and weird company he was called upon to do his share of duty, to test his skills of persuasion on an opponent and his not very considerable knowledge of the Italian language, acquired at college. At the same time, at his very first step as it were, he felt an almost physical sense of man’s enormous and implacable responsibility, parceled out though it was among separate individuals and scattered like traps the world over.

  His frozen hands were now burning. The smoke stung his eyes and made him cough. His struggle to keep awake was as much a nuisance as his drowsiness, as if he were on sentry duty somewhere, but he kept his eye on the friar as on a target. The sleepiness was like a warm milky liquid that filled his ears with a soft hum and glazed his eyes, through which he saw the quaint friar, as if from a distance, and heard his broken sentences and Latin quotations. His native gift of observation made him think: “The monk is filled to the brim with energy and crammed with quotations and it is evident that he has no one on whom to unload them.” The friar kept saying how no man opposing the Church could ever enjoy lasting success, not even a whole country like France, and how it had been said long ago: Quod custodit Christus, non tollit Gothus (what Christ guards, no Goth can take away). Mixing French and Italian words, the young man once more tried to explain how Napoleon’s France had proved that it desired peace in the world and had given the Church its due place, thus making amends for the violence and mistakes of the Revolution.

  Things began to blur and soften under the influence of food, drink, and warmth. The eyes of the friar grew less hard, even though they remained stern, and at times there was a hint of a smile in them. As he watched him, it seemed to Desfosses that this was a signal for truce between them and also proof that big and momentous questions could wait, since in any event they could not be solved in a Turkish khan in the chance meeting between a French consular official and an “Illyrian” friar, and that, therefore, this might be the moment to relent and show consideration, without prejudice to the honor and good name of the service. At peace with himself and lulled by these thoughts, he yielded to exhaustion and sank into a deep sleep.

  When they woke him, he needed some moments to come to himself and realize where he was.

  The fire had burnt down to embers. Most of the travelers were already outside. Their shouting, as they saddled t
heir horses and strapped their loads, was clearly audible inside. The young man rose and began to get ready, feeling stiff and sore. He checked his belt and wallet and then called his escort, rather more loudly and sharply than was necessary. He was oppressed by the thought that he had forgotten or failed to do something, but as soon as he found that everything was in its place and his men ready and waiting by the harnessed carriage, he calmed down. His acquaintance of the night before, the friar, was coming out of the stable with a fine black horse. In dress and bearing he resembled one of the Croat frontiersman and bandits in the book illustrations. They smiled at each other like old friends whose differences have been ironed out. With an easy, unforced air, Desfosses asked him if they could travel together. The friar explained that he must take another road—he wanted to say “short cut” but couldn’t find the right word and waved his hand toward a wooded hill. Desfosses didn’t quite understand him, but took his hat off all the same and bade him adieu. “Vale, reverendissime domine!” (Farewell, most reverend sir!)

  The blizzard was over, like a bad joke. A few thin white suds lingered on the slopes. The ground was soft as in the springtime, the view rinsed clear and far, the mountains blue, and up in the pure gentian sky there were a couple of fiery bands of incandescent clouds tilted at the horizon, from behind which the sun cast a strange diffused light over the whole countryside. Everything reminded one of a far northern country, and the young man cast back in his mind to the Consul at Travnik, who had often dotted his reports of the Bosnians and Moslems with words like “wild Scythians” and “Hyperboreans,” which had caused some amusement at the Ministry.

  And that was how young M. Desfosses had entered Bosnia, which promptly made good all her promises and threats at the first contact, and now enveloped him more and more in the cold cutting air of her barrenness, and especially in her silence and loneliness, with which the young man wrestled every night when sleep wouldn’t come and there was no help from anywhere.

  5

  Months passed and the end of the year drew near, but the Austrian Consul, who everyone believed would come hard on the heels of the French one, did not appear. The people began to put him out of their minds. Toward the end of summer a rumor spread that the Austrian Consul was coming. The word went through the bazaar, occasioning new smiles, new frowns, and whisperings. Weeks went by again, and there was no trace of him. Then, during the last days of autumn, he arrived.

  Long before he ever set foot in Bosnia, Daville had heard, while passing through Split, that the Austrian government was getting ready to open a Consulate-General at Travnik. Later, at Travnik itself, this prospect had hung over his head like a threat for a whole year. Yet now, when after all these months of waiting the threat was about to materialize, he was less disturbed than one might have expected. He had, in fact, become reconciled to it. What was more, in the wondrous logic of human weakness, he was flattered by the fact that another great power should attach importance to this outlying spot. His stature increased in his own eyes and his strength and fighting spirit revived.

  Already since the middle of summer D’Avenat had been gathering information, spreading intelligence about the dark intentions of Austria, and generally spinning a web around the arrival of the new Consul. He had, to begin with, sounded various people on what they thought of the news. The Catholics were jubilant and the Franciscans made ready to place themselves at the new Consul’s disposal as cordially and devotedly as they had been cool and aloof to the French Consul on his arrival. The Serb-Orthodox, who were persecuted on account of the uprising in Serbia, avoided any public discussion of it but would, when asked in confidence, repeat their stubborn assertion that “there’s no consul without a Russian consul.” The Turks at the Residency, occupied for the most part with their own troubles and mutual intrigues, kept a lazy, dignified silence that was heavy with contempt. The local Moslems were even more perturbed than they had been over the news of the French Consul’s arrival.

  If Bonaparte was a distant, shifty, and slightly fantastic force which had to be reckoned with for the time being, Austria, on the contrary, was a real and familiar danger quite close at hand. With the infallible instinct of a race that has held and dominated the country for so many centuries exclusively on the basis of status quo, they had a feeling for any danger, even the smallest, which might threaten that system and their habit of domination. They knew well that every foreigner coming to Bosnia pushed the gate open another crack—the gate that stood between them and the hostile world outside—and that a consul, with his special privileges and resources, could open it wide and let in all manner of things that bode no good, and possibly bode evil, for them, their interests, and their holy faith.

  They were especially bitter about the Turks in Istanbul for permitting a thing like this. Their fear was greater than they were willing to let D’Avenat see. They parried his insistent questions with vague and general answers and kept their hate of the invading foreigners well hidden, though not their contempt for his pestering. And when he tried to find out from a merchant in the bazaar which consul he preferred, the French or the Austrian, the man told him flatly that there wasn’t much to choose between them. “One is black, the other is pie. The one is a dog, the other his brother,” the man said.

  D’Avenat gulped his reply. At least now it was clear how the people felt and thought, although he would have trouble translating and explaining it to his Consul without offending him.

  In spite of this, the French did everything in their power to foil the work of their antagonist and make his stay uncomfortable.

  Daville had long, though vainly, argued with the Vizier that the new Consul constituted a danger for Turkey and that it would be best to withhold the imperial exequatur and not allow him to take up residence. The Vizier had looked blank and refused to commit himself. He knew that the imperial permit had already been issued, but he let the Frenchman talk on, while he speculated what harm or advantage he might derive from the tug of war that was obviously beginning between the two consuls.

  All the same, D’Avenat had used his old connections and done some fresh bribing to delay the dispatch of the exequatur. When the Austrian Consul-General, Colonel von Mitterer, arrived in the town of Brod at the frontier, he was unpleasantly surprised to find that neither the imperial firman nor his consular exequatur had been sent to the local Austrian commander, as promised. Von Mitterer moped around in Brod for a whole month, vainly dispatching couriers to Vienna and Travnik. At length he was informed that the exequatur had been sent to the Turkish commander at Derventa, Nail Beg, who was to hand it over and so enable the Consul to have the permit with him when he arrived in Travnik. At that von Mitterer left Brod, with his interpreter Nicholas Rotta and a couple of escorts. At Derventa another surprise awaited him. The local commander declared he had nothing for the Consul, neither an exequatur nor any other instructions. He made him break his journey and stay at the fort of Derventa with his party—in a damp barrack room, in fact, as the local resthouse had burned down only a short time before. Although he was a man of experience, grown old working and battling with the Turkish authorities, the Consul was quite beside himself with indignation. The commander, a dour and tough Bosnian, sounded offhand as he told him over a cup of Turkish coffee: “You’d better wait, sir. If it’s true they have sent the firman and the exequatur, as you say, then they are bound to arrive. They can’t get lost. Anything the High Porte sends, must arrive. So you’d better wait here. You are no trouble to me.”

  Even as he was talking, under the cushion on which he sat there lay hidden the firman and the exequatur, neatly folded and wrapped in heavy brocade, issued in the name of Herr Joseph von Mitterer, the Imperial and Royal Consul-General at Travnik.

  In baffled despair, the Consul once again sent urgent letters to Vienna, imploring them to demand the exequatur from Istanbul and to rescue him from this invidious situation, which could only tarnish the prestige of the country that had sent him and was certain to jeopardize his
future work at Travnik. He ended his letters with: “Written at the fort of Derventa, in a dark cell, on the floor.” At the same time he hired special messengers and dispatched them to the Vizier at Travnik, with the request that they either send him the permit or allow him to proceed to Travnik without it. Nail Beg intercepted the messengers, confiscated the letters on the grounds of suspicion, and tucked them calmly under his cushion, next to the firman and the exequatur.

  So the Colonel spent another two weeks at Derventa. During that time he was visited by a Jew from Travnik who offered his services and claimed that he was in a good position to spy on the French Consul. The wary Colonel, who was used to dealing with spies and informers, turned down the dubious offer but made use of him as a messenger and gave him a letter for the Vizier. The man accepted the reward, took the message to Travnik and handed it to D’Avenat, who had originally bribed him to go to Derventa and pretend to offer his service to the Austrian Consul. Daville saw from this letter in what an unsavory and grotesque situation his opponent now found himself, and read with gloating his requests and futile entreaties to the Vizier. The letter was sealed again and returned to the Residency. The surprised Vizier ordered an inquiry and set his men to trace the firman and the exequatur, which had been forwarded over a fortnight before to the commander at Derventa, with orders to hand them over to the new Consul on his arrival. The Vizier’s Chief Records Keeper rummaged two or three times through his dusty files in a vain attempt to determine where the dispatch might have got stuck. The Tartar dispatch rider, who had taken it to Derventa and had since returned, swore that he had delivered the Vizier’s mail to the commander in good order. Everything seemed to have gone according to plan, and yet the Austrian Consul was still sitting at Derventa, waiting impatiently for his exequatur.