Bosnian Chronicle

by Ivo Andrić

  With these fundamental differences between them, the two men began their life together. Although the autumn was cold and wet, Desfosses explored the town and the surrounding country and met a number of people. Daville presented him to the Vizier and to the top men at the Residency, but the young man did the rest himself. He met the parish priest at Dolats, Fra Ivo Yankovich, a man weighing about three hundred pounds but with an alert mind and a sharp tongue; and Pakhomi, the pale and self-effacing monk who was then looking after the Orthodox Church of St. Michael the Archangel. He visited the houses of the Travnik Jews and the monastery of Gucha Gora, where he made the acquaintance of several Brothers who filled him in on the country and its people. He intended to look over the ancient settlements and tombs in the vicinity as soon as the spring thaw set in. As early as the third week he confided to Daville that he would probably write a book about Bosnia.

  The Consul, who had been brought up and schooled in the prerevolutionary classical humanities, functioned strictly within the limits of thought and expression set by that education, notwithstanding his revolutionary activities. So he looked askance, even with suspicion, on this undoubtedly talented young man, on his enormous intellectual curiosity and amazing memory, his bold and impulsive way of talking, and his enviable bubbling imagination. He was intimidated by this energy, which nothing could check or sidetrack. He found it hard to keep up with and yet felt that there was no way of curbing or stopping it. The young man had studied Turkish in Paris for three years and had no qualms about accosting and talking to anyone. (“His Turkish is the kind they teach at the College of Louis Le Grand in Paris, not the sort that is spoken by the Turks of Bosnia,” wrote Daville.) If sometimes he failed to make himself clear, he nevertheless won the people with his broad and frank eyes. Even the Brothers, who avoided Daville, and the scowling reserved Pakhomi, talked to him. The only ones who kept their distance were the Travnik begs. But even the bazaar could not remain indifferent to the “young Consul” for long.

  Defosses never missed a market day, when he would stroll up and down the bazaar inquiring about the prices, examining the merchandise, and jotting down phrases and names of things. Very soon a crowd would collect and watch this foreigner, dressed à la français, as he tried out a sieve or bent down to examine a display of chisels and drills. The “young Consul” would, in turn, be fascinated by some peasant buying a scythe, by his intense air of concentration as he drew a calloused thumb over the blade and then knocked and knocked the scythe on the stone threshold, listening in rapt attention to its sound and pitch; as, at last, he screwed up one eye and peered down the long curve of the blade, like a man taking aim, in order to judge its keenness and temper. Desfosses would go up to the old but still hardy countrywomen and ask the price of wool that lay on sacks of goat’s hair in front of them, still smelling of the sheepfold. Seeing a foreigner before her, the woman would be dumbfounded at first and think that the gentleman was joking. Finally, after a good deal of prodding from Desfosses’s groom, she would come out with the price and swear that the wool was “soft as a soul” once it had been washed. He inquired about the names of different cereals and seed stocks, tested the grains for size and quality. And he showed interest in the workmanship and the types of wood used in making the various handles and hafts for axes, hatchets, hoes, and other implements.

  The “young Consul” got to know all the colorful personalities in the bazaar, such as Ibrahim Aga, the overseer of weights and scales, the town crier Hamza, and the bazaar idiot, “the Mad Schwabe.”

  Ibrahim Aga was a lean, tall stooping old man with a white beard and a dignified, almost forbidding manner. He had once been well off and used to collect the scales tax himself; his sons and assistants did the measuring and checking of everything that was sold in the bazaar, under his supervision. But with time he became poor and was left without sons or helpers. Now the Travnik Jews ran the public scales and collected the weight tax, and Ibrahim Aga worked for them—a fact that was quietly ignored by the bazaar. To the peasants and to all those who either bought or sold in the bazaar, the one and true overseer was still Ibrahim Aga, and he would remain that until he died. Every market day he could be seen standing by the public scale from morning till dusk. When he began to weigh, a solemn silence fell all around him. As he set about adjusting the scale, he held his breath; then, with an air of intense concentration, he grew and shrank as the scale tip rose and dipped. With one eye firmly shut, he scrupulously adjusted the weights and carefully nudged the counterweights in the opposite direction from the goods on the scale, a little more, and then another tiny notch again, until the scale steadied and stopped swinging and the true measure was there for everyone to see. Then he took his hand away, lifted his face, and, with his eyes riveted on the figure, called out the correct weight in a loud firm voice that brooked no question or appeal: “One and sixty, less twenty drams.”

  There was no disputing the measure. The rest of the bazaar might well be a mad hustle, but where he stood there was an island of order, silence, and the sort of respect which all men show for a true measure and a task well done. Ibrahim Aga’s whole personality was such that no other reaction was possible. And when sometimes a suspicious peasant whose stuff was being weighed edged closer to the scale, the better to see and verify the weight behind the scale keeper’s back, Ibrahim Aga at once clapped his hand over the counterweight, held up the measuring, and chased the pest away.

  “Get back! Stop pushing and coughing into the scale! True measure’s the same as faith, a breath can spoil it. And it’ll be my soul that’ll burn for it, not yours. Step back!”

  So Ibrahim Aga spent his whole life suspended over the public scale, living for it and from it, a walking example of what a man can make of his calling, whatever that may be.

  This same Ibrahim Aga, who kept his soul pure by blameless measuring, Desfosses once saw thrashing a Christian peasant in the middle of the market place in full view of everybody. The peasant had brought for sale a dozen axe handles and had leaned them against a crumbling wall that enclosed an abandoned tomb and the ruins of an old mosque. Ibrahim Aga, who watched over the market, flew at the peasant in a rage and kicked over all the axe handles, fuming and threatening the bewildered peasant, who scrambled after his scattered merchandise.

  “Do you think the mosque wall is there for you to lean your filthy handles on, you pig of pigs! There’s no infidel bell-ringing here yet, and no church organ, you son of a she-pig!”

  The crowd went on with their bargaining, haggling, measuring, and counting, and paid scant attention to the fracas. The peasant quickly collected his stuff and disappeared in the throng. When Desfosses got home, he made this entry in his diary: “Turkish authority has two faces. Their methods appear mysterious and illogical to us. They never stop puzzling and amazing us.”

  Hamza the crier was something else again—a different sort of destiny as it were.

  Famed at one time for his voice and his good looks, he had been a wastrel and a loafer from his early youth, one of the most notorious drunkards in the whole of Travnik. In his younger days he had been known for his pluck and his wit. Some of his brash but clever sayings were still remembered and recounted. When asked why he had chosen the job of town crier, he answered: “Because I don’t know of any easier one.” On one occasion, a few years back, when Suleiman Pasha Skoplyak led an army against Montenegro and burned the town of Drobnyak to ashes, Hamza was ordered to broadcast the great Turkish victory and to announce that one hundred and eighty Montenegrin heads had been cut off. One of those who always gather around a town crier asked out loud: “And how many of ours lost their heads?” “Well, that’s the business of the crier in Montenegro,” replied Hamza flatly and went on shouting what had been ordered.

  His dissipation, singing, and the strain of a crier’s profession had long since ruined Hamza’s voice. He no longer roused the bazaar with his old ringing baritone, but announced the official and market news in a hoarse pipsqueak, heard only by
those near him. Still, it would never have occurred to anyone that Hamza should be replaced by someone younger and more sonorous, and he himself appeared to be hardly aware that he no longer had any voice. Striking the same poses and using the same gestures with which he had once sent his famous voice echoing down the lanes, he now delivered his messages to the world as best he could. Now the small fry would gather and skip around him, giggling at these histrionics which had long been too extravagant for his croaking and piping, and they stared open-mouthed and in awe at his bull neck which swelled with the strain like a bagpipe. Nevertheless, he needed these children, for they were the only ones who heard the croaking and promptly spread the news all over town.

  Desfosses and Hamza soon became friends, as the “young Consul” occasionally bought some rug or bauble which Hamza was crying for the merchants and on which he made a handsome profit.

  The Mad Schwabe was an old “character” in the Travnik bazaar. He was a halfwit of uncertain parentage, from somewhere across the border. The Turks left morons severely alone, and so he was allowed to live here and fend for himself, sleeping under shop counters and feeding on charity. He was a man of giant strength and, when he had a little inside him, he was willing to play the fool to the crude pranksters of the bazaar. On a market day someone would buy him a drink or two and thrust a wooden club in his hand, and the poor idiot would then stop the passing Christian peasants and begin to drill them, always with the same words: “Halbrechts! Links! Marsch!” (Half-right! Left! March!)

  The peasants would dodge him or clumsily try to run away, well aware that the Mad Schwabe was put up to it by the Moslems, and he would chase them up and down the street, to the amusement of the younger shopkeepers and the idle agas.

  One market day Desfosses was returning to the Consulate after a visit to the bazaar. His kavass walked behind him. As they reached the spot where the square narrows down and becomes the market street, the Mad Schwabe suddenly popped up in front of Desfosses. The young man saw before him a square-headed colossus with wicked green eyes. The drunken halfwit blinked at the stranger, then lunged toward the nearest shop, snatched up a wooden bar, and made straight at him. “Halbrechts! Marsch!”

  The merchants squatting on their platforms began to crane their necks in malicious anticipation, eager to see how the “young Consul” would dance to the nitwit’s bidding. But the thing turned out quite differently. Before the groom could come to his aid, Desfosses managed to duck under the swinging bar and, in one nimble and lightning movement, grabbed the idiot’s wrist; he then reeled around with his whole body, twisting the giant after him like a stuffed doll. As the idiot tottered backwards around the youth, the bar flew out of his clutching hand in a wide arc and fell to the ground. Meanwhile the groom had run up with his small rifle at the ready; but the idiot’s wind had already been knocked out of him by the painful backward wrench of his arm, about which he could do nothing. Desfosses handed him over to the groom, then picked up the bar from the ground and quietly put it back in its place by the store. With a contorted face, the nitwit looked now at his hurting hand, now at the young stranger, who shook his finger at him, as at a child, and admonished him in his clipped high-flown Turkish accent: “You’re a rowdy. You’re not to be a rowdy, understand!” Then he called the groom and calmly went on his way, past the flabbergasted shopkeepers on their little platforms.

  Daville took the young man sternly to task over the incident, which only proved, he said, that he was right when he warned him not to go through the bazaar on foot, as one never knew what those spiteful, uncouth, idle people might do or think of next. But D’Avenat, who otherwise had little love for Defosses and thoroughly disapproved of his free-and-easy ways, was obliged to admit to Daville that the bazaar was buzzing with admiration for the “young Consul.”

  The “young Consul” continued to explore the neighborhood, rain and mud notwithstanding, and to accost the people freely and talk to them, and so managed to see and learn things which Daville, grave and stiff and unbending as he was, would never see or learn. Daville, whose bitterness caused him to look on everything Turkish and Bosnian with distaste and mistrust, could see no purpose or official advantage in these excursions and reports of Desfosses. The easy optimism of the young man irritated him, as did his eagerness to delve deeper into the history, customs, and beliefs of the natives; his habit of explaining away their faults; and, lastly, his passion for discovering their good traits, which he believed were corrupted and smothered by the strange circumstances in which they were forced to live. This business impressed Daville as a fool’s errand, a harmful straying from official propriety. So his talks with the young Secretary always ended in an argument or petered out in offended silence.

  One cold autumn evening Desfosses came back from one of his excursions, soaked, pink-cheeked, frozen, full of impressions and aching to talk about them. Daville, who had been pacing for hours up and down the warm lighted dining room, his mind churning with melancholy thoughts, was at first astonished to see him. The young man, still a little out of breath, ate with gusto and gave a lively account of his visit to Dolats, a crowded Catholic settlement, and of the enormous trouble he had had in making the short trip there and back.

  “I sometimes think there’s no country in Europe as roadless as Bosnia,” said Daville, who picked at his food without any real appetite, for he was not feeling hungry. “These people, more than any other people in the world, have a peculiar and perverse hatred of roads, which in fact represent progress and prosperity. In this God-forsaken country the roads are not kept up and they don’t last, they almost fall apart by themselves. You see, the fact that General Marmont is building a great highway through Dalmatia is doing us more harm with the Turks here, even with the Vizier, than our boastful and eager friends in Split could possibly imagine. These people don’t like to see roads anywhere near them. How can you explain that to our friends in Split? They’re busy bragging to all and sundry how these new roads of theirs will improve communication between Bosnia and Dalmatia, and they have no idea how suspicious the Turks are about it.”

  “Well, it’s no wonder,” Desfosses told him. “I can see it all rather clearly. As long as Turkey has the kind of government it has, as long as conditions in Bosnia remain what they are, there’ll be no roads or communication. On the contrary, both the Turks and the Christians, though for different reasons, oppose the opening and maintenance of all traffic links. As a matter of fact, I had a good example of it today when I was talking with my friend Fra Ivo, the fat priest of Dolats. I was complaining how steep and eroded the road was from Travnik to Dolats, and wondering why the people of Dolats, who had to use it every day, did nothing to keep it in at least some kind of order. The Brother first looked at me with a grin, as if I didn’t know what I was saying, then winked shrewdly and told me in an undertone, ‘The worse the road, sir, the fewer are the Turkish visitors. What we would like to see is a great big mountain between us and them. As for ourselves, well, we can manage any road with a little trouble when we have to. We are used to bad roads and every kind of difficulty. Indeed, we live on difficulties. Don’t repeat what I’m telling you, but, you know, as long as there are Turks in Travnik, we don’t need a better road. Between you and me, as soon as the Turks repair it, our folk break it up and spoil it at the first rain or snow. It all helps to keep the unwelcome guests away.’ As he said this, the Brother opened his closed eyes and, pleased with his cunning, begged me once more not to repeat his words to anyone. Well, there you have one reason why the roads are unspeakable. And the other is the Turks themselves. Every new link with the Christian world outside is like opening a door to enemy influences. It gives the enemy a chance to work on the rayah and to threaten Turkish authority. And when everything is said and done, M. Daville, we French have swallowed half of Europe and shouldn’t really wonder if the countries we have not yet occupied look with a jaundiced eye on these highways, which our armies are building right on their frontiers.”

  �
��Yes, I know, I know,” Daville interrupted him. “But Europe needs roads and we can’t stop to consider backward peoples like the Turks and the Bosnians.”

  “Those who maintain that roads have to be built, build them. Which means they consider them necessary. But the point I’m trying to make is that these folk here don’t want any roads, that there are reasons why they don’t want them, and that the roads do them more harm than good.”

  As always, Daville was annoyed by the young man’s urge to explain and justify everything he saw.

  “Really, it’s not anything one can defend,” the Consul said. “And you can’t explain it with rational arguments. The backwardness of these people is in the first place the result of their bad nature—their congenital worthlessness, as the Vizier puts it. That certainly can explain all of it.”

  “Very well then. How do you explain the bad nature itself? Where does it come from?”

  “Where from? They’re born with it, that’s where. You’ll have plenty of opportunity to see for yourself.”

  “Good, but until that happens allow me to stand by my own view that the goodness and badness of a people are the product of conditions in which they live and develop. It’s not goodness that motivates our road-building, but need and our desire to expand useful links and our influence, which many people regard as our own brand of wickedness. So our bad nature drives us to build roads, and theirs to hate them and destroy them whenever possible.”