Black Lamb and Grey Falcon

by Rebecca West

  When we were well on our way back to our hotel at Gruzh, past Dubrovnik and among the lovely terraced gardens of its suburb Larpad, my husband said, ‘When we were in that idiot house at Trebinye, which was like Hamlet without the Prince of Denmark, a brothel with the sexual intercourse left out, I could not help thinking of that poor chap we came on in that farm over there.’ We had a night or two before walked up to the top of Petka, a pine-covered hill at the edge of the sea, and after seeing the best of the sunset had strolled over the olive groves towards Dubrovnik and dinner. We had missed our path and when the dark fell we were wandering in an orchard beside a farm, obviously very old, and so strongly built that it had a fortress air. The place bore many touches of decay, and the steps between the terraces crumbled under our feet; we took one path and it led us to a lone sheep in a pen, the other brought us to a shut wooden door in a cavern-mouth. We felt our way back to the still mass of the farm, and we heard from an open window the rise and fall of two clear voices, speaking in a rhythm that suggested a sense of style, that recognized the need for restraint, and within that limit could practise the limitless freedom of wit. Both of us assumed that there were living in this house people who would certainly be cosmopolitan and polyglot, perhaps ruined nobles of Dubrovnik, or a family from Zagreb who had found a perfect holiday villa.

  We knocked confidently at the door, and prepared to ask the way in German. But the door was opened by a man wearing peasant costume and a fez, and behind, the light of an oil-lamp hung on a wall shone down on a room paved with flagstones, in which a few sacks and barrels lay about in a disorder that suggested not so much carelessness as depression. At the back of the room sat a woman who gracefully turned away her head and put up her hand to hide her face, with a gesture that we were later to see parodied and profaned by the girls in the Turkish house at Trebinye. The man was a tall darkness to us, and he remained quite still when my husband spoke to him in German and Italian. Then I asked him in my bad Serbian how we might get to Dubrovnik, and he told me slowly and courteously that we must go round the corner of the house and follow a landward wall. Then I said ‘Sbogom,’ which means ‘With God’ and is the Serbian good-bye. He echoed it with the least possible touch of irony, and I perceived I had spoken the word with the wrong accent, with a long lift on the first syllable instead of a short fall.

  We moved away in the darkness, turned the angle of the house, and found a cobbled path beside the wall. As we stood there a door in the house behind us suddenly opened, and there stood the tall man again. ‘Good!’ he said, and shut the door. It had been done ostensibly to see that we were on the right path, but really it had been done to startle us, as a child might have done it. It was as if this man who was in his body completely male, completely adult, a true Slav, but had the characteristic fire and chevaleresque manners of the Moslem, had not enough material to work on in this half-ruined farm, and had receded into childishness of a sort one can dimly remember. As one used to sit in the loft and look down on the people passing in the village street, and think, ‘They can’t see me, I’m sitting here and looking at them and they don’t know it; if I threw an apple at their feet they wouldn’t guess where it came from,’ so he, this tall man sitting in this fortress, had told himself, ‘They won’t know there is a door there, they will be startled when I open it,’ and the empty evening had passed a little quicker for the game.

  I said, looking down the slopes towards the sea. ‘It was odd a Moslem should be living there. But it is a place that has only recently been resettled. Until the Great War this district was largely left as it was after it had been devastated in the Napoleonic wars. Ah, what a disgusting story that is! See, all day long we have seen evidences of the crimes and follies of empires, and here is evidence of how murderous and imbecile a man can become when he is possessed by the imperial idea.’ ‘Yes,’ said my husband, ‘the end of Dubrovnik is one of the worst of stories.’

  When France and Russia started fighting after the peace of Pressburg in 1805 Dubrovnik found itself in a pincer between the two armies. The Republic had developed a genius for neutrality throughout the ages, but this was a situation which no negotiation could resolve. The Russians were in Montenegro, and the French were well south of Split. At this point Count Caboga proposed that the inhabitants of Dubrovnik should ask the Sultan to grant them Turkish nationality and to allow them to settle on a Greek island where they would carry on their traditions. The plan was abandoned, because Napoleon’s promises of handsome treatment induced them to open their gates. This meant their commercial ruin, for the time, at least, since after that ships from Dubrovnik were laid under an embargo in the ports of all countries which were at war with France. It also meant that the Russian and Montenegrin armies invaded their territory and sacked and burned all the summer palaces in the exquisite suburbs of Larpad and Gruzh, hammering down the wrought-iron gates and marble terraces, beating to earth the rose gardens and oleander groves and orchards, firing the houses themselves and the treasures their owners had accumulated in the last thousand years from the best of East and West. The Russians and Montenegrins acted with special fervour because they believed, owing to a time-lag in popular communication and ignorance of geography, that they were thus defending Christianity against the atheism of the French Revolution.

  When Napoleon was victorious the inhabitants of Dubrovnik expected that since they had been his allies they would be compensated for the disasters the alliance had brought on them. But he sent Marshal Marmont to read a decree to the Senate in the Rector’s palace, and its first article declared: ‘The Republic of Ragusa has ceased to exist.’ This action shows that Napoleon was not, as is sometimes pretended, morally superior to the dictators of today. It was an act of Judas. He had won the support of Dubrovnik by promising to recognize its independence. He had proclaimed when he founded the Illyrian provinces that the cause of Slav liberation was dear to him; he now annulled the only independent Slav community in Balkan territory. He defended his wars and aggressions on the ground that he desired to make Europe stable; but when he found a masterpiece of stability under his hand he threw it away and stamped it into the mud.

  There is no redeeming feature in this betrayal. Napoleon gave the Republic nothing in exchange for its independence. He abolished its constitution, which turned against him the nobles, from whom he should have drawn his administrators, as the Venetians had always done in the other Adriatic cities. Hence, unadvised, he committed blunder after blunder in Dalmatia. In a hasty effort at reform he repealed the law that a peasant could never own his land but held it as a hereditary tenant, and therefore could never sell it. In this poverty-stricken land this was a catastrophe, for thereafter a peasant’s land could be seized for debt. He also applied to the territory the Concordat he had bullied Pius VII into signing, which bribed the Church into becoming an agent of French imperialism, and caused a passionately devout population to feel that its faith was being tampered with for political purposes. This last decree was not made more popular because its execution was in the hands of a civil governor, one Dandolo, a Venetian who was not a member of the patrician family of that name, but the descendant of a Jew who had had a Dandolo as a sponsor at his baptism and had, as was the custom of the time, adopted his name. These errors, combined with the brutal indifference which discouraged Marmont’s efforts to develop the country, make it impossible to believe that Napoleon was a genius in 1808. Yet without doubt he was a genius till the turn of the century. It would seem that empire degrades those it uplifts as much as those it holds down in subjection.

  ROAD

  Because there was a wire from Constantine announcing that he would arrive at Sarajevo the next day, we had to leave Dubrovnik, although it was raining so extravagantly that we saw only little vignettes of the road. An Irish friend went with us part of the way, for we were able to drop him at a farmhouse fifteen miles or so along the coast, where he was lodging. Sometimes he made us jump from the car and peer at a marvel through the downward st
reams. So we saw the source of the Ombla, which is a real jaw-dropping wonder, a river-mouth without any river. It is one of the outlets of the grey-green waters we had seen running through Trebinye, which suddenly disappear into the earth near that town and reach here after twenty miles of uncharted adventure under the limestone. There is a cliff and a green tree, and between them a gush of water. It stops below a bridge and becomes instantly, without a minute’s preparation, a river as wide as the Thames at Kingston, which flows gloriously out to sea between a marge of palaces and churches standing among trees and flowers, in a scene sumptuously, incredibly, operatically romantic.

  Our sightseeing made us dripping wet, and we were glad to take shelter for a minute or two in our friend’s lodgings and warm ourselves at the fire and meet his very agreeable landlady. While we were there two of her friends dropped in, a man from a village high up on the hills, a woman from a nearer village a good deal lower down the slopes. They had called to pay their respects after the funeral of the landlady’s aunt, which had happened a few days before. Our Irish friend told us that the interment had seemed very strange to his eyes, because wood is so scarce and dear there that the old lady had had no coffin at all, and had been bundled up in the best table-cloth. But because stone is so cheap the family vault which received her was like a ducal mausoleum. The man from the upland village went away first, and as the landlady took him out to the door our Irish friend said to the woman from the foothills, ‘He seems very nice.’ ‘Do you think so?’ said the woman. Her nose seemed literally to turn up. ‘Well, don’t you?’ asked our friend. ‘We-e-e-ell,’ said the woman, ‘round about here we don’t care much for people from that village.’ ‘Why not?’ asked our friend. ‘We-e-e-ell, for one thing, you sometimes go up there and you smell cabbage soup, and you say, “That smells good,” and they say, “Oh, we’re just having cabbage soup.”’ A pause fell, and our friend inquired, ‘Then don’t they offer you any?’ ‘Oh, yes.’ ‘And isn’t it good?’ ‘It’s very good. But, you see, we grow cabbages down here and they can’t up there, and they never buy any from us, and we’re always missing ours. So, really, we don’t know what to think.’

  Mostar

  I was so wearied by the rushing rain that I slept, and woke again in a different country. Our road ran on a ledge between the bare mountains and one of these strange valleys that are wide lakes in winter and dry land by summer. This, in spite of the rain, was draining itself, and trees and hedges floated in a mirror patterned with their own reflections and the rich earth that was starting to thrust itself up through the thinning waters. We came past a great tobacco factory to Metkovitch, a river port like any other, with sea-going ships lying up by the quay, looking too big for their quarters. There we stopped in the hotel for some coffee, and for the first time recognized the fly-blown, dusty, waking dream atmosphere that lingers in Balkan districts where the Turk has been. In this hotel I found the most westward Turkish lavatory I have ever encountered: a hole in the floor with a depression for a foot on each side of it, and a tap that sends water flowing along a groove laid with some relevance to the business in hand. It is efficient enough in a cleanly kept household, but it is disconcerting in its proof that there is more than one way of doing absolutely anything.

  Later we travelled in a rough Scottish country, where people walked under crashing rain, unbowed by it. They wore raincoats of black fleeces or thickly woven grasses, a kind of thatch; and some had great hoods of stiffened white linen, that made a narrow alcove for the head and a broad alcove for the shoulders and hung nearly to the waist. These last looked like inquisitors robed for solemn mischief, but none of them were dour. The women and girls were full of laughter, and ran from the mud our wheels threw at them as if it were a game. Moslem graveyards began to preach their lesson of indifference to the dead. The stone stumps, carved with a turban if the commemorated corpse were male and left plain if it were female, stood crooked among the long grasses and the wild irises, which the rain was beating flat. Under a broken Roman arch crouched an old shepherd, shielding his turban, which, being yellow, showed that he had made the pilgrimage to Mecca.

  The rain lifted, we were following a broad upland valley and looked over pastures and a broad river at the elegance of a small Moslem town, with its lovely minarets. It was exquisitely planned, its towers refined by the influence of the minarets, its red-roofed houses lying among the plumy foliage of their walled gardens; it was in no way remarkable, there are thousands of Moslem towns like it. We left it unvisited, and went on past an aerodrome with its hangars, past the barracks and the tobacco factory that stand in the outskirts of any considerable Herzegovinian town, and were in Mostar, ‘Stari most,’ old bridge. Presently we were looking at that bridge, which is falsely said to have been built by the Emperor Trajan, but is of medieval Turkish workmanship. It is one of the most beautiful bridges in the world. A slender arch lies between two round towers, its parapet bent in a shallow angle in the centre.

  To look at it is good; to stand on it is as good. Over the grey-green river swoop hundreds of swallows, and on the banks mosques and white houses stand among glades of trees and bushes. The swallows and the glades know nothing of the mosques and houses. The river might be running through unvisited hills instead of a town of twenty thousand inhabitants. There was not an old tin, not a rag of paper to be seen. This was certainly not due to any scavenging service. In the Balkans people are more apt to sit down and look at disorder and discuss its essence than clear it away. It was more likely to be due to the Moslem’s love of nature, especially of running water, which would prevent him from desecrating the scene with litter in the first place. I marvelled, as I had done on my previous visit to Yugoslavia, at the contradictory attitudes of the Moslem to such matters.

  They build beautiful towns and villages. I know of no country, not even Italy or Spain, where each house in a group will be placed with such invariable taste and such pleasing results for those who look at it and out of it alike. The architectural formula of a Turkish house, with its reticent defensive lower story and its projecting upper story, full of windows, is simple and sensible; and I know nothing neater than its interior. Western housewifery is sluttish compared to that aseptic order. Yet Mostar, till the Austrians came, had no hotels except bug-ridden shacks, and it was hard to get the Moslems to abandon their habit of casually slaughtering animals in the streets. Even now the average Moslem shop is the antithesis of the Moslem house. It is a shabby little hole, often with a glassless front, which must be cold in winter and stifling in summer, and its goods are arranged in fantastic disorder. In a stationer’s shop the picture-postcards will have been left in the sun till they are faded, and the exercise-books will be foxed. In a textile shop the bolts of stuff will be stacked in untidy tottering heaps. The only exceptions are the bakeries, where the flat loaves and buns are arranged in charming geometric patterns, and the greengroceries, where there is manifest pleasure in the colour and shape of the vegetables. There are, indeed, evident in all Moslem life co-equal strains of extreme fastidiousness and extreme slovenliness, and it is impossible to predict where or why the one or the other is going to take control. A mosque is the most spick-and-span place of worship in the world; but any attempt to postulate a connexion in the Moslem mind between holiness and cleanliness will break down at the first sight of a mosque which for some reason, perhaps a shifting of the population, is no longer used. It will have been allowed to fall into a squalor that recalls the worst Western slums.

  The huge café of our hotel covered the whole ground floor, and had two billiard-tables in the centre. For dinner we ate the trout of the place, which is famous and, we thought, horrible, like fish crossed with slug. But we ate also a superb cheese soufflé. The meal was served with incredible delay, and between the courses we read the newspapers and looked about us. Moslems came in from the streets, exotic in fezes. They hung them up and went to their seats and played draughts and drank black coffee, no longer Moslems, merely men. Young officers m
oved rhythmically through the beams of white light that poured down upon the acid green of the billiard-tables, and the billiard balls gave out their sound of stoical shock. There was immanent the Balkan feeling of a shiftless yet just doom. It seemed possible that someone might come into the room, perhaps a man who would hang up his fez, and explain, in terms just comprehensible enough to make it certain they were not nonsensical, that all the people at the tables must stay there until the two officers who were playing billiards at that moment had played a million games, and that by the result their eternal fates would be decided; and that this would be accepted, and people would sit there quietly waiting and reading the newspapers.