by Ivo Andrić
In reality, the thing was perfectly simple and clear. With the help of D’Avenat and the Jew, Daville had bribed the commander at Derventa to hold up the permit as long as possible. The commander had no objection to sitting on his cushion for two weeks, with the firman and the exequatur under him, and he assured the Colonel day after day, coolly and with a straight face, that there had been no dispatch for him—for which service he received a gold thaler per day. Moreover, the commander was not in the least concerned about the consequences as he had long before stopped answering any correspondence or complaints which were not to his liking and was keeping away from Travnik altogether.
At last everything was straightened out. The Colonel had a letter from the Vizier telling him that the documents were being traced and inviting him to move to Travnik forthwith, without the exequatur. That same day the Colonel joyfully left Derventa and started on the road to Travnik; the day after, the commander returned the consular papers to the Vizier, with apologies for having mislaid them.
And so the Austrian Consul-General went through the same disheartening merry-go-round that is the invariable lot of foreigners who go to Turkey or do business with the Turks. Before the stranger can properly turn around, the Turks manage to harass, humiliate, and tire him, often deliberately and consciously, but sometimes quite unwittingly, through the accident of circumstances, so that when the stranger finally gets down to the business which was the object of his visit his energy is already spent and his confidence in himself quite shaken.
Nevertheless, it was also true that, while waiting for his exequatur at Brod, von Mitterer had secretly began to open the French Consul’s mail from Ljubljana.
The entry of the Austrian Consul into Travnik passed off in much the same way as Daville’s own. The only difference was that von Mitterer didn’t have to put up in a Jewish home, as the Catholic community was humming like a beehive and the leading merchant families vied with each other to have him. His reception by the Vizier, according to D’Avenat’s intelligence, was a trifle shorter and cooler than Daville’s had been; and the reaction of the local Moslems was neither better nor worse. (“One is a dog, the other his brother!”) In the streets he was showered with the same abuse and curses from women and brats, he was spat on from windows, and the older men in the shops ignored him with an air of stony dignity.
The new Consul first called on two leading Moslem worthies and then visited the Apostolic Delegate, who happened to be staying at the monastery of Gucha Gora; only then did he drop in on his French colleague. During these visits he was shadowed at every step by D’Avenat’s spies, who reported all they could find out and invented and embellished what they couldn’t. All of it, nevertheless, helped to crystallize the impression that the Austrian Consul desired to bring together all those who were against the French Consul, and that he did so carefully and unobtrusively, without uttering a single word against his colleague and his work, while listening to everything others had to say. Even so, he managed to hint that he was sorry for his colleague for having to represent a government which had sprouted from revolution and was, at bottom, godless; that was his line with the Catholics. With the Moslems, he regretted Daville’s bad luck in having to pave the way—what an ungrateful task!—for a gradual infiltration of French Dalmatian troops into Turkish territory, thus visiting on this quiet and lovely land all the troubles and suffering which wars and armies bring with them.
It was on a Tuesday, exactly at noon, that von Mitterer at last called on Daville.
Outside the sun shone with all the brilliance of late autumn, but in the large room on the ground floor of Daville’s residence the air was brisk, almost chilly. The two consuls studied each other carefully, trying not to sound forced in their conversation; each told the other in his most natural tone of voice how long he had looked forward to this occasion. Daville spoke about his stay in Rome and added, as if parenthetically, that his Sovereign had happily put an end to the Revolution and had restored not only the social order but respect for religion in France. Accidentally—or so it seemed—he discovered on his desk the order for the creation of a new imperial nobility in France, which he explained in some detail to his visitor. Von Mitterer, on the other hand, following the established custom, dwelt on the wise policies of the Vienna Court, whose objectives were peace and peaceful collaboration, although it was obliged to maintain a strong army in view of the delicate frontier situation at the eastern reaches of Europe.
Both consuls fairly bristled with the dignity of their profession and with a zeal reminiscent of neophytes. This made it impossible for them to see the absurd side of the high tone and solemn formality of their meeting, though it did not prevent them from observing and sizing each other up.
Daville found von Mitterer looking much older than hearsay had led him to believe. Everything about him—the pine-green military uniform, the old-fashioned style of coiffure, the stiff pomaded mustache on a sallow face—seemed to him lifeless and antiquated.
To von Mitterer, on the other hand, Daville seemed a lightweight and much too young. In his whole manner of speech, in his casual red mustache and the pile of blond hair above the high forehead, innocent of powder or queue, in fact in everything about him, the Colonel detected revolutionary coarseness and an unpleasant surfeit of fantasy and freedom.
Who knows how much longer the consuls might have dilated on their courts’ lofty intentions, if they had not been interrupted by shouts, screaming, and a wild commotion in the yard?
In spite of the strictest warnings, a flock of Christian and Jewish children had gathered on the street and clambered onto the fence to see the Consul in his splendid uniform. As they could not keep still during the long wait, someone gave the youngest one a push from behind, and he slipped and tumbled into the yard where Daville’s servants and von Mitterer’s escort were standing around. The other children scattered like sparrows. After the first shock, the youngster—a Jewish child—began to bawl as if he were being flayed alive, while his two brothers hopped around by the locked gate outside and called him, weeping in unison. The shouting and commotion caused by all this turned the conversation of the two consuls to children and family matters. Thereupon they began to resemble a couple of soldiers who had been ordered “at ease,” after an excruciating drill.
From time to time, one or the other, remembering his professional duty, vainly endeavored to put on a hard-bitten official air. Their common trouble and the similarity of their lot proved stronger than airs. Behind their poses, uniforms, decorations, and memorized phrases there lapped the tide of their common discontent at the coarse and grubby life they were condemned to. In vain Daville cited the extraordinary cordiality with which he had been received at the Residency from the beginning; in vain did von Mitterer emphasize the great, secret, and powerful sympathy he enjoyed among the Catholics. The tone of their voice and the look in their eyes showed only sadness and the profound human understanding of two fellow sufferers. And only the lingering sense of duty and propriety kept them from patting each other on the shoulder, as any two sensible private people might have done in their common plight.
And so their first meeting ended on a note of children’s illnesses and problems of feeding and in a general discussion of their dreary life in Travnik.
But that same day, and at about the same time, the two consuls sat long over sheets of coarse draft paper, penning long columns of their official reports on the subject of their first confrontation. Here the visit came off quite differently. Here, on paper, it was a bloodless duel of wits, subtlety, and zeal between a couple of giants. Each imputed a strength and quality to his opponent that fully corresponded to his high opinion of himself and of his task; save that in the Frenchman’s report it was the Austrian who in the end, morally speaking, lay floored and pinned by both shoulders, while in the Austrian’s report it was the Frenchman who was rattled and dumbfounded by the sublime reasoning of the Imperial and Royal Consul-General.
However, each heavily scored the fact that his r
ival was unhappy over the extraordinarily harsh circumstances in which a civilized European and his family were forced to live in this wild and mountainous backwater. And of course neither mentioned his own unhappiness.
Thus the consuls enjoyed double solace and satisfaction that day: they had talked and sympathized with each other as human beings, insofar as that was possible at a first meeting, and each had portrayed the other in undiluted acid, which served to flatter his own image by contrast. With it, each of them assuaged two inner needs, both vain and contradictory, and at the same time equally human and equally understandable. And that was some gain at least, in this strange life of theirs, in which any kind of satisfaction, real or imagined, was rare and likely to become rarer still.
From then on, the two consuls lived on the two opposite sides of Travnik with their families and helpers—one house against the other. Predestined to be rivals, the two men had been sent here to deceive and foil each other, to advance the interests of their Court and country among the authorities and the people at large, while, in the same breath, combating and damaging those of their rivals. This they did to the best of their capacity, each according to his own temperament, upbringing, and opportunities. Often they fought bitterly, with no quarter given or asked, forgetting everything else, swept along entirely by their instincts of struggle and survival, like two bloodied fighting cocks loosed by unseen hands into a narrow, shadowy arena. Every success was a failure of the other, every defeat of the other a small triumph. When they were outmaneuvered, they hid the fact carefully, or minimized it in their own eyes; when they outmaneuvered their rival, they magnified and stressed it in their dispatches to Vienna and Paris. As a rule, the rival Consul and his activities were painted in these reports only in the darkest of colors; and so these careworn patres familias, meek citizens well on in years, appeared at times bloodthirsty and terrifying, like raging lions or sinister Machiavellians. This at any rate was the picture they conveyed of each other, each goaded by his own troubles and confused by the strange environment into which they had both been plunged, in which, only too quickly, both lost their sense of proportion and all feeling for reality.
It would be time-consuming and superfluous to relate all these consular storms in a teacup, all their dogfights and tricks, many of which were laughable, some depressing, all pointless and quite unnecessary. The consuls strove to enlarge their influence with the Vizier and his senior assistants, they bribed the officers in the frontier posts and egged them on to plunder and pillage in their enemy’s territory. The Frenchman sent his hirelings northward across the Austrian border; the Austrian directed his south to Dalmatia, occupied by the French. Through their agents each spread false rumors among the people, refuting those of his rival. Before long, they were abusing and slandering each other like two embattled women. They intercepted each other’s couriers, opened each other’s mail, stole and bribed each other’s servants. If one might believe all they said about each other, they were, it seemed, actually poisoning each other, or attempting to.
Yet at the same time there was a great deal, after all, which brought the rival consuls closer together and even linked them. Here, in effect, were two grown men, “burdened with families,” each with his own scheme of life, his own plans, cares, and frustrations, forced to struggle and carry on in an alien and unfriendly country, each grimly holding on, each simulating, in his own small way, the larger movements of his distant, unseen, and often incomprehensible masters. Bad luck and a hard life brought them close together, and if there were two people in the world who should have understood and even helped each other, it was these two consuls who in fact spent their energy, their days and nights, putting obstacles in each other’s path and embittering their lives wherever possible.
In reality, it was only the aims of their official work that differed—everything else was identical or nearly so. They struggled under the same conditions, with similar weapons and varying success. Besides fighting with each other, they had to wage a daily battle with the slow and unreliable Turkish authorities and with the town Moslems, whose spite and obstinacy had to be seen to be believed. Both had their own family cares and the same disputes with their own governments which were tardy in forwarding instructions, with their respective ministries which were reluctant to issue grants, and with the frontier officials who made mistakes or failed to get things done. Above all, both had to live in the same oriental town, without company and diversions, without any comfort, sometimes even without the barest necessities, among wild mountains and backward peoples, in a running battle with mistrust, vagueness, squalor, sickness, and mishaps of all kinds. In short, they lived in a place that first unnerves a Westerner, then makes him sickly and irritable, a burden to himself and others, and at last, after some years, utterly changes and crushes him and buries him in a dull apathy long before his death.
As conditions changed and the relations between their two countries improved, the consuls readily sought each other’s company. In those moments of truce and respite they looked at each other bewildered and a little ashamed, like men roused from a dream, and each tried to summon up different, more personal feelings toward his rival, at the same time wondering how safe it was to indulge them. They associated freely at such times, cheered each other up, gave presents and wrote notes to each other, in the warm friendly fashion of two people who have harmed each other and are at the same time linked by a common misfortune and dependent on each other.
But as soon as the brief lull showed signs of ending and the tug of war between Napoleon and the Court of Vienna was resumed, the consuls began to space out their visits and ration their amity, until a rupture of relations or war separated them and once more left them at loggerheads. Then both the weary men would take up their struggle afresh, echoing, like two obedient puppets on long strings, the twitchings of the distant momentous struggle, whose ultimate design was hidden but whose vast scope and fierceness filled them both to the depths of their souls with the same feelings of terror and insecurity. But even then the subtle link failed to snap between the two consuls—the two “exiles,” as they called themselves in their letters. They stopped meeting and visiting each other and their families; they were up to their ears now in prodigious intrigue against each other. At night, long after the town had sunk in deep darkness, a light would remain burning in one or two windows of each Consulate, where the two men kept watch over sheets of paper, reading the reports of their agents, drafting dispatches. And it happened sometimes that M. Daville, or von Mitterer, pausing for a breather, would go to the window and gaze at the lonely light on the hill, by which his neighbor-adversary was dreaming up unknown tricks and fresh traps in which to snare his colleague on the other bank of the Lashva River.
At those moments it was as if the town huddling between them no longer existed, as if they were separated only by darkness and an empty silence. Their lighted windows stared at each other, like the pupils of men in a duel. But hidden behind the curtains, one of the consuls, or both at once, would peer through the dark toward the feeble ray of light on the opposite slope, and they would think of each other with deep and heartfelt understanding and with genuine compassion. Then, once more, they would wrench themselves away and go back to their work by the guttering candlelight, to continue writing their reports in which there was not a vestige of the sympathy they had felt a moment before; in which they blackened and libeled each other in that spuriously lofty tone which officials adopt toward the whole world when writing to their superiors in all confidence, and which they know will never be seen by those who are the subject of it.
6
If the hand of luckless chance lay heavily on this encounter of the two men in a Bosnian valley, in those anxious years of universal war, it was no more than an aspect of the bad luck that ran like a thread through the life of Joseph von Mitterer, the Austrian Consul-General.
He was a dark-haired man, with a sallow face and a black pomaded mustache, slow-spoken, cold and reserved in his manner; eve
rything about him was stiff, angular, clean, and neat, but unobtrusive and strictly “regulation,” as if the whole figure, man and uniform, had just been issued by the Imperial and Royal Quartermaster for the immediate outfitting of a stock colonel. Only his round brown eyes, with their perpetually red and inflamed eyelids, gave an impression of some mute goodness of heart and a sensibility carefully kept out of sight. They were the opaque eyes of a man who suffers from bad liver, eyes tired from years of service on the frontier and the grind of office routine, eyes that had spent themselves in long vigils over the constantly threatened frontiers of the Empire; sad and uncomplaining eyes that had seen much evil in the course of this work and witnessed the limitations of man’s capacity, man’s freedom, and man’s humanity to his fellow men.
Born some fifty years before at Osiyek, where his father had been an officer in a Slavonian hussar regiment, he had been sent to cadet school and graduated as an ensign in the infantry. After his commission as lieutenant, he was sent to Zemun as an information officer. There, except for short intervals, he spent some twenty years—hard years crowded with campaigns against the Turks and the mutinous Serbs. During that time he not only organized agents, gathered intelligence, set up communications, and submitted reports, but also crossed into Serbia several times disguised as a peasant or monk, and reconnoitered the Turkish strength, under the most difficult conditions, sketching their fortifications and important positions and sounding the mood of the people. In this work, which wears a man out before his time, von Mitterer was eminently successful. As often happens in life, it was the sort of success that breaks a man’s neck. After several years of this work, the Ministry was so pleased with his reports that he was summoned to Vienna in person and there received the rank of captain and a purse of one hundred ducats. The success filled the young officer with the daring hope that he might finally rise above the dreary, monotonous rut in which all his forebears had plodded before him.