Alija babbled constantly and regardless of the fact that he was sitting beside a boy whose whiskers hadn’t even started growing and who, in all likelihood, had no idea about any kind of female spells.
Rafo listened to him and nodded. He could have repeated everything that Alija said between Dubrovnik and Mostar, but it didn’t concern him, nor did he think about what the midget was saying. He was preoccupied with his own torments and would only occasionally lower his gaze to Alija’s feet, which didn’t reach the floor. When Alija got completely carried away by his enthusiasm for Sarajevo and the low women, he would squirm on the bench and kick with his feet like a little boy. In that scene there was a sorrow that Rafo could easily bond with.
In Mostar they went to eat borek before the Sarajevo trainset was moved up.
“That’s what Herr Heydrich ordered,” Alija said darkly and irrefutably. Rafo knew that he had to eat, even though his stomach was contracting from misery, because if he didn’t eat the borek Alija would probably collapse from fear before that Herr Heydrich. The midget said his name with fear, and it was very probable that he regretted that he himself wasn’t of a heroic nature. Because if he were, he would have kept quiet about the borek, and then he would have had more money for the roasted chickpeas, the sweets, and the kerchief. He would have cheated the emperor and the state and gotten by better in life. That was possible, Alija thought, but God hadn’t granted him to be like that. Whoever was granted this would get rich, spend his earthly days in luxury, and end up in dark jahannam. Alija was comforted because this was so, but again he couldn’t understand why his heart filled with pain if it was true that God sees everything and thieves go to hell. Difficult questions for his little mind! He had to get them out of his head, especially on that day when he was going on this, his longest journey, with which he’d been rewarded for his faithful service to the Viennese emperor. It was true that it was an earthly recognition, but it wouldn’t have come to pass without the approval of the great Allah, who sees everyone and knows everything. The emperor’s will was collaborating with the will of God. It pays to be good, he thought, as he watched Rafo struggling with the borek. Herr Heydrich had reminded him to buy himself some borek too. But if he told Heydrich that he hadn’t been hungry, he wouldn’t ask Alija to return the money. Herr Heydrich wasn’t stingy. Herr Heydrich was a gentleman.
“Hey, how about that trainset?!” Alija gaped like a fish, and Rafo wasn’t indifferent when from a sideline there appeared a locomotive that was twice the size of the one from the Dubrovnik train, black as tar and gleaming like a girl’s hair. It was pulling four cars, and a glance was all it took to tell that they were more luxurious than the most luxurious carriages in which Ali-pasha Rizanbegović had ridden during the time of the Turks whenever he would go to Trebinje.
“Lord have mercy! By the power of Allah!” Alija said, folding his hands and walking around the trainset in amazement. But he did so cautiously so as not to disturb or break anything and be charged for it afterward. And so the trainset wouldn’t suddenly jump up and bite him on the nose.
It seemed as if Rafo smiled too. Or maybe it just seemed so. That midget was growing on him, with his little feet that swung back and forth when he was excited, as was his enthusiasm, as a mutt has when it gets excited about something but is afraid to go closer to it. Rafo had never met anyone like Alija in his life. He was small, so every mood took hold of all of him, not just half or three-quarters. If one of Rafo’s moods took hold of all of him, he would burn up in a minute like a match, or he would vanish like a piece of hail that falls in a yard in the middle of the August heat. But Alija was good; he was all happy five minutes after he was all unhappy. He would have started getting on someone else’s nerves, and maybe he did— Rafo would have to ask people who had known Alija longer. But Rafo came to like him. It wasn’t that he didn’t like other people, but Alija was the first person about whom one could say that he really liked him. It was easy to disappear in front of Alija. But when Rafo disappeared, Alija kept acting like he was there.
They’d hardly taken their places in the trainset— the car was, to be sure, half empty, but God forbid that Alija would sit in someone else’s seat!— and the locomotive had hardly started pulling the cars on their way when he suggested they go to the Viennese restaurant on wheels.
He’d remembered the conductor’s words verbatim, and there was no chance that he would distort something or misrepresent it. Rafo liked the game. He imagined how the midget would be surprised and everything he would say and was entertained by his happiness.
The interior of the restaurant car was all gold-plated and covered with ornaments, with a shag carpet on the floor, lounge chairs and tables of carved wood, and with strange curves. Two waiters were wearing formal railway uniforms with strange yellow fringes, ribbons, and epaulettes. If one had the impression that the imperial railway happened to be introducing military ranks, then the waiters would be generals and the conductors ordinary soldiers. Alija gently stepped back in the face of those figures, who looked at him lazily and somewhat scornfully. There was no one else in the Viennese restaurant on wheels, and the waiters didn’t think that the midget and the boy looked like potential customers at all. Instead of yielding to melancholy and drawing a long face at the beauty of the car and not noticing that they were looking at him or losing his nerve and saying, “Let’s get out of here!” Alija bravely stepped on in, grabbed Rafo by the hand, and with unexpected authority said, “You sit here!”
And then he went around the table and hopped up on a chair that was too high for him.
Maybe someone would think this scene was funny, but the waiters didn’t even manage a smirk, nor did they think of noticing how the midget’s feet hung down because Alija turned around ever so slightly, as if his neck were stiff, and with the baritone voice of a Herzegovinian aga barked:
“Young man! Some service!”
The waiters came skipping with the manners of third-class circus performers when their act goes wrong. Alija leaned on the little table with his elbow and waved in the direction of the older one with his little finger, following the rhythm of his own words: “For the boy, raspberry juice, and brandy for me. Grape brandy! No, no; bring me plum brandy, but don’t let it get over twenty-five degrees. If it’s over twenty-five degrees, it doesn’t agree with my stomach, and I’ll give it back to you. And I won’t pay you because I told you nicely that it can’t be more than twenty-five degrees!”
The waiters looked at him with a kind of fear that people of the twentieth century know nothing about and have a hard time understanding even when people try to conjure it up for them with images. It wasn’t the fear of a weakling in the face of a bully but the fear of a Bosnian commoner before a grand vizier— fear before a grim glance behind which hides intelligence, power, confidence, tradition, and the law of heaven and earth. It was the fear that in people who are given to feel it tears away every inner and outer support. Before the vizier they were pathetic and small, even in those things that had never occurred to the vizier himself. And that’s how the waiters of the restaurant car were as Alija was telling them what he wanted.
In an instant raspberry juice and brandy were on the table— it wasn’t a smidgen warmer than twenty-five degrees! Rafo then saw clearly for the first time the face of that man. Earlier Alija had continually laughed, made faces, complained, frowned like a child, and changed ten expressions in five minutes, and each one was as if his face was made of rubber and created for humility of any kind. The faces of the humble are harder to remember than the words of a strange and completely incomprehensible language. But in the restaurant car the pauper turned into a grim and languid aga whose bright eyes didn’t show a tepid soul but radiated fountains locked in ice in the middle of January. His face was symmetrical and typically Herzegovinian, with chiseled wrinkles wherever they are according to the rules of mature male beauty. Alija was another man. Rafo sensed that he had a protector, someone who watched over his outer and inner
worlds equally. Alija knew that and was glad.
He grabbed the boy by the hand, remembered something, and started singing through his nose, softly, so the waiters wouldn’t hear him: “May your repose be great, enormous, endless . . .”
As he paid the bill, Alija didn’t even show with a misplaced flash of his eye that he’d just reduced by half the gifts that he meant to take home to his family. He knew that the raspberry juice and the plum brandy would cost so much; it was clear to him as soon as they stepped into the Viennese restaurant on wheels, but the price wasn’t too high for him. He regretted every kreuzer that he’d paid for the borek, but the money that he’d just spent would have bought three pans of borek. He could have fed the Dubrovnik-Mostar train and the Mostar-Sarajevo trainset, but that was something else. He’d bought the borek on orders, whereas the raspberry juice and the plum brandy had nothing to do with Herr Heydrich or the radiant emperor. No one would reimburse him for the money he had spent, but was that important? And could anyone really reimburse such expenses? Honor and hospitality have no price. And it was no accident that those two words— čast and čašćenje— were so similar, though their meanings were different. The language wasn’t stupid, even if the people that spoke it could be. Alija knew that well, just as he knew that Allah wouldn’t hold it against him if he downed a brandy here and there. Bosnia was a land of brandy; every Turk knew it. Even those who’d never in their lives violated God’s law and drunk a drop from a bottle knew it. And it was a land of brandy not only because of its plums and vineyards, but also because of the effort that it took to make brandy. Allah didn’t measure every person, all of his sons and daughters, by the same ell, but took into account whether someone lived in the mountains, where the fog didn’t lift until May; or lived on the seacoast, where the bora blew through a man’s ribs; or lived in the desert, where it was always scorching hot and your head started to boil every so often even without brandy. Allah wouldn’t reproach him even for the rage and spite that made him spend money. You couldn’t look at someone you knew nothing about the way the waiters had looked at him. If someone was going to humiliate him out of the blue, then he was clearly going to humiliate them three times worse.
He sat down by the window and looked down at the Neretva, above which a canyon rose up into the sky. Gray shadows were laid softly one on top of another like layers of phyllo dough in a thick cheese borek. They wound and curved as if a giant hand were crumpling them in the borek before it let green water flow in between them. What had God had in mind when he piled them up like that? And then He planted a single pine tree on top of the highest bluff. That pine grew out of the stone; Alija saw clearly that there was no soil up there. When the wind blew, the pine clutched the cliff with its roots, and through the cliff it clung to the entire world. Anything you might touch at any spot in the whole wide world and wherever you stepped and whatever you sat down on so you could rest was a part of what that pine above the Neretva was holding on to. And there was no place on the globe that was so far away that it didn’t belong to that pine. In the face of such a wonder a man had to be quiet. In the face of other wonders one was supposed to be loud and rejoice at them. The first kind were greater than the second kind. The pine growing out of that rock was a greater wonder than the trainset in which they were riding.
Rafo sat across from him but didn’t notice the same sights. As he looked at Alija, his own solitude returned to him. A feeling that it was crazy to believe that it was possible not to be alone. As soon as you took a better look at something, you began to notice that it was moving away from you. If you looked at it long enough, you realized that it would soon disappear. It was the same way with Alija. And so it was better to stop watching him because he might disappear too. And that would be a pity, a great loss, the greatest that Rafo could think of before he shut his eyes, only to see Alija’s feet swinging in the air a few seconds later because he’d remembered that some young men dive from the bridge in Mostar. They weren’t afraid at all. And Alija had been terrified of looking down when he’d been in Mostar for his job two years before and had climbed up to the middle of the bridge. Herr Heydrich had sent him because it was his daughter’s birthday, and they were baking her a cake in the Kaltz pastry shop. Herr Heydrich didn’t like our desserts. He said that he thought baklava was too sweet, and Bosnian poached apples were too low class. Whoever heard of stuffing apples with walnuts?! If that were meant to be, Heydrich fumed, Eve wouldn’t have bitten into the apple, but Ismo the boza maker would have brought her a poached apple. Herr Heydrich was a man of the world and knew that well. Our desserts weren’t world-class; they were just ours, Bosnian. And who were we? Nobody and nothing. If we hadn’t had Austria, we would have been left as orphans on the globe. Even Istanbul had washed its hands of us after a few hundred years. Why wouldn’t it?! The Turks had too many headaches with Bosnia, and even more with Herzegovina. No gain at all, but the expense was tremendous! Both in blood and gold, or whatever you wanted! And then our beys went ape! They put fezzes on their heads, took their muskets out in the sun, and spread their cushions out on the dirty ground. They sunned their butts a little and started a few rebellions and uprisings! They said they weren’t going to listen to what the sultan said but were going to do as they pleased. You couldn’t tell them anything! Of course the Turks got up and left. Better to steer clear of lunatics; and we’re lunatics and don’t do ourselves any good, and so others— bigger, better, and smarter— can’t do us any good either. Oh, how can Trebinje measure up to Istanbul?! That would be like little Alija challenging that acrobat from Prizren to a duel, the one who the year before had broken heavy chains with three fingers! God forbid if Austria ever gets tired of us and leaves. God pity whoever lives to see that!
Good Alija thought some of that and told some of it to Rafo while the trainset crept and crawled along Mt. Ivan, so slowly that they could have gone out and picked wild strawberries along the track. Alija might have suggested they go out, but it was dark, and if there were any strawberries, no one could have seen them. As the locomotive struggled along the last ascent before Bradina, they fell asleep one after the other. And no one knew who drifted off first while the steel wheels spun and recited their zikr, as if in the middle of a ring of dervishes.
The shouts of the railway porters awoke Rafo. Alija, coiled up, kept snoring and wouldn’t have woken up until the conductors threw him out. In those years people with light sleep were rare. People fell asleep wherever they managed to, and they slept deeply and without fear of being woken up. Light sleepers are another invention of the twentieth century and a modern age in which life is easier, the body is exerted less and wasted less, and the soul has it harder and harder, so it never really gets a good night’s sleep.
The platforms were as crowded as Purgatory. There were porters, people selling boza and popcorn, train dispatchers, pickpockets, town criers, people waiting for someone, policemen and spies in plainclothes, coquettes and women in black, Gypsies and cripples missing arms and legs, Krauts with disgusting expressions and their beautiful wives, travelers and clerks from provincial post offices, emigrants of all kinds, people with big butts, big eyes, or big beards, bald men, those who smelled of feces, and those who looked at everything around them more sinisterly than dogs. There were lowlifes and dolts, high-class gentlemen, traveling singers, people invited to municipal picnics, and an unfamiliar mass of people about whom no one knew which class they belonged to or what their story was. When a train arrived in the station, they all began pushing and shoving each other and sticking their fingers in others’ pockets, so much that it looked just as if Noah was preparing for another voyage and everyone needed to get aboard as soon as possible to escape the flood. Alija grabbed Rafo firmly by the hand; he wasn’t going to lose him now when his mission was nearing its end, and the boy trembled with fear.
Freshly awoken, he wasn’t sure that he hadn’t passed from one slumber to another and wasn’t dreaming that he was awake when he’d really sunk deeper int
o sleep, into a nightmare beyond all nightmares, which he’d known had existed for a long time. Everyone knew it and awoke from bad dreams happy because they hadn’t dreamed those uglier dreams. The faces of these men and women, old and young, and even of the children were without exception threatening. They laughed wickedly and shouted wickedly, and the Sarajevo speech— Rafo was hearing it for the first time— had rough and hard accents. As if those people had never felt open spaces but were all squeezed into a fit of slurring, grating their teeth, and hissing.
Grayish-yellow boza spilled on the platform; there was the fragrance of salep, intense and intoxicating like medicine given to a dying patient so his suffering might be eased with the illusion that it could be treated. Hot halva was smeared on blue packing paper and dripped down the sleeves of sweaters of undyed wool. In the distance one could hear a chorus of dogs howling and barking; the recently established dog pound was working at full force.
Beyond the high mountains, the likes of which neither Rafo nor Alija had ever seen, the red morning sky was spreading out. In a few minutes, the valley, which the city filled from one end to another, was flooded with stark colors that hurt the eye and sent a tingling up one’s spine and all the way to the skull, which Goethe (who was still unknown in Sarajevo) had claimed was the last vertebra. Alija saw the minarets of a hundred mosques— did Istanbul have as many? Instead of a dusty road beneath his feet, there was a black pavement that had no end; in every direction there were buildings with five or six stories— how could their foundations hold up such big houses? Women with uncovered calves passed by— were they the low women, and were there really so many of them? Married women in headscarves passed by, but they too hurried as if their legs were naked and they didn’t know how to cover them up . . .
The Walnut Mansion Page 52
