by Rebecca West
I was really very glad to see her again. When Constantine and I had been in Skoplje the previous Easter he had taken me to a night club in the Moslem quarter. That form of entertainment which we think of as peculiarly modern Western and profligate was actually far more at home in the ancient and poverty-stricken Near East. In any sizable village in Macedonia I think one would find at least one café where a girl sang and there was music. In Skoplje, which has under seventy thousand inhabitants, there are many such, including a night club almost on a Trocadéro scale. In the little Moslem cabaret we visited there was nobody more opulent than a small shopkeeper, but the performers numbered a male gipsy who sang and played the gusla, a very beautiful Serbian singer, a still more beautiful gipsy girl who sang and danced, and this danseuse de ventre, who was called Astra. When Astra came round and rattled the plate at our table I found she was a Salonika Jewess, member of another colony of refugees from Ferdinand and Isabella who still speak Spanish, and I asked her to come and see me the next day at my hotel and give me a lesson in the danse de ventre.
She was with me earlier than I had expected, at ten o‘clock, wearing a curious coat-frock, of a pattern and inexpert make which at once suggested she had hardly any occasion to be fully dressed, and that she would have liked to be a housewife in a row of houses all exactly alike. The lesson in the danse de ventre was not a success. I picked up the movement wonderfully, she said; I had it perfectly, but I could not produce the right effect. ’Voyez-vous, Madame,’ she said, in the slow French she had picked up in a single term at a mission school, ’vous n‘avez pas de quoi.’ It is the only time in my life that I have been reproached with undue slenderness; but I suppose Astra herself weighed a hundred and sixty pounds, though she carried no loose flesh like a fat Western woman, but was solid and elastic. After the lesson had failed we sat and talked. She came of a family of musicians. She had a sister who had married an Englishman employed in Salonika, and now lived in Ealing and had two pretty little girls, like dolls they were so pretty, Milly and Lily. It was terrible they were so far away. She herself was a widow, her husband had been a Greek lorry driver who was killed in a road accident after three years of marriage. She had one son, a boy of ten. It was her ambition that he should go to a French school, in her experience there was nothing like French education ‘pour faire libre l’esprit.‘ In the meantime he was at a Yugoslavian school and doing well, because he was naturally a good and diligent little boy, but she wanted something better for him.
It was very disagreeable, her occupation. She did not state explicitly what it included, but we took it for granted. It was not so bad in Greece or Bulgaria or in the North of Yugoslavia, in all of which places she had often worked, but of late she had got jobs only in South Serbia, in night clubs where the clients were for the most part Turks. She clapped her hand to her brow and shook her head and said, ‘Vous ne savez pas, Madame, à quel point les Turcs sont idiots.’ Her complaint, when I investigated it, was just what it sounds. She was distressed because her Turkish visitors had no conversation. Her coat-frock fell back across her knee and showed snow-white cambric underclothing and flesh scrubbed clean as the cleanest cook’s kitchen table, and not more sensuous. She was all decency and good sense, and she was pronouncing sound judgment.
The judgment was appalling. The Turks in South Serbia are not like the Slav Moslems of Sarajevo, they are truly Turks. They are Turks who were settled there after the battle of Kossovo, who have remained what the Ataturk would not permit Turks to be any longer. They are what a people must become if it suspends all intellectual life and concentrates on the idea of conquest. It knows victory, but there is a limit to possible victories; what has been gained cannot be maintained, for that requires the use of the intellect, which has been removed. So there is decay, the long humiliation of decay. At one time the forces of Selim and Suleiman covered half a continent with the precise and ferocious ballet of perfect warfare, the sensuality of the sultans and the viziers searched for fresh refinements and made of their discoveries the starting points for further search, fountains played in courtyards and walled gardens where there had been till then austere barbarism. At the end an ageing cabaret dancer, the homely and decent vanishing point of voluptuousness, sits on a bed and says with dreadful justice: ‘Vous ne savez pas, Madame, à quel point les Turcs sont idiots.’
When Astra came to our table later she told me that she hoped to be in Sarajevo for some weeks longer, and that she was happier here than she had been in Skoplje. ‘Ici,’ she pronounced, ‘les gens sont beaucoup plus cultivés.’ As soon as she had gone I found at my shoulder the Swabian chauffeur from Dubrovnik, whom we had paid off that afternoon. ‘Why is that woman talking to you?’ he said. He always immensely disconcerted me by his interventions. I was always afraid that if I said to him, ‘What business is this of yours?’ he would answer, in the loathsome manner of a miracle play, ‘I am Reason’ or ’I am Conscience,‘ and that it would be true. So I stammered, ’I know her.‘ ’You cannot know such a person,‘ he said. ’Do you mean you have been in some café where she has performed?‘ ’Yes, yes,‘ I said, ’it was in Skoplje, and she is a very nice woman, she has a son of whom she is fond.‘ ’How do you know she has a son?‘ asked the chauffeur. ’She told me so,‘ I said. ’You do not have to believe everything that such a person tells you,‘ said the chauffeur. ’But I am sure it is true,‘ I exclaimed hotly, ’and I am very sorry for her.‘ The chauffeur gave me a glance too heavily veiled by respect to be respectful, and then looked at my husband, but sighed, as if to remind himself that he would find no help there. Suddenly he picked up my bag and said, ’I came to say that I had remembered I had forgotten to take that grease-spot out with petrol as I had promised you, so I will take it outside and do it now.‘ He then bowed, and left me. I thought, ’He is really too conscientious, this is very inconvenient for now I have no powder.‘ But of course he would not have thought it necessary for me to have any powder.
But my attention was immediately diverted. A very handsome young man had come up to our table in a state of extreme anger; he was even angrier than any of the angry young men in Dalmatia. He evidently knew Constantine and the judge and the banker, but he did not give them any formal greeting. Though his hair was bronze and his eyes crackled with blueness, and he might have been brother to the two Moslems we had seen talking politics in the park that afternoon, he cried out, ‘What about the accursed Turks?’ The judge and the banker made no reply, but Constantine said, ‘Well, it was not I who made them.’ The young man insisted, ‘But you serve our precious Government, don’t you?’ ‘Yes,’ said Constantine, ‘for the sake of my country, and perhaps a little for the sake of my soul, I have given up the deep peace of being in opposition.’ ‘Then perhaps you can explain why your Belgrade gangster politicians have devised this method of insulting us Bosnians,’ said the young man. ‘We are used,’ he said, stretching his arms wide and shouting, ‘to their iniquities. We have seen them insulting our brothers the Croats, we have seen them spitting in the faces of all those who love liberty. But usually there is some sense in what they do, they either put money in their pockets or they consolidate their tyranny. But this crazy burlesque can bring them no profit. It can be done for no purpose but to wound the pride of us Bosnians. Will you be polite enough to explain a little why your horde of thugs and thieves have formed this curious intention of paying this unprovoked insult to a people whose part it should be to insult rather than be insulted?’
The judge leaned over to me and whispered, ‘It is all right, Madame, they are just talking a little about politics.’ ‘But what has the Government done to insult Bosnia?’ I asked. ‘It has arranged,’ said the banker, ‘that the Turkish Prime Minister and Minister of War, who are in Belgrade discussing our military alliance with them, are to come here tomorrow to be received by the Moslem population.’ ‘Ah,’ said my husband, ‘that accounts for all the fezes being ironed. Well, do many people take the visit like this young man?’ ‘No,’ said t
he banker, ‘he is a very extreme young man.’ ‘I would not say so,’ said the judge sadly.
At that moment the young man smashed his fist down on the table and cried into Constantine’s face, ‘Judas Iscariot! Judas Iscariot!’ ‘No,’ said poor Constantine to his retreating back, ‘I am not Judas Iscariot. I have indeed never been quite sure which of the disciples I do resemble, but it is a very sweet little one, the most mignon of them all.’ He applied himself to the business of eating a line of little pieces of strongly seasoned meat that had been broiled on a skewer; and when he set it down wistfulness was wet in his round black eye. ‘All the same I do not like it, what that young man said. It was not agreeable. Dear God, I wish the young would be more agreeable to my generation, for we suffered very much in the war, and if it were not for us they would still be slaves under the Austrians.’
Cautiously the banker said, ‘Do you think it is really wise, this visit?’ Constantine answered wearily, ‘I think it is wise, for our Prime Minister, Mr Stoyadinovitch, does not do foolish things.’ ‘But why is it objected to at all?’ said my husband. ‘That even I understand a little,’ said Constantine, ‘for the Turks were our oppressors and we drove them out, so that we Christians should be free. And now the heads of the Turkish state are coming by the consent of our Christian state to see the Moslems who upheld the oppressors. I see that it must seem a little odd.’ ‘But how is it possible,’ said my husband, ‘that there should be so much feeling against the Turks when nobody who is not very old can possibly have had any personal experience of their oppressions?’
The three men looked at my husband as if he were talking great nonsense. ‘Well,’ said my husband, ‘were not the Turks booted out of here in 1878?’ ‘Ah, no, no!’ exclaimed the three men. ‘You do not understand,’ said Constantine; ‘the Turkish Empire went from here in 1878, but the Slav Moslems remained, and when Austria took control it was still their holiday. For they were the favourites of the Austrians, far above the Christians, far above the Serbs or the Croats.’ ‘But why was that?’ asked my husband. ‘It was because of the principle, Divide et impera,’ said the banker. It was odd to hear the phrase from the lips of one of its victims. ‘Look, there were fifty or sixty thousand people in the town,’ said the banker. ‘There were us, the Jews, who are of two kinds, the Sephardim, from Spain and Portugal, and the others, the Ashkenazi, who are from Central Europe and the East, and that is a division. Then there were the Christian Slavs, who are Croats and Serbs, and that is a division. But lest we should forget our differences, they raised up the Moslems, who were a third of the population, to be their allies against the Christians and the Jews.’
Their faces darkening with the particular sullenness of rebels, they spoke of their youth, shadowed by the double tyranny of Austria and the Moslems. To men of their position, for both came from wealthy and influential families, that tyranny had been considerably mitigated. It had fallen with a far heavier hand on the peasants and the inhabitants of the poorer towns, and there it meant a great deal of imprisonment and flogging, and occasional executions. But to these people there had been a constant nagging provocation and a sense of insult. The Moslems were given the finest schools and colleges, the best posts in the administration were reserved for them, they were invited to all official functions and treated as honoured guests, the railway trains were held up at their hours of prayer. The Turkish land system, which grossly favoured the Moslems at the extense of the Christians, was carefully preserved intact by his Catholic Majesty the Emperor Franz Josef. And it was a special source of bitterness that the Austrians had forced their way into Bosnia after the Slavs had driven out the Turks, on the pretext that they must establish a garrison force to protect the Christians there in case the Turks came back. That they should then humiliate the Christians at the hand of those Moslems who had stayed behind seemed to these men an inflaming piece of hypocrisy which could never be forgotten or forgiven.
They evidently felt this deeply and sincerely, although they themselves were Jewish. The situation was obviously one of great complexity. That was apparent when they likened the Turks to dogs and swine, and spoke the words with more than Western loathing, as the Turks would have done. ‘When I went to Berlin to study for my degree,’ said the banker, ‘I used to feel ashamed because the Germans took me as an equal, and here in my house I was treated as an inferior to men with fezes on their heads, to Orientals.’ In that statement too many strands were twisted. Later my husband asked, ‘But are the Moslems a sufficiently important and active group for it to matter whether they are encouraged or not?’ The lawyer and the banker answered together, ‘Oh, certainly,’ and Constantine explained, ‘Yes, they are very, very clever politicians, much cleverer than we are, for Islam taught them something, let us say it taught them not to run about letting off guns just because one of them had a birthday. Our Government has always to conciliate the Moslems. In the present Cabinet Mr Spaho is the Minister of Transport, and he is a Moslem from this town.’ ‘A most excellent man,’ agreed the judge and banker, beaming. All that they had spoken of for so long in such a steady flow of hatred was forgotten in a glow of local patriotism.
At last it was time to go. ‘No, your Mr Stoyadinovitch has not done well,’ said the banker finally. ‘It is not that we do not like the Moslems. Since the war all things have changed, and we are on excellent terms. But it is not nice when they are picked out by the Government and allowed to receive a ceremonial visit from the representative of the power that crushed us and ground us down into the mud.’ We rose, and Astra in her sequins and pink muslin bounced from the platform like a great sorbo-ball to say good-bye. I wanted to give her a present, but remembered that the chauffeur had taken my bag away to clean it, so I told her to come and see me at the hotel next day. As we went out the Swabian chauffeur suddenly reappeared, rising from a table which was concealed by the bushes and creepers which were set about to give the cabaret the appearance of an open-air beer-garden. He handed back my bag with a triumphant smile, and I perceived that he had hidden himself for this very reason, that I should not be able to find him and get my money if I felt a charitable impulse towards my unsuitable friend.
‘And please note,’ he said, his eyes passing uneasily from my husband to me and then back again, deeply distressed by our lack of sense, ‘it would be a good thing to stay indoors tomorrow morning, for the Turkish Prime Minister and War Minister are coming to visit the Moslems and there might be a disturbance. At any rate, it is not for you, there will be great crowds.’ He spoke with authority out of the mass of his ideal world, which was almost as solid as if it were real because it had been conceived by his solid mind: a world in which people with money were also reasonable people, who did not give alms to the unworthy and stayed indoors when it was not so safe outdoors. And his blindish-looking eyes begged us to remember that we were English and therefore to refrain from acting like these Slavs.
Sarajevo III
I woke only once from my sleep, and heard the muezzins crying out to the darkness from the hundred minarets of the city that there is but one God and Mohammed His prophet. It is a cry that holds an ultimate sadness, like the hooting of owls and the barking of foxes in night-time. The muezzins are making that plain statement of their cosmogony, and the owls and the foxes are obeying the simplest need for expression; yet their cries, which they intended to mean so little, prove more conclusively than any argument that life is an occasion which justifies the hugest expenditure of pity. I had nearly fallen asleep again when my husband said out of his dreams, ‘Strange, strange.’ ‘What is strange?’ I said. ‘That Jewish banker,’ he replied, ‘he said so proudly that when he was a student in Berlin he felt ashamed because he was treated there as an equal when here he was treated as inferior to the Moslems. I wonder what he feels about Germany now.’
In the morning we were not late, but Constantine was down before us, breakfasting in the café. One of the reasons why people of the Nordic type dislike Constantine is that he is able to
do things out of sheer vitality for which they require moral stimulus. His good red blood can fetch him out of bed without a moment of sombre resolution, his vigorous pulse keeps him going without resort to perseverance. The writings of the early Christian Fathers show that few things irritated them like a pagan who was in full possession of the virtues. But though he was vigorous this morning he was not gay. ‘Look at all the flags,’ he said, ‘it is a great day for Sarajevo. See how I show you all.’ But he spoke glumly.
I suspected that he was secretly of his friends’ mind about the day’s doings; and indeed it was not exhilarating to look out of the café windows and see a stream of passing people, and none of the men without fezes, all of the women veiled. I do not mind there being such men and women, but one sees them with a different eye when they are in a majority and could put at a disadvantage all those not of their kind. ‘I can understand that such a ceremony as this can revive all sorts of apprehensions,’ I said tartlessly. ‘We had better go,’ said Constantine, ignoring my remark. ‘The party from Belgrade are not coming to the railway station, they stop the railway train at a special halt in the middle of the boulevards, near the museum, and it is quite a way from here.’
For part of the way we took a cab, and then we had to get out and walk. Because Constantine had his Government pass and we were to be present at the reception at the station, we were allowed to go down the middle of the streets, which were entirely lined with veiled women and men wearing fezes. Only a few Christians were to be seen here and there. ‘There seem to be a great many Moslems,’ I said, after the first two or three hundred yards. The crowd was close-packed and unified by a common aspect. The faces of the men were flattened, almost plastered by an expression of dogged adherence to some standard; they were all turned upwards to one hope. The women were as expressive in their waiting, though their faces were hidden. A light rain was falling on their silk and cotton overalls, but they did not move, and only some of them put up umbrellas, though most of them were carrying them. It was as if they thought of themselves already as participants in a sacred rite. Some of the spectators were arranged in processional order and held small, amateurish, neatly inscribed banners, some of them in Turkish script; and a great many of them carried Yugoslavian flags, very tidily, not waving them but letting them droop. There were many children, all standing straight and good under the rain. I looked at my watch, and I saw that we had been walking between these crowds for ten minutes. There are thirty thousand Moslems in Sarajevo, and I think most of them were there. And they were rapt, hallucinated, intoxicated with an old loyalty, and doubtless ready to know the intoxication of an old hatred.
