by Rebecca West
We both hung about him and made penitent and sympathetic murmurs, and suddenly we were friends as we had been at the beginning. He was to us as our child and a great man, and we were to him as his father and mother and his pupils, and there was no barrier between us and our words. But soon his face grew vacant, as if he were listening to a distant voice, and then hardened. He said, ‘Yes, I feel very ill, but you need not bother, I will come downstairs, and though I will not be able to eat one mouthful, I will sit with you when we have dinner, and afterwards I will take you a walk round the town.’ ‘You will do nothing of the sort,’ said my husband, ‘you will go to bed and have some dinner sent up to you.’ ‘No,’ said Constantine. ‘I know your habits very well now. The walk round the town after dinner, you would feel terribly if you missed it. And I know what you English are.’ My husband said suddenly a short word which has so rarely been spoken in my presence that I wonder how it is I understand it, and taking Constantine’s arm in his led him from the room. When he came back, he said, ‘Forgive me, my dear. But I thought this situation could only be handled by the natural man. And do not worry. He was quite happy to be sent to bed.’
We dined in the restaurant of the principal hotel and there we ate excellent trout, but not until after an immense delay. The apartment was so large that as soon as a waiter took an order he broke into a trot towards the kitchen; and I have no doubt that the kitchen was also vast, and that the cooks had to stop their work every now and then to re-build a wall or re-lay a floor. We passed the time in spelling out the news in the Belgrade newspapers which were constantly brought in by little dark boys of distinguished appearance in very ragged clothes, and in talking to a young man who came up to us and asked in German if he could be of any help to us, since we were strangers. He told us he was a Croat lawyer, come to be clerk of the local law court, and he gave a very pleasant impression of youthful simplicity and courtesy, of a real knightliness. He left us when our trout was brought, and as soon as we had finished it we had another visitor. A dark full-bodied man, more smartly dressed than anybody else in the restaurant, had been watching us from a near-by table for some time and now came up to us. He said to my husband, ‘Good evening. It is interesting to meet a German so far from home.’ ‘I am not a German,’ said my husband, ‘I am English.’
The dark man looked at his reply as if it might be picked up, carried away, dropped down, buried, or accorded any treatment except belief. ‘Yet you speak German like a German,’ he said. ‘That is because I spent some years as a boy in Hamburg,’ answered my husband, ‘and I have spent much of my life doing business with Germans.’ The dark man said nothing to distract us from his disbelief, and my husband said testily, ‘And you? You are a German; what are you doing here?’ ‘Oh, I am not a German!’ exclaimed the dark man with an air of surprise. ‘Yet you speak like a German,’ said my husband. ‘That is because I am a Dane,’ said the dark man. After an instant he appeared to become intensely irritated with my husband’s face, which is long and intelligent, and he left us with a curt farewell. ‘He does not believe me when I say I am English,’ commented my husband, ‘but he is infuriated when I do not believe him when he says, “I am a Dane.” He feels I am not playing the game. That means that he is a German.’ ‘Could he possibly be a Dane?’ ‘Not possibly,’ said my husband; ‘he does not even speak with a North German accent. That man has spoken Berliner German from his infancy.’
At that point Dragutin, who had been sitting on the other side of the room, came up to say good-night to us. We gathered that he was telling us that Petch was very depressing after Trepcha, and that he had never seen anything more wonderful than the house and works he had seen at Goru. After he had gone it struck me that Goru is not the name of a place but a word meaning ‘up in the mountain.’ He had, in fact, been to the mine-head. ‘This is too frightful!’ I said. ‘Do you remember when I thought I saw Dragutin at that canteen just before we had lunch in the mess? Well, I did! He must have got a friend to take him up there!’ ‘What is so frightful about that?’ asked my husband. ‘It means,’ I answered, ‘that he went off and left Constantine, probably without asking permission, so that instead of Constantine going off for a solitary drive and feeling superior to us and all the people at the mines, because he was a poet and acting poetically, he had to sit in the hotel feeling left out and despised.’ ‘My God, I believe you’re right!’ exclaimed my husband. We gazed at each other in real horror. ‘I do not think Dragutin would deliberately disobey Constantine,’ he said, ‘I think he simply forgot him. He knows quite well that Constantine is not a whole man, and that he has been in some way destroyed, and he fears an infection. Now I understand another cause for anti-Semitism; many primitive peoples must receive their first intimation of the toxic quality of thought from Jews. They know only the fortifying idea of religion; they see in Jews the effect of the tormenting and disintegrating ideas of scepticism. Dragutin sees a man made as miserable as sickness, as poverty, as disgrace could make him, by an idea which is so mighty that it can exercise this power even though it was let loose on him by a woman. No wonder he is appalled. Well, let us go and get some sleep.’
So we climbed the creaking staircase and came to our room, passing the little Hungarian chambermaid as she burrowed among candles in a store cupboard, still busy; and we slept well, though once I woke and turned on the light and watched a frieze of five mice pass along the skirting. In the morning as many beetles watched me as I dried after my antique bath. But all was clean, aseptically clean; and for the explanation there was the chambermaid down on her knees, her right hand swishing the suds across the flimsy floor, her head rolling from side to side and a tune coming in a half hum, half whistle, through her teeth. We bade her good-morning and told her she worked too hard for a pretty girl, and she looked up laughing, and from a plank in front of her broke off a huge splinter like a piece of toast. ‘Yes,’said Constantine, who just then came out of his room, ‘she is a good girl, and she has great sensibility. Last night she came into my room and she said so kindly, “Ah, I would so like to be with you, for there is something about you very sweet, and you are far more cultured than most men who come to this hotel, but I see you are too ill, and so I will bring you a little orange drink instead.” ’
We went down and had our breakfast outside the principal hotel, and sat over our coffee for an unnecessary length of time, enchanted by the scene. The most enchanting element in it was a number of pretty little girls with dark hair sun-bleached on the surface, and fair delicate bronze skins, who darted about in most beautiful costumes, consisting of fitted jackets and loose trousers gathered at the ankles, cut out of brilliant curtain material with an extreme sense of elegance that was not of an Oriental sort. The effect is too feminist. The little girl is set apart as a little girl, as a possible object for poetical feeling, but her will is respected, she can run and jump as she likes. We ceased to look at them only to wonder about several cheap cars waiting in front of the hotel, which as we breakfasted filled up with people apparently strangers to each other, who all held lemons in their hands and looked exceedingly apprehensive. ‘They fear to be sick,’ explained Constantine, ‘and it is to prevent it that they are going to suck lemons. They are going to travel through Montenegro, to Kolashin or Tsetinye or Podgoritsa or Nikshitch, and they must go by motor bus or by car, since there is no railway in all Montenegro, it is too mountainous.’ And looking up the road at the walls of rock which barred the way, that seemed obvious. Nothing but a Simplon tunnel that took a whole day to pass could meet the case. ‘The poor passengers,’ continued Constantine, ‘they have reason for fearing to be sick, and even to die. For the Montenegrins are a race of heroes, but since the Turks have gone they have nothing to be heroic about, and so they are heroic with their motor cars. A Montenegrin chauffeur looks on his car as a Cossack or a cowboy looks on a horse, he wishes to do tricks with it that show his skill and courage, and he is proud of the wounds he gets in an accident as if they were scars of battle.
It is a superb point of view, but not for the passenger. One cannot work out a formula, not in philosophy, not in aesthetics, not in religion, not in nothing that would make it good for the passengers. Yet there have to be passengers for there to be a chauffeur. It is a very grave disharmony.’
There came to our table at that moment a lean and hard-bitten and harassed man in uniform, who introduced himself as the Chief of Police at Petch. He spoke American English, for he had been in the Middle West nearly twenty years, and he was consumed by that emotion so socially disruptive, so critical of all our sentimental pretences, that it has no name: the opposite of nostalgia, a sick distaste for the fatherland. ‘All here is as strange to me as it is to you,’ he complained. ‘They asked me to come back from the United States and become Chief of Police, and because I was for Yugoslavia I obeyed, but I made a mistake. There is too much to do. These folks here won’t act right unless you make ’em, and to make ‘em you have to know every one of them by sight. Will you believe that I have to come down every evening and watch the corso, just to see how they all act and get in my mind who’s who? Can you imagine folks acting that way in the States?’ There are nearly fourteen thousand inhabitants of Petch; in the plain which stretches from Petch south to Prizren, a matter of fifty-five miles or so, there were in Turkish days a steady six hundred assassinations a year; I found some pathos in the lot of a gentleman who was trying to induce by individual attention such a large number of people, who had been shaped by such a tradition, to behave like good Babbitts. My husband said, ‘But many of your charges look very charming,’ and I added, ‘The little girls are really lovely.’ The Chief of Police said in astonishment, ‘Do you really think so?’ ‘But certainly,’ we said. ‘Oh, no, you are mistaken!’ he exclaimed. ‘But we have seen the most exquisite little girls,’ I began, but Constantine interrupted me. ‘The Chief of Police,’ he explained, ‘is a Montenegrin, and he is trying to tell you, if you would only let him, that only up there behind that wall at the end of the street in Montenegro are people really charming and little girls really lovely.’ ‘Well, I doubt if a man not fortified by such beliefs would accept such a post,’ said my husband. I asked, after the Chief of Police had made exactly the speech that Constantine had anticipated, ‘But are not the people influenced a great deal by the monks at the Patriarchate church and the Dechani monastery?’ He looked at me in bewilderment. ‘Influenced? But in what way?’ ‘Why, for good,’ I stammered; ‘the monks, you know.’ He continued to look at me in perplexity, but just then a gendarme came in and, after saluting, whispered in his ear; and he jumped up and left us in the manner of a mother who has just heard that two of her children have been fighting and have hurt themselves.
‘It is hotter than it has been,’ I said, as we drove out of the town, along the road towards Montenegro, on our way to the Patriarchate church of Petch, which is nearly as famous as the monastery of Dechani.
It was a very pleasant drive, with the houses thinning and showing us the rich pastures that ran up to the wooded foothills, and the brilliant river that dashed down from the gorge. ‘I do not think that it is hot at all,’ said Constantine. ‘But the sun is strong,’ I said. ‘I find it very weak,’ said Constantine. ‘Oh, no!’ I exclaimed. ‘This morning at eight the stockings that I washed last night and hung at the window were quite dry.’ I realized that I had spoken foolishly even before he had sneered, ‘You have proof for everything.’ His face was heavy and swollen, half with fever, half with the desire to hurt. Gerda had convinced him that being a Jew he was worthless, and he wanted to establish that everybody else she despised was worthless too, so that we could crash down together to common annihilation under her blond, blind will. The three of us kept silent till we came to the Patriarchate, which lies in a walled compound among the foothills at the opening of the gorge, low by the river under the wooded cliffs.
Through an archway we entered what seemed a decent little country estate, with proper outbuildings and a trim wood-stack, a kitchen garden as neat as a new pin, and an orchard with its trunks new-washed against blight. A very old monk, lean and brown as a tree-trunk, smiled at us but did not answer what Constantine said, and led us along an avenue to a round fountain shaded by some trees. We thought he was deaf, but he was a Russian who had never learned any Serbian during his seventeen years of exile here. While he fetched the Abbot from his house, there appeared at our elbows Dragutin, to enforce the observance of his special rite and see that we drank from the fountain. It cured all ills, he said, and bestowed also the blessing of Christ. He had brought tumblers from the automobile, so that we could drink in comfort, and indeed it was delicious beyond the nature of water.
When I had finished drinking, I looked round with satisfaction. This was a fat little estate: the buildings were not only new, they were well kept, and on the finely tilled terraces behind the guest-house there were trim beehives of modern pattern, and the stone runner that took the fountain’s overflow to a stream was weedless. I remembered the account of the Patriarchate in that valuable book, Travels in the Slavonic Provinces of Turkey-in-Europe, by Miss Muir Mackenzie and Miss Irby, so penetrating in its view of the Balkans that, though it was written seventy-six years ago, it still answers some questions that the modern tourist will find unanswered anywhere else. These two ladies arrived here with a guard of Moslem Albanian soldiers, with the intention of staying the night, and found terrified monks who, with an inhospitability most uncharacteristic of the Slav or the Orthodox Church, made every effort to turn them away. The ladies, who were, like so many Victorian women outside fiction, models of courage and good sense, turned their guards out of the room and talked to the monks privately, and found that the poor wretches had had all their food seized by a passing troop of Moslem Albanians, and were terrified lest the new invaders should punish them for their empty cupboards. When the ladies met the situation by sending their guards not only out of the room but out of the monastery, there was still some delay before they could get to bed, since the relative flea population of the different rooms had to be considered, and empty windows had to be fitted with glazed frames, which were not brought out till the soldiers had gone. It is a very strong compact of medieval discomfort and medieval insecurity. Nothing could be more remote from the present atmosphere which could be best expressed by the Scottish word ‘douce.’ Yes, we were standing in as douce a wee policy as could be wished.
The Abbot still did not come. We passed some time looking at the carvings on the fountain, which had an extremely primitive air yet in one panel represented a man carrying a fairly modern rifle, but Constantine grew nervous and restless and we took him off to look at the church. It lay on our right, among some walnuts and mulberries and pines, the green ground rising steep behind it. ‘I have a prejudice against this church,’ said my husband, as we went towards it, ‘because a French author wrote of it, “Elle a la couleur tendre de la chair des blondes.” ’ I said, in some bewilderment, ‘This is even more than I should have asked of you, my dear.’ ‘I felt strongly,’ he explained, ‘that he should not have followed that sentence with his next, “Elle est bâtie de gros blocs rectangulaires, irréguliers.” The picture one is left with is hardly pleasing.’ But indeed what was in the French author’s mind was very apparent. The church is actually the colour of a fair woman’s skin, where it gets some weathering but not much, say in the throat or just above the wrist; and in form it is a many-breasted Diana of Ephesus. It is an assembly of three small churches lying side by side, each with a cupola and a rounded apse, and all its masses are maternally curved. It seemed very fitting that there should come out of the porch a company of matrons in whom age had destroyed all that is evanescent in womanhood, all that is peculiar to the period of mating and child-bearing, yet who might have served gloriously as types of their sex because what was left was so plainly dedicated to all its essential purposes, the continuity of life and its harmony. They were slender and erect, like the old women of Ochrid, but lacked that aristocratic and even
luxurious air which was natural enough in a town with its Byzantine past; they might have been Romans when Rome was still a sturdy republic. All of them were old enough to remember the bad days in Petch when the Turks had so encouraged the Albanian Moslems to ill-treat their Christian fellow-Slavs that at every Serb funeral the corpse was pelted with stones and filth; but they carried themselves with the most untroubled dignity. It came back to me that Miss Muir Mackenzie and Miss Irby had been immensely impressed by a woman of Petch called Katerina Simitch, a childless widow who carried on a Christian school for girls, with a courage that never broke before the persistent hostility of the Moslems. She was a nun solely because the status was useful to her in her nationalist work; the Englishwomen’s descriptions of her evoke the calm and wise personality of a great statesman. Yet it is safe to say that she took her vows without impiety, for in those days Christianity and Slav nationalism must have seemed, even to the most spiritual, almost one and the same. These women who were coming out of the church would certainly be kin to Katerina Simitch’s pupils, and some might even be of her blood. If she had seen them she would have felt pride. She would have taken for granted their quiet fierceness and their fleet dignity for it was hers also, and she could not have conceived Slav women otherwise; but she would have recognized a sign of new times, and rejoiced at it, in the white sleeves which were disclosed by their black cloth boleros. They were made of the striped silk which is woven in the district; in Katerina’s day only a few Christian women could afford to buy it, or even to make it, since the mulberry leaves for the silkworms cost more than Christians could afford.
We went into the porch, which formed a long hall outside the three churches. There were two more old women sitting and talking thoughtfully on a stone bench that ran round the wall, one holding a branch cut from a walnut tree. Their ease, and a proud and hospitable gesture that this woman made with her walnut branch when she saw we were visitors come to admire, recalled the history of these churches.
