Bosnian Chronicle

by Ivo Andrić

  Another wealthy Moslem from Turbe, whose wife Fra Luka had saved, did not speak of it to anyone (since one did not talk of women), but every year after the Feast of the Assumption he sent the monastery a big jar of honey and a sheepskin with the instructions “to give it to the priest who cures the sick.”

  But there were also contrary cases of black ingratitude and diabolical spite. The monastery would long remember the case of Mustay Beg Miralem’s daughter-in-law. The young woman suffered some kind of seizure and began to act in a restless, possessed fashion; she screamed, tossed, and gnashed her teeth day and night, or else lay on the bed all day long, speechless and unmoving, refusing to look at anyone or eat anything. The people in the house tried everything they were advised to do, but nothing helped, neither sorcery nor hodjas nor talismans. And the woman wasted away by the day. In the end, her father-in-law, old Miralem himself, sent to the monastery for “Brother Doctor.”

  When Fra Luka arrived, the woman was in a state of near collapse for the second consecutive day, her body all contorted; and no one could move her out of her dark silence. At first she wouldn’t even turn her head. But a moment later, opening her eyelids just a little, she caught sight of the friar’s heavy sandals, then the hem of his cassock and the white cord which the friars tie around their waists, and then her gaze traveled slowly and sullenly up the long lean figure of Fra Luka, and it took quite some time until she came up to his gray head and met his smiling blue eyes. At that moment the woman suddenly burst into laughter—unexpected, uncontrollable, mad laughter. The friar tried to calm her with words and gestures, but in vain. As he came out of Miralem’s house he could still hear that terrible laugh echoing from the ground floor behind him.

  Promptly the next day the police took a manacled Fra Luka to jail. The Guardian of the monastery was informed that old Miralem had accused Fra Luka of casting an evil spell on his daughter-in-law, with the result that for two days now she had been in a spasm of laughter and drove the whole house crazy. The Guardian denied it and maintained that a doctor’s duty was to treat and cure if he could, and that spells and charms were against the religious laws of the Brotherhood. At the same time he bribed the officials left and right, five groschen to one, ten to another, though it was for nothing. He was told only that the “Doctor’s” case looked very bad, as the young woman had stated that the friar had secretly given her a drink of “something black and thick like axle grease” and had twice struck her on the forehead with a long cross, and that since then she hadn’t been able to stop that laughter which was a constant racking agony.

  Just as everything began to look grim and hopeless, they suddenly broke Fra Luka’s irons and let him go as if nothing had happened. It seems that on the fourth day the young woman had calmed down and then burst into silent copious tears. She called her father-in-law and her husband and told them that she had vilified the friar in her fit of madness; she admitted that he had given her no medicines of any kind and did not have a cross on him, but had merely raised his arms over her and prayed to God according to his own law, on account of which she was now feeling better.

  So the affair died down. For a long time afterwards, however, the Brothers were very cross with Fra Luka. Fra Miyo Kovachevich, who was Guardian at the time and had had the most trouble and worry over Fra Luka’s case, told him later in the refectory before the assembled Brothers: “Now listen to me, Fra Luka. Either you take those harebrained Moslem hussies off my back or I’m going to run off into the forest and you take these and carry on both as doctor and Guardian. We can’t go on like this.” Angrily, in all seriousness, he held out the monastery keys.

  But peace was restored and the incident was forgotten. All that remained was the Guardian’s entry in the monastery ledger, under “fines and expenses”:

  On January 11 the police officer came with manacles and a warrant declaring that Fra Luka Dafinich, the doctor (ill-starred was the day when he became one!), had given the wrong pills to Miralem’s daughter-in-law. . . . Paid in fines, to the judge and the cashier: 148 groschen.

  And even in later years there were frequent difficulties with Fra Luka’s medical practice. The Brothers usually forgot them after a while, but the monastery ledger did not. In the column of fines, bribes, and expenses, there was many a note on Fra Luka.

  Because Fra Luka treated a Turk . . . 48 groschen.

  On account of the doctor . . . 20 groschen.

  Here, somewhere, an entry was made at last of the number and date of the order by which the monastery superiors placed a total ban on “Any praying over a Turk or Turkish woman whatsoever, or giving any medicines whatsoever,” even if they had a permit for it from the Turkish authorities. And immediately underneath there was a new fine entry:

  Because Fra Luka did not go to see the patient . . . 70 groschen.

  And so it went on, year in and year out.

  Twice during Fra Luka’s long life Travnik was laid waste by the plague. The people fell sick, died, took to the mountains. The bazaar closed down and many houses were left desolate forever. The most intimate ties loosened, conventions were swept away. In both epidemics Fra Luka proved his great worth as a fearless doctor and member of his Order. He went through the plague-stricken quarters, treated the sick, heard confession and administered communion to the dying, buried the dead, helped and counseled those who survived. The Brothers fully acknowledged this and his reputation and fame as “Doctor” were recognized even among the Moslems.

  But when a man lives a long time he is apt to outlive everything, even his good works. The epidemics and catastrophes were succeeded by good and quiet years; things changed and were forgotten, they blurred and faded away. And through all this, the successes and the misfortunes, the praise and the abuse, the temptations and the victories, Fra Luka alone remained the same, unchanged and constant, with his look of preoccupation, his thin smile and lightning movements, with his faith in the mysterious interdependence of medicines and illnesses. Because he knew no other life but that of medicine and pharmaceutical work, as far as he was concerned everything in the world had its place and raison d’être—sickness as well as harm, the Guardian’s anger as well as misunderstandings and calumnies. In the last analysis, even being arrested was undoubtedly some sort of blessing, except for those unpleasant irons on one’s feet and the nagging worry that back there at the monastery the herb potions might spoil and the leeches die out, or his Brothers in Christ might scatter and mix up the sprigs and packets of his botanicals.

  And yet whenever these “inveterate opponents” of his, the friars, at whom sometimes, though only for a moment, he grumbled to himself—whenever any of them fell ill, Fra Luka nursed them and cared for them with selfless devotion, and advised them and worried over them when they were well. As soon as one of them had the slightest cough, Fra Luka would set a pot of herbs on the brazier and personally carry the hot aromatic brew to the patient’s cell and force him to drink it. Among the Brothers there were a few cholerics and eccentrics, waspish, grumpy old “uncles” who wanted no part of the “Doctor” or his medicines, who drove him out of their cells or else jeered at him and his treatments; but Fra Luka refused to be put out or turned back. He passed over the jokes and insults as if he didn’t hear them, doggedly insisting that they follow his treatment and look after themselves; he begged them, argued with them, and bribed them to take the medicine which he had compounded with so much trouble and often at so great a cost.

  There was one among the old “uncles” who loved plum brandy in excess of his allotment and beyond what was considered good and useful for physical health and spiritual well-being. The old man had a bad liver but wouldn’t stay off drink. Fra Luka, who in his book of prescriptions also had a formula under the heading “to make drinking hateful,” went to a lot of trouble to try to cure the old friar, but without success. Every day they would go through the same argument.

  “Forget about me, Fra Luka, and get busy with those who want to be cured and for whom there is a
cure,” the uncle would grumble.

  “Come, come, sick one, use your head. There is help for everybody. Mother earth has a cure for every man.”

  And Fra Luka would sit by the ailing and churlish old uncle who had never, even when he was in better health, cared much for books or learning, and he would produce texts and expatiate at great length on the bounties of the earth and her marvelous benevolence toward mankind: “Did you know that Pliny calls the earth ‘benigna, mitis, indulgens, ususque mortalium semper ancilla’—kindly, gentle, patient, ever at the service of mortals? That he wrote, ‘She bringeth forth healing herbs and ever laboreth in man’s cause’? See, that’s what Pliny says. And you keep repeating, There’s no cure for me.’ Of course there is, and we have to find it.”

  The old man’s answer was a bored frown. He dismissed both Pliny and the potion with a wave of his hand, but Fra Luka would neither be brushed off nor foiled.

  And when he could not cure him with his medicines and soothe him with quotations, he then brought him, secretly and under the guise of medicine, a dram or two of plum brandy from which the Guardian had cut him off completely, and so eased his suffering at least a little.

  Moreover, Fra Luka didn’t confine his nursing to the Brothers who were in the monastery. For those scattered in the outlying parishes he wrote out yellow slips of paper in his microscopic hand and bound them into thin little booklets. These little volumes, known as “medicals,” were then copied over and distributed through the villages and parishes. They contained alphabetical lists of folk medicines, interspersed with instructions on hygiene, popular superstitions, and useful household hints and advice. For example: how to clean a hassock of candle wax dripping; or, what to do about wine that is turning vinegary.

  Here, among the prescriptions for jaundice and “fever not caused by gall,” there were notations from Italian sources on “How Experts mine Ore in the Indies and other Places,” or “How to Make the so-called Vermouth Wine, which is a tonic for the Intestine.” All the knowledge and the facts which Fra Luka had culled and gathered in the course of years, from the hoary Compositiones Medicamentorum down to Mordo Atias’s formulas and old wives’ brews, were contained in these little brochures. Yet here too Fra Luka met with ingratitude from his Brothers and many disappointments. Some were careless in making copies, while others, either from ignorance or lack of attention, perverted or dropped out single words and entire sentences; and there was a third lot who filled the margins of certain prescriptions with scornful remarks about the medicines and even the “Doctor” himself. But Fra Luka laughed at these remarks when he came across them; and then consoled himself with the thought that this labor of his on the “medicals” was nevertheless of far greater use to the people and to the Brothers themselves than the hurt he suffered from the inattention and lack of appreciation of his Brothers.

  There was one other, though much less obdurate, thing that made Fra Luka’s work difficult—the mice. The ancient and sprawling monastery building truly abounded in mice. The Brothers maintained that Fra Luka’s cell, resembling as it did Mordo’s pharmacy, with its fats and balms and concoctions of every kind, was the main reason that the building teemed with mice. On his side, Fra Luka complained that due to the age of the building and the disorder in the cells the mice had become firmly ensconced, which was why they now played havoc with his medicines and why he was powerless against them. The battle of the mice had with time become a harmless mania with him. He wailed and complained more than was warranted by the actual damage. He locked things away from them and hung his medicines on the ceiling beams, and he thought up a hundred tricks for outsmarting his invisible enemies. He dreamed of getting a large metal box in which he could store all the more valuable things under lock and key, fully protected from the mice, but hadn’t the courage even to breathe of such a purchase and expense before the Brothers or the Guardian. And he was inconsolable when the mice did, in fact, eat up the rabbit fat which he had so carefully prepared and cleansed in several waters.

  He kept two mouse traps in his cell at all times, a large and a small one. Every night he set them up meticulously, baiting them with a sliver of smoked ham or a gob of wax from the remnant of a candle. And in the morning, when he got up to go to chapel prayers, he usually found both traps empty, though still set, and the wax and ham eaten up. But when sometimes the mouse did get caught and he was awakened by the snapping of the trap door, he would get up from bed, walk around the frightened mouse, and shake his finger and his head at him. “Ahaaa! What now, you little wretch? Wanted to do mischief, did you? Well, look at yourself now!” Then, barefoot as he was and wrapping the habit loosely around his middle, he would carefully pick up the trap, carry it into the long gallery as far as the stairs, open the small trap door and hiss: “Out with you, you little sneak! Out, out!”

  The panic-stricken mouse would dart down the few steps, then straight across the courtyard floor and into the woodshed which was stacked with logs at all seasons of the year.

  The Brothers were familiar with this mouse-catching system of Fra Luka’s; they teased him often and said that the “Doctor has for years been trapping and releasing the same mouse.” Fra Luka firmly denied it and cited long chapter and verse to prove that over a twelve-month period he had caught a good many of them, large, small, and medium-sized ones.

  “Come, come,” one of the older Brothers told him, “I heard that when you let the mouse out, you open the trap door and say to him: ‘Get out and run to the Guardian’s room. Run!’”

  “Ooh, you tempter, what a tongue you have! What’ll you think of next!” laughed Fra Luka, defending himself.

  “I didn’t think it up, Doctor Effendi, they’ve heard you, the ones that gad about the gallery in the dead of night the way you do.”

  “Go on, tempter. Stop it, will you.”

  And the others were usually quick to join in. “If I were you, Brother, I would catch him and dunk him in boiling water, trap and all, and then see if he came back,” a younger friar said with tongue in cheek.

  At this Fra Luka always grew very agitated. “Go on, you wretch, think what you’re saying. What boiling water? Is that the talk of a Christian?” the “Doctor” would fly at him.

  And even half an hour later, after all the banter and other conversation, he would turn to the young man, his voice brittle with reproof: “Boiling water, eh? Look at him! One of God’s creatures into boiling water—really!”

  And that was how Fra Luka contended with his adversaries, big and small, while nursing, feeding, and defending them. It filled his long and happy life.

  The fourth doctor who came to the Consulate during the illness of Daville’s son was Giovanni Mario Cologna, the accredited physician of the Austrian Consulate-General.

  It would seem now that we erred when we said of Mordo Atias that he was the one of whom least could be said among the four doctors of Travnik. In reality, no more could be said of Cologna than of Mordo. The reason for it, in Mordo’s case, was that he never said anything, whereas Cologna talked too much and constantly modified what he said.

  He was a man of uncertain years, of uncertain origin, nationality, and race, of uncertain beliefs and views, and of equally uncertain knowledge and experience. About the whole man there was, in fact, very little that lent itself to clear definition.

  According to his own account, he was born on the island of Cephalonia, where his father had been a well-known doctor. The father had been a Venetian, though born in Epirus, and his mother had come from Dalmatia. Cologna had spent his childhood with his grandfather in Greece and his youth in Italy, where he had studied medicine. His adult life had been spent in the Levant, in Turkish and Austrian service.

  He was tall but uncommonly thin; he walked with a stoop, bent and loose in all his joints, so that at any given moment he could either contract and fold up, or else unwind and extend himself, as on hidden springs; which, in fact, he did constantly whilst talking, now more, now less. This long body was topped b
y a regular head, always restless, almost entirely bald, with a few long wisps of lusterless flaxen hair. The face was clean-shaven, the eyes were large, brown, and always unnaturally shiny under the thick bristling gray brows. In the large mouth there were a few big yellow teeth which clattered slightly as he talked. And not only his facial expression, but the whole appearance of the man kept changing all the time, in a way that was hard to believe. He was capable, in the course of a single conversation, of transforming his appearance completely several times over. Under the mask of a feeble old man there would sometimes flash out—was it yet another mask?—the image of a forceful, self-assured man of middle years; or—a third mask?—that of a pert, fidgety, lanky youth, who has grown out of his clothes and doesn’t know what to do with his hands and feet, or where to look. The expressive face was always in motion and betrayed the feverishly rapid play of his brain. Depression, reverie, outrage, sincere enthusiasm, naïve delight, pure unruffled joy, succeeded one another with amazing swiftness on this regular and unusually mobile face. In keeping with it, his large mouth, with its scant and infirm teeth, poured out words, a spate of them, rich and pregnant ones, words that were angry, bold, kindly, sweet, and rousing. And they were words of Italian, Turkish, modern Greek, French, Latin, and “Illyrian.” And the ease with which he changed his facial expressions and his movements was also apparent in his switching from one language to another, in his mixing and borrowing of words and whole sentences. In reality, the only language he knew well was Italian.

  He did not even sign his name always in the same way, but wrote it differently on different occasions and at different periods of his life, depending on whose service he was in and what kind of work he did, whether scientific, political, or literary—Giovanni Mario Cologna, Gian Colonia, Joannes Colonis Epirota, Bartolo cavagliere d’Epiro, dottore illyrico. The nature of what he did, or claimed to do, under these different names changed even more frequently and thoroughly. In his basic convictions Cologna was a man of his time, a philosophe, a free and critical spirit, purged of all prejudice. But that did not prevent his studying the religious life, not only of the various Christian churches, but Islamic and other Eastern sects and faiths. And for him to study meant identifying himself for a period of time with the object of his study, enthusing over it, at least for the moment, as his sole and exclusive belief, and rejecting all that he had previously believed and all that heretofore had moved him to enthusiasm. He had an extraordinary mind, capable of strange flights, but made up of elements which readily fused with their environment and had a tendency to link and identify themselves with whatever lay around them.