Bosnian Chronicle

by Ivo Andrić

  Special couriers came and went, and the Vizier sent his own confidential agents to Istanbul with mysterious messages and gifts to those friends he still had left. D’Avenat, who had managed to learn a few details, asserted that the Vizier was fighting as much to save his head as to save his position under the new Sultan.

  Knowing what the removal of the present Vizier would mean for himself and his work, Daville at once dispatched some urgent messages to General Marmont in Dalmatia and to the Ambassador in Istanbul, urging them to use their best offices with the High Porte to ensure that Mehmed Pasha remained in Bosnia, irrespective of the political changes in the capital, for that was how the Russians and Austrians interceded for their own friends and the Turks would judge the influence and strength of a Christian power by its success in this direction.

  The Bosnian Moslems were jubilant.

  “Gone is the infidel Sultan,” said the hodjas in the bazaar. “The time has come to scrape off the mud that has collected around the true faith and the Moslem way of life these last few years. The Lame Vizier will go and take his friend the Consul with him, just as he brought him here.” The ragtag of the streets spread the words and grew steadily more aggressive. They taunted and molested the Consul’s servants; they jeered and abused D’Avenat in the streets, asking whether the Consul was packing to leave, and if not, what he was waiting for. The interpreter, dark and hulking on his dappled mare, gave them a withering look of disdain and replied caustically that they didn’t know what they were talking about; that obviously they’d picked up this nonsense from a nitwit whose brain was soaked in plum brandy; that, on the contrary, the new Sultan and the French Emperor were the best of friends and Istanbul had already sent word that the French Consul in Travnik was an official guest of the state, and if anything happened to him Bosnia would be scorched from one end to the other and not even the babes in their cribs would be spared. D’Avenat kept telling the Consul that at a time like this it was essential to put on a bold and resolute front since this was the only thing that would carry weight with these savages, who were apt to pounce on anyone betraying the slightest sign of quailing or retreat.

  The Vizier, in his own fashion, acted on the same principle. The Mameluke Guard went every day to drill and exercise on the field near the Tombs and the townspeople looked with a mixture of hate and respect at these athletic horsemen in their shining heavy armor, dressed up and spangled like a wedding party. The Vizier rode out with them to inspect the exercise, he raced with them, and did target practice, much like a man who had not a care in the world and no thought either of departure or death, but, on the contrary, was getting in shape for combat.

  Both sides, the Vizier and the Moslems of Travnik, awaited the decision of the new Sultan and the news from the capital about the outcome of the struggle going on there.

  Toward the middle of summer a special envoy, one of the confidential assistants to the Sultan, arrived with his retinue. Mehmed Pasha arranged a particularly glittering reception for him. He was met outside the town by the entire Mameluke Guard and all the courtiers and dignitaries. The guns boomed a salute from the fortress and Mehmed Pasha himself waited at the gates of the Residency. Word spread through the town with lightning speed that this meant the Vizier had won the grace of the new Sultan and that he would remain in Travnik. The Moslems refused to believe it and maintained that the Sultan’s emissary would go back to Istanbul with the Vizier’s head in his saddlebag. However, the facts seemed to bear out the rumor. The emissary had brought a royal decree confirming Mehmed Pasha in his post at Travnik; and at the same time he solemnly gave the Vizier a jeweled sword as a gift from the new Sultan, together with orders that he mobilize a powerful striking force and move against Serbia the next spring.

  The day after the arrival of the emissary—it happened to be a Friday—Daville was scheduled to see the Vizier by previous appointment. Far from canceling the audience, Mehmed Pasha received the Consul in the presence of the emissary, whom he introduced as an old friend and an auspicious bearer of the Sultan’s grace. At the same time he showed him the sword which he had received as a gift from the Sultan.

  The emissary, who took pains to assure the Consul that he too, like Mehmed Pasha, was an admirer of Napoleon’s, was a tall man, obviously of mixed blood, with rather pronounced Negroid features. There was an undertone of gray in his sallow complexion, his lips and nails were almost purple, the whites of his eyes unclear, all but muddy. He spoke emphatically and at great length about his sympathies for France and his hatred of the Russians. As he talked, the deep notches on both sides of his fleshy mulatto mouth filled with white specks of froth. Looking at him, Daville wished that the man would take a breath and wipe himself, but he went on talking in his fevered manner. D’Avenat, who translated, could barely keep up with him. With a fresh surge of hatred, as it were, the emissary went on to tell them of his old campaigns against the Russians and of a skirmish somewhere near Otchakov in which he had been wounded; and all at once, with startling alacrity, he pulled up the tight sleeve of his tunic and displayed a thick scar on his forearm. The slender but muscular dark-skinned arm shook visibly.

  Mehmed Pasha seemed to enjoy the conversation of his friends and chuckled more than usual, like one who cannot conceal his satisfaction and happiness at being allowed to bask in imperial grace. That day the audience went on much longer than usual. As they were going home, Daville asked D’Avenat: “What do you think of the emissary?”

  He expected, as always, that the interpreter’s answer would be couched in a wealth of details—all the details he had collected about the man up to that moment; but this time D’Avenat was surprisingly short: “He is a very sick man, Your Excellency.”

  “Yes indeed. A very strange guest.”

  “Very, very sick,” muttered D’Avenat, looking straight in front of him and refusing to elaborate.

  And two days later, before the usual time, D’Avenat made an urgent request to see the Consul. Daville received him in the dining room, where he was finishing breakfast.

  It was Sunday, one of those mornings in midsummer whose freshness and limpid beauty were like a reward for the dark, bone-chilling, and unpleasant autumn and winter days. The air was cool and alive with the purl and blue shimmer of countless invisible streams. Daville had spent a restful night, pleased with the news that Mehmed Pasha would be staying on at Travnik. Before him were the remains of breakfast and he was wiping his mouth with the air of a man who has just appeased his hunger, when D’Avenat came in, dark and tense as usual, his lips drawn and his jaw set. In a low voice D’Avenat informed the Consul that the Sultan’s emissary had died that night.

  Daville got up abruptly and pushed away the breakfast tray. D’Avenat, not budging from where he stood or changing his voice, met his agitated questioning with terse, barely intelligible replies.

  On the previous afternoon, the emissary, who lately had not been in the best of health, had suddenly felt unwell. He had taken a warm bath and gone to bed and had died suddenly during the night, before anyone knew what was going on or could help him. They were planning to bury him this morning. Anything further that he, D’Avenat, might learn about it, concerning either the death itself or the effect which this news might have in the bazaar, he would report later. That was all he would say. To Daville’s query as to whether there was anything he could do, such as offer condolences or the like, D’Avenat answered that it was better not to do anything that might be taken as a breach of custom. Death in these parts was not anything to be talked about, and everything connected with it was disposed of swiftly, without many words or much ceremony.

  Left alone, Daville felt as though his day that had started so buoyantly had suddenly gone dark. He could not help thinking of the tall, rather unpleasant man with whom he had been talking only two days before, who was now dead. He wondered about the Vizier too, and about the unsavory repercussions that were bound to follow from having an important personage die in his house. And D’Avenat’s ash
en and sepulchral face was constantly before his eyes, and also his silence and impassivity, the way he bowed and went out, as cold and somber as when he entered. But he followed D’Avenat’s advice and made no move of any kind, though he never for a moment stopped thinking about the death at the Residency.

  Next morning D’Avenat came again and, in an alcove by the window, told the shocked Consul the true purpose of the emissary’s mission and the cause of his death.

  The emissary had in fact been the bearer of the Vizier’s death sentence. The imperial firman confirming the Vizier in his present office and the sword of honor were intended only to camouflage the sentence, to put the Vizier at ease and to bemuse the people at large. On the eve of his departure from Travnik, after he had lulled the Vizier into a sense of security, the emissary was supposed to produce a second imperial decree, the so-called katil-firman, which condemned the Vizier to death, together with all those who had worked directly or indirectly with the ex-Sultan; he was then to command one of his escort to cut the Vizier down before any of his people could spring to his defense. But the cunning Vizier, anticipating something of the order, had overwhelmed the emissary with attentions and honors, pretending to believe his words and to be delighted with the Sultan’s graciousness, while promptly bribing the man’s retinue. Meanwhile he showed him the town and introduced him to the French Consul in a formal audience.

  On the following day he treated him to a splendid picnic in a meadow by the road that leads to the Tombs. On their return to the Residency, after much entertainment and an abundance of highly spiced food, the emissary developed a sudden high fever—“from the sharp Bosnian water.” The Vizier offered his guest the use of his sumptuously appointed steambath. While the emissary was steaming on the hot stone slabs, working up a sweat and waiting for the masseur whom Mehmed Pasha had particularly recommended to him, the Vizier’s men skillfully opened the lining of his long cloak where, according to a bribed attendant of the emissary, the death decree was hidden. The death firman was thus discovered and taken to the Vizier. And when the emissary, parboiled and tired out, came out of the bath, he suddenly felt a painful, burning thirst that no drink could assuage. The more he drank, the faster the poison worked. At dusk, panting like a man whose mouth and guts were on fire, he collapsed and then stiffened and fell silent. When they saw that he had lost the power of speech and was completely paralyzed, that he could not communicate either by voice or sign, they rushed out of the Residency looking for doctors and summoning the hodjas. For a doctor it was too late, but for a hodja there was always time.

  Stiff as a dead fish, his face the color of indigo, the emissary lay on a thin mattress in the middle of the room. Only his eyelids trembled a little and he rolled them up from time to time with the utmost effort as, goggling and with a terrible look, he scanned the room, perhaps trying to locate his cloak or one of his men. The big glassy eyes of the dying, hoodwinked man, who himself had come on a mission of treachery and murder, were the only part of him that was still alive and they expressed all he could no longer say or do. Awed and fearful, the Vizier’s servants moved around him on tiptoe, showing him every possible attention and communicating with one another only by signs and terse whispers. No one was able to say exactly when he gave up his ghost.

  His host, the Vizier, appeared inconsolable. It was as if the sudden death of his old friend had soured all his pleasure in the recent good news and the great honor he had received. His flashing white teeth now remained hidden under his thick black mustache. Unsmiling, not to be recognized, the Vizier spoke to everyone, but only briefly, in a voice that was unsteady and full of barely controlled pain. He summoned the Mayor of the town, Ressim Beg, a man of aristocratic lineage but weak and aged before his time, and requested his help during these difficult days, although he well knew that the Mayor was a useless fumbler who couldn’t even look after his own affairs. He spoke bitterly of his grief in front of the Mayor: “It was written that he should come all this way only to die before my eyes. That is Fate, but I would sooner have lost my own born brother.” The Vizier sounded like a man who, with all his self-control, cannot keep his anguish bottled inside him.

  “There’s nothing you can do, Pasha,” the Mayor consoled him. “Remember the old saying, ‘All of us die, we’re only buried at different times.’”

  The katil-firman, that was to have cost Mehmed Pasha his head and was to have buried him, was carefully sewn back into the same place in the lining of the emissary’s cloak. He was to be laid to rest that morning in one of the finest of Travnik’s cemeteries. His entire retinue, bribed and richly rewarded, was leaving that day for Istanbul.

  So D’Avenat concluded his account of the latest events at the Residency.

  Daville was shocked and dumb with amazement. It all sounded to him like a lurid, improbable tale and he was on the point of interrupting the interpreter several times. The Vizier’s action seemed to him not only revolting and criminal, but dangerous and illogical as well. Covered with gooseflesh, he paced up and down the room and peered into D’Avenat’s face, as if to see whether he had spoken seriously or had gone out of his mind.

  “How is it possible? How?” the Consul kept saying. “How can anyone do such a thing? How dare he? They’re bound to find out! And in the end what good will it do him?”

  “Oh, but it will. It seems as if it might do him a lot of good,” D’Avenat said calmly.

  The Vizier’s scheme, bold and reckless though it was, was not as far-fetched as may appear at first sight, D’Avenat explained to the Consul, who had stopped pacing.

  First and foremost, the Vizier had escaped the immediate danger, and rather skillfully at that, by outwitting his opponents and forestalling the emissary. The people were bound to gossip and cast suspicion, of course, but no one could point to anything, much less prove it. Secondly, the emissary had publicly brought good news and extraordinary honors to the Vizier. It stood to reason that the Vizier would be the last man to wish to see him dead; and those who had sent the emissary on his double-faced errand would not dare, at least for the time being, to initiate fresh plots against the Vizier, for in so doing they would show their hand and give away the conspiracy and confess their failure. Thirdly, the emissary had been an unpopular man, with a bad reputation, a mulatto without any real friends, who lied and betrayed as easily as he breathed and talked, and was not particularly esteemed even by those who used him. So his death would not be a great surprise to anyone, much less the cause of bitterness or vengeance on anybody’s part. His bribed retinue would do their best to see to that. Fourthly, and most important of all, Istanbul was in a state of utter anarchy at the moment; and Mehmed Pasha’s friends, to whom only a few days before the unexpected arrival of the emissary he had sent “everything necessary,” would be able to complete their “countermove” to reinstate the Vizier in the Sultan’s favor and, if possible, have him confirmed in his present post.

  Cold with excitement, Daville listened to the calm exposé of his interpreter. Unable to refute him, he could only stammer: “But still . . . still . . .” And D’Avenat, who did not think the Consul needed further convincing, merely added that the bazaar was quiet and that the untoward death of the emissary had not stirred up any special agitation, although there was much comment.

  It was only after he was left alone that the full horror of what he had just heard overcame the Consul. As the day went on, his restiveness grew also. He ate little and couldn’t stay put in any one place. Several times he was on the point of calling D’Avenat and questioning him some more, if only to prove to himself that the tale he’d heard that morning was really true. He began to wonder what kind of report he should write about it, whether it might not be better to keep silent altogether. He sat down at his desk and began to write. “At the Vizier’s Residency last night there was enacted . . .” No, that was fatuous and in poor taste. “The events of the last few days seem to indicate that, by the use of methods and stratagems which are customary here, Mehmed Pa
sha will succeed in keeping his post, even in the face of altered circumstances, and that, accordingly, it is safe to assume that this Vizier who is sympathetic to us . . .” No, no. That was dry and nebulous. At length it came to him that the best way to describe it was to report the thing exactly the way it had happened and the way it appeared to an outsider: that a special emissary had arrived from Istanbul with an imperial decree confirming the Vizier in his present post and had brought him a sword of honor as a sign of the Sultan’s favor and a symbol of the imminent campaign against Serbia. He might point out at the end that this augured well for the continued success of French aspirations in these parts, and then add, parenthetically as it were, that the emissary had died unexpectedly while carrying out his mission in Travnik.

  Phrasing and drafting the official report in his head, Daville calmed down somewhat. The crime which had occurred only yesterday, here, under his very eyes, began at once to seem less heinous and appalling the moment it became the subject of his report. In vain the Consul looked in himself for the excitement and moral confusion of the morning.

  He sat down and wrote out the document, interpreting the event as it appeared to the people at large. And later, as he made a fair copy, he felt more at ease with himself, even a little smug in the thought that the report wisely left untold the great and sinister secrets that were at the core of it.

  So he waited for the summer twilight, full of silence and oblique shafts of light between the dark shadows on the steep hillsides. Quieter now, the Consul stood by the open window. Someone came into the room behind him with a lighted taper and began to light the candles on the desk. At that moment the thought assailed him: Who could have prepared the poison for the Vizier, set the dose and measured its action so expertly that the whole thing would go off fairly quickly (each stage at the appointed time), yet not too suddenly or suspiciously? Who, if not D’Avenat? Drugs were part of his profession. He had been in the service of the Vizier until quite recently, and perhaps he still was.