Bosnian Chronicle

by Ivo Andrić

  Daville was shaken, disgusted, and indignant. He told D’Avenat to settle the thing with all possible speed, to prevent further bazaar spectacles of the same or possibly a worse kind. D’Avenat, to whom these qualms were a matter of utter indifference, and who had long accepted squabbling as an integral feature of doing business in the East, assured the Consul in his dry and matter-of-fact manner: “That fellow is not a suicidal type. When he sees that he will get nothing out of us, he’ll clear out as fast as he came.”

  And that was exactly what happened. Two days later the whole family left Travnik, after a stormy quarrel between D’Avenat and Lorenzo, in which the latter threatened at one moment to shoot himself on the spot and in the next swore that he would protest to Napoleon in person about his treatment at the hands of the Travnik Consulate, while his sizable wife flashed her eyes at D’Avenat in the highly dramatic style of a former beauty.

  Daville, who was always concerned with the prestige of his country and the Consulate, sighed with relief. But three weeks later another uninvited guest made his appearance at Travnik.

  This time it was a Turk, conspicuously well dressed, who took up quarters at the inn. He came from Istanbul and sought out D’Avenat right away. He called himself Ismail Raiff but was in fact a converted Alsatian Jew by the name of Mendelsheim. He too asked for a private interview with the Consul and claimed to have important information for the French government; he boasted of wide connections in Turkey, France, and Germany and of membership in the leading Freemason Lodge in France and claimed to know many of the plans of Napoleon’s opponents. He was strong, of an athletic build, a redhead with pink cheeks, talkative and overweening. There was a bright, almost drunken glaze in his eyes. D’Avenat tried to get rid of him with a stratagem he often used: he advised him in all earnestness to continue his journey without a minute’s delay and to convey all he knew to the military commander at Split, who had the sole authority to receive such information. The Jew demurred, complaining that French consular officials showed no understanding whatever of these matters, which an English or an Austrian consul would welcome with open arms and pay for with fourteen-carat gold. Still, after a few days he too left.

  The day after he departed D’Avenat learned that before he left the man had visited von Paulich and offered his services against Napoleon. D’Avenat immediately reported this to the commanding officer at Split.

  Hardly two weeks later Daville got a long letter from Bugoyno, signed by the same Ismail Raiff, informing him that he was stopping at Bugoyno and had entered the service of Mustapha Pasha Suleimanpashich. He was writing on Mustapha’s orders and requested in his name that they send him two or three bottles of cognac or Calvados, or any other French drink, “as long as it is strong.”

  Mustapha Pasha was the oldest son of Suleiman Pasha Skoplyak, a spoiled and debauched young nobleman, given to many vices and especially to drink, and quite unlike his father, who was shrewd and dissembling but also a brave, upright, and hard-working man. The young Pasha led an empty and dissolute life, molesting his women tenants, drinking with idlers, and tearing about the countryside on his horse. Suleiman Pasha the Elder, who was otherwise stern and a skillful handler of men, was weak and indulgent with this son of his and always found excuses for his laziness and bad habits.

  D’Avenat at once understood what drew those two men together. With the Consul’s approval, he promptly wrote to the young Pasha himself that he was sending some bottles of spirits by a separate messenger, but that he would advise him not to put too much trust in this Ismail as he was an adventurer and quite possibly an Austrian spy.

  Ismail Raiff sent back a long letter, defending and justifying himself, in which he tried to prove that, far from being anybody’s spy, he was a good Frenchman and world citizen, an unhappy man whose only sin was that he had lost his bearings. The letter, which reeked of plum brandy, ended with some mawkish verses in which he bemoaned his fate:

  “O ma vie! O vain songe! O rapide existence!

  Qu’amusent les désirs, qu’abuse l’espérance.

  Tel est donc des humains l’inévitable sort—

  Des projets, des erreurs, la douleur, et la mort!”

  (Oh life of mine, oh idle dream, oh swiftly passing span!

  Teased by fond desire, mocked by hope.

  Such, then, is the inescapable lot of men—

  Plans, mistakes, pain, and death.)

  He wrote a few more times in this vein, remonstrating and justifying himself in alcoholic prose garnished with verses, signing the letters with his original name and an assumed masonic title, “Cerf Mendelsheim, Chev . . . d’or . . .” until drink, wanderlust, and events swept him out of Bosnia.

  As if they had arranged to succeed each other, the moment Ismail stopped writing another French traveler arrived in Travnik, one Pepin, a tiny, nattily dressed man, powdered and perfumed, with a shrill voice and a mincing gait. He told D’Avenat that he had come from Warsaw, where he had kept an acting school, and was stopping here because he had been robbed on the way; that he was returning to Istanbul, where he used to live at one time and where some people owed him money. (How he got to Travnik, which could not, by any stretch of the imagination, be said to lie on the Warsaw-Istanbul route, he did not explain.)

  This little man was as forward as a tart. He stopped Daville as he was riding through the bazaar, placed himself in front of the horse, and requested him in ceremonious language to receive and hear him. Afraid of another public scene, Daville consented. Once he got home, however, trembling with anger and excitement, he called D’Avenat right away and implored him to get rid of the pest.

  The Consul, who saw English agents even in his dreams, was sure that the man had an English accent. D’Avenat, unshakably calm as usual, lacking imagination and incapable of seeing anything that was not there, or of embellishing anything he did see, formed an accurate idea of the traveler right away.

  “Watch out for this man,” the Consul had warned D’Avenat in some excitement. “Get rid of him, please. He’s obviously an agent, sent here to compromise the Consulate or for some such purpose. He is an agent provocateur. . . .”

  “He is not,” D’Avenat said flatly.

  “How not? What do you mean?”

  “He’s a pederast.”

  “He’s what?”

  “A pederast, monsieur le Consul.”

  Daville clutched at his head. “O-o-o-h! That’s all we need in this Consulate. You say he is . . . oh, mon Dieu!”

  D’Avenat calmed his chief and the very next day he rid Travnik of M. Pepin. Not saying anything to anyone, he cornered the man in his room, got a firm grip on the immaculate lace ruffle of his shirt, and told him that unless he moved on right away the Turks would give him a public lashing in the middle of the bazaar and then throw him into the fortress dungeon.

  Daville was relieved when this last vagabond had gone, but he remained apprehensive and kept wondering what trash and human flotsam and debris blind and senseless chance would bring next into this valley where life was quite hard enough without them.

  Daville’s sixth autumn in Travnik had nearly run its course and was fast moving to a dramatic climax.

  Toward the end of September the news came of the fall of Moscow and of the great fire. No one came to congratulate him. Von Paulich continued to maintain, with barefaced calm, that he had no news whatever of the campaign, and avoided all talk of it. And D’Avenat reported that von Paulich’s staff took the same line in their conversation with the local people and behaved in all respects as if they were unaware of the fact that the Austrian Empire was at war with Russia.

  Daville made a point of visiting the Residency more often and meeting the people of the town, but all of them, one after another, as if by mutual agreement, shied away from any discussion of the Russian campaign and retired behind meaningless generalities and noncommittal pleasantries. At times it seemed to Daville that they were all looking at him in awed wonder, as though he were a sleepwalker teetering
on the edge of some perilous abyss and they were anxious not to startle him awake with a careless word.

  Nevertheless, little by little, the truth came to light. One rainy day when the Vizier, as was his custom, asked Daville what news he had from Russia and Daville told him the latest bulletin about the capture of Moscow, the Vizier expressed his pleasure, despite the fact that he already knew this; he congratulated Daville and hoped that Napoleon would continue to march forward, like Cyrus of antiquity, a just and true conqueror. “But why is your Emperor marching north at this time of the year, just before the winter? That is dangerous, dangerous. I would prefer to see him going south,” said Ibrahim Pasha, gazing anxiously through the window, into the distance, as if he were looking at Russia itself and trying to fathom her dangers.

  The Vizier said this last in the same tone of voice in which he had recited his good wishes and made his analogy with Cyrus, and D’Avenat translated it in the same flat and uninspired fashion in which he did all his interpreting. Yet Daville felt a stirring of queasiness in his innards. “Here, then, is this thing I am afraid of, and they all seem to know it already, only nobody wants to say it openly,” thought Daville, waiting tensely for the Vizier to go on. But Ibrahim Pasha was silent. (“He will not say it either,” Daville thought, distressed). After a long pause, however, the Vizier spoke up again, but on another subject. He recalled how many years before Ghisari Tchelebi Khan had marched against Russia and, in a series of battles, had routed the enemy army, which kept retreating north, deeper and deeper into the country. Then, winter suddenly overtook the victorious Khan. His great army, irresistible till then, became demoralized and afraid, while the infidel barbarians, inured to cold on account of their hairiness, began to ambush it from all sides. Ghisari Khan then spoke the unforgettable words:

  “When a man leaves his country’s sun behind him Who shall light the way on his return?”

  (Daville had never had much patience with this Turkish custom of sprinkling conversation with weighty aphoristic lines, whose pertinence and aptness more often than not were lost on him, and at the same time he could not help feeling that the importance and meaning they attached to those verses was something special in itself which he ought to make it his business to divine and understand.)

  Young Ghisari Khan flew into a rage at his astronomers, whom he had purposely brought with him and who had forecast a much later onset of winter. So he gave orders that these wise men, who had turned out to be less than wise, be tied up and made to march barefoot and lightly clad at the head of the army, so that they might rue their colossal fumble with their own bodies. And then it turned out that these emaciated scholars, with less flesh on them than bedbugs, withstood the cold much better than the army. They remained alive, while the hearts of the young warriors cracked in their chests like green beechwood in the first frost. You could not touch steel, they said, because it stung you like white-hot iron and the skin of your palms remained stuck to it. And that was the sad end of Ghisari Khan’s expedition. He lost his magnificent army and barely escaped with his head.

  The Vizier terminated the audience with blessings and good wishes for the success of Napoleon’s undertaking and the defeat of the Muscovites who, as was well known, were bad neighbors and warmongers and never kept their word.

  The tales of Ghisari Tchelebi Khan and Cyrus had not, as it happened, come out of the Vizier’s head but out of Tahir Beg’s. He had produced them in conversation with the Residency inmates when they were discussing the fall of Moscow and Napoleon’s further adventures in his march across Russia. The ever-alert D’Avenat found that out in the course of his pulse-taking at the Residency; and the stories left no doubt about what the Turks really thought of the French army’s chances in Russia.

  Tahir Beg had apparently told the Vizier and the others that the French had already gone too far and could no longer pull back without considerable losses. “And if Napoleon’s men spend another week where they are,” the Secretary had said, “I can see them turning into grave mounds covered with Russian snow.”

  D’Avenat’s informant had repeated the statement word for word, and D’Avenat in turn reported it to Daville exactly as he heard it.

  “In the end, all fears become reality,” Daville told himself, calmly and aloud, as he woke up one winter day.

  It was an unusually cold December morning. He had woken up with a start, imagining that the hair of his own forehead was somebody’s cold hand. He had opened his eyes and spoken these words as if they were a message from someone.

  He spoke them again, a few days later, when D’Avenat came in to tell him that the Residency was agog with rumors of Napoleon’s defeat in Russia and the French army’s complete disintegration. The newest Russian war bulletin, with full details of the French debacle, was circulating around town. One could safely assume that the Austrian Consulate had procured and secretly distributed these bulletins through its agents. In any case, Tahir Beg had the bulletin in his possession and had shown it to the Vizier.

  “It’s all coming true,” Daville told himself over and over again as he listened to D’Avenat’s account. Then he pulled himself together and quietly ordered the interpreter to go visit Tahir Beg on some pretext and, in the course of the conversation, ask for the Russian bulletin. At the same time he called in the junior interpreter Rafo Atias and told them both to try to scotch these unfavorable rumors around the town and assure everyone that Napoleon’s army was invincible, in spite of temporary setbacks which were the result of the distances and the winter weather and not of any Russian victories.

  D’Avenat managed to see Tahir Beg and ask him for the Russian bulletin, but the Secretary would not give it to him. “If I gave it to you, it would be proper for you to pass it on to M. Daville, and I don’t want that. What they write here is too disagreeable for him and his country, and I esteem him too highly to have him receive this news from me. Tell him that my good wishes are with him constantly.”

  D’Avenat repeated this to Daville in his flat, faithful, and exasperating way and left the room at once. Alone with his thoughts, Daville mulled over Tahir Beg’s oriental compliment—the kind of compliment that made a man’s flesh creep. When the Osmanlis began to pussyfoot like that with a man, he was as good as dead, or the unluckiest man alive! Such were Daville’s thoughts as he leaned on the window sill, gazing into the winter dusk.

  In the narrow band of dark blue sky above Vilenitsa the new moon came on stealthily, cold and sharp, like a graven metallic letter.

  No, this time things would not end as they had before, with triumphal bulletins and victorious peace treaties.

  What until then had lurked like a premonition at the back of Daville’s mind now rose up before him as a full and clear realization, in the cold night of a foreign land under a sinister young moon, forcing him to consider what a complete breakup and ultimate defeat might mean for him and his family. He made a concerted effort to think about it but felt that the problem required more strength and courage than he was capable of that evening.

  No, this time the end would come not, as it had earlier, with a victorious bulletin and a peace treaty bestowing new territories on France and fresh laurels on the Imperial Army, but, on the contrary, with a rout and dissolution. A hush was falling over the entire world: the dull, bated-breath kind of pause before the dreadful crash that was certain to come. Or so, at any rate, it seemed to Daville.

  During these months Daville remained without any news, almost without any contact with the outside world on which all his thoughts and fears were centered, and to which his personal destiny was bound.

  Travnik and the whole countryside were in the grip of a long, cruel, and unusually severe winter, the worst of all winters Daville had spent here. The townspeople recalled a similar winter twenty-one years before, but, they said, this one was colder and fiercer. As early as the month of November the winter bore down hard on all life and changed the face of the earth and the appearance of people. It filled and flattened the va
lley, hardening and settling like a fatal desolation and leaving no hope of change. It emptied the granaries and shut off the roads. Birds fell dead from the air, like phantom fruit from invisible branches. Wild animals came down from the high mountains and wandered into the town, their fear of winter stronger than their fear of men. In the eyes of the poor and homeless one could see terror of a defenseless death. People froze on the roads, in their quest of bread and warm quarters. The sick were dying, for there was no medicine against winter. In the arctic night one could hear the shingles on the Consulate roof crack open with the force of pistol shots, and the wolves howling above Vilenitsa.

  Fires in the earthen stoves were kept going all through the night, as Mme Daville feared for the children and could not help remembering the boy she had lost four years before.

  During these nights Daville and his wife sat after dinner, she fighting sleep and exhaustion from the day’s work, he with sleeplessness and endless worries. She would be aching for sleep, while he would want to talk. To her all talk and brooding about the winter and poverty sounded gloomy and unwelcome, for she had spent the whole day struggling against them, frail as she was, muffled to her chin in shawls, yet nimble and always on the move. He, on the contrary, found at least momentary comfort in such talk. Still, she listened to him, although dying to go to sleep, and so gave him his due, just as all day long she had done her duty by all the others.