He touched his cap with his index finger in saying goodbye. Prewar school, I thought.
“Good night,” I said.
“Good night,” said the skinny one.
“And quietly, sir!”
He had used the word sir, repeating it as children do when they’re learning something new. I wanted to say something more to him but felt embarrassed. I wanted to apologize but didn’t. At the same time, with another part of my consciousness, I kept trying to remember whose sixth-floor apartment it could have been on Alipašino polje in whose bunk bed I was trying to get to sleep.
I continued down Sarači toward Slatki Ćošet. The fountain by the harem wall of the Gazi Husrev-beg Mosque gurgled, the water was alive, flowing. It wasn’t cold enough yet for them to shut it off. Though I couldn’t remember ever passing by the fountain when it wasn’t flowing. I remembered it flowing freely even in the middle of winter, when strips of ice would form around the drain. They probably turned it off unobtrusively when the temperature dropped to ten below or less. They trusted that people would not notice such things. For them the water flowed endlessly, even when it didn’t. Their ears were used to the sound and heard it even when there was no water. Their eyes saw what wasn’t there: a lively, free-flowing spurt that never stopped. And no one noticed that the people who took care of the mosque turned off the water so the pipes wouldn’t crack beneath the mosque around which Sarajevo had grown and spread over the centuries.
The only ones who might be able to remark the day and hour when the water went off at the mosque’s fountain were the former Sarajevans who had moved away across the ocean and didn’t come here anymore or only came when they needed an overhaul on their mouths since dentists in Sarajevo were much cheaper than in America, but even they came mostly in the summer. They’d have to come in winter, in December or January, when Bosnia’s at its coldest, and mist and smog presses in on the valley, but no one comes to Sarajevo then without great distress, much greater than cavities or porcelain crowns. You go to Sarajevo in winter only for a funeral of somebody you want to see for the last time. Then, maybe, you’ll be that individual who sees and hears that they’ve shut off the water in front of the Begova Mosque.
I was standing in front of the display windows of a store that sold women’s silk slippers and loafers decorated with fake silver and plastic jewelry. The slippers had acquired their own name over the years: aladinke. They’d been fashionable over the last fifteen years, so the hungover filmmakers would buy them the day before their departure to take back to their wives and girlfriends in Zagreb, Ljubljana, and Belgrade. Later the foreigners copied this custom, thinking as usual that there were some deeper reasons and roots behind it, like maybe that these slippers had been sewn in Sarajevo ever since the Ottomans adopted Bosnia, and that it was precisely there that the roots of the town had taken hold. This belief was securely held even by the owner of the store, a squat sixty-year-old with a shaved head and the characteristic eastern need to chat up the foreigners until he could find some fatal similarity between Sarajevo and the countries and cities from which they had come. This was probably something that had existed forever, but I only started to notice it once I had become a foreigner to these people. Before they’d been taciturn and ill-tempered: if they said anything at all, it was some story about Želja’s ćevapi, burek, or yogurt, while today they’d probably use the same tone to discuss the genocide and Republika Srpska or peaceful Islam and the Israeli aggressors, such that I wouldn’t ever learn a thing, and it would forever remain a secret to me, had I never moved away from Sarajevo, that the master slipper maker knew and loved Zagreb, that he practically had the whole map of the city in his head, along with all the details one can only learn from tourist guides since more often than not they’re not even known by Zagreb natives. For instance, he knew in what year the Stone Gate had been built and that Ilica Street had once been the longest in Yugoslavia. He knew the habits of Zagreb’s inhabitants as well as their antipathies, and he praised both even when they involved questions of outlook on the world and customs that were in complete opposition to his beliefs. Of course any foreigner, a Zagreb native for instance, might appear in the shop. The man was prepared to relate wonders merely in order to sell, for the price of twenty-five convertible marks, his silk-upholstered slippers, which reminded me of candies wrapped in tissue paper of the sort that had been sold in the Yugoslav provinces forty years earlier.
There was an ad in the display window: aladinke of all sizes and colors.
In the half-light of the shop, on the wall above the little table where the master worked, hung a levha panel with Arabic calligraphy. A framed photograph hung on the opposite wall: the master shaking hands with President Clinton there in the workshop during his visit to Sarajevo.
Some people looked at one wall when they entered, others looked at the other. He sold them slippers, telling each of them what he thought that person wanted to hear.
I remembered him with his bronzed forehead and obsequious smile, grasping my hand and looking into my eyes as he said what he thought I wanted to hear. After that I would hurry by his shop so he wouldn’t see me and invite me in.
At Slatki Ćošet, there were two sweetshops across the way from each other: Ramisa’s always had the shapeliest cakes, in modern showcases and refrigerators. That was where the tourists came and those in the know. On the other side of the alley crisscrossing Sarači was an older, skimpier sweetshop. Its name changed whenever the owner changed, or whenever the owner wanted to alter the signpost indicating the name of the business. For the longest time it was simply called Sweet Ćoše, from the Turkish word meaning “nook.” It was there at the beginning of the seventies that I’d drunk my first boza.
Between the two confectionaries, at the very end of the Oriental market, before Sarači emptied into the Vaso Miskin Street, which today is called Ferhadija, hung the balance of a civilization, which was not conscious of itself or its own existence. I looked through the display windows of the Ramisa sweetshop: little stainless steel and fake marble tables, clean glass cabinet windows in which by early morning there would be cakes with bright artificial colors, cream, and candied fruit. The back wall was covered in mirrors to make the interior seem larger, and in them, the competing store from across the street was visible. While it was still night and the street light was barely flickering, it was possible to make out the worn café tables and chairs in the mirror, the opaque glass kolach case, which had probably survived the war, and two glass gallon containers on top of it, one for boza and one for lemonade. Even though there was always a bigger crowd at Ramisa, the people in the shop across the way never tried to make adjustments and compete in the way handbooks on capitalist business recommend. They had fewer clients, but their boza was better. And everyone knew the boza across the street was better. Maybe the kolach too? This was impossible to say, since no one but tourists went to Sweet Ćoše for the kolach. One went to Sweet Ćoše because such was the custom. And for the boza, which had always been better across the way. Maybe it really was better – maybe one drank the boza in the sweetshop across the way because it inspired faith in the poverty of its creation. Boza was something from the past, from an old, rundown sweetshop on the verge of being closed forever. One was always drinking it for the last time.
When either of the two sweetshops disappeared, or when the poorer one was remodeled into one that would compete against the other, richer one, all this would fall apart and the balance on which this Oriental city had always managed to rest would disappear, leaving it as gloomy as the town of Kars in Pamuk’s Snow, as picturesque as a kitschy nineteenth-century veduta by a French traveler to Bosnia.
* * *
—
Ganimed Troyanovsky came to Bosnia on the invitation of Omar Pasha Latas. It was the spring of 1851. The trip from Paris to Sarajevo had taken him thirty-seven days. On the road he had contracted a fever that had long tormented him, rendering him weak
in both body and spirit. And his character had not been particularly strong to begin with. He easily changed his mind and was never sure whether he had set off on the right path, so even when Paris was still in view as he turned around to look, he was bitterly regretting his acceptance of the invitation by this Bosnian serasker. But he could not go back, for Latas had sent two very well-educated Venetians to accompany him, one a bridge builder and storyteller named Sarchione, the other a certain Botta, about whom he knew nothing except that he very kindly watched over him. They had come with twelve helpers – porters, riders, coachmen, gendarmes – hand-picked men of the sort that were sent in those times through insecure lands and regions to convey cargo that was valuable to the vizier or the Sublime Porte.
On this occasion there was no valuable cargo but Ganimed Troyanovsky, who had just turned twenty-three, and it would remain a mystery how and through whom Omar Pasha had heard about him and why he had decided to bring him to Sarajevo for such a delicate and serious job, which was of the sort that only proven builders and artists were typically selected for, people at the height of their calling, or at its end, when they needed to put a finishing touch on a great career and secure the gratitude of the empire. He was inclined toward the Western taste and measure of Paris and Vienna, but instead of bringing a forty-year-old from one of those cities, he had invited someone who was practically a child. But the fact that Omar Pasha knew everything about him – namely that he was of an unstable nature, melancholic, and scatter-brained – is attested to by his having sent such an experienced group of men, led by Sarchione, who would entertain and encourage him and with whom, should he feel the urge, he might shorten the journey through conversations on art, poetry, and architecture, and by Botta, who would take care not to let the youngster lose his way.
The moment he sat down in the coach and a servant covered his legs with a wool blanket and offered him some chamomile tea, which he said would cure his ailment, Ganimed understood that things had begun to unfold beyond his will. This thought upset him, and it became cramped for him first inside the carriage and then inside his own skin, and soon he began to emit almost constant sighs.
He drank the tea. It was actually the first time in his life he had drunk chamomile, and he imagined it was some sort of Turkish narcotic plant that broke a prisoner’s will to flee, lowered his spirits, and made him fearful. And so for days on end Ganimed cried – which first alarmed his escorts, then frightened them, and eventually entertained them – and was not up for conversations about bridges in the East or bridges in the West, or about Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, the Venetian painter and renegade, with his enigmatic Scherzi etchings, or about the Vienna theater project, or about the enormous expanses of Russia, whose imperial mission to Paris had brought Ganimed’s father Ivan Vasilievich into contact with Ganimed’s mother Elise and caused him never to return to Petersburg…
Ganimed didn’t feel like talking. He wasn’t interested in anything but going back home, and he bitterly regretted having answered the invitation of this unknown Turkish pasha. He had felt honored and, more than that, soothed in his limitless vanity in knowing that word about him had reached Istanbul, and he had felt he had no choice but to agree. Who would not have done so in his place? When he had answered in the affirmative to the pasha’s invitation, six months had remained before the journey to Sarajevo. A full half year in which Ganimed could enjoy the honor being bestowed on him. But the time had passed quickly, and as the journey grew near he began to regret his decision and to consider how to put it off. And then he had come down with that strange fever – in the morning he would be fine, but by evening he would be gripped in turn by fever and trembling. This could have been a good reason for postponing the expedition, but even if Ganimed Troyanovsky had written a letter, or if he’d sent a messenger to Sarajevo, neither would have made it to Omar Pasha Latas. One could simply not get to the serasker. The pasha was the one to choose when he made contact with the world.
After Ganimed had a good cry, the state of his fever only got worse. They traveled slowly and uncertainly, for the sick man was constantly demanding things, and then they would wait for him to recover at some wayside Belgian inn.
This drove even the sedate Botta to despair, then to fury, which he would appease by having wrestling matches with Mula, the escort commander, a huge Turk with a shaved head and a Tatar braid. They would strip to the waist, rub oil on their torsos and hands, and go at it in the middle of afield. Remnants of winter were still visible in places – if the diaries, chronicles and notes of the day are to be believed, the winter of 1850–51 was one of the snowiest of the century, and it was somewhat unusual that Latas did not postpone Ganimed Troyanovsky’s journey to Bosnia on this account – and there were Botta and Mula wrestling in the icy snow, which poked and tore at their backs. But they didn’t feel anything in the heat of battle, going at it for two hours at a time, until eventually Mula would win.
Botta had studied wrestling along with a few other arts: throwing knives, handling Damascus swords, strangling a man with a silk scarf, remaining without air for a long time under water, slowing the heart, using poisons, setting traps along the road, in the forest, and in the desert – but also more refined skills like how to influence the masses through powerful words, how to offer conviction by means of a glance, such that he was preeminent among the whole group of them, that he wished them all well and was their leader, and among these finer skills was that of talking about books he had not read, as well as the most ordinary trick of all, that of convincing people they were hearing the most beautiful of all singing voices when he had merely opened his mouth. In journeying to the East the Venetian had learned all these skills, among others. From Salonika to Istanbul and on to Samarkand, Bukhara, and Baghdad, he had studied the arts of self-control and dispassionate behavior, which rendered him one of the cruelest and most dedicated killers of his time, whose unerring nature is witnessed by the fact that he remained completely outside of history. Even Omar Pasha Latas, who prized him more than any other man in his surroundings, didn’t know his full name. He knew him only, as did others, as Botta from Venice.
But still he could not overpower Mula and throw him onto the ice. Although he was physically stronger and better prepared than the Turk, and although he was more agile and unquestionably craftier – craftiness was something one learned from life, but also from books, and Mula was illiterate – and although according to everything he was predestined to be able to throw the weaker, slower Mula onto his back on the ice, he couldn’t manage to do it. Wrestling, one of the fundamental skills of the Ottoman empire, was not something Mula had ever studied. He had been born into it, had wrestled from the time he started walking, and wrestled in the same way that he walked, without thinking about it, and never thought about wrestling as something one used to defeat another or humiliate another. Botta quickly understood: wrestling for Mula was a game he could not do without, as one cannot do without breathing.
This was what made Mula unbeatable. In order to beat him, Botta understood, he would have to eliminate in himself beforehand any inkling of superiority and wrestle with him as if with his own child. There weren’t any boys in the caravan, so he went dancing around looking to see whether there wasn’t some young Belgian or maybe a Gypsy he could convince to wrestle with him. The Belgians ran from the crazy Turk, hiding their children in the sheds and animal stalls. They thought Botta was a Turk, which in a certain sense he was. Actually, Botta was a Turk in almost everything – for he never thought about what he actually was or about what sort of clothing the God he believed in had put on him – except in the fact that he had gained all his knowledge through hard experience and there was more of it than in any Turkish killer or wise man, though they had acquired their knowledge and skills naturally. A true Turk would have had mastery over one or two of Botta’s skills, rather than his thirty or forty, and would not have needed to learn more than that.
Mula, for instance, knew how
to wrestle, could cut off the head of a live ox with a single blow of his sword, and could crack a whip in the air above his head. These were essentially all his skills.
The Belgians hid their children because they thought the Turk was strange when he proposed wrestling with the seven-year-olds. Rumor also had it that Orientals had a preference for boys. They would cut off the heads of men but they instinctively loved boys, believing that by the force of their love these boys could grow up into the most beautiful girls. Such was the belief in Belgium in the middle of the nineteenth century, during Ganimed Troyanovsky’s journey to Bosnia.
The Gypsies didn’t hide their children: they offered them to Botta for sale, in pairs or individually. He could take the children with him to Turkey so they would grow up with the pashas and great viziers. It was futile of him to offer them money just to wrestle with one and then return him. This made them terribly sad, and there wasn’t a single Belgian Gypsy who would agree to let his boy wrestle with the Turk for any amount of money. When Botta asked one of the fathers why, the man said it wasn’t humane to offer the child hope and then take it away. Let him either buy the boys or stay away from them altogether.
Botta stopped trying.
The story of Botta’s wrestling with Mula would have remained unimportant and unrecounted if not for the fact that on the eleventh day of the journey, somewhere in the wide German plains, Ganimed Troyanovsky disappeared.
It was early afternoon, the caravan had stopped for lunch, and the two of them had gone off to wrestle. As always in such circumstances, Botta instructed two youths from the escort to keep an eye on the young man. But it seems they were not aware of what could happen – for why would the young lord run off anywhere? – or perhaps they’d been befuddled by the young wine they had drunk in big pots with the roast mutton, such that by the end of lunch Ganimed was nowhere to be found.
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