Bosnian Chronicle

by Ivo Andrić

  D’Avenat, who knew, or at least guessed, everything that was going on in Travnik, soon got wind of Rotta’s predicament in the Consulate and promptly began to speculate how and where, in the ripeness of time, the French interests might benefit by it. Once, during one of those typical conversations which the two interpreters sometimes struck up after meeting accidentally in the bazaar or on the way to the Residency, D’Avenat jokingly told Rotta that if anything happened he could always count on finding asylum in the French Consulate. Rotta parried his joke with a joke of his own.

  After the first clashes, there was an ominous calm between von Paulich and his interpreter that lasted a whole year. Had the Colonel loaded the interpreter with too much work or harassed him with unfair demands, or had he thrown tantrums and displayed ill will, Rotta might have learned to live with it and might perhaps have found the patience to bear up with his new chief and last out to the end. But von Paulich’s Olympian attitude and the way in which he simply ignored Rotta’s personality were bound, sooner or later, to lead to a break.

  The actual rupture took place in the spring of 1812. The diminutive, hunchbacked interpreter could not live unnoticed in this way, reduced to his basic duties, frustrated in all his deepest instincts and ingrained habits. Losing his self-restraint, he abused the servants and junior office clerks and in quarreling with them addressed certain unmistakable threats and messages to his chief, in his desperate need for some relief. In the end, he clashed with von Paulich himself. When the Colonel coldly informed him that he was throwing the book at him and sending him away to Brod, Rotta found strength, for the first time, to challenge him openly and impertinently, asserting at the top of his voice that the Consul had no such authority and that he, Rotta, would perhaps send him packing, and much farther from Travnik at that. Von Paulich ordered Rotta’s effects to be thrown out of the house and forbade him to enter the Consulate. At the same time he informed the town Mayor that Nicholas Rotta was no longer in the service of the Austrian Consulate-General, that he no longer enjoyed imperial protection, and that his presence in Travnik was undesirable.

  Dismissed, Rotta at once went to D’Avenat and through him applied for the protection of the French Consulate.

  Not since the advent of the consuls and the establishment of the consulates had there been such a scandal and uproar in Travnik. Not even the strange conversion and mysterious death of Mario Cologna had made such a stir or set so many tongues wagging, so many people scurrying. Cologna’s death had happened at a time of general unrest and had, indeed, been a part of it, whereas now the times were quiet. Moreover, the “Illyrian doctor” was dead and silent forever, whereas Rotta was more alive and noisier than ever.

  Rotta’s defection from his Consul and his country was generally regarded as a great success for D’Avenat. D’Avenat shrugged it off and bore himself like a modest and reasonable winner. In reality, he was scheming to make the best possible use of Rotta’s quandary, but he was going about it carefully, without unseemly haste.

  The event, like so many others, left Daville with a feeling of unease, divided in himself. He could not, dared not, ignore all the advantages that Rotta’s defection offered to the French cause, the more so as the hunchback interpreter, driven by circumstances and swept along by his own passions, was edging closer and closer to open treason and was revealing, bit by bit, all he knew about the activities and intentions of his superiors. On the other hand, he felt pained and humiliated at the thought of having to use his official reputation as a cloak for the plotting of two interpreters, low and unscrupulous Levantines, against a gentleman like von Paulich, a man of honor and intelligence. In his heart of hearts he hoped that the whole thing—once D’Avenat had made all the use of it he could—might simmer down and be hushed up. But that was not what the two interpreters had at heart, and Rotta especially. In his fight against von Paulich he had at last found a worthy object for his denied and repressed passions and appetites. He sent long letters not only to the Consul but also to the commanding officer at Brod and to the Ministry in Vienna, presenting his case but suppressing, of course, the fact that he was in touch with the French Consulate. Accompanied by a kavass from the French Consulate, he rode out to the Austrian Consulate and demanded some of his things that were still there, he quarreled loudly and made public scenes, he invented new demands, ran about town in a huff, went up to the Residency and to the town Mayor. In short, he basked in his own scandal like a demented woman who has lost all shame.

  Von Paulich kept his composure. Nevertheless, he made the mistake of formally asking the town Mayor to arrest Rotta as a common thief of official documents, which forced Daville to write to the Mayor informing him that Rotta had placed himself under French protection and could therefore not be arrested and prosecuted. He sent a copy of the letter to von Paulich, adding that he regretted the whole thing but could not act otherwise, as Rotta, who was perhaps a man of unstable and volatile temperament but otherwise an upright person, had placed himself under the French protection, which could not be denied to him.

  Von Paulich replied bluntly, protesting the action of the French Consulate in giving asylum to paid spies, embezzlers, and traitors. He requested Daville to mark all his future letters to him as “not containing a reference to Rotta,” for otherwise he would return them unopened, so long as this sordid dispute over the interpreter continued.

  This further offended and saddened Daville, to whom this affair of Rotta’s was becoming increasingly distasteful and troublesome.

  The morose old town Mayor, finding himself in the middle of two contending consulates, one of them firmly pressing for Rotta’s arrest and the other firmly opposing it, fell into a dither and was equally annoyed with both, and especially with Rotta. Several times a day he snorted and muttered aloud to himself: “The dogs are fighting, and in my own back yard!”

  He notified the two consuls through one of his men that he would sooner hand in his resignation than permit the pair of them to squabble around Travnik while their emperors were at peace, and that across his already overburdened back. He would not wish to give umbrage to either of the consuls over anything, and particularly not over the question of this rabid little fellow who was, after all, no more than a lackey and an errand boy and as such hardly deserved to be the subject of conversation between imperial officers and people of rank. And, with much less ceremony, he advised Rotta to pipe down and keep what little head he had on his shoulders, since for many weeks now he had been a cause of upset to the leading people of the town, which up till now had been as peaceful as a temple of God; he would not be worth all this trouble even if he had a head of gold and the brain of a vizier. If he wanted to live on quietly and decently in Travnik, well and good; but if he chose to throw the town on its ear by dashing between the two consulates, stirring up trouble, and dragging in both the Turks and the Christians, he’d better take one of the two roads that led out of Travnik, the sooner and quicker the better.

  And in fact Rotta had filled the town with his vendetta and dragged into it everyone he could. He had rented the upper floor in the house of one Pero Kalydzich, a single man who lived alone and had a bad reputation. He brought in gypsy blacksmiths and had them put up iron bars on his windows and fit all doors with special locks. Besides two good English pistols, which he kept under his pillow, he also bought a long musket with powder and shot. Afraid of being poisoned, he made his own food; he cleaned the place himself, for fear of thieves and tricks. His rooms were pervaded with that chilly bleakness that invests the living quarters of eccentrics and solitaries. Rags and refuse began to pile up, dust and soot settled on everything. The house, which had been quite humble to begin with, grew more neglected by the week, even from the outside.

  Rotta himself began to change rapidly, to waste and disintegrate. He became careless of his dress and stopped caring about cleanliness. His shirts were soft and crumpled and he wore them over and over again; his black cravat was spattered with food, his shoes trampled and dir
ty. His hair, which had turned completely gray, now developed greenish and yellow streaks. His nails were black, he stopped shaving regularly, he began to reek of the kitchen and drink. In his bearing he was not the old Rotta any more. He no longer walked about with his head thrown back, swaggering and looking down his nose, but scurried around the town with a mincing, preoccupied step, whispering conspiratorially to those who were still willing to talk to him, or ranting against the Austrian Consul in some low-down pothouse, defiantly and at the top of his lungs, buying his listeners with drams of the brandy which he himself was beginning to consume in greater and greater quantities. Day by day the gilded veneer of his erstwhile dignity, his spurious power and gentility grew thinner and more threadbare.

  So Nicholas Rotta lingered on in Travnik, convinced that he was waging a great fight against his mighty and various enemies. Blinded by his morbid hate, he never even noticed his own backsliding and transformation, or realized that on the way down he was retracing the whole long and tortuous road of his former climb. He never even felt how countless petty circumstances were fusing together to create an imperceptible but powerful stream that would carry him back into that life which he had left as a child in the slums of San Giusto in Trieste, right back into the world of ugly squalor and besetting vice from which he had run with all his strength for thirty years and which, for a long time now, he had believed was behind him.

  23

  Daville had no patience with petty superstitions, yet often caught himself entertaining them. One of these was to the effect that the summer months in Travnik were unlucky and usually brought along some unpleasant surprise or other. He told himself that this was entirely natural. All wars and rebellions usually began with the summer; the summer days were longer and people had more time, ergo more opportunity, for getting up all those follies and mischiefs which are a deep inner necessity to them. And after he had reasoned it all out very neatly, he would catch himself a few minutes later in the same thought: that summer brings trouble and that the summer months (“those without the letter r”) are in every respect more dangerous than the others.

  That summer, indeed, got off to a bad start.

  One morning in May, which had begun rather well with a couple of hours of work on his Alexandrines, Daville was sitting with young Freycinet, who had come to report personally on the difficult situation at the French depot at Sarajevo and the various problems in the French transit commerce in Bosnia.

  The young man sat on the veranda, among the potted flowers, and talked in his lively and quick southern manner.

  It was his second year at Sarajevo. In all this time he had visited Travnik only once, but he had been in constant correspondence with the Consul-General. In his letters of late more and more space had been taken up with complaints about people and conditions at Sarajevo. The young man was completely disillusioned and discouraged. He had lost weight, the hair above his forehead was beginning to thin, his face had an unhealthy color. Daville noticed that his hands shook and that his voice was full of bitterness. Of that cool clarity, with which he had outlined his plans and intentions during his first visit the summer before, on this same terrace, there was not a vestige left. (“It’s the East,” thought Daville, with that unconsciously malevolent thrill one feels when discovering and observing the symptoms of one’s own disease in other people. “The East has got into this young man’s blood; it has sapped, unnerved, and embittered him!”)

  Young Freycinet was indeed bitter and fed up. That rankling dissatisfaction with everyone and everything which eats into and overcomes Westerners who come to work in these countries, had obviously got the better of him and he had not the strength to fight it or contain it.

  His proposals were sweeping. The whole enterprise should be liquidated, the sooner the better, and they should look for an alternative route through some other territory where conditions of life and work were more human.

  It was clear to Daville that the young man was infected with the “oriental toxin” and that he was in that phase of sickness in which, as in a fever, a man is incapable of seeing reality or forming a sober judgment and can only battle and flail, with every nerve and thought, against everything that surrounds him. This state of mind was by now so familiar to him that he could afford to play the part of the healthy, balanced elder who consoles and reassures. But the young man shrank from all consolation as though it were a personal slur and offense.

  “No,” he said bitterly, “they haven’t the faintest idea in Paris about what goes on here. No one could possibly know. Only when you’ve lived and worked among these people can you get an inkling of how undependable, stuck-up, primitive, and treacherous these Bosnians can be. Only we can know it.”

  Daville thought he was hearing his own words, the same ones he’d spoken and put in letters so many times. But he listened to them attentively, not taking his eyes off the young man who fairly trembled with barely contained emotion and deep disgust. “So that’s how I must have sounded to Desfosses and to all those others to whom I have so often said the same thing, in the same tone of voice, with the same show of nerves,” Daville thought. Aloud, however, he tried to calm and soothe the excited young man. “Yes, conditions are hard, we know that from experience. But we have to be patient. In the long run French reason and pride are bound to overcome their conceit and quick tempers. Only we had better . . .”

  “We’d better get out of here, monsieur le Consul, and as quickly as possible. Because we’re going to lose our reason and pride, not to speak of the effort we’ve put in, and all for nothing. That much is certain, at least as far as my own work is concerned.”

  “The same sickness, the same symptoms,” thought Daville, as he continued to calm him and reassure him that it was all a matter of patience and waiting, that the work cannot be simply abandoned, that in the great imperial plan for a Continental System and in the European economic organization as a whole Sarajevo was a vital point, thankless but vital, and that a slackening of effort at any point now might jeopardize the whole concept and damage the plans of the Emperor.

  “This is our share of toil and bitterness and we have to accept it, no matter how hard it is. Even if we can’t see the sense and direction of the plan on which we are collaborating, results are bound to show eventually, so long as each of us sticks to his post and doesn’t give way. And we should bear in mind at all times that Providence has given us the greatest ruler in all the centuries, that he guides the destinies of all, including our own, and that we can blindly trust his leadership. It is not an accident that the fate of the world is in his hands. His genius and lucky star guide every enterprise to a positive end. Believing in that, we can do our work quietly and confidently, in the face of the greatest difficulties.”

  Speaking slowly and calmly, Daville listened to himself in growing wonder: he was using words and arguments he had never been able to muster in his own daily waverings and doubts. He grew more and more eloquent and persuasive. He was experiencing the sensation of an old nurse who lulls a child to sleep with a long fairy tale and in the end gets drowsy herself and nods off beside the wide-awake child. By the time he finished talking he was relaxed and convinced of his own words, while the young man, whose life was being poisoned by the Sarajevo merchants and pack drivers, shook his head slowly and watched him bitterly, nibbling at his lips, with a twitching face that showed signs of bad digestion and overflowing spleen.

  At that moment D’Avenat came in. After apologizing for the intrusion, he informed the Consul in an undertone that a courier had arrived from Istanbul the night before, bringing news of an epidemic in Ibrahim Pasha’s harem. The plague that had been ravaging Istanbul for some weeks had spread to the Vizier’s house on the Bosporus. In a short space of time fifteen people had died, mostly servants, but the Vizier’s oldest daughter and a son of twelve years were also among them. The remaining inmates had fled to the mountains in the interior.

  As he listened to D’Avenat’s bad news, Daville could almost see t
he tall figure of the Vizier in front of him, dressed up in his gaudy clothes and leaning slightly to the left or right, as he always did, and now rocking under new blows.

  On D’Avenat’s advice and in accordance with wise oriental custom, they decided not to seek an immediate audience with the Vizier, but to let a few days go by, in which time the first shock of the tragedy would have passed.

  When he resumed his conversation with Freycinet, Daville felt himself even more patient and understanding, steeled as it were by another person’s misfortune. Boldly and without hesitation, he promised the young man that he would personally visit Sarajevo the following month in order to see, on the spot, what he could do with the authorities to improve the conditions for French transit commerce.

  Three days later the Vizier received Daville in his summer divan on the upper floor.

  From a blazing summer day Daville passed without any transition into the dusky, cool ground floor of the Residency, and shivered as if he had entered a catacomb. There was more light on the upper floor, yet there too the shade was heavy and cool in comparison with the heat and glitter of outdoors. One of the windows had been raised and a thick-leaved vine spilled lushly over the sill and into the room.

  The Vizier sat in his usual place, unchanged, in his full ceremonial dress, but leaning to one side like an ancient tombstone. Seeing him like that, Daville tried to appear casual and unchanged himself, while concentrating hard on what he had to say about the misfortune that had occurred; he wanted to express it warmly and with circumspection, without specifically mentioning those who had died, and particularly not the women, while nevertheless showing his understanding and sympathy.