Bosnian Chronicle

by Ivo Andrić

  Daville forced himself to look at the Vizier, whose eyes indeed had lighted up and glowed at the corners like crystals.

  A barely audible murmur passed through the divan. The audience was at an end. Seeing von Mitterer’s eyes riveted on the mat, Daville too screwed up courage to cast a glance at the trophy heap. The lifeless objects of leather and metal seemed dead twice over; abandoned and pitiful, they lay there like something that had been disinterred and brought into the light of day after centuries. The indescribable mound of severed ears and noses lay still; around it was a scattering of salt, black as earth with the soaked-up blood and mixed with the chaff of grain sacks. All of it gave off a cold, rancid, trailing odor.

  Daville looked several times at von Mitterer, and then back at the reed mat in front of him, secretly hoping that the whole thing would vanish like a bad dream; but each time his eyes came to rest on the same objects, defying belief yet real and inescapable in their lifelessness.

  “Wake up!” Daville thought quickly. “Wake up and shake off the nightmare, get out into the sun, rub your eyes and get a breath of fresh air!” But there was no awakening; this sordid horror was the bedrock of reality itself. This was the kind of people they were. Such was their life. This was what the best of them did!

  Once more nausea welled up in Daville’s throat and he felt his eyes dimming. Still, he managed to take his leave politely and go home with his suite as if nothing had happened. Once there, instead of sitting down to lunch, he went and lay on his bed.

  Next day Daville and von Mitterer met again. Not asking who owed a visit to whom, they all but rushed into each other’s arms, as if they hadn’t seen each other in ages. They kept shaking hands and looking into each other’s eyes like two shipwrecked men. Von Mitterer had already checked up on the true facts of the Turkish victory and on the origin of the trophies. The arms had been seized from a Serbian column, while the pennants and everything else were taken in a brutal massacre which the exasperated and unemployed troops had wreaked on a congregation of Bosnian peasants somewhere in the vicinity of Zvornik, during a religious feast.

  Von Mitterer was not a man given to reflection and there seemed to be no point in discussing the thing further. But Daville fretted himself sick over the last audience, asking himself over and over again: “Why the lies? Why this useless, almost infantile pretense? What is the real meaning of their laughter and of their tears? What is behind their silence? And how can the Vizier, with his lofty notions, and that seemingly honorable Suleiman Pasha and the wise Tahir Beg organize such a thing and lend their presence to these exhibitions which bear the ghastly stamp of another, lower world? Which is their true face? Which is real life and which calculated play-acting? When are they lying, when are they speaking the truth?”

  And besides his physical revulsion he felt himself tormented by the gnawing realization that he would never be able to find a rational standard for judging these people and their actions.

  This kind of soul-searching was even more painful and harder to take when it involved some point of French interest—in other words, Daville’s personal pride and official zeal.

  Through his agents Daville kept in constant touch with the Turkish garrison commanders on the Austrian frontier. Every plundering foray by these garrisons, even the smallest, or even an intimation that a foray was being mounted, forced the Austrians to send their troops into the territory and maintain them there. Making full use of his connections, Daville thus tried all he could to weaken the Austrian army’s strength and to perpetuate the tension along the Austrian-Bosnian frontier.

  Outstanding among these garrison commanders was the captain of Novi, Ahmed Beg Cerich. Daville knew him personally. He was quite a young man, who had taken over his father’s command after the latter’s death. He was voluble and impetuous. Ahmed Beg burned with a desire to gain glory in fighting on the frontier which his forebears had crossed and plundered so often. He boasted indiscreetly of his ties with the French and sent threats and insulting messages to the Austrian commander on the other side, signing them: “From Ahmed Beg Cerich and the French Emperor Napoleon.”

  In keeping with the tradition of the frontier commanders, he hated and despised the Vizier, seldom came down to Travnik, and refused to obey orders and instructions from anyone.

  The Austrians succeeded, through their people at the Porte, to blacken Ahmed Beg’s name and expose him as a traitor in the pay of the French. It was a faster, cheaper, and more efficient method than battling for years with the young and ebullient captain along the frontier. The trap was well laid. A decree sentencing Ahmed Beg to death was sent to Travnik, with a reprimand to the Vizier for tolerating such captains and letting the Porte find out about their treason from other sources. The choice was laid down very plainly: Either the offending captain would be removed and disposed of or a new Vizier would be sent to Travnik.

  It was not an easy thing to lure Ahmed Beg to Travnik, but the Austrians were helpful even here. The captain was tricked into believing that the French Consul would like to see him and talk to him. The moment he got to Travnik he was arrested, put in irons, and thrown into the fortress dungeon.

  Daville now had an opportunity to see the Turkish terror at work, to find out what lies and force could do when combined, and what powers he was up against in this town of the damned.

  Already the morning after Ahmed Beg’s arrest, a gypsy was hanged below the cemetery and the town crier announced pointedly that he had been hanged “because he invoked God’s mercy on the captain from Novi” when the latter was being led to the fortress. It was the same as condemning the captain to death. All at once, everything and everybody began to quail with that blind, cold fear that from time to time descended on Travnik and Bosnia, halting and freezing all life and even thought for a few hours or days, thus enabling the power which inspired it to carry out its will swiftly and without interference.

  All his life Daville had loathed and avoided everything that was dramatic. He found it hard even to imagine that there could be only one solution to a conflict, the tragic one; this ran counter to his whole nature. Yet now he was embroiled, indirectly, in a real tragedy that was beyond unraveling and solution. In the excitable state he was in, trapped in these mountains, confused and harried now for almost two years by difficulties and troubles of every kind, Daville felt himself more entangled in the affair of the captain from Novi than in fact he was. What pained him especially was that the captain, according to D’Avenat, had been lured to Travnik in his name, so that the hapless man might imagine that the French Consul had been an accessory to his misfortune.

  After a sleepless night he decided to seek an audience with the Vizier and to intercede for the captain, in a discreet and moderate way, so as not to cause him more harm. The talk with the Vizier revealed a totally new face of Ibrahim Pasha. This was not the Ibrahim Pasha with whom, only a few days before, he had conversed, as with a close friend, about the disorders of the world and about the need for harmony among intelligent men of high ideals. As soon as he mentioned the captain, the Vizier grew cool and distant. Impatiently, almost in wonder, the Vizier listened to his “noble friend,” whom, evidently, life had not yet taught that conversations were conversations and business was business and that everyone had to bear his appointed burden alone and deal with it as best he could.

  Summoning all his wits, Daville tried to be resolute, persuasive, and trenchant, but he himself was aware that his mind and will were languishing and ebbing, as in a dream, and that some irresistible flood tide was sweeping the handsome smiling captain away. He even dropped Napoleon’s name a few times, asking the Vizier what the world would say when it learned that a distinguished high officer was given capital punishment simply because he was thought to be a friend of France and had been falsely accused by the Austrians. But every word of Daville’s was swallowed up instantly, without recall, in the silence of the Vizier.

  At length, the Vizier said: “I thought it would be safer and better to hol
d him here until the hue and cry against him has died down; but if you wish, I shall send him back to his garrison and let him wait there. However, Istanbul shall have the last word.”

  It seemed to Daville that none of these obscure phrases had any connection with the captain’s fate, or with his own agitation, but he could not get anything more out of the Vizier.

  He also called on Suleiman Pasha, who had just come back from Serbia, and on Secretary Tahir Beg, and was amazed and stunned to be greeted with the same silence and the same gaze of pained astonishment from them. They looked at him as if he were wasting his breath on something that had long been over, and irretrievably lost, although politeness required that his speech should not be interrupted but should be heard with patience and sympathy to the end.

  On the way back to the Consulate, Daville asked his interpreter what he thought about it. D’Avenat, who had translated all three interviews that morning, said unexcitedly: “After what the Vizier said it is clear that nothing can be done for Ahmed Beg. It is a lost cause. It will be either exile to Anatolia, or something worse.”

  Blood rushed to the Consul’s head. “How do you mean? Didn’t he promise to send him back to Novi at the very least?”

  For a moment the interpreter let his red-rimmed eyes rest on the Consul’s face; then he said in a dry, flat voice: “How could he send him back to Novi, where the captain would have a hundred ways of saving himself and defying him?”

  The Consul had the impression that the tone and the eyes of his interpreter too had something of that impatient wonder which had so rattled and offended him when he spoke with the Vizier and his assistants.

  Once again, the Consul had to endure a sleepless night, with its creeping hours, its sense of utter loss that sharpened his realization of impotence and sapped his will to defend his cause. He opened the window, as if seeking help from outside. He inhaled deeply and stared into the darkness. Out there somewhere was the grave of the gypsy who’d had the bad luck to meet the captain on the bridge before the fortress and had called out “Merhab”—God be with you—in a humble and timid voice, for, gypsy though he was, he had not the heart or the effrontery not to greet the man who had once done him a great favor. Out there too was the young captain, lost, without justice or good reason. As if the darkness were easier to see by than the beguiling light of day, Daville now plainly saw his own helplessness and the captain’s fate.

  During the Revolution in Paris and in his war years in Spain he had seen many deaths and disasters, tragedies of innocent lives, and fatal misunderstandings; but he had never yet seen, in this way, so close at hand, a man of honor foundering headlong under the pressure of events. In this kind of environment, where morbid circumstances, blind chance, caprice, and base instincts were the order of the day, it was evidently possible for a man, singled out accidentally by someone’s accusing finger, to find himself swept into the whirlpool of events and to drown without help. And now this handsome, strapping, wealthy captain was suddenly caught up in this kind of vortex. He had done nothing which frontier commanders had not done all their lives as far back as anyone could remember, but he, as it happened, found himself snarled in a tangle of events that was to kink and knot itself into a lethal rope.

  It was by accident that the Austrian frontier commander, in advancing his proposal to destroy the young captain of Novi, had met with ready understanding among his superior officers; it was by accident too that the Austrian authorities happened just then to attach great importance to keeping peace on the frontier; that Vienna sent a strongly worded demand to an official at the Porte, who was in their pay, asking that the captain be removed; that this unknown high official, being very anxious at that moment not to jeopardize his Austrian income, exerted strong pressure on the Vizier at Travnik; and that Ibrahim Pasha, discouraged and intimidated for the rest of his life, handed the matter over to the harsh and implacable town Major, who thought nothing of destroying an upright man, and who, in his turn, happened at that moment to be casting about for a strong deterrent example that would illustrate his power and strike fear into the notables and frontier commanders.

  Each one of these personages acted independently and for himself alone, without any reference to the person of the captain; but working as they did, all together, they drew the noose tight around the captain’s neck. All unwittingly and quite by accident.

  Such was the fate of the Consul’s unlucky protégé. As he peered into the humid darkness, Daville began to grasp more clearly what he had been unable to grasp that morning from the impatient silence and those amazed looks at the Residency.

  And on the other side of Travnik, on the farther bank, as it were, of that same darkness, sat Colonel von Mitterer, still awake in a pool of untroubled light, penning his report on the case of Ahmed Beg Cerich to his superior. He took care to underline his own contribution to the downfall of the captain from Novi, without undue embellishment, so as not to upset the commanding officer in Croatia and all the others who had worked on this case. “The restless and ambitious captain, a great enemy of ours, is at this moment lying in irons in the local citadel, under a grave indictment. The way things stand, he is not likely to keep his head. From what I have learned, the Vizier is determined to make short work of him. While I cannot work openly and make special efforts toward that end, you may rest assured I shall do nothing do discourage them from wringing his neck once and for all time.”

  Next day at dawn, the captain from Novi was shot dead in his sleep and buried the same morning in the cemetery between the highway and the Lashva River. The town was given to understand that he had attempted escape while they were taking him to Novi and that the guards had to fire after him.

  Daville lived in a slow fever and all but collapsed from lack of sleep and fatigue. Yet the moment he closed his eyes he felt that he was alone in the world, surrounded by a conspiracy of the forces of hell, that he was fighting them with the last of his strength, with fading senses, in thick fog and on slippery ground.

  He was kept awake by the thought that he must write a report without delay, in three copies, one each to Paris, Istanbul, and Split. He must sit down and write, describing his intervention with the Vizier as a dramatic struggle for the prestige of France, and blaming his lack of success on unfortunate circumstances.

  For a time, the death of the captain of Novi afflicted Daville like a sickness, but then he began to convalesce. When he rose up from it he said to himself: “You came to this country at a bad time and now you can’t turn back. Try to bear in mind always that you cannot measure the actions of these people by your own standards and according to your own sensibility, for this is the surest way of going under in a very short time.” With this resolution he went back to work once more. And times being what they were, new anxieties soon pushed the old ones into oblivion. New tasks and instructions arrived for the Consul. Realizing that his superiors did not attach the same significance to the death of the captain of Novi that he did himself in his isolation and bewilderment, Daville too made an effort to erase this defeat from his consciousness and silence the nagging questions raised by it. It was not easy to forget the ruddy girlish face of Ahmed Beg, with its flashing teeth and the clear brown eyes of a mountaineer and the smile of a man who was afraid of nothing. Nor was it easy to forget that silence of the Vizier’s, before which the Consul had felt powerless and humbled, incapable of defending his rights and the cause of his country. And yet, under the avalanche of new problems that kept growing by the day, he could not help forgetting even that.

  The Vizier suddenly became his old self again. He resumed inviting Daville and was cordial to him, he did him various favors and talked to him as usual. Daville cultivated this peculiar friendship of his. They came to spend more and more time in intimate conversation, which the Vizier often monopolized for his pessimistic soliloquies but in which Daville always managed in the end to push through some petty consular business for which he had come. There were days when the Vizier himself took the init
iative and asked the French Consul for a chat on some pretext or other. In this respect Daville far outclassed his rival von Mitterer. The Austrian Consul was received only when he asked for an audience and the Vizier talked to him briefly, in a politely cool and official manner.

  Not even the fact that Napoleon’s peace treaty with Russia had caused widespread disappointment and strong anti-French feeling in Istanbul could for long affect the relationship between the Vizier and the Consul. As always with the Turks, the change of mood was sudden and the surprise complete. When the Vizier first got the news of the treaty from Istanbul, he cooled off immediately. He stopped inviting Daville for a chat; and when the latter asked for an audience, he talked to him dryly and curtly. But all this lasted only a short while and, as always, ended in an abrupt about-face. The Vizier relented for no visible reason, and the friendly discourses and small mutual attentions were resumed once more. If the Vizier felt like carping on Napoleon’s latest move, that too served only as a take-off for joint melancholy reflections on the impermanence of human relationships. Daville put the blame for everything on England; and Ibrahim Pasha had loathed the English as much as the Russians ever since the day when, as Grand Vizier, he had watched the English navy force an entry into the Bosporus.