by Rebecca West
It was a room that could be found anywhere in Europe. It had light distempered walls and a polished floor laid with simple rugs; it was hung with pictures in the modern style, bright with strong colours; the furniture was of good wood, squarely cut by living hands; there was a bowl of fruit on the sideboard; there were many books on the shelves and tables, by such writers as Shaw and Wells, Aldous Huxley and Ernest Hemingway, Thomas Mann and Romain Rolland and Gorky. This sort of room means the same sort of thing wherever it is, in London or Paris, Madrid or Vienna, Oslo or Florence. It implies a need that has been much blown upon since the last war ended and reaction got its chance; but it certifies that its owners possess honourable attributes. They have a passion for cleanliness, a strong sense of duty, a tenderness for little children that counter-balances the threat made to young life by the growth of the town, a distaste for violence, a courageous readiness to criticize authority if it is abusing its function. Such a room implies, of course, certain faults in its owners. They are apt to be doctrinaire, to believe that life is far simpler than it is, and that it can be immediately reduced to order by the application of certain liberal principles, which assume that man is really amenable to reason, even in matters relating to sex and race. They are also inclined to be sceptical about the past and credulous towards the present; they will believe any fool who tells them to fill themselves with some contorted form of cereal and despise the ancient word that recommends wine and flesh. These are, however, slight faults, easily corrected by experience, compared to the dirt and irresponsibility, violence and carelessness towards children, cowardice and slavishness, on which these people wage war.
Only the malign bigot hates such rooms. Even those who believe that there is more in life than such people grant must admit that these rooms are worthy temples to subsidiary gods. There are those who sourly remark that Bolshevism was made in such rooms. It is not true. The Russian exiles who were responsible for that sat on unmade beds in flats as untidy as Versailles or any medieval castle. They were the powerful people who never tidy up, who only happened for the moment to be out of power. But those who live in these swept and garnished rooms wish only to serve. In the hereafter they shall be saved when all the rest of us are damned.
It could be seen that the doctor husband was of salvation, like his wife: his handsome face spoke of kindliness, discipline, and hope. They gave us coffee, and we told them of the beauty of our journey, and they told us how homesick they had been when they had to leave Bosnia to take their training at the University in Belgrade, and how happy they had been to come back and practise here. They spoke of their work with a sternness which seemed strange in people who are in their own country, which we hear only from colonists and missionaries in Africa or Asia. But they were in the position of colonists and missionaries, because Austria left Bosnians in the position of Africans or Asiatics. ‘They did nothing for us,’ said the doctor, ‘nothing, in all the thirty-six years they were here. You can test it. Look for the buildings they left behind them. You will find a great many barracks, some tourist hotels, and a few—pitifully few—schools. No hospitals. No reservoirs. No houses for the people.’ They told us that when they had left Bosnia after the war to study in Serbia they had been astonished at the superior lot of the Serbian peasant. His country had been sacked and invaded, but nevertheless he was better fed and better clad than his Bosnian brother. ‘Liberation meant to us,’ said the dentist, ‘release from being robbed.’ I thought grimly of the many books written by English travellers between 1805 and 1914 which stoutly maintained that the Bosnians and Herzegovinians were so much better off, first under Turkey and then under Austria, than the free Serbs. It would be pleasant if this could be proved quite unconnected with the circumstance that the Turks and the Austrians knew how to entertain a Western visitor, while the free Serbs lacked the money and experience.
At length Constantine came in, and they greeted him affectionately. After we had drunk the ceremonial round of coffee that was brought in for him, he spoke to the dentist in Serb and she turned to us with a face suddenly flushed, the eyes and mouth happy and desperate, as in a memory of a love-affair that had been unfortunate but glorious. ‘Constantine says I am to tell you about my brother,’ she said. ‘But the story is so long, and it is so difficult for foreigners to realize. This will help you to understand some of it.’ She took from the book-case an album of photographs of the attentat that had been sent to her after the war by the Chief of Police at Sarajevo, and spread it out before us, and then walked up and down, her hands over her face, quivering in that lovely nervousness which, save when her sense of duty was organizing her, governed her being. Most of the photographs we had seen before; they showed the streets of Sarajevo, with the two poor stuffed and swollen victims being pushed on to their deaths, and the frail and maladroit assassins laying hold of the lightning for one minute, and then falling into the power of the people in the streets, who on this day looked so much more robust and autonomous than either the victims or the assassins that they might have belonged to a different race. But there were in addition some ghastly pictures of the terror that followed the assassination, when, long before any inquiry into the crime, hundreds of Bosnian peasants who had barely heard of it were put to death. There were some particularly ghastly pictures of men who had never known anything but injustice, misgovernment by the Turks and Austrians, poverty, and this undeserved death, and were now saying in grim pride with their wry necks and stretched bodies, ‘Nevertheless I am I.’ There were also pictures of some peasant women who hung from the gallows-tree rigid as saints on icons among their many skirts. There were several photographs of the fields round the barracks at various towns where these mass-executions took place, each showing the summer day thronged as if there were a garden-party going on, with the difference that every single face was marked with the extremity of agony or brutality. The interest and strangeness of the pictures were so great that I swung loose from what I was and for a moment looked about me, lost as one is sometimes when one wakes in a train or in an unfamiliar hotel; it might have been that we were all dead and that I was looking at some records of the death-struggle of our race.
Coming close to me, the dentist cried, in that voice which was delicious even when what she said was acutely painful, ‘But we have no record of the worst part, of what happened to him in prison. That should be known, for if such things happen it is not right that they should not be known. But it is dreadful to me to wonder what he did suffer, for you cannot think how delicate and fragile he was, my little brother. He was so—fine. If it had not been for the oppression never would he have done anything violent. So it was easy for them to kill him in prison.’ I asked, ‘Is it true, what they say, that he was bound to die, because before he went into prison he had tuberculosis?’ ‘No, no, no,’ she protested, ‘never did he have anything of the sort before they got hold of him, never!’ Then, correcting her impulsiveness by a lovely effort of self-discipline, she explained, ‘I have asked myself again and again, in the light of my medical training, if he suffered from anything of the sort, and quite honestly I do not think so, I cannot remember any definite symptoms at all. He was not robust, and he had a tendency to catarrh and bronchitis, but really there was nothing more than that. But it is the habit of our people to say when they see a boy or girl who is thin and weakly, “He looks consumptive,” and the Austrians took advantage of that to excuse themselves.’
It has always interested me to know what happens after the great moments in history to the women associated by natural ties to the actors. I would like to know what St. Monica had to do after her son, St Augustine, heard the child in the garden say, ‘Tolle lege, tolle lege,’ and was converted to Christianity; how she treated with the family of the little heiress whom St. Augustine was then obliged to jilt, how she dismissed the concubine with whom he had been passing the difficult time of his engagement, how she gave up the lease of the house in Milan. These are the things you are never told. I said to the dentist, ‘T
ell me what happened to you and your mother after the attentat.’ She said, ‘You cannot think how terrible it was for my poor mother. She knew nothing of politics, she had been married when she was a young girl, she had had many children, my father was a very stern man who would hardly let her speak and never spoke to her save to order her and scold her, she was quite dazed. Then suddenly this happened! Her eldest child tried to kill the Archduke and his wife—apart from anything else, she felt it was too grand for us, it could not happen. Then, that same evening, they came and arrested my father, and it was as if the end of the world had come, she had not known what it was to be without a man, without her father or her husband. I was no use to her. I was a girl, and indeed I was only fifteen. She was like a terrified animal. But then the next morning a neighbour climbed into her back garden and said, “Come, you must escape, a mob is coming to kill you,” and she and I had to take the five children that were younger than me and my brother, and get them down the back garden and out through another house into the street beyond where another friend sheltered us. As we got clear we heard the mob wrecking our home. Then she was very brave. But for long she simply could not understand what had happened. Nothing in her life had prepared her for it.
‘Later on, before she died, she saw that my brother had been very brave and had done something that history demanded, but at first it was only a disgrace and a disaster. You see, for long she was stunned by the terrible things that happened to us. We were taken with many other Bosnians to an internment camp in Hungary, and she and I had to earn money by working all day as laundresses, but even so my little brother and sisters were always hungry, and so were we, and many people died all round us. It was like Hell, and we grieved for my poor brother Nedyelyko, for we did not know what had happened to him, and even now, beyond the fact that he is dead, we do not know. Then at the end of the war it was still terrible, for one day they simply came to us and turned us loose, drove us out of the camp with no money and nowhere to go, and no clear idea of what had happened, and we were so weak and foolish and confused with suffering. That was a nightmare. Then, when we had found my father, we settled down again and all lived together in the same house. But it was not for long, she was a dying woman, and she lived only a year or two. I will show you a photo that we had taken of her on her deathbed only a few days before she died.’
The dentist rose to fetch it, and Constantine said to me, prepared to hate me if I was unsympathetic, ‘It is the habit of our people to take photographs of their beloveds not only at weddings and at christenings, but in death too, we do not reject them in their pain.’ It marked a real division between our kinds. I could not imagine any English person I knew having had this photograph taken, or preserving it if by chance it had been taken, or showing it to a stranger. The mother’s face was propped up against pillows, emaciated and twisted by her disease, which I imagine must have been cancer, like the petal of a flower that is about to die; her eyes reviewed her life and these circumstances that were bringing it to an end, and were amazed by them. The children’s faces, pressing in about her sharp shoulders and her shrunken bosom, mirrored on their health the image of their mother’s disease and were amazed by her amazement. But no part of their grief was being rejected by them, it was running through them in a powerful tide, it was adding to their power. Constantine need not have been alarmed, I felt this difference between his people and mine as a proof of our inferiority. To be afraid of sorrow is to be afraid of joy also; since we do not take photographs of our deathbeds, it is hardly worth the trouble to take photographs of our weddings and christenings. ‘Think of it,’ said the dentist, ‘there is such a sad and funny thing I remember about that photograph! We sent for the photographer and gathered round the bed; and afterwards we found that my father was hurt because we had not told him that the photographer was coming and he could not be included in the picture. It did not occur to him that to us he was the instrument of her martyrdom, that we would have thought it as odd to have him in a picture of her agony as it would be for the wife of a shepherd who has been fatally mauled by a wolf to include the animal in a last photograph of him. It showed how innocent he was in his severity, how it was all part of a role he had chosen and stuck to because he had not the sensitiveness to realize the consequences.’
‘This is what he was like,’ said the doctor, who had been turning over the portfolio out of which his wife had taken her mother’s picture. He handed us a photograph of a man in peasant costume, with a face as completely ‘made-up’ by an aggressive expression as Mussolini’s, standing in a defiant pose in front of some banners bearing Serbian inscriptions of a patriotic nature. ‘He was a very stern Bosnian patriotic man,’ said Constantine; ‘see, these are the banners of his secret nationalist society. Es musste mit ihm immer trotzen sein, immer trotzen.’ The dentist picked it up, looked at it for a minute as intently as if she had never seen it before, shook her head and put it down. ‘In the house, never a gentle word,’ she said. She buried her face in her hands, but began to laugh ‘I can think of things that seemed terrible to me at the time, but now they seem funny. There was the time when I was chosen to recite for my class at the school prize-giving.’ ‘Yes,’ said the doctor, ‘tell them that, it always makes me laugh!’ ‘Yes, please do,’ we said.
‘It was when we still lived at Trebinye,’ said the dentist, ‘and already my brother and I were very ambitious, we meant to be educated, so I worked very hard, and I was top of my class. Therefore I was chosen to say a recitation at the prize-giving which was a great affair, all the functionaries came to it and even some of the officers and their wives, to say nothing of all the townspeople. But, of course, I was miserable when I heard that I was chosen, because I knew that all the other little girls who were chosen to recite for their class would have pretty new dresses and light shoes and stockings for the occasion, and I knew I would have nothing. We had nothing, none of us, never. We had only to ask for something and Father immediately felt that made it a duty to refuse it, lest we become spoilt and self-indulgent. It was no good asking our mother to speak for us. That would make it doubly certain we should not get what we wanted, he would then want to prove that he was master in his own house.
‘But I began to see he was proud I had been chosen. I found out that he was taking about with him the local newspaper in which the choice of pupils was announced and showing it to his friends. So very, very timidly I approached him. I was not honest. Usually I was honest with him, however much he beat me. But this time—ah, I wanted so much a little soft, fine dress! So I went and I told him how I wanted a new dress and new shoes, and I thought I should have them, because the Austrians and Hungarians would be there and they would sneer at me as a Serb, if I was in my old clothes. And that impressed him. “Yes,” he said, “I see it, you must have a new dress, and new shoes, and new stockings. It must be done.” I shall never forget how my heart leaped up when I heard him say this.
‘But I had not reckoned it was still my father who said I could have these things, and therefore it followed that they could not possibly be the things which I wanted and which would give me pleasure. The poor dear man began to think of these shoes and these stockings and this dress as expressions of his Weltanschauung. He became very smiling and mysterious, he treated me as if he were about to confer some benefit on me which I was not old enough to understand as yet, but which would astonish me when I came to full knowledge of it. Then at last a day came, just before the prize-giving, when he took me out to see what he had been preparing for me. We went to a bootmaker who had already made for me a pair of boots, immensely large for me so that I should not grow out of them, made so strongly that if I had walked through a flood I should have come out with dry feet, cut out of leather so tough and thick that it might have been from an elephant or a rhinoceros. For weeks he had been inquiring which cobbler in Trebinye made the stoutest footwear, used the most invincible leather. I put them on, saying in my heart, “This cannot be true.”
‘Then he
took me to a tailor who tried on me a dress that was as incredibly horrible as my boots. For weeks the poor man had been going about the drapers’ shops, in search of material that was strongest, that would never wear out. He had found out something with which one could build a battleship, I cannot tell you what it was like. It hardly went into folds. This had been made into a dress for me by a tailor, who had been chosen because he was an old man who made no concessions to modern taste and cut clothes as the people in the hill villages wore them, more like the cloths you put on horses and cattle. By the instructions of my father he had made my dress far too big for me, so that I should not grow out of it for years, and it even had deep hems, that felt like planks, so that the skirt would be long enough for me when I was a grown woman. It had even great insets in the bodice, for the days when my bosom should develop, that stuck out like capes.
‘I cannot tell you what I felt like as I had this horror tried on me. But it was only a day or two before the prize-giving; and if there had been weeks and months before it happened, I still could have done nothing. For never had I seen my father in such a good humour, and this terrified me. I felt that interference in this state would lead to something so horrible that it could not be faced. My brother was very kind to me about it and I wept in his arms, but my mother was no use to me, because she was so dazed by my father, she said nothing but “Hush, hush, you must not anger him!” So on the day of the prize-giving I crept into my school weeping. All my teachers and my school-fellows were very kind to me; they understood at once, for my father was well known for his severity. But the time came for me to speak my recitation, and then I had to stump on the platform in these horrible new boots that would have been suitable for a peasant working in one of our flooded valleys. I was scarlet, and with reason, for I must have been the most ridiculous sight in the world, less like a little girl than a fortress. But I stood there, and it seemed to me that this was just another battle in the endless war that I would have to carry on with my father all my life if I wanted to do anything, so I began my recitation as well as I could.
