Black Lamb and Grey Falcon

by Rebecca West

  Round the cross lay a heap of women in ritual trance, their eyes closed, their breasts rising and falling in the long rhythm of sleep. They lay head to heel, athwart and alongside, one with a shoulder on another’s knee, another with a foot in someone’s face, tangled and still like a knot of snakes under a stone in winter-time. It seemed to me their sleep was real. Their slow breathing, the lumpiness of their bodies, the anguished, concentrated sealing of their eyes by their lids made me myself feel drowsy. I yawned as I looked down on the face of one woman who had devoted herself to sleep, who had dedicated herself to sleep, who had dropped herself into the depths of sleep as a stone might be dropped down a well She had pillowed her head on her arm; and on the sleeve of her sheepskin jacket beside her roughened brow there was embroidered an arch and a tree, the rustic descendant of a delicate Persian design. We were among the shards of a civilization, the withered husks of a culture. How had this rite contracted! The Greeks had desired to know the future, to acquaint themselves with the majestic minds of the gods. These women’s demand on the future was limited to a period of nine months, and the aid they sought lay in a being so remote as to be characterless save for the murmured rumour of beneficence. Nevertheless the rite was splendid even in its ruin. The life that had filled these women was of the wrong sort and did not engender new life, therefore they had poured it forth, they had emptied themselves utterly, and they had lain themselves down in a holy place to be filled again with another sort of life, so strong that it could reproduce itself. This was an act of faith, very commendable in people who had so little reason to feel faith, who had received so little assurance that existence was worthy of continuance.

  As we left the chapel we saw an old peasant woman with a group of friends round her, who held out her hands to two younger women and kissed them on both cheeks. ‘Take a look at her,’ said our host, ‘it was she who saw in a dream that there was a coffin buried on this hillside, and that the body inside it was St. George.’ We tried to see her face through the darkness, but the night was too thick, and we could not learn whether she bore the stigmata of the visionary or of the simpleton. As we passed the apse of the chapel on our way downhill a man went by carrying an electric torch, and its beam showed us that one of the windows was barred with strands of wool, wound from side to side and attached to pieces of wood and metal that had been driven into the wall. ‘That they do too, the women who want children,’ said our host; ‘it must be wool they have spun themselves.’ On the common a large part of the crowd was gathered round some men and women sitting in a ditch who were having a quarrel, which was curiously pedantic in tone, although they had to shout to drown the gipsy bands and the venders. They put their cases in long deliberate speeches, which the others then criticized, often with a peevish joy in their own phrases familiar to those who have visited Oxford. Suddenly one of the women in the party took off her sheepskin jacket, threw it on the ground, flung herself down on it, and began to weep; and the scene lost its intensity and broke into sympathetic movements round her sobbing body.

  The automobile was not ready, and my host and I walked down our road in the darkness. I said. ‘How beautifully you speak English,’ and he answered, ‘Well, I was at Eton. Has Militsa not told you the ridiculous story? I went there by such a roundabout route.’ But Militsa had told me nothing save that his father had been a great general, distinguished both in the Balkan wars and in the Great War of 1914. As this man talked, I realized that I had heard of this general before, as one of the regicides who slew Alexander Obrenovitch and Draga. He himself, he said, had been sent at the age of ten from Serbia to study at the Imperial Military College in St. Petersburg, and had stayed there till he was sixteen. After the Revolution he had escaped over the Urals as one of a small detachment of troops, and in Siberia, after the death of the two officers originally in charge, he became their leader. He took them safely to Vladivostok, sailed back by the United States to Europe, and at Nice was re-united to his family, who had for long mourned him as dead. Then he was sent to London, and soon was summoned to the War Office. In the waiting-room he found amusement in playing noughts and crosses against himself to find out whether he was going to be sent to France or to Salonika. But the officer who saw him said, ‘We think it would be good if you went to Eton for a year.’ It was as if Leif Ericson, back from America, were sent to school. He was indignant, but came to love Eton; and as the war was over when he had finished his year, he went to Cambridge as an agricultural student, so that he could farm this tract of Macedonia which was given to his father in reward for his services. So now he was trying to repair the curse of sterility laid on the land by the Turk, and he was playing his part in politics, obstinately re-stating the Slav’s fundamental preference for democracy. As he talked it became apparent that his air was muted and indirect because he had read extraordinary things on the last page of history which had been turned over. He would not be surprised at anything he might read on the next, and he would not, indeed, be surprised if some page was not turned over but torn out of the book.

  On our return we were given an immense dish of bacon and eggs, a huge Swiss roll, sheep’s cheese, home-made bread and strong wine. Afterwards, while the others talked, I looked round at the pictures on the living-room wall. There was, according to the custom in old-fashioned Serb houses, the usual gallery of small prints, about six inches by four, hung in a group, that showed the Karageorgevitches and the Obrenovitches: a composite nationalist icon. My host came over to see what I was looking at, and lifted some off the wall so that I could look at them in the full lamplight. ‘Here is one of Karageorge that I do not like,’ he said, ‘it makes him look like Hitler. He cannot have looked like Hitler, for he was large and finely built and trained in manly exercises. But I dislike it that our people should have liked a picture of our leader which makes him look a fanatic, a dervish. I want all such things not to be, I want man to be reasonable.’

  Most of the other pictures on the wall were photographs of my host’s father, the great general, a small fine-boned man with the expression of pure and docile submission to rule so noticeable in any body of young Serbian soldiers, which in his later photographs had grown to a stare of mystical contemplation. There was one picture that showed him sitting in a pinewood with the murdered King Alexander, who for once looked easy and happy, his mouth made of two lips and not a compression making a signal to give strength to the distressed will. ‘My father was a most wonderful man,’ said my host, and stopped and sighed. The strongest of our beloveds, once they are dead, seem too fragile to be spoken of to strangers. ‘But this is the photograph I like best, it is my father with his mother, who was a peasant.’

  Byzantine art is hardly stylized at all. This woman, sitting with a white cloth about her head, in a rigid armament of stuffs, exercised the enormous authority and suffered the enormous grief of the Madonnas. She was the officer of earth, she had brought her children into its broad prison, and her face showed how well she knew what bitter bread they would eat in captivity. Her nose was prominent, a fleshless ridge of bone as it is in many frescoes, and her cheeks were hollow. Such women have to suckle their children too long, because the kings and magi of the world have never yet been ready to take them over at their weaning and give them a liberal diet from the fields, such women all their lives eat only when their husbands and sons have had enough; so they are spare. If she had found life so meanly disposed, why did she condemn her children to suffer it? She could not tell us; but on that point she is inflexible. And her son honours her for this indefensible insistence. He stands by her in reverence, but his slimness and strength and lightness of bearing, even the dedicated fervour in his eyes, so different from her solidity, show a revolt against her decree. He will escape from life, from the prison to which she was delivered him, not directly into death, but into a new kind of life, contrary to the instincts. So he will interfere with natural growth by subjecting himself to unnatural discipline and putting himself to impossible tasks, such as the u
psetting of kings and the overthrowal of empires. The fertility for which women were asking the gods everywhere in the dark night over Macedonia was not as simple a gift as they supposed. They were begging for the proper conduct of a period of nine months and a chance to ripen its fruits; they would obtain the bloodstained eternity of human history. My host put the photographs back on the wall and said, ‘I wonder what pictures will hang here when my two little children, who are now sleeping upstairs, are as old as we are.’ He came back and sat by the lamp, his head on his hand, and spoke of Mussolini in the West and Hitler in the North. It was clear that he knew that perhaps no other picture would hang on these walls, that these pictures in front of us might some day be brought to the ground with the slash of a bayonet and die under the hot tide of their own glass when the smoke rose from the burning walls. Alone of all these women in the night Militsa had asked for something ‘really terribly drastic politically,’ trying to protect them and their children with a brilliant thought, an Ariel to aid the Madonna.

  St. George’s Eve: II

  Because we were going to see a ceremony that took place on a stone at Ovche Polye, that is to say the Sheep’s Field, an upland plateau some miles away, we got up at half-past five and set off in a grey morning. A cold wind moved about the hillside, marbling the fields of young wheat; and along the lanes peasants on pack-horses, nodding with drowsiness, jogged back from the chapel of St. George’s tomb, their cloaks about them. We took to the good road that runs south beside the Vardar down a gorge to Veles, under steep grassy hillsides splashed here and there with fields of deep-blue flowers and thickets of wild roses. As we got nearer the town, we saw that there were people encamped on the brow of each hill, eating and drinking and confronting the morning. Men stood up and drank wine out of bottles, looking at the whiteness above the mountain-tops.

  ‘How beautiful are these rites,’ said Militsa, ‘that make people adore the common thing, that say to all, ’You shall have the fresh eye of the poet, you shall never take beauty for granted‘!’ ‘Yes,’ said Mehmed, ‘I am down here in an automobile, because I am a lazy fellow, but I am up there with them in spirit, for I know what the morning means. You know, I should be dead. I should have died twenty-three years ago in prison. For on June the twenty-eighth, 1914, I was walking in Vienna with my cousin, who was, like me, a Herzegovinian nationalist, and we came into the Ring, and we saw that everybody was very excited, and we heard something about Serbs and the heir to the throne being killed. We thought it was our Serbian Crown Prince who had been killed, so we were very sad, and we sat down in a café and had a drink. Then a news-boy came by and I bought a paper, and I saw that it was Franz Ferdinand who had been killed by a Serb, and I got up and said, ’Come, we must escape to Serbia, for now the end of all has come. Let us hurry for the train.‘ But he would not come with me, because he knew how awful the war was going to be and he did not want to admit that it was bound to happen. So I argued with him till I pulled out my watch and saw that I was going to miss the train, so I took to my heels and just caught it. My cousin was arrested that night, and so would I have been if I had stayed; and my cousin died in prison, and I do not think that the Austrians would have been very careful to keep me alive. When I think of that, I feel what those people up there are feeling. Ouf! The day, just as a day, is good.’

  As we drew towards Veles we passed a gipsy family trudging homewards, the young daughter in immense balloon trousers of bright pink satin; a primitive cart with some people dressed in black and white, profiline and impassive as Egyptians, from a far village, probably in the Bitolj district; a cart of more modern fashion driven by a plump and handsome young woman in Western clothes, who, on seeing Militsa, threw down her reins and shouted for us to stop. She was a Serbian who had been coached by Militsa in Latin for her science preliminary in Belgrade some years before, had later married a Macedonian politician, and now ran a chemist’s shop in a hill town above Veles.

  ‘Why did you not tell me you were coming?’ she reproached them. ‘I am going to the Slava of a friend who lives on the other side of Skoplje, but heaven knows I would have liked far better to stay at home and entertain you. For today I take a holiday, and indeed I have a right to it. I am always on my feet from morning till night before St. George’s Day.’ ‘Why is that?’ asked Militsa. ‘Oh, all these women who go to the monasteries to ask for children buy powder and rouge and lipstick to get themselves up for the outing,’ said the chemist, ‘they come in all day. But where are you going?’ ‘We are going to the stone in the Sheep’s Field,’ said Militsa. ‘Oh, you will like that, if you are not too late,’ said the chemist, ‘but I think you will be late if you do not hurry. It is a very interesting rite, and I think there is something in it, to judge from my own case. I went there two years ago, because it was nearly five years since Marko and I had been married and we had no children, and I did the easiest thing you can do there, which is to climb up on to the stone and throw a jar down on the ground to break it. Three times I threw down my jar, and it would not break, and still I have no children. I will not keep you any longer, for all the people will be gone unless you make haste.’ The road then mounted, we saw in the distance Veles lying like a mosaic, cracked across by the gorge of the Vardar, and we left the road for a hillside track that climbed a pass between two summits black with people saluting the morning, and took us into the Sheep’s Field. Here we entered quite a new kind of landscape. It is a wide sea of pastures and arable land, rising and falling in gentle waves within a haven of blue-grey mountains. Under a grey sky this place would be featureless, in a Macedonian summer it must be a hardly visible trough of heat. But this was spring, and the morning was pearly, there was a mild wind and soft sunshine, and all forms and colours in the scene were revealed in their essence. The earth on this upland plain is a delicate red, not so crimson as in the lowlands. Young wheat never looks so green as when it grows from such soil, and where it carries no crop it is transparent and nacreous, because of the powdered limestone which sprays it with the insubstantial conspicuousness of a comet’s tail. Of the surrounding hills one stood alone, magnificent in sharp austerity of cliff and pyramid; it is called ‘the witness of God.’ As the sun rose higher there was manifest in the valley a light that was like Greek light, a steady radiance which stood like a divine person between the earth and the sky, and was the most important content of the horizon, more important than anything on the ground.

  The road we followed became a casual assembly of ruts that persisted across the Field for something like ten miles. We saw, near and far, a few bleak white villages, but we touched none of them, save where we crossed a spindly railway by the side of two preposterously large buildings, one a gendarmerie, the other a combined station and post-office. The Sheep’s Field was the subject of an unfortunate experiment in land settlement which was among the early mistakes of the new Yugoslav state after the war. It planted some unhappy families from the North on this highly unsuitable site without the necessary equipment and governed them ill, being entirely inexperienced in the arts and sciences of colonization. On the other side of this railway line we began to come on groups of peasants, the women glorious even from far off because of the soft blaze of their multi-coloured aprons. All were walking slowly, and though they looked quite good-humoured it was obvious that they were very tired. Some carts passed us too, and in these people were lying fast asleep. On the sheepskin jacket of one sleeping woman I saw, as we bumped slowly by, the same Persian pattern I had noted on the sleeve of the woman in trance on the tomb of St George.

  It became apparent that we were approaching some focal point, which was not a village. The track was running along the crest of one of the land-waves, and though this was not very high it gave us an advantage over the countryside for several miles. We could see a number of people, perhaps twenty in all, who were travelling in every direction away from some spot on the next crest, a spot which was still not to be discovered by the eye. Some of these people were walking, some w
ere in carts, some of them rode on pack-horses; and there passed close by us a party of dark and slender young horsemen, galloping over the pastures on better mounts than I had yet seen in Macedonia, with a gay confidence and a legendary quality that showed them to be the elegants of some isolated and archaic community. ‘But they are all going away!’ exclaimed Militsa. Her husband called out to one of the horsemen, ‘Are we right for the stone, for the Cowherd’s Rock, and are we too late?’ The young man reined up his horse with a flourish and trotted towards us, making a courteous gesture with a hand gloved in purple. In a flute-like voice, sweeter than is usual among Europeans, he answered, ‘Yes, go on, you will see it in a minute or two; you cannot be mistaken, for it is the only stone on the Sheep’s Field, and there are still some people there.’

  Our car left the track and struggled up a stretch of pasture till it could go no further. When we got out we were so near the rock that we could see its colour. It was a flat-topped rock, uneven in shape, rising to something like six feet above the ground, and it was red-brown and gleaming, for it was entirely covered with the blood of the beasts that had been sacrificed on it during the night. A dozen men were sitting or lying at the foot of the rock, most of them wearing the fez; and one man was very carefully laying a little child on a rug not far away. The grass we walked on from the car was trodden and muddied and littered with paper, and as we came nearer the rock we had to pick our way among a number of bleeding cocks’ heads. The spectacle was extremely disgusting. The colour of spilt blood is not properly a colour, it is in itself discoloured, it is a visible display of putrescence. In every crevice of the red-brown rock there had been stuck wax candles, which now hung down in a limp fringe of greasy yellow tails, smeared with blood. Strands of wool, some of them dyed red or pink, had been wound round the rock and were now daubed with this grease and blood. A great many jars had been thrown down from the rock and lay in shards among the cocks’ heads on the trodden grass. Though there was nothing faecal to be seen, the effect was of an ill-kept earth closet.