Bosnian Chronicle

by Ivo Andrić

  Just as there was no resemblance between the two Viziers, so their adjutants too were completely different. The men whom Mehmed Pasha had brought and taken away with him had been, for the most part, young men, all professional soldiers more or less, in any case all good horsemen and hunters. There had been no outstanding personalities among them, who, by their physical or spiritual qualities, whether good or bad, might have stood out from the rest or particularly caught the eye. They had all been bluff and mediocre men, blindly devoted and obedient to Mehmed Pasha, and they were almost as alike to one another as the Vizier’s thirty-two Mamelukes who, like some blank-faced dolls, were all of the same face and size.

  Ibrahim Pasha’s household was quite another matter. Here the number of people was greater, their types and appearance more varied. Even D’Avenat, for whom the world of the Turks held few secrets, sometimes asked himself in wonder where the Vizier could have picked up such a weird collection, why he dragged them around the world with him, and how he managed to keep them together. Ibrahim Pasha was not, as was the case with most viziers, an upstart of uncertain origin. Both his father and his grandfather had been high dignitaries and rich people in their own right. Their family had thus accumulated a large crowd of slaves, wards, confidants, and servants, adoptees, dependents, and relations of vague and uncertain kinship, hangers-on and parasites of every kind.

  In the course of his long and active life and service the Vizier had had to use all sorts of people for a variety of purposes, and especially during the time when he was Grand Vizier to Selim III. Most of them had never left him, even though the job for which they had been employed no longer existed, but remained stuck to him like barnacles to an old ship, tied to his career and fortunes, or, more exactly, to his kitchen and treasury. A few of them were so old and infirm that they never ventured out in daylight and had to be tended in their little cubicles somewhere in the cellars of the Residency; they had, at one time or another, been in Ibrahim Pasha’s employ and had performed some valuable service, which the Vizier had long forgotten and they themselves could only dimly remember. There were some who were young and perfectly fit, but had no clear-cut function and did very little work. A few had been born in Ibrahim Pasha’s household, as their fathers worked there, and so they had grown up and would spend their lifetime in the household, for no visible reason and to no definite purpose. And the accretion did not lack its portion of spongers and the usual beggar dervishes. In short, D’Avenat did not overly exaggerate when, with his knowing smile, he referred to the Residency of the new Vizier as a “museum of freaks.”

  The Vizier took in all of these people without a murmur; he put up with them, dragged them around with him, and, with a patience bordering on superstition, endured their faults and their domestic intrigue and quarrels, feuds and bickering.

  Even those who occupied posts of responsibility and did the work were mostly eccentrics, with a few normal everyday people between them.

  The foremost among them, based on his importance and the influence he had on the administration, was the Vizier’s Secretary, Tahir Beg, a man who enjoyed Ibrahim Pasha’s full confidence and was his chief counselor in all affairs. He was sickly and peculiar, but an honorable man of unusual intelligence. Opinions about him were exceedingly divided, both at the Residency and in the town, but there was no doubt—and here the people of Travnik and the consuls were in agreement—that Tahir Beg was the brains of the Residency as well as the Vizier’s “right hand and the pen in his fingers.”

  As was the case with every high Ottoman dignitary, he too had been preceded by a reputation, garbled and magnified in transit. The Ulema of Travnik—a body of scholars learned in the Koran—who were as numerous as they were full of envy, bit their lips spitefully and consoled themselves with the thought that he too was only a man and that “it is only the heavens above us to which nothing can be added and from which nothing can be taken away.” And indeed, before Tahir Beg had come halfway to Bosnia, they had already managed both to inflate and disparage his reputation. Among those who had come from Istanbul and were spreading tales of Tahir Beg’s intelligence and erudition, one man said that at school they still called him “the Well of Knowledge.” So at Travnik he was immediately nicknamed “Well Effendi.” Which was typical of the bluebloods and agas of Travnik, especially the educated and learned ones. For anything they did not have, did not know, or could not do themselves, they invariably found a bad word or a disparaging name. In this way they managed to participate in all things, even the most exalted, in which otherwise they could never share.

  But when Tahir Beg reached Travnik, the people soon dropped the jeering nickname; it boomeranged on the Ulema, which had been too quick to invent it. Before the personality of the new Secretary every insult and every thought of ridicule withered of itself. After a few weeks the people already called him simply “Effendi,” pronouncing that common title of respect with special emphasis. And although there were many effendis in Travnik at that time, literate and half-literate scribes, men who had learned the Koran by heart, theologians and hodjas, there was only one Effendi.

  Learning, knowledge of foreign languages, and writing skill were in the tradition of Tahir Beg’s family. His grandfather had been a lexicographer and writer of commentaries, his father First Secretary to the Porte, who ended his life as Reis Effendi—high religious dignitary of Islam. Tahir Beg might have followed his father’s footsteps had it not been for the coup d’état which dethroned Sultan Selim and removed the Grand Vizier Ibrahim Pasha first to Salonica and then to Travnik.

  Tahir Beg had only just completed his thirty-fifth year but he appeared much older. From being a precocious youngster he had become, almost without transition, a sickly, heavy, and prematurely aged man. His life and work reflected this. Today, after all he had gone through with Ibrahim Pasha during the latter’s career as Grand Vizier at a most difficult time, and because of the illness which ate away more and more at his otherwise strong and well-made body, he was already a chronic invalid, who moved slowly and unwillingly and yet displayed an irrepressible will to live and an unusual vitality of spirit.

  Had he known how to moderate himself or been willing to give up work, his physician at Istanbul might have perhaps cured him in the beginning. Now the peculiar disease had taken hold and become chronic, and Tahir Beg had resigned himself to the fact that he must live and suffer simultaneously. He had a permanent wound on his left abdomen which closed and reopened several times a year. This forced him to bend in the waist and walk slowly. In the winter and during the spring thaw he was racked with pains and insomnia, and had then to seek relief in alcohol and stronger sleeping draughts. In the absence of his Istanbul physician, Tahir Beg had to salve and dress his wounds himself; he suffered altogether quietly and in secret, never complaining or upsetting anyone.

  It is true that among the numerous staff at the court of Ibrahim Pasha there was also a physician to the Vizier; he was Eshref Effendi, a witty old man who had long forgotten everything he once knew, let alone the medical skills with which he had never been too well acquainted in the first place. In his youth he had been something of an apothecary, but had spent half his life in the army, on the front and in camps, where he “cured” more by means of his kindness and indestructible good will than with professional knowledge and medicines. Ages before, Ibrahim Pasha had pulled him out of the army and taken him along wherever he went, more as a pleasant companion than a doctor. Once a passionate hunter, especially of wild duck, he was now virtually immobilized by rheumatism in his legs and mostly sat around in the sun or in a warm room, always wearing boots topped with woolen cloth. He was a lively man, witty and caustic, but loved and respected by everyone.

  Naturally it would never have occurred to Tahir Beg to entrust himself to the professional mercies of Eshref Effendi, with whom otherwise he loved to converse and make jokes.

  In a special chest, Tahir Beg kept a ready supply of bandages, wide and narrow ones, carefully rolled up, and a
lso cotton wool, lotions, and balms. This was a finely wrought and cleverly designed little box, of a good and rare wood that became more good-looking the older it grew, the longer it was used. In that box Tahir Beg’s grandfather had locked his manuscripts; his father had kept money; and he now stored his medicines and dressings.

  On the days when he was sick, the Secretary had the servants prepare special hot water for him; he would then begin the long, painful, almost ritual treatment of bathing, cleansing, and bandaging. Alone, locked up, and with knitted brows, his facial muscles in a tense cramp, he would carefully wash his wound and apply the ointment and put on a fresh dressing. This often took him several hours.

  Those were the secret and trying hours of the Secretary’s life. Yet they also absorbed and washed away all the distress and rancor which he never spoke about. For after he had finally swabbed, bandaged, laced, and dressed himself, the Secretary emerged once more among his people, calm and strengthened and utterly transformed. On his cool, expressionless face the eyes burned with the old force and his thin lips quivered in a way that was barely noticeable. At such times nothing in the world was too difficult or too formidable for him, there were no questions that could not be solved, no men to be feared, no insuperable problems. The chronic, sore-infested invalid was stronger than healthy men, cleverer than the strong ones.

  The feature which betrayed this man’s real life and true strength was his eyes. At times they were large and shining, the eyes of a great man whose powerful intelligence raised him above the common; at times they narrowed and sharpened and became gold-specked, the bright eyes of an animal that is trapwary, a marmot or a lynx, piercing and cool, showing no recognition or mercy; then again the excited, laughing eyes of a goodhearted but willful boy, sparkling with the natural charm and carefree innocence of youth. The whole of this man seemed to live in his eyes. His voice was hoarse, his gestures slow and sparing.

  Of all the Vizier’s assistants, Tahir Beg had by far the greatest influence on him. His advice was the most often solicited and was always listened to; to him were entrusted those troublesome and doleful problems which the Deputy Vizier often didn’t even know existed. As a rule, he disposed of them swiftly, easily, and naturally, without too many words, with that golden glint in his eyes; and once the thing was settled, he would never refer to it again. He gave selflessly and generously of his knowledge and acumen, like a man who had more than enough and was used to giving, who needed nothing for himself. He was equally at home in Moslem law, military affairs, and finance. He knew Persian and Greek. He was a perfect calligrapher and had his own collection of verse which Sultan Selim had read and loved.

  Tahir Beg was one of the few Osmanlis at the Residency who never complained about his exile in Bosnia, about the wildness of the land or the crudity of the natives. Privately he pined for Istanbul; more than any of his colleagues, he missed the luxury and joys of life in the capital. But like his wounds, he hid and “salved” his nostalgia out of sight, in the privacy of his room.

  The direct opposite of Tahir Beg was the Treasurer, Baki—his irreconcilable but ineffectual opponent, known at the Residency as Kaki. He was a cripple in mind and body, a freak accounting machine, a man whom everyone hated and who did not ask for anything else. Force of habit, rather than need, had long made him indispensable to the Vizier. Although he never admitted this to himself, the Vizier, who ordinarily liked only quiet and gentle people, kept and tolerated this spiteful oddity in his midst from a kind of superstitious instinct, as though he were a talisman that attracted all hatred and evil to itself, from near and far. As Tahir Beg described it, he was “the Vizier’s house snake.”

  Wifeless and friendless, Baki had for years been the keeper of the Vizier’s accounts, a job he performed scrupulously and conscientiously in his own fashion, saving every penny with a morbid, tight-fisted obsession, defending it as it were from all comers, even the Vizier himself. His life, which in reality was joyless and devoid of any personal happiness, was devoted entirely to self-congratulation and the struggle against expenses, no matter whose, what kind, or in what department. Infinitely and savagely malicious, he in fact derived no advantage from his malice, since he needed nothing for himself and lived only to indulge his malice.

  He was a short and portly man, without beard or mustaches, with a sallow, thin, and transparent skin that seemed to be filled, not with muscles and bones, but with a colorless liquid or with air. His yellow cheeks were bloated and sagging, like two bags. Above them floated a pair of shifty eyes, blue and clear like the eyes of small children, but always chary and suspicious. These eyes never laughed. His shirt and tunic were cut low around the neck, which was swollen and ringed by three deep creases, as on a fat anemic woman. All of him, in fact, gave the impression of an oversized bagpipe that would collapse with a loud hiss if one pricked it with a needle. His whole body quivered with its own labored breath and shrank in fear from any touch that was not its own.

  Humor and relaxation were alien to him. He spoke little, not a word more than he had rehearsed beforehand, or what he considered necessary. He listened and paid rapt attention to anything that concerned himself or what he regarded as his. If he could have lived two lives, they would not have sufficed for this preoccupation. He ate little and drank only water, for he neither had teeth to chew with nor a stomach that could digest, and the mouthful he saved was sweeter to him than the one he ate. But since eating was unavoidable, he made the most of every morsel, caressed it with his tongue and thought of it tenderly, for it was about to become part of his body.

  This man always felt cold, no matter where he was or what the season of the year. His sensitive skin and flabby body would not allow him to dress as warmly as he should have. The chafing of a seam or a hem made him sore; it could irritate and exasperate him to the point of self-pity. All his life he had been looking for warm fabrics that were both light and soft, and he dressed himself with an eye to comfort, in ample, loose, and simple garments, regardless of style and public opinion. One of his dreams was a dream of warmth. He dreamed of a small unfurnished room that would be heated by an invisible fire from all sides, evenly and constantly, and would yet be light, clean, and full of fresh air. It would be a sort of temple to himself, a heated tomb, but a tomb from which one could exert a mighty, unceasing influence on the outside world, to one’s own satisfaction and the undoing of everyone else.

  For Baki was not only a ridiculous tightwad and an egocentric crank, but a slanderer, informer, and scandalmonger who had embittered many lives and caused not a few men to be separated from their heads. That was particularly true of the Treasurer’s period of glory during Ibrahim Pasha’s term as Grand Vizier, when he, Baki, had rubbed elbows with great dignitaries and had been at the center of events. “The man whose plate Baki upsets will never dine again,” was what they said of him then. Yet even now, in this peripheral job of his, lacking his old connections and influence, an aging man more laughable than dangerous, he did not cease writing to various important people in Istanbul and, more from habit than anything else, informing them of anything he thought he had found out, slandering and casting suspicion on anyone he could. Even now he could sometimes spend an enjoyable night in this manner, hunched in a cramp over a piece of paper, as other people spend a night in jolly company or in the transports of love. And he did all this quite naturally, almost always without any personal gain, driven by an inner need, without shame, pangs of conscience, even without fear.

  Every living creature at the Residency loathed this Treasurer, and he loathed them all in return, together with all the rest of creation. A fiend for thrift and bookkeeping, he refused to employ clerks and scribes. All day long he pored over money, muttering to himself as if in prayer, counting and making notes with a short blunt reed pen on odd scraps of paper which he had filched from other officials. He spied on the inmates of the Residency, beat and sacked the younger ones, pestered the Vizier with calumnies and denunciations of the senior officials, imploring hi
m to stop and forbid waste and “extravagance.” He fought against expenses and disbursements, against every pleasure and joy, indeed against every form of activity in general, and was inclined to lump together the articulate and enterprising people with the jolly and happy-go-lucky ones, and to look upon them all as idlers and dangerous spendthrifts.

  In this battle of his against life as it is lived, there were a number of absurd and depressing incidents. He paid spies to tell him in what room the light was burning longer than necessary, he counted what people ate and drank, and took an inventory of the heads of onion in the garden as soon as they showed above the soil. In point of fact, all these measures cost more effort and money than the sum total of prevented waste. (Tahir Beg jokingly suggested that Baki’s zeal caused the Vizier more damage than all the indulgence and vices of the other officials put together.) Fat and short-winded as he was, he thought nothing of climbing down to the cellars or up to the attic to inspect the stores. He made lists of everything, marked everything, and kept an eye on everything, yet all of it melted away somehow. He waged a desperate campaign against the normal course of life itself and would have been happiest if he could have snuffed out the whole living world the way he snuffed out the needless candles in various rooms, with a moistened thumb and forefinger; and if then he could have remained alone in the dark beside this guttered light of life, gloating over the fact that they were all plunged in darkness, that at last they had stopped living, and therefore spending, whereas he was still alive and breathing, a victor and witness of his triumph.