Black Lamb and Grey Falcon

by Rebecca West

  It was a painful thought, implying that the world we have embarked on is a leaky ship and may not keep afloat. I did not want to get out of the automobile when Constantine said, ‘See, now we must walk and I will show you all things of our tragedy.’ But when I stood on the road I felt nothing. I saw before me simply green downs like those that lie along some Wiltshire valleys, and a high silver sky which took all foreignness from the scene, since it made the snow ranges on the horizon look like shining bars of cloud; some winding roads and lanes, and some scattered buildings. Nothing that had happened here was present to me. At Grachanitsa I had seen medieval Serbia in its living guise as the visitor may see the Tudors at Hampton Court or Frederick the Great at Potsdam; but the armies that had waited here on the eve of St Vitus’s Day in 1389 were not even ghosts to me, they were words out of a book. Nothing could be more agreeable than to be so exempt. I remembered how I had dreaded the first anniversary of the most disagreeable event that had ever befallen me, and how I had awakened on the day and felt nothing, absolutely nothing. I walked away from the automobile towards a tuft of pinkish-purple flowers that grew about a hundred yards away, enjoying the cool, freely flowing air of the uplands, and I did not turn round when Constantine called to me. But Dragutin ran after me, and said slowly, in order that I might understand, ‘Like a child, like a child.’ He put his hand flat two or three feet above the ground, and with the other pointed to Constantine. ‘Like a child he is, but he has a bad wife. Come to the hill, it is very interesting. Do not mind him.’

  ‘No, no, it is not that,’ I said, but I could not explain, so I followed him across the grass, and we joined my husband and Constantine, who were on a path running up a little hill, on the top of which was a whitewashed hexagonal building, surmounted by a grey-blue metallic dome. Around it the turf was pierced here and there with the white toppling poles of Moslem tombs, and there were some wild rose bushes and a fruit tree, hung with brown wreaths of dead blossom. Out of the folds of what had seemed an empty landscape there emerged suddenly a number of people who converged on us just as we reached the building. There was a veiled woman, her black cotton garments made a strange ghostly colour by the heavy summer dust, gliding along with a baby in her arms and two little children at her heels, exhibiting a dark and slippery and un-individualized fecundity like caviare. There was a lean and wildish-looking man with a shepherd’s staff, his cheeks so hollow that one might have thought he usually wore false teeth and had taken them out, were it not that his belly was as concave. There was a Christian girl of about fourteen who had better been veiled, for her face showed a fixed and empty stare of hunger, of appetite so completely starved that it was ignorant of its own object. She wore a skirt that was a straight piece of cloth gathered along one selvedge to form a waistband so that it stood out round her knees like a coarse version of the ballerina’s toutou. There were several boys, all wearing the fez, all bandy. The veiled woman slipped with her children into the shabby porch of the octagonal building, and Constantine explained sententiously, ‘This is a holy place for them,’ and indeed she had the air of being on some errand which at once satisfied the motor impulses and the sense of duty, like shopping or calling, but more so, which Moslem women bring to their religious exercise. The man with the shepherd’s staff stared at Dragutin with the admiration due to a very handsome man. The children held out to us bunches of flowers with an almost aristocratic lack of insistence, and Constantine said, ‘These are the famous poppies of Kossovo that grow nowhere else, they are supposed to have sprung from the blood of the slaughtered Serbs. Later the whole plain is red with them, but as you see it is too early for them, these are only buds.’ They were a very beautiful kind of wild peony, with golden centres and pink stamens. My husband bought some from the girl and Dragutin bought some from the boys; he was behaving at Kossovo as he behaved at springs and in churches, with a mystical and soldierly excitement, like one who salutes the sacred spectre of valour.

  Constantine began to tell us how the troops had been marshalled for the battle. Here Prince Lazar had had his tent, there the Turks had waited. ‘But no!’interrupted Dragutin. He was shouting slowly and without rage, as he did when moved by patriotic fervour. ‘How could they wait in the North-West! Not here, but there were they, the dogs! And there, over there, Vuk Brankovitch should have come in with his troops but turned away and left the battle-field!’ ‘Vuk Brankovitch,‘ said Constantine, ’is the Judas of our story. He was the specially beloved brother-in-law of the Prince Lazar, and he is supposed to have sold himself to the Turks and to have led his army off the battle-field at a crucial moment, thus exposing Lazar’s flank. But now historians do not think there was any treachery, though it seems likely that one of the Serbian princes did not receive a message in time telling him to go forward to Lazar’s support, and so failed him. But we all know that it was not treachery that lost us Kossovo, it is that we were all divided among ourselves.‘ ’Yes,‘ said Dragutin, ’it is so in our songs, that we were betrayed by Brankovitch, but we know that it was not so, that we lost the battle because we were not of one mind.‘ ’How do you mean you know it?‘ I asked. ’Do you mean you learned it at school?‘ ’No,‘ he said, ’we know it before we go to school. It is something our people remember.‘ I was again checked by the curious honesty of the Slav mind, by its refusal to dress up its inconsistencies and make them superficially acceptable to the rationalist censor. They had evolved a myth which accounted for their defeat by treachery within their own ranks and thereby took the sting out of it, just as the Germans did after the war; but they did not suppress the critical part of their mind when it pointed out to them that this myth was merely a myth. With an inconsistency that was not dangerous because it was admitted, they let their myth and the criticism of it coexist in their minds.

  Constantine and Dragutin waved their arms at the downland, and still I saw nothing. I turned aside and looked at the white building behind us and I said, ‘What is this place? Can we go in?’ ‘Certainly, certainly,’ said Constantine, ‘it is very interesting; this is the mausoleum of Gazi Mestan, a Turkish standard-bearer who was killed in the battle and was buried where he lay.’ ‘Yes,’ shouted Dragutin, ‘many of us fell at Kossovo, but, praise be to God, so did many of them.’ As we went into the wooden porch, the veiled woman and her children padded past us. We found ourselves in a room which, though light and clean, had that look of having been long disused by any normal forces which one expects to be completed by stuffed animals; but there was nothing there except two coffins of the Moslem type, with a gabled top, higher at the head than the heels. They were covered with worn green baize, and hung with cheap pieces of stuff, some clumsily embroidered, others printed. On the walls were a few framed scraps of Turkish calligraphy, a copy of a Sultan’s seal, and some picture postcards. A man came towards us, smiling sweetly and indecisively. He wore a faded fez and neat but threadbare Western clothes, and his whole appearance made a wistful allusion to a state better than his own; I have seen his like in England, walking through November rain in a summer suit and a straw hat, still mildly cheerful. He told us of the fame and gallantry of Gazi Mestan in a set speech, unnaturally uttered from some brain-cell petrified by memory. ‘And you? Who are you?’ said Constantine. ‘I am the descendant of Gazi Mestan’s servant,’ the man answered, ‘the descendant in the sixteenth generation. My forefather was by him as he fell, he closed his dead master’s eyes for him, he preserved his body and guarded it after it had been placed in this tomb. So have we all guarded him.’

  A weak-eyed boy ran into the room and took his stand beside the man, who laid an arm about his shoulder. ‘My brother,’ he said tenderly, and laid his face against the boy’s fine lank hair. They looked incredibly fragile. If one had tapped them with a pebble on the paperthin temples they would have dropped to the ground, still faintly smiling; the bare ankle-bones showing between the boy’s brown shoes and frayed trouser-hems were so prominent that the skin stretched across them was bright red. ‘What do
these people live on?’ I asked. ‘Doubtless they receive gifts, this is a kind of shrine,’ said Constantine, ‘and there would probably be an allowance from the Vakuf, the Moslem religious endowment fund. In any case they can do nothing else, this is the family’s destiny and it is a distinction.’ ‘But they are not like human beings at all,’ I said, ‘they are to human beings what a ship inside a glass bottle is to a real boat.’ I saw before me what an empire which spreads beyond its legitimate boundaries must do to its subjects. It cannot spread its own life over the conquered areas, for life cannot travel too far from its source, and it blights the life that is native to those parts. Therefore it imprisons all its subjects in a stale conservatism, in a seedy gentility that celebrates past achievements over and over again. It could be seen what these people had been. With better bones, with more flesh, with unatrophied wills, they would have been Turks as they were in the great days of the past, or as they are in the Ataturk’s Turkey, robust and gracious. But there they were sweet-sour phantoms, human wine gone to vinegar.

  Outside we found Dragutin lying on the ground, the girl and the boys about him and a field mouse curled in his hand. ‘You do not want to go inside?’ asked Constantine. ‘No,’ he said. ‘That a Turk was alive and is dead is good news. But this one has been dead so long that the news is a bit stale. Hola!’ he roared, and opened his hand and the field mouse made a brown streak for safety. ‘Now I am to take you to the tomb of the Sultan Murad,’ he said, standing up, ‘but thank God we stop at a Christian monument first.’ It was some miles down the main road, a very plain cross set back in a fenced garden where irises and lupins and the first roses grew with an astounding profusion. It could be understood that Kossovo had really been fertile, that it had once supported many fat villages. The two soldiers who were guarding the monument came down to the gate to meet us, two boys in their earliest twenties, short and sturdy and luminous with health, their skins rose under bronze, their black eyes shining deep and their black hair shining shallow.

  When I admired the garden one of them fell back and picked some flowers for me from a bed, not in the main avenue, lest the general effect should be spoiled, and Constantine said to the other one, ‘You are a Serb from the North, aren’t you?’ He answered smiling, ‘Yes, I am from the North, I am from the same town as you, I am from Shabats.’ ‘What!’ exclaimed Constantine, looking like a baby that has seen its bottle. ‘Do you know me?’ ‘Which of us in Shabats does not know the great poet who sprang from our town?’ replied the soldier; and I liked the people of Shabats, for I could see from his face that they knew the best as well as the worst of Constantine, and revered him as well as mocked him. ‘But tell me,’ interrupted Dragutin, ‘is that other one not a Croat?’ ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘he is from Karlovats.’ ‘Is it not hard to be here all day with a Croat?’ ‘No, indeed,’ said the soldier, ‘it is most surprising how pleasant he is; he is my true friend, and he is a good soldier; I never would have believed it.’ ‘You don’t say so!’ said Dragutin. ‘I tell you,’ said Constantine, ‘there are many good Croats, and we Serbs must make friends with them.’ ‘So,’ said Dragutin.

  We were silent for a time at the foot of the memorial which bore the appalling words, ‘To the heroes who fell for the honest cross, freedom, and the right of the people, 1389-1912, erected by the people of Prishtina.’ It made the head ache with its attempt to commemorate people who were utterly outside the scope of memory; slaves born of slaves, who made their gesture of revolt and died, isolated by their slavery from the weakest, furthest light and warmth of fame. When we turned our faces to the garden again, we found the other soldier standing beside us, holding out a bouquet that was like a bouquet on a fire-screen made for a court, that had form and a tune of colour. All Slavs, except those who become florists, have a natural genius for arranging flowers. After I had thanked him, Dragutin said, ‘Hey, Croat! You’re a brave fellow. How do you like us Serbs?’ ‘Very well, very well!’ he answered smiling. ‘Everybody is kind to me here, and I had thought you were my enemies.’ ‘Eyah!’ said Dragutin, twisting the lobe of the boy’s ear, ‘We’ll kill you all some day.’ The boy wriggled and laughed, and they all talked till we turned to go, and Dragutin gave the boy a great smack on the back, saying, ‘Well, you two, if you come to Skoplje, you’ll find me at the Ban’s garage, and maybe there’ll be some paprikasch for you. You’re what Yugoslavia needs.’ On this little ledge they met and clung together, on this cross-wide space from which the dark grasses of Kossovo had been driven back, they who had been born under different flags and had to beat down a wall of lies before they could smile at each other.

  If the battle of Kossovo was invisible to me it was because it had happened too completely. It was because the field of Kossovo had wholly swallowed up the men who had awaited destiny in their embroidered tents, because it had become sodden with their blood and now was a bog, and when things fell on it they were for ever lost. Constantine said, ‘Now I am taking you to the mausoleum of the Sultan Murad, who was commanding the Turkish forces and was killed the night before the battle by a Serb called Milosh Obilitch, who had been suspected of treachery by our people and wished to clear his name.’ The Sultan Murad, or Amurath, was the son of Orkhan the Victorious and a Greek girl raped from her bridegroom’s arms, whom the Turks called Nilufer, the Lotus Flower, and his records suggest an immoral attempt to create the kind of character admired by morality, for an astounding cruelty seems to have been introduced as an alloy to harden the soft gold of his voluptuous delight in all exercises of the mind and body. ‘His mausoleum,’ said Constantine, ‘was built where he fell.’

  A track led from the road across the opaque and lustreless pastureland characteristic of this place, to what looked like a deserted farmhouse. As we came to the gate in the farm paddock it was as it had been at the tomb of Gazi Mestan: the bare countryside exhaled people. They came to meet us at the gate, they whipped round the corners of the paddock, men in Western clothes who had the look of Leicester Square or Place Pigalle touts, not that they knew much or perhaps anything of infamy. The resemblance lay in their terrible desire to sell what they had, which since they had nothing caused them to make piteous claims to the possession of special knowledge, the power to perform unusual services. Their bare feet, treading softly on rag-bound leather sandals, pattered before us, beside us, behind us, as we followed a stone path across a grassy quadrangle. A house looked down on us, its broken windows stuffed with newspaper, its wall eczematous where the plaster lacked.

  Through another gateway we came on a poor and dusty garden where the mausoleum stood. A fountain splashed from a wall, and there was nothing else pleasant there. The door of the mausoleum was peculiarly hideous; it was of coarse wood, painted chocolate-colour, and panes of cheap glass, all the wrong shape. Public libraries and halls in small provincial towns in England sometimes have such doors. Beyond was a rough lawn, cropped byaafew miserable sheep, which was edged with some flowers and set with two or three Moslem graves which were of the handsome sort, having a slab as well as a column at the top and bottom, but were riven across by time and neglect. On the grass sat some veiled women picnicking among their pretty, sore-eyed children, with the infinitely touching sociability of Moslem women, which reticently reveals a brave and frustrated appetite for pleasure, doling itself out crumbs and making them do. On a fence made of small sticks, defending a young tree from the sheep, hung a line of many-coloured rags, just recognizably garments that had been washed very clean. At least one of these women lived in a cottage so far from all other water that it was worth her while to bring her washing to the fountain; yet on these bare downs it could be seen there was no cottage for a mile or two.

  We drew near to the hideous door of the mausoleum, and it was opened by an old man whom we knew to be an imam, a priest, only from the twist of white cloth about his fez; not in his manner was there any sign of sacred authority. He greeted us blearily and without pride, and we followed him, our touts padding behind us, into the pr
esence of the Sultan Murad. The walls of his last lodging were distempered in drab and ornamented with abstract designs in chocolate, grey, and bottle-green, such as Western plumbers and decorators loved to create in the latter half of the last century, and its windows were curtained with the intensely vulgar dark green printed velvet used in wagons-lits. In a sloping gabled coffin such as sheltered Gazi Mestan, but covered with velvet and votive offerings of stuffs by some halfpence costlier, lay Murad. His turban hung from a wooden pole at the head of the coffin, a dusty wisp. The priest turned blindish eyes on Constantine and told him something; after the telling his fishlike mouth forgot to close. ‘This old one is relating that only the Sultan’s entrails are here,’ said Constantine, ‘the rest of him was taken away to Broussa in Turkey, but I do not know when.’ Even the most rational person might have expected that the priest would have shown some slight regret that this shrine held the entrails of the Sultan and not his heart or his head. But in the pale luminousness of his eyes and the void of his open mouth there was seated the most perfect indifference.