Bosnian Chronicle

by Ivo Andrić

  Moving the household strips a man’s life bare in all its intimate details. Von Mitterer had the opportunity to observe and compare his own moving out (which he would have best liked not to think about, if Frau von Mitterer had let him) with the moving in of this unusual man. With him everything went smoothly and without wasted motions, just as it did in his official work. There was no messing about with the luggage, no overlapping or duplication among the servants. All things found their proper places, as if by themselves, everything was simple, purposeful, clear cut, numbered, and named. The servants understood one another simply by a glance, without words, shouting, or noisy instructions. There was no equivocation over anything, or the least shadow of ill-temper, uncertainty, or disorder.

  Always, in everything, a clean account with no balances.

  When it came to taking over the inventory and reviewing the work in progress and the staff of the Consulate-General, von Paulich used much the same approach.

  Speaking of Rotta, the chief assistant, von Mitterer dropped his eyes unwittingly and his voice sounded uncertain. Hemming and hawing, he said about the chief interpreter that he was somewhat—in a way—peculiar and was not exactly—well—the choicest flower in the garden, but he was loyal and very useful. Throughout the conversation von Paulich looked sideways, all but away: his big eyes narrowed and a cool gleam of irritation appeared in the corners. He listened to von Mitterer’s briefing in stony silence, without any sign of either approval or disapproval, evidently having made up his mind to handle the inventory and other matters under discussion in his own way and by his own method of accounting, in which there would be no errors or outstanding balances.

  Considering the kind of man he was, his sudden arrival in Travnik and his confrontation with the fluttery Anna Maria were bound to arouse her attention and give fresh point to her old unquenchable urge for passionate admiration and her vague hankering for a “concord of souls.” She at once nicknamed him “Antinoüs in uniform,” which the Lieutenant-Colonel took without a word or a flicker of an eyelash, as something that neither had, nor could possibly ever have, the slightest connection with him or the world around him. Von Paulich was quite unmusical and did not hide the fact; indeed, he could not have made a secret of it if he had wanted to, since he was quite unable to sham that genial air with which unmusical people participate in musical discussions, as if by doing so they hope to atone for their shortcoming. Their talks about mythology and Roman poets were more successful, although here Anna Maria was the weaker, for the remarkable Lieutenant-Colonel countered each one of her distichs with a whole string of verses. On most occasions he was able to recite from memory the entire poem of which she knew only a line, and would also, in passing, correct the mistake she usually made in that line. But his quoting had a dispassionate, factual ring, as if the thing had nothing whatever to do with him or with the surroundings or with live mankind in general, and all her lyrical allusions bounced off him like an unintelligible sound.

  Anna Maria was taken aback. All her encounters so far—and there had been a good many of them—had ended in disappointment and in running away, yet in all her “strayings” she had always managed to force the man to take a step forward or a step back, or both; never yet had it happened that he stayed exactly where he was, like this robot Antinoüs for whose benefit she now put on her fluttery, preening game in vain. He was to her a new and particularly acute form of self-torture. This promptly made itself felt in her home life. (Right on the first day, Rotta was heard saying in the office, in that caustic jargon in which petty bureaucrats discuss their superiors, that “Frau Konsul was putting on quite a performance.”) While von Mitterer was familiarizing the new Consul with his duties, Anna Maria blustered through the house, changed her husband’s instructions, sat on the packed cases and cried. One moment she would try to delay the departure, and in the next she would excitedly try to speed it up. At night she shook her husband awake just as he had fallen asleep, to berate him and tell him all the reproachful things she had thought up while he slept.

  Hardly was the packing finished when it turned out that nothing was in its proper place, that no one knew where anything was or how it had been put away. When the luggage was ready to be moved, the pack horses which the Chief of Police had promised to the Consul failed to arrive in time. Anna Maria alternated between outbursts of fury and moody resignation. Rotta scurried around, shouted, and threatened. When finally, on the third day, enough horses were rounded up, it was found that some crates were too bulky and would have to be repacked. Even this might have been accomplished somehow if Anna Maria had not insisted on issuing her own orders and lending a helping hand. As a result, packing cases broke and things were damaged even before they got under way, and the Consulate was surrounded by a whole camping caravan of animals and drivers.

  At length everything was loaded and sent on its way, and the family von Mitterer followed a day later. With compressed lips and dry unfriendly eyes Anna Maria bade an insultingly icy farewell to von Paulich in front of the devastated Consulate, in a courtyard littered with straw, broken boards, and horse droppings. She and her daughter drove off first, followed by von Mitterer and von Paulich on horseback.

  Daville, accompanied by D’Avenat and a groom, saw them off as far as the first crossroad. Here Daville and von Mitterer said good-bye and parted, in a manner not so much cold and insincere as rigid and awkward—in fact, in the same way in which they had first greeted each other on that autumn day more than three years before and in which they had lived and associated ever since.

  On the crossroad too Daville could see the Catholic women and children approaching von Mitterer from both sides, to kiss his hands and clutch his stirrup shyly, and he could see that the Colonel was greatly moved by it; there was a whole crowd of them waiting their turn at the edge of the road.

  With this image of von Mitterer’s last triumph before his eyes, Daville turned to go home and discovered that he too was moved quite considerably, not because von Mitterer was gone, but because his departure touched off memories of their common past and fresh speculations about his own future. His actual going seemed almost to be a relief; it was not so much that he was getting rid of a tricky rival, since judging from all he’d heard the new Consul was even cleverer and more formidable than von Mitterer, but because this sallow-faced Colonel, with his weary eyes and woebegone look, had with time become a kind of embodiment of their common, unconfessed misery in this wilderness. No matter what came after him, Daville was more content to part from and bid farewell to this difficult man than to have to meet him and welcome him.

  Around noon, at the first resting place by the river Lashva, von Paulich also took leave of his predecessor. Anna Maria exacted her punishment by giving him no opportunity to greet her once more. Letting the carriage trudge empty up the slope, she went on foot along the green edge of the road and refused to turn and look down into the valley where the two consuls were saying good-bye on the riverbank. That tearful sadness which overcomes even steadier women on leaving a place where they have spent a part of their life, whether that life was good or bad, now choked Anna Maria too. Her lips pouted, her throat tightened, as she fought to keep back her tears. But more than this, she was tormented by thoughts of the handsome, cold Lieutenant-Colonel, whom she no longer called Antinoüs but “the glacier,” since she had found him to be even colder than the marble statue of the beautiful youth of antiquity. (She had named him that the night before and so gratified her need to invent a special name for everyone she met, appropriate to her feelings of the moment toward the person in question.) With an air of rigid solemnity, Anna Maria walked up the mountain road as though it were a stairway to some poignant, mystical height.

  Parallel to her, on the other side of the road, her daughter Agatha walked along the other shoulder, timid and silent. Unlike her passionate mother, the little girl did not feel that she was making a grandiose ascent, but rather that she was going downhill under a cloud of sadness. She too was
struggling to keep back her tears, but for quite different reasons. She was the only one in the family who genuinely grieved to leave Travnik and the silence and freedom of its gardens and verandas, who was sorry to be going back to huge and unfriendly Vienna where there was no quiet, no view to the open sky, where the moldy breath of houses chilled one’s heart right in the doorway, where this mother of hers, who made her feel uncomfortable even in her dreams, would be ever-present and inescapable.

  The tears in Agatha’s eyes went unnoticed by her mother, who seemed to have forgotten that she was there. Angry, disjointed words came from Anna Maria’s lips, and she was furious with her husband for tarrying so long and “making up to that glacier, that nonhuman,” instead of turning his back on him as she had done. And as she muttered to herself, she felt the wind inflating the long, light green veil tied to the back of her traveling hat, fluttering it and tugging at it. She found the sensation lovely and somehow moving and her mood suddenly lifted and changed, exalting her in her own eyes, so that all the trivia of her present existence faded away and she saw herself as a noble victim treading the lonely path of renunciation before the awed gaze of the world.

  That was all she would deign to give that cold unfeeling man: a blurred glimpse of herself on the horizon and the last proud, imperious flutter of her veil as it faded and receded without appeal.

  Lost in these dreams, she went up along the edge of the hill with a firm deliberate step, as though the landscape around her and the sky above were some great deep stage.

  But down below, in the valley, her husband was the only one who noticed the mountain; he glanced up anxiously, while “the glacier,” not noticing a blessed thing, went through the amenities of parting with the utmost politeness and finesse.

  The touchy and emotional Anna Maria was not the only one whom the personality of the new Consul had fascinated and then disappointed.

  Even during the first visit von Paulich had paid him, in the company of von Mitterer, Daville had seen that he would be dealing with a totally different kind of man from the latter. In matters of consular business, von Paulich was more forthright and much clearer. One could also talk to him on virtually any other subject, especially on the subject of classical literature.

  In their subsequent exchange of visits, Daville had got an even better impression of his ample and thorough knowledge of classic texts and commentaries. Von Paulich had looked through Delille’s French-language translation of Virgil, which Daville had sent him, and had described his reaction lucidly and earnestly; he had maintained that a true translation must follow the meter of the original, and had criticized Delille’s use, and misuse, of rhyme. Daville had defended his idol Delille, happy to have someone to discuss it with.

  But the first flush of Daville’s pleasure at having this cultivated and well-read man available paled rather quickly. It didn’t take him long to realize that chatting with this learned man produced very little of that glow of satisfaction which is the usual aftermath of an exchange of ideas on a favorite subject with a cultivated partner. A conversation with the Colonel was, in fact, an exchange of data—which were invariably accurate, interesting, and copious, on any and all subjects—but hardly an exchange of thoughts and impressions. Everything about these talks was impersonal, dispassionate, and general. Having said all he wanted to, the Colonel would leave with his rich and precious bag of facts, as fresh, neat, cool, and upright as he had come, and Daville would be left just as lonely as he had been before, his craving for a good talk unappeased. A discussion with the Colonel left nothing for the senses or the soul; one could not even recall the timbre of his voice. His conversation gave the partner no clue to his inner personality, and invited no confidence from the latter. In general, everything that was personal, close, and intimate recoiled from the Colonel as from a rock. So Daville had to forego all hope of discussing his own poetic work with this cold-blooded lover of literature.

  At the time of the happy event in the French ruling family, Daville had written a special poem commemorating the baptism of the King of Rome and had sent it to his Ministry with the request that they pass it on to the august parents. The poem opened with the words: “Salut, fils de printemps et du dieu de la Guerre!” (Son of spring and god of War, we salute you!) Further along, the poem voiced a hope for peace and well-being among the nations of Europe and made a passing mention of those who, “scattered in wild and desolate regions,” did their humble bit toward that goal.

  Daville read the poem to von Paulich during one of his visits, but there was no reaction. The Colonel not only failed to understand the allusion to their joint work in Bosnia but did not comment with a single word either on the verses or their subject. What was worse, he kept his usual polite and affable manner throughout. And while Daville felt disappointed and even annoyed, he could not very well show that he was offended.

  20

  The period after the Peace of Vienna, the years 1810 and 1811—which we have called the quiet years—were in reality a time of strenuous work for Daville.

  There were no wars, no visible crises or open clashes, but now the whole Consulate was deep in work on problems of commerce, the gathering of information, writing of reports, issuing of certificates of origin and recommendations to the French authorities in Split or to the Customs House in Kostaynitsa. There was a saying among the people that “trade moved across Bosnia,” and Napoleon himself was alleged to have said somewhere, “The time for diplomats is over, these are the Times of the Consuls.”

  Three years before, Daville had drawn up a plan for the development of trade between Turkey and France and the countries under French occupation. He had strongly recommended that France organize her own postal service through the Turkish lands and not be at the mercy of the Austrian service or the whims and confusion of the Turks. All those proposals had got stuck somewhere in the bursting files in Paris. Now, however, after the Peace of Vienna, it became evident that Napoleon himself stood to gain enormously if they were put into effect with all possible speed, on a scale much greater and more significant than the Consul at Travnik would ever have dared to suggest.

  Napoleon’s Continental System called for sweeping changes in the network of communications and trade routes on the European continent. The creation of Illyrian Provinces, with their center in Ljubljana, was to serve this purpose exclusively, according to Napoleon’s ideas. Due to the English blockade, the old routes through the Mediterranean, by which France obtained her raw materials, especially cotton from the Levant, had become risky and dangerous. Now trade had to be shifted to an overland route and the new Province of Illyria was to serve as a link between France and the Turkish lands. These routes had always existed—from Istanbul along the Danube to Vienna, and from Salonica through Bosnia to Trieste—and commerce between the Austrian lands and the Levant had always made use of them. Now it was necessary to expand them and suit them to the needs of Napoleonic France.

  As soon as the first proclamations and newspaper articles revealed Napoleon’s thinking on this, French authorities and institutions began to vie with each other in carrying out the Emperor’s wishes with the greatest zeal and to the best possible effect. All of a sudden there was prolific correspondence and lively collaboration between Paris, the Governor-General and Intendant-General in Ljubljana, the Embassy at Istanbul, Marshal Marmont in Dalmatia, and the French consulates in the Levant. Daville worked with enthusiasm, referring with pride to his three-year-old proposals which showed how close, even at that time, his viewpoint and line of thought had been to the ideas of the Emperor.

  Now, in the summer of 1811, this work was in full swing. During the past year Daville had tried very hard to find reliable men and to organize a supply of horses in all the places through which French goods passed, and to establish some kind of supervision over the pack drivers and freight. It had been a slow, uphill, and unsatisfactory task, like every other thing in this country; but now, with “Napoleon breathing on the sails” as it were, it was all begi
nning to perk up and look more promising, and the work went more easily and cheerfully.

  The day came at last when one of the leading trading houses at Marseilles, Freycinet Brothers, which so far had used the sea route to transport goods from the Levant, opened an agency at Sarajevo. The French government had approved the agency, directing it to work with the Consul. One of the Freycinet brothers, a young man, had arrived in Sarajevo a month earlier to supervise the work personally; and now he came to Travnik for a couple of days to visit the Consul-General and discuss further developments.

  The lovely but short Travnik summer was at its zenith. A dazzling clear day, all sunshine and blue skies, glittered over the Travnik valley. On the big terrace in the shade of the Consulate Building a table was laid out with several white wicker chairs. The air in the shade was fresh, though touched now and then by the waitings of the torrid heat that rose from the huddled streets of the bazaar down below. The steep green sides of the narrow valley gave off a dry heat and seemed to pulse and throb like the underbelly of a lizard stretched out in the sun. Madame Daville’s hyacinths on the terrace were long past their bloom, both the white ones and the colored varieties, the single- as well as the double-petaled ones; the borders now sparkled with red geraniums and delicate violet Alpine flowers.