by Rebecca West
‘I am taking your husband to look at some carving on the outer wall,’ said Constantine. ‘Will you come?’ But I stayed where I was among the frescoes, which the afternoon light was now irradiating and showing more and more manifestly superb as pure painting, quite apart from their revelation of the sensibility of a demonic people. Suddenly the little golden-haired monk was back at my side. I had thought that he had said he was going away to put on his galoshes as a pretext for escaping from my husband, but he had actually changed into curious flapping footwear of blue cloth. I heard again Mrs Mac’s words, ‘I hope you’ll not be shown round by that wee monk with the awful galoshes.’ Apparently such imbecile scenes were the usual lot of the visitors to Dechani. ‘You must give me your passport,’ he said. ‘But why?’ I asked. ‘It is a rule,’ he said, ‘that everybody who comes to the monastery must give me his passport.’ ‘But we are not staying here.’ I objected. ‘We are going back to Petch quite soon, before evening.’ ‘That does not matter,’ said the little creature, ‘everybody who comes here, even for a few moments, must give me his passport.’ This was, of course, perfect nonsense. ‘Give it to me, give it to me,’ he clamoured. I knew well that if I handed it over to him I would never see it again. He would probably take it away, tear it up, and come back saying that he had never had it. ‘I am sorry,’ I said, ‘I haven’t got it with me. We all left ours at the hotel at Petch.’ His face screwed up in anger. ‘But I know you have got it!’ he insisted. ‘I saw it inside your bag when you took out your handkerchief! Give it to me at once!’ I made a ridiculous flight out of the church and, since I could not see my husband and Constantine anywhere, began to run round it in search of them, jumping over the trenches and rubble-heaps. Round the first corner I found them talking to one of the older and more dignified monks. The little monk, who was scrambling and jabbering at my heels, came to a sudden halt and scuttled away, crying over his shoulder, ‘I am looking for the Hungarian count I have to show round the monastery. I cannot think what has happened to him.’
I said angrily, ‘It really is not fair to have this disgusting little pest running about this lovely place, preventing people from looking at it.’Though I spoke English the monk had caught my meaning, and, looking distressed and embarrassed, he suggested that we go down to the stream which runs through the farmlands a short distance from the monastery and drink from a famous healing spring that rises on its bank. We followed him down a steep path through an orchard, and met three Moslem women, coming up, leading a pack-horse. They asked breathlessly, their black veils shaking and twitching with their agitation, ‘May we go into the church?’ and the monk answered, ‘Yes, but you must leave the horse outside.’ The stream ran shining in and out of the shadows cast by poplars and oaks, willows and acacias; like the quite distinct river which runs through Petch, it is called the Clean One. From the bridge we looked on a far panorama of operatic picturesqueness, a nearer composition of water-meadows and woodlands that was limpid and lovely as ideal flute-music. The only touches in the scene not exquisitely fresh were the filthy black coats of the young theological students who stood about and gaped at us.
As we sipped the spring water we found pleasure in watching some young Albanians who were kneeling between the willows on the river’s brink and were bathing their faces and heads. It is a salient difference between the Serbs and Albanians that, whereas a Serb boy baby looks definitely and truculently male as soon as it is out of its mother’s arms, the sex of many Albanians is not outwardly determined until they are in their late teens, and these boys, who were perhaps thirteen to seventeen, might have been so many Rosalinds. They had long lashes, bright lips, bloomy skins, and a nymph-like fluency of movement. I said, ‘Why are they bathing their faces and heads like that? It is not so very hot.’ The monk answered, ‘It is a ceremony of purification which they have invented themselves. They like to come up to the church every Friday, and always they come here first and wash as you see them doing now. We never ask them to do it, they do it of their own accord. I suppose that they feel guilty, for they are not like the Turks, who have always been heathen. They were Christians when this monastery was built, in the fourteenth century, and I think they know they should be as they were then, and should come back to us.’ I thought to myself, ‘But the trouble is that you too are not as you were in the fourteenth century, and that there is not so much as there ought to be for them to come back to. This reconquered country is like a chalice waiting to be filled, and it seems to me that the wine is lacking.’
At that moment an elbow was thrust into my side, and the little golden-haired monk forced himself between Constantine and myself. He waved a disparaging hand at the landscape and cried, ‘I too have made sacrifices for my religion. For this have I left all the pleasures of city life. Hierfür hab’ ich das schönste Stadtleben aufgegeben.’ Constantine turned on him with a shout of rage, and the other monk flung out an arm at him and told him to go away. Tossing his head defiantly, like a character in an old-fashioned book about schoolgirls, he scampered away and ran up the steep path through the orchard, sometimes pausing because he had lost one or other of his galoshes. The Albanian boys tilted up the lovely ovals of their faces towards the bridge, the unkempt students gathered closer and stared harder, while Constantine kept on shouting. ‘For a Croat, and a Schwab Croat at that, to speak so of one of our holiest Serbian places!’ he ended, and the monk shrugged his shoulders wearily.
‘Let us go away,’ I said, ‘let us go away at once.’ As we passed through the quadrangle the church was glowing more brightly than a pearl, like a lily in strong sunlight, in spite of all the scaffolding and hugger-mugger. ‘Do you want to go in again?’ asked Constantine. ‘Not at all,’ I said. ‘I only want to walk for a little in the woods outside.’ When we had said good-bye to the monk and given him some money for the church, we went out to the road and found Dragutin standing beside the automobile with his arms folded, while the little golden-haired monk skipped round him. ‘Yes,’ he was crying, ‘and that is not the end of the famous folk who are proud to be our guests! For today we have had great news, we have heard that next Whitsuntide we will have the great honour of entertaining at Dechani Herr Hitler and General Göring!’ ‘Drive us a short way down the road,’ said Constantine; ‘the Gospodja does not want to stay here any longer, she would rather walk in the woods.’ ‘I don’t wonder,’ said Dragutin; ‘this isn’t my idea of a holy place. If this little one had a dancing bear I’d think we were in the gipsy quarter.’
We found a path through very still and fragrant pinewoods, leading to a holiday camp for children, not yet opened for the summer, and we sat down on one of the seats. Soon Constantine fell into a doze, and I went for a stroll among the trees, and came back with a handful of peppermint. My husband too was asleep now, and I sat down between the two men till they wakened. When Constantine opened his eyes he asked, ‘What are those things on your lap? I like those dark-green leaves, and those sad, middle-aged mauve flowers. Peppermint, you say? But what have they to do with peppermint? Do they smell like it?’ ‘No,’ I said, ‘it is peppermint itself.’ ‘What are you telling me!’ he exclaimed. ‘I am like a little one who has thought all his life that babies came in the doctor’s bag and is suddenly told the truth by a cruel schoolmaster. Always I have thought that peppermint came simply from a shop, or at furthest a jar in a shop, and now you tell me brutally that it grows out of the earth, in my own land, in woods such as I have seen all my life.’ I crushed a piece and held it under his nose. ‘Hey, it is truly peppermint,’ he cried ecstatically, for he loved pungent scents and flavours. But suddenly his expression changed from a grin of delight to a rictus of horror. He pushed my hand away and groaned. It was as if he suddenly rebelled against the intensity of sensation, as if he loathed the acute quality of experience. ‘I am very ill,’ he sighed. ‘I am in great pain. And there is nothing whatsoever the matter with me,’ he added, more faintly still.
My husband and I put our arms round him because w
e were afraid he would fall off the bench. He remained with his eyes closed for a moment, then said, ‘I am quite all right. It is the sting on my hand that has given me fever. That is all.’ ‘No,‘ I said, ’there is more than that the matter with you. You are very tired.‘ I paused, at a loss for words. I did not know how to say that he was dying of being a Jew in a world where there were certain ideas to which some new star was lending a strange strength. But my husband said, ’Dear Constantine, you know you are tired to death. Why do you not go straight away back to Belgrade and let us find our way over Montenegro to Kotor? You think we are English and stupid, but not a dog could lose its way from here to Dubrovnik.‘ ’How bored you are with me,‘ said Constantine. ’I have seen that coming for a long time.‘ ’Dear Constantine, that is not true,‘ I said. ’We could not have had a more wonderful companion,‘ said my husband. ’Is it so?‘ asked Constantine very earnestly. We patted his hand, but he looked away as if he found our reassurance not so interesting as he had expected. ’I will come with you,‘ he said. ’Montenegro is a very interesting country and nobody can explain it to you so well as myself. Now, let us sit here and enjoy the calm. Breathe, breathe deep! This is the sweetest air, such as you have not in England.‘
When we returned to Petch Constantine went to bed at once, and we sat for a time drinking plum brandy outside the hotel, watching the corso. ‘Our relations with Constantine are painful but very interesting,’ I said; ‘it is as if we had ceased to be people, and had become figures in a poet’s dream.’ ‘I cannot help feeling,’ said my husband, ‘that there are more restful ways of taking a holiday than becoming characters in the second part of Faust.’ Before us streamed the mountain people, large-boned and majestic, and always tragic when old; the trim functionaries moving whippily, as if they were determined to dodge out of the path of destiny likely to work such a change on them between youth and age; lads ranged in groups yet loosely, like skeins of wool, as they do in the distressed areas of our own country; grave and pallid little boys circled between the tables selling newspapers and picture postcards, gay little girls ran through the crowd in their enchanting costumes of flowered tight jackets and loose trousers.
Suddenly we were jerked out of our contented drowsiness. Two lads were talking at the edge of the stream that runs down the roadway; they drew apart, one struck the other on the chest, not violently, but with an intention of insult; before he had well delivered the blow its answer came to him. He was struck with a force that had at least thought of murder. His body pivoted on one heel and fell obliquely, with the arms wind-milling, into the middle of the stream. As he scrambled out of the water a silence fell on the whole street. Not a shocked silence; simply the silence of a circus audience watching the acrobats as they hang impaled on the climax of their great trick. Maybe many of the audience thought that the old days had come back when men were allowed to be men and have their excitements. But the silence was broken. A sword rattled. It had not been drawn, it had got caught in the legs of a chair. The Chief of Police had risen from his table in the café, with a look of extreme exasperation on his hard-bitten face, and was hurrying across the street to the two lads. He boxed the ears of the one who was standing on the edge of the stream; the other he helped out of the water, and then cuffed him with just as little tenderness. Then he stood over them and scolded them in the very pose of a nursemaid. The corso shuffled on again, the newsboys once more shouted ‘Pravda!’ and ‘Politika!’ Doubtless many hearts were the heavier as they realized, as they must have done many times, that the old days were over.
We strolled along the main street, passing some bright caves in the dim simplicity of the low buildings, where the functionaries and their wives could buy Kolynos and Listerine, Coty powders and Lenthéric lip-sticks. At length we came to a point in the road which we had remarked on our way to the Patriarchate, where objects not in themselves remarkable, a disused mosque of no great architectural distinction, a square Turkish tower two or three hundred years old, a patch of grass and some trees, and a gravelled open space, were set at angles which gave them a mysterious and exciting value. We stood for a while and enjoyed its challenge to the imagination. Twilight was falling. The brilliant sky was bluish and white, lit with stars that minute by minute grew more immense. The mountains were the colour and texture of lamp-black and the woods on the foothills looked liquid as green water. Beside the mosque a puddle lay pure white. We heard a drumming, throbbing sound, and thought that the mosque could not be disused as we were told, since surely this was the chanting of a service. But when we drew near the mosque the droning grew fainter, and bats flew straight out of the walls, and our search for the sound led us to round the open space to a little cottage with a garden where somebody was giving a party and entertaining his guests with very old records played on a very old gramophone. It must have been a very small party, for it was the smallest of cottages. I do not think there can have been more than two or three guests; but there were the solemn, self-consciously orgiastic noises of a Slav party.
As we looked and listened there was a scuffle behind us, and a tug at my coat. One of the little girls in flowered jacket and trousers was there behind me, panting through her laughter, ‘Parlez-vous français, madame?’ The golden patina on her sun-bleached brown hair shone like a halo through the half-light. Softly shrieking with laughter, hampered and delayed by laughter, she fled back to a group of shadows that was hiding at a corner of the Turkish tower and now scattered, laughing as she had laughed, into the dusk. Though we called her she would not come; but it did not matter, for she had no more need than a kingfisher to break her flight to prove her loveliness. The town seemed the quieter for this sudden unfolding and furling of wings in its stillness. We turned at random down a street, where white houses showed blank and secretive faces, and were defended by a broad stream that flowed between them and the roadway. We did not hear a human sound until we met a Turk, wearing a red-and-white turban of archaic fashion, and carrying two amphoræ; as he passed us his spectacles flashed at us but he went on talking contentiously to himself. I said to my husband, ‘Miss Kemp says in her book, The Healing Ritual, that she met a young man here who studied occultism and had in his home two hundred ancient manuscripts and books dealing with the art.’ ‘If one lived in Petch one would do queer things,’ said my husband; ‘its dignified decay makes me feel like a fly walking over velvet.’
At last we heard voices. On a bridge leading over the stream from a house stood a young girl in a white blouse and black skirt, holding a lantern with one hand while her other arm was laid about the shoulders of four young children as they all looked earnestly along the street. ‘They are coming!’ cried a little boy at the sight of us. ‘No, they are not!’ jeered the others. ‘These people are not they! Do you not know them better than that?’ That broke the tensity of the children’s interest, and they ran back into the house, but the young girl continued to look down the street, even when a glance had told her that we had come to a stop in front of her, startled out of our good manners by her incomparable beauty. The slight change of expression by which she rebuked our impudence was neither excessive nor complaisant; she was noble in her manners as well as her appearance. I thought it probable that she too was of the strain that had produced the great Katerina Simitch, or at least her followers, and I hoped that the visitors she awaited would bring her some food for her splendid appetites, some opportunity to coerce life into a superior phase by an act of courage. But, if they came on such an annunciatory errand, I could not think that they would belong to the same organization that had fostered the genius of Katerina Simitch: I could not think that they would be sent out by the local church. The Abbot of the Patriarchate was performing his pious and non-mystical function to perfection; when this girl was older his monastery would be a refuge and a refreshment to her. But there was no force here to tell her youth, as the Church had told Katerina Simitch when she needed the lesson, how to take the Kingdom of Heaven by storm. I looked nervously over my sh
oulder lest I should see the only emissary of the faith that was likely to appear in this place at this hour, since he was likely to appear anywhere at any hour. I could well imagine him caponing and curveting down the twilit street, coquetting with his shadow, while his blond curls swung.
The starlight waxed stronger, and colour drained out of the world. The stream in its deep channel glittered like a black snake; the houses were pale as chalk, as a ghost, as a skeleton. I might be wrong; I would be able to check it when I got back to the high-street, where Petch was sitting down for its evening meal, for this was Friday, and a fast-day. When we got back to our hotel and sat down in the restaurant, I said to my husband, ‘Eat what you like, I want to make an experiment.’ I asked the waiter what I could eat, and he mentioned dish after dish containing meat or eggs or butter, or fish cooked in butter, or cheese or milk, and all these things are forbidden by the Orthodox Church on fast-days. ‘These will not do,’ I said; ‘though I am a foreigner I want to keep the fast. Have you no dish that fulfils the condition? Haven’t you any beans, or fish fried in oil or boiled in water?’ ‘No,’ he said. ‘Is that because this is the evening meal?’ I asked. ‘Perhaps at midday you had such dishes.’ ‘No,’ he said, ‘we are never asked for them.’ I said, ‘Very well, then, I must eat somewhere else.’ My husband by this time had become interested in the test I was applying. We went up and down the high-street from inn to inn, and they were all full of people eating their evening meal, none of whom was fasting. This was a strange sign in a town which lies in the shadow of Dechani, which for centuries lived not only in a state of ecstatic faith, but by it; for man loves his little abstinences, and he does not abandon the obscure pleasure of fasting until he actually wishes to dissociate himself from the belief which is its apparent justification. If the West had failed to provide Yugoslavia with a formula for happiness, it could not be pretended that the failure of new things did not matter, because there were old things here which were all the country needed. In parts of the country these old things are as valuable as they ever were, as they have ever been. In other parts they are not valid. The people will no longer accept them as currency; and here, since no new currency has been minted there is bankruptcy. As we went back to the restaurant the wind came down from the gorge ice-cold, and like a battering-ram; there was a sound of splintering wood and the crash of sheet-iron. A small shop had come to pieces.
