His porcelain plate, silver cutlery, and Murano glass cup were all that remained.
(Thus had it been ordered: all the others ate from tin mess kits, with their fingers, and with wooden spoons, while only Sarchione used the same sort of plate as Ganimed and drank from a Murano glass cup. It’s true there was one more set of the lord’s cutlery – for Botta – but he never used it.)
The search for the young man didn’t last long. They found him in tears as he lay in a hay shed on the nearest village estate. But the fact that he’d run away was a great setback for Botta. His own vanity had made him careless.
The journey’s continuation was difficult and slow for some time longer. Ganimed’s fever did not abate. Every evening some serious ailment seemed to take hold of him, eventually causing him to collapse into his bed, and the entire caravan would worry – who would go before the lord to tell him the youth had died? – and then in the morning, after he’d had a good cry and slept, he would again seem to be healthy. And so they would travel for a day, camp for two, waiting for Ganimed to get better or, perish the thought, fall seriously ill.
The garrison slept inside or underneath the coaches – Mula the wrestler, always slept in the middle of a field and without any covering, so by morning the frost had accumulated on him and two or three times he was covered over with snow and almost suffocated – while Ganimed Troyanovsky, as the occasion dictated, slept in wayside inns, city hotels, or, most often, in a coach himself, since the inns across the Bavarian wastelands were rare and suspicious, and it was easy to get oneself killed since plunderers lurked, waiting for solitary travelers, who were often outlaws themselves. Carrying off the plunder from someone they had killed a night or two earlier, the thieves themselves would be run through or have their throats slit at an inn, and then, maybe fifty kilometers or so farther on, at the next inn, the same fate would befall those murderers. This was how gold coins, Turkish pocket watches, saffron, cinnamon, and nutmeg were transported from the east to the west of Europe, while all around such goods heads rolled, and very soon it was no longer clear where the gold coins had come from and who that first explorer and wretch had been who, in the distant Orient, in some Indian village, had bought the saffron, cinnamon, and nutmeg from a native for a pittance. This is why history does not even make note of such journeys and has barely an idea of the routes taken by such caravans, where death traveled from east to west, bringing gold and spices, progress, and a better life to Europe.
* * *
—
Eustachio Millas Sarchione was a man gifted in everything that made for adornment, accumulation, and zest in this world, especially in the realm of government and governing. A musician, a quack, and a fine portraitist, he had begun his career as a jester in the court of some now nameless Venetian grandee. He was – according to the documents – from a poor family that had lived at the edge of the lagoon and been ravaged by a cholera epidemic. Of the twenty members of the family of Lazarus Sarchione, only the youngest male child had survived, Eustachio. They had found him in a pile of garbage and his own excrement. He had survived for days by gnawing on the bones of his dead relatives. This prodigious story was passed from person to person among men and women, from one end of Venice to another, doing away with people’s need to criticize the powerful, which was where the idea of revolt had always emerged. Venice’s powerful, like those throughout the world, kept track of what eliminated people’s need to speak ill of them, or redirected it from political figures to something else, something to one side, to men and women, the Church, or even God, as long as they were not saying anything about those in power. Natural disasters and epidemics were of great help to them in this, for they distracted the people from dangerous ideas. From the time that the empire had grown weak and shrunk down to one stinky lagoon and its immediate vicinity, and there were no more wars or threats of war, the only thing that could save them was cholera, small pox, malaria, or the plague, when their sailors and merchants happened to bring such things from distant lands.
The epidemic from Sarchione’s childhood had been one of the largest. Or it had become such in his imagination, especially during times of travel, when he would gather around himself a group of listeners and narrate the story of his life from the very beginning. Everyone would listen, for in these stories Sarchione was an unrivaled artist.
He had been adopted by a rich widower, a patrician without children. The man had done this because of his gentle heart, or perhaps he had been drawn to him by the nearness of his own death. The old man, whom Sarchione sometimes called Muscha, sometimes Master Pio, Elder Silvester, Kanibal, Dužd, Elijah, or, most often, “my dear papa,” was a terribly sad person, never laughed, and thought often of suicide. He had a collection of daggers and ordered that poisons be brought to him from all over the world, which he kept in hundreds of little bottles in the wine cellar. After a certain Dubrovnik sailor brought him the poisons of some New Zealand aboriginals, whose homeland had been reached just twenty years before by Captain Robert Cook, the first European to do so, the old man, without even knowing it, had brought together in his collection of four hundred bottles (here we cease estimating: there were 429 jars of various colors and sizes) all six continents of the future world, not counting the one eternally under ice, in a unique atlas of the world, probably the first such created in Venice, and maybe the first in Europe. Thus did our modern history, without the gray stains of a map or unexplored seas, begin with an atlas of poisons. Unless Sarchione had invented it to make his story more exciting.
The old man had procured the poisons, paying very little for them, by combining his two passions, one for collecting, the other for suicide. The first was typical of the Venice of his time: everyone was collecting something while the state was crumbling. The priests too started collecting treasure once they had stopped believing in God.
Meanwhile, recognizing his benefactor’s other passion for what it was, the boy set out to entertain him and make him laugh. Though he was not aware of what he was doing and did not know he was engaged in one of the oldest occupations of our civilization, from as early as five years old he had been a small court jester. This was how he dressed and appeared before the old man every morning. Not once did his papa, Muscha, Master Pio, Dužd, or Elijah laugh, but the boy succeeded in distracting him. When the time came, he sent him to school with the Dominican friars, then with the Armenian monks, who would be the first to acquaint him with the enchantments of the East. And while the West was shallow, and one could quickly drown in the Atlantic Ocean, the East was deep and spread out to the farthest edges of the human mind and human understanding. The East, as the Armenian scholars explained, was more profound than even the universe with all its stars, so profound that no one had ever found its bottom. They had even directed him, after his papa had died, to set out on the road to the East. It turned out that he would never make it to Ararat or Yerevan, for in wondrous Istanbul all his talents would be realized: he would tell stories and compose Western sonnets and Eastern ghazals in competitions. Though the poets would never meet, for years between Istanbul and Samarkand heralds on camelback would carry scrolls with the latest ghazals and short inquiries about each other’s health and whether enemies were trailing.
In Istanbul Sarchione would study calligraphy and painting, the goblet drum, and violin and piano. Thanks to the piano, he would become acquainted with the charming Lika Serb. Omar – elegant, educated, and witty – had just one fault: he was ashamed of his own imagination. And he was known to take pleasure in Sarchione’s fantasies and invented stories for hours and days on end, especially the variations on his own biography. These had been known to mesmerize Omar.
Once in a while, in rare moments of weakness, Omar Latas would sigh:
Oh, if only such things came to me!
But the moment the Venetian began to improvise, assuring him it was in everyone’s power to create new versions of his own life, Omar would turn sad, scowling a
nd shrinking into his shell, and then quickly disappear. For weeks there would be no sign of him, and when he did appear he had only one thing to say to his friend:
We shall not speak of it!
Sarchione knew what Omar meant. It was simply not the case that everyone was able to embellish other people’s lives, let alone his own. Some had no gift for it. Others were ashamed of such creation, as if of their own nakedness. As a rule, they were unhappy people. Then they made others unhappy.
In this alone lay the explanation for Omar Pasha Latas’s unusual character and militant cruelty. He would kill and order others to kill, calmly and without an afterthought, without allowing his imagination to ruin his reason or inflame his emotions. At the same time, he was quite sensitive and interested in every form of art. It was as a young soldier in Vidin that he had been hired by the fortress commander to teach drawing to his children. The commander had recommended him to Istanbul, where Omar had become acquainted with Western literature and Arab poetry, studying the piano a little bit as well.
He believed in art more than in war. Like Sarchione he was sadly aware that his empire was declining, but this merely strengthened his belief that he had done the right thing in converting, changing from Mića to Omar. On one side he held Sarchione – a friend he admired – and on the other Botta – a killer whom he valued as much as his friend, for if Sarchione had a gift for the beautiful and the extraordinary and knew how to lie in such a way that his lie was recognizable as such but was still more beautiful, more humane, and more necessary to a person than was the truth, Botta had the unerring gift of being correct and just.
Eustachio Millas Sarchione and Omar Latas had met in the middle of the thirties, in Istanbul, where the future pasha was working as the drawing tutor for the future sultan Abdulmedjid. Omar was not yet twenty-seven, when a man’s maturity begins, Sarchione was several years older. They were both foreigners in the great city, but this was not what brought them together. Rather it was their attraction to the arts and their fascination with the city of Caesar Constantine and its magnificence.
Before long Latas broke with the young prince or had nothing more to teach him and, fleeing from his own shame and the vices of the big city, returned to his fundamental military calling. As a young boy, Mićo from Jana Gora, near Plaški in the Kordun region, had graduated from a good cadets school in Gospić, and this would be quite useful to him in Constantinople. Strong of spirit and voice – his whisper alone could be heard from one hill to another if he wanted – and friendly with Abdulmedjid, he was quickly promoted to the rank of colonel in 1838. Soon thereafter, when Abdulmedjid became sultan, Latas was named pasha, upon which his great military career was immediately launched. The empire was tearing and falling apart like an old overcoat, and while he did not believe in its ultimate salvation, Omar sewed it back together and spared it with lightning speed. He quashed rebellions in Syria and Albania, then in the southeastern borderlands, in Kurdistan, dealing savagely with the national and political elites of those regions, where, in accordance with the prevailing European fashion, new nations had begun to be born. Constantinople was far away, the empire growing more outmoded and decrepit the more literate they became, and nothing awakens the need for freedom in a person more than that strange impression of a kingdom’s outmodedness. Plus they counted on their apostasy to turn them into the fathers of nations. Latas soullessly cut them all down, and one might have said that there was even some private passion of his own in this. He was insulted by the suspicion that people were merely rats fleeing a sinking ship. If this were true, if people were rats, art would have no meaning.
The two would go for years without seeing each other. News would reach Sarchione of his friend’s heroic exploits, his madly courageous attacks on enemy camps and fortresses, all of which confirmed that Omar was a man whose fierceness was so great it did not even allow him to perish. He would later ask him why this was. Because, Latas responded reasonably, one cannot do it otherwise. It would be too expensive, and maybe even impossible, to keep the borders of the kingdom if the enemy did not live in the belief that the keepers are insane and bloodthirsty and that they wouldn’t stop once they had started. What about the fear? he asked. Every man fears in the same way. It’s just that the majority of people fear in such a way that the world sees it, and a few bury their fear deep within. It’s to those few that the keeping of the kingdom should be given.
When Omar was sent in 1850 to put down the uprising of the Bosnian begs, he invited Sarchione to join him so he would be near at hand. This was not convenient. While Omar had been building his career in the military, Sarchione had been occupied with the design and construction of bridges – that ancient passion of Istanbul artists and architects that, in the meantime, everyone had abandoned, and there was no longer so much need for bridges since, rather than conquering the other shores, they had long since lost them – and here was Latas inviting him to go to Bosnia. Sarchione knew if he stopped now, it would be for his whole life and he would not design or build the bridge he had been dreaming of, narrower than the one in Mostar, so narrow as to be invisible to anyone who didn’t know how to look, but he also knew he would lose his friend if he didn’t go with him.
Latas would have preferred not to go to Bosnia. At first he was afraid, but this fear of his was not ordinary. He was afraid of the sudden clarity that had lit up inside him when the grand vizier had announced this campaign. Before his eyes he could clearly see the thick, dark woods cut through with powerful mountain streams. He could smell the heavy scent of just-ploughed soil and see its color, a color he could distinguish from all the other colors and lands of the earth…He was afraid of the fact that he knew all this and could imagine it all beforehand, but there was something more that was much worse: he thought about the insurgent begs with a kind of joy that was sudden and demonic, those people he knew in his head, and he recognized in himself each of their motives. By contrast to every other commander or lieutenant in the Ottoman kingdom Omar Pasha Latas knew the people who were standing up against the sultan for some sense of their own rights and for an old-fashioned, primitive understanding of God and custom.
And he thought: How can they not be ashamed of themselves!
And whenever he thought this, the blood would rush to his head and he’d be ready to slaughter them all.
They were doing what he would have done if he, God forbid, had been in their place, if things had worked out that way, and if God had so willed it, the God in whom Omar did not even believe, and if instead of a Kordun and Lika Serb he’d been made a Bosnian beg and had managed to see how something that had been built to last for all time was eroding and crumbling in Istanbul, and how the kingdom was crumbling into little pieces at the edges. Yes, he would have behaved the same way if he’d had the misfortune to be a Bosnian beg. And then something occurred to him that would provoke a fury that was even more bitter: as a Serb on the Austrian frontier, a worthy and talented student of the Gospić school for lower officers, he had had the opportunity to see Istanbul, become Turkish, attain the rank of marshal in the Ottoman kingdom, but it would have never been possible for him, a boy from Janja Gora, near Plaški, to wake up one morning as a Bosnian beg.
They were, it so happened, above him.
This did not bother him.
They were, it so happened, above him and did not feel any sense of shame about what they were doing and what they planned to do.
This did bother Omar, and at that moment he turned his eyes from them, those Bosnian begs, with the eyes of a Turkish pasha. He saw in them what he had seen when he was Mićo.
And this frightened him. At that moment, he was no longer a pasha. He was a cutthroat and an arsonist, one who killed in a fit of passion. He was afraid he might really become that. This was why he had asked Sarchione to come with him to Bosnia.
The Venetian was not impressed by the poor, primitive country, not before he had seen it and not after he had b
een in Bosnia for several months. If there was anything that stirred him in connection with Bosnia, it was the fact that such an intelligent man could be put into such a state by the place as to lose his mind and peace. And he was not alone in this: in Istanbul, as they were preparing for the journey and later on the road and in Sarajevo, he had met many wise, composed, and gifted foreigners, people of diverse faiths and heritage who, like Omar, could be induced by the place to put all their bets on a single throw of the dice. He wasn’t swayed by the understanding that it was a poor, backward land that wasn’t worth his attention, where one could not find a single truly beautiful building or hear anything at all that was intelligent or great from the locals, except how great was their sadness that they didn’t live in some other part of the world, and he understood that there was something in Bosnia that clouded foreigners’ minds. Something like henbane or opium, which an infected spirit could only clean out with difficulty and which after a time turned fatal.
He went with Omar to keep him safe in Bosnia, and more than that, to watch out for the health of his mind and the purity of his soul.
Whatever anyone might have thought, Omar Pasha Latas was for Eustachio Millas Sarchione a man with a child’s purity of soul. This was why he abandoned his life’s dream of a perfect, invisible bridge, and went with the pasha to Sarajevo.
Omar Pasha Latas accomplished his work coldly and with lightning speed. He quelled the uprising quickly and easily, much more easily than in Syria because it became clear there was no great reason to have an uprising. The begs were not imagining Bosnia as some sort of France, or Prussia, or Venice, or Hungary. The begs were not even thinking about Bosnia really. What was on their minds had always been their own lands and status. And the moment they bumped up against this reality, they closed themselves up in their courtyards and paid no more attention to what was happening with the country or the people. But this was not enough for Omar, and he selected the most highly regarded from among them and humiliated them in the worst possible ways, setting out with his soldiers to confiscate and destroy their estates, beat and kill them like dogs. He counted on the fact that this too would enter into folk legend and national storytelling, in an epic song that would be sung for centuries. This people would lament its leaders, and this sadness.
Kin Page 93
