Black Lamb and Grey Falcon

by Rebecca West

  The guide turned out to be as we had thought him. It was a poor day for the market. A storm had been ranging over the mountains all night, and as the year was still early and the crops light, most of the peasants had not thought it worth while to get up at dawn and walk the seven or eight miles to Trebinye. There were a few handsome women standing with some vegetables before them, soberly handsome in the same vein as their plain round caps and their dark gathered dresses, gripped by plain belts. We saw a tourist level a camera at two of these. They turned away without haste, without interrupting their grave gossip, and showed the lens their backs. These were very definitely country women. They wore the typical peasant shoes of plaited thongs, and by their movements it could be seen that they were used to walking many miles and they bore themselves as if each wore a heavy invisible crown, which meant, I think, an unending burden of responsibility and fatigue. Yet there were women among them who were to these as they were to town ladies, country women from a remoter country. The eyes of these others were mild yet wild, like the eyes of yoked cattle, their skin rougher with worse weather than the others had seen and harsher struggles with it; and their bodies were ignorant not only of elegance but of neatness, in thick serge coats which were embroidered in designs of great beauty but were coarse in execution, if coarse is used not in the sense of vulgarity but to suggest the archaic, not to say the prehistoric. There was a difference among the men also. Some seemed sturdy and steadfast as the rock, others seemed the rock itself, insensitive, except to the weathering power of the frost and sun.

  There were also about the market-place plenty of Moslems, the men wearing the red fez, the women in the black veil and the overall made of a straight wide piece of cotton pulled in at the waist by a drawstring. ‘Turks,’ said the guide, and he was talking nonsense. Nearly all the Moslems in Yugoslavia except in the extreme south, in Macedonia, are Slavs whose ancestors were converted by the Turks, sometimes in order to keep their properties, sometimes because they were Bogomil heretics and wanted defence against Roman Catholic persecution. This is pre-eminently the case in Bosnia and Herzegovina; the true Turks left at the time of the Austrian occupation. ‘Look!’ said my husband, and I found that he was enraptured at the sight of the fezes and the veils, for though he had spent some time in Istanbul and Ankara, that had been since the days of the Ataturk and his reforms. ‘Do you think the veil adds charm to the female?’ I asked. ‘Yes, in a way,’ he answered; ‘they all look like little Aberdeen terriers dressed up to do tricks, with those black muzzles sticking out.’ One stopped, and offered to sell him some white silk handkerchiefs of offensive aspect, with tatting at the corners. His taste in linen is classical; she was not fortunate. Nor were any of the six others who sought to sell him such handkerchiefs at various points in Trebinye. ‘I don’t like their handkerchiefs and I don’t like them,’ he decided. ‘No doubt they’re perfectly respectable, but they waggle themselves behind all this concealment with a Naughty Nineties sort of sexuality that reminds me of Ally Sloper and the girls, and the old Romano, and the Pink ’Un and the Pelican.’

  This was not the last we were to see of that peculiar quality. After our guide had so far exhausted the possibilities of Trebinye that he was driven to taking us down a street to see a boot-shop and saying reverently, ‘Batya,’ we decided we would go back to Dubrovnik. But we changed our minds because a little Moslem boy handed us a leaflet which announced that tourists could visit an old Turkish house in the town, formerly the home of a famous pasha, which was complete with its original furniture and its original library. We found it in the suburbs, standing among gardens where spring was touching off the lilac bushes and the plum trees: a house perhaps a hundred or a hundred and fifty years old. It was a very pleasing example of the Turkish genius for building light and airy country houses that come second only to the work of our own Georgians, and in some ways are superior, since they hold no dark corners, no mean holes for the servants, no rooms too large to heat.

  This stood firm and bright and decent, with its projecting upper stories, the windows latticed where the harem had been, and its two lower stories that had their defended Arabian-nights air of goods made fast against robbers. Across a countryish courtyard, almost a farmyard, was the servants’ house, where the kitchens and stables were. Down an outer staircase ran a pretty, smiling girl of about sixteen, unveiled but wearing trousers, which here (though not in other parts of Yugoslavia) are worn only by Moslem women. Behind her came an elderly man wearing a fez and a brocade frock-coat. On seeing us the girl broke into welcoming smiles, too profuse for any social circle that recognized any restrictions whatsoever, and left us with a musical comedy gesture. Her trousers were bright pink. ‘Turkish girl,’ said the man in the frock-coat, in German. ‘Then why is she unveiled?’ asked my husband. ‘She is too young,’ said the man in the frock-coat, his voice plump to bursting with implications.

  We wavered, our faces turning back to Trebinye. ‘Come in, come in,’ cried the man in the frock-coat, placing himself between us and Trebinye. ‘I will show you all, old Turkish house, where the great pasha kept his harem, all very fine.’ He drove us up the stairs, and shepherded us through the main door into a little room, which in its day had been agreeable enough. Pointing at the latticed windows he said richly, ‘The harem was here, beautiful Turkish women wearing the beautiful Turkish clothes.’ He opened a cupboard and took out a collection of clothes such as may be found in any old-clothes shop in those provinces of Yugoslavia that were formerly occupied by the Turks. ‘Very fine, all done by hand,’ he said of the gold-braided jackets and embroidered bodices. ‘And look, trousers!’ He held up before us a garment of white lawn, folded at the ankle into flashy gold cuffs, which can never have been worn by any lady engaged in regular private harem work. ‘Transparent,’ he said. It was evident that he was affected by a glad pruritis of the mind. Coyly he sprang to another cupboard and brought out a mattress. ‘The bed was never left in the room,’ he said; ‘they took it out when it was needed.’ There was unluckily a third cupboard, with a tiled floor and a ewer. ‘This was the bathroom, here is where the Turkish lady kept herself clean, all Turkish ladies were very clean and sweet.’ He assumed a voluptuous expression, cocked a hip forward and put a hand on it, lifted the ewer upside-down over his head, and held the pose.

  Undeterred by our coldness, he ran on to the next room, which was the typical living-room of a Turkish house, bare of all furniture save a bench running along the walls and an ottoman table or two, and ornamented by rugs nailed flat to the wall. I exclaimed in pleasure, for the view from its window was exquisite. The grey-green river we had seen from the heights above the city ran here through meadows deep in long grasses and pale flowers, and turned a mill-wheel; and the first leaves of the silver birches on its brink were as cool to the eye as its waters. Along this river there must have once wandered, if there is any truth in Oriental miniatures, a young prince wearing an ospreyed fez and embroidered garments, very good-looking now though later he would be too fat, carrying a falcon on his wrist and smugly composing a poem about the misery of his love.

  ‘I should be obliged,’ said the man in the frock-coat, ‘if the well-born lady would kindly pay some attention to me. Surely she could look at the view afterwards.’ ‘Shall I throw him downstairs?’ asked my husband. ‘No,’ I said, ‘I find him enchantingly himself.’ It was interesting to see what kind of person would have organized my life had I been unfortunate enough, or indeed attractive enough, to become the inmate of a brothel. So we obeyed him when he sharply demanded that we should sit on the floor, and listened while he described what the service of a formal Turkish dinner was like, betraying his kind with every word, for he took it for granted that we should find all its habits grotesque, and that our point of view was the proper one. ‘And now,’ he said, rising and giving a mechanical leer at my ankles as I scrambled off the floor, ‘I shall show you the harem. There are Turkish girls, beautiful Turkish girls.’

  At a window in the pa
ssage he paused and pointed out an observation post in the roof of the servants’ house. ‘A eunuch used to sit there to see who came into the house,’ he said. ‘A eunuch,’ he repeated, with a sense of luxuriance highly inappropriate to the word. He then flung open a door so that we looked into a room and saw three girls who turned towards us, affected horror, and shielded their faces with one hand while with the other they groped frantically but inefficiently for some coloured handkerchiefs that were lying on a table beside them. Meanwhile the custodian had also affected horror and banged the door. ‘By God, it is the Pink ’Un and the Pelican,’ said my husband. Then the custodian knocked on the door with an air of exaggerated care, and after waiting for a summons he slowly led us in. ’Typical beautiful Turkish girls,’ he said. They were not. Instead of wearing the black veil that hides the whole face, which almost all Yugoslavian Moslems wear, they wore such handkerchiefs as Christian peasant women use to cover their hair, but knotted untidily at the back of the head so that their brows and eyes were bare. ’Now they are cultivating our beautiful Turkish crafts,’ he explained. They were not. Turkish embroidery and weaving are indeed delicious; but two of these wenches held in their hands handkerchiefs of the offensive sort that my husband had rejected in the market-place, and the third was sitting at a loom on which a carpet which ought never to have been begun had been a quarter finished.

  After we had contemplated them for some time, while they wriggled on their seats and tittered to express a reaction to my husband which both he and I, for our different reasons, thought quite unsuitable, the custodian said, ‘Now, we will leave the ladies by themselves,’ and, nodding lecherously at me, led my husband out of the room. I found this disconcerting but supposed he had taken my husband away to show him some beautiful Turkish ‘feelthy peectures,’ in which case they would be back soon enough. As soon as we were alone the girls took off their veils and showed that they were not ill-looking, though they were extremely spotty and had an inordinate number of gold teeth. They suggested that I should buy some of the offensive handkerchiefs, but I refused. I meant to ask my husband to give them some money when he came back.

  To pass the time I went over to the girl at the loom and stood beside her, looking down on her hands, as if I wanted to see how a carpet was made. But she did nothing, and suddenly I realized she was angry and embarrassed. She did not know how to weave a carpet any more than I do; and the girls with the handkerchiefs did not know how to sew, they were merely holding them with threaded needles stuck in them. They all began to laugh very loudly and exchange bitter remarks, and I reflected how sad it is that slight knowledge of a foreign tongue lets one in not at the front door but at the back. I have heard poems recited and sermons preached in the Serbian language which were said to be masterpieces by those who were in a position to judge, and I have been unable to understand one word. But I was able to grasp clearly most of what these young women were saying about me, my husband, my father, and my mother.

  The scene was horrible, because they looked not only truculent, but unhappy. They were ashamed because I had detected that they could not sew or weave, for the only women in the Balkans who cannot handle a needle or a loom are the poorest of the urban population, who are poorer than any peasant, and cannot get hold of cloth or thread because they have no sheep. The scene was pitiful in itself, and it was pitiful in its implications, if one thought of the fair-mannered and decent Moslem men and women in Trebinye and all over Yugoslavia, sad because they knew themselves dead and buried in their lifetime, coffined in the shell of a perished empire, whose ways these poor wretches were aping and defiling. I could not bear to wait there any longer, so I left them and walked through the house, calling for my husband. The search became disagreeable, for I opened the door of one or two rooms, and found them full of trunks and bundles lying on the bare floor, stuffed with objects but open and unfastened, as if someone here had meditated flight and then given up the plan on finding that the catastrophe which he had hoped to escape was universal.

  I called louder, and he answered me from a room by the main door. ‘What did he take you away for?’ I asked. ‘He didn’t take me away for anything but to give you the thrilling experience of seeing those wenches unveiled,’ said my husband. The custodian came forward and said, ‘I have been showing your husband these beautiful Turkish books; they have been in this house for many centuries.’ He thrust into my hand a battered copy of the Koran, which fell open at a page bearing a little round label printed with some words in the Cyrillic script. ‘Oh, Lord! Oh, Lord,’ I said. ‘This is the stamp of a Sarajevo second-hand book-shop.’ ‘Really, this is all too bloody silly,’ said my husband; ‘it is like charades played by idiot ghosts round their tombs in a cemetery.’ We went out into the courtyard, followed by the custodian, who seemed at last to realize that we were not pleased by his entertainment. ‘Do they speak Serbian or not?’ he asked our guide. ‘No, I don’t think so,’ he was answered. He looked puzzled and decided to assume that life as he knew it was continuing in its usual course. So he gave us the Turkish greeting by raising his hand to his forehead, exposing that national custom to our patronage or derision, he did not care which it was so long as we tipped him, and he said, ‘Now you have met a Turkish gentleman and seen how all Turkish gentlemen used to live.’ My husband gave him money, and we walked away very quickly. The guide said, ‘Were you pleased with the visit? It is interesting, is it not?’ My husband asked, ‘Who is that man?’ ‘He used to be the servant of the owner of the house,’ said the guide. ‘Who is the owner?’ my husband asked. ‘He is a Moslem baron,’ said the guide. ‘Once his family was very rich, now he is very poor. He furnished this house and put his servant in charge of it, and I think the money he gets from it is nearly all that he has. He lives far out in the country, where it is very cheap.’

  When we were driving out of the town I said, ‘I hate the corpses of empires, they stink as nothing else. They stink so badly that I cannot believe that even in life they were healthy.’ ‘I do not think you can convince mankind,’ said my husband, ‘that there is not a certain magnificence about a great empire in being.’ ‘Of course there is,’ I admitted, ‘but the hideousness outweighs the beauty. You are not, I hope, going to tell me that they impose law on lawless people. Empires live by the violation of law.’ Below us now lay the huge Austrian-built barracks, with the paddocks between them, and I remembered again what I had hated to speak of as we drove into Trebinye, when we were out to have an amusing morning. Here the Herzegovinians had found that one empire is very like another, that Austria was no better than Turkey. Between these barracks the Austrian Empire killed eighty people for causes that would have been recognized on no statute book framed by man since the beginning of time.

  When the news came in 1914 that the Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife had been assassinated by Serb patriots at Sarajevo, the Austrian authorities throughout Bosnia and Herzegovina arrested all the peasants whom they knew to be anti-Austrian in sentiment and imprisoned some and hanged the rest. There was no attempt at finding out whether they had been connected with the assassins, as, in fact, none of them were. Down there on the grass between the barracks the Austrians took as contribution from Trebinye seventy Serbs, including three women, such women as we saw in the market-place. Someone I met in Sarajevo on my first visit to Yugoslavia had had a relative killed there, and had kept photographs of the slaughter which the Yugoslavian Government had found among the Austrian police records. They showed the essential injustice of hanging: the hanged look grotesque, they are not allowed the dignity that belongs to the crucified, although they are enduring as harsh a destiny. The women looked particularly grotesque, with their full skirts; they looked like icons, as Constantine had said Slav women should look when dancing. Most of them wore an expression of astonishment. I remember one priest who was being led through a double line of gibbets to his own; he looked not horrified but simply surprised. That indeed was natural enough, for surprise must have been the predominant
emotion of most of the victims. They cannot have expected the crime, for though it was known to a large number of people these were to be found only in a few towns, far away from Trebinye; and when they heard of it they can never have dreamed that they would be connected with it.

  ‘The scene was a typical illustration of the hypocrisy of empires, which pretend to be strong and yet are so weak that they constantly have to defend themselves by destroying individuals of the most pitiable weakness,’ I said. ‘But an empire,’ my husband reminded me, ‘can perform certain actions which a single nation never can. The Turks might have stayed for ever in Europe if it had not been for the same combination of forces known as the Austrian Empire.’ ‘But there was no need for them to combine once the Turks were beaten,’ I objected; ‘in the nineteenth century the Turks were hopelessly beaten, and the Porte was falling to pieces under the world’s eye, yet the Austrians were flogging their peoples to keep them in subjection exactly as if there were a terrifying enemy at their gates.’ ‘Yes, but by that time there were the Russians,’ said my husband. ‘Yes, but Tsarist Russia was a rotten state that nobody need have feared,’ I said. ‘That, oddly enough, is something that no nation ever knows about another,’ said my husband; ‘it appears to be quite impossible for any nation to discover with any accuracy the state of preparedness for war in another nation. In the last war both Great Britain and Serbia were grossly deceived by their ideas of what support they were going to receive from Russia; and Germany was just as grossly deceived by her ally Austria, who turned out to be as weak as water.’ ‘But how absurd the behaviour of nations is!’ I exclaimed. ‘If I ran about compelling people to suffer endless inconveniences by joining with me in a defensive alliance against someone who might conceivably injure me, and never took proper steps to find out if my companions were strong enough to aid me or my enemies strong enough to injure me, I would be considered to be making a fool of myself.’ ‘But the rules that apply to individuals do not apply to nations,’ said my husband; ‘the situation is quite different.’ And indeed I suppose that I was being, in my female way, an idiot, an excessively private person, like the nurse in the clinic who could not understand my agitation about the assassination of King Alexander of Yugoslavia. But it is just to admit that my husband was indulging his male bent in regard to international affairs, and was being a lunatic.