Bosnian Chronicle

by Ivo Andrić

  The bethrothal and marriage of the Austrian Princess Marie Louise to Napoleon were matters of passionate concern to Anna Maria. She followed every detail of the ceremonies in the Vienna newspapers, knew the names of all personages who took part in them, and memorized every word allegedly said on those occasions; and when she read somewhere how Napoleon, unable to wait for his bride at the prearranged spot, had rushed off incognito, in a plain carriage, to meet her and had burst into her coach somewhere along the open road, Anna Maira wept with enthusiasm and rushed like a whirlwind into her husband’s study to tell him how right she had been all along in judging the Corsican as an unusual man and a unique example of greatness and sensitivity.

  Although it was Holy Week, Anna Maria visited Mme Daville, to tell her all she had learned and read and to share with her the admiration and wonder she felt.

  April had brought some unusually sunny days and Mme Daville was putting them to good use in the garden. Work around the flowers and the vegetable patch was the duty of Mundjar, a deaf-mute, who had been their gardener from the first year. Madame Daville was so used to him that she found it quite simple, with signs, facial expressions, and finger movements, to work with him in perfect understanding on everything relating to the garden. And not only that, but the same language of signs enabled them to “talk” about other things, the events in the town, the gardens in the Residency, the Austrian Consulate, and especially about the children.

  Mundjar lived with a young wife in one of those poor huts at the foot of Osoye. Their place was clean and orderly, the woman was strong, handsome, and a good worker, but they had no children. This was a bane of their life. When the Daville children came to watch him at work, he often couldn’t take his eyes off them and watched them longingly. Always clean, quick and nimble-handed, he kept right on digging like a mole as he smiled at them with his deeply sunburned, creased face—the special, inimitable smile of those who cannot speak.

  Wearing her wide-brimmed garden straw hat, Mme Daville would stand by as he dug and supervise the manuring, crumbling hard clods of soil with her fingers, preparing a special bed for a rare species of hyacinth she had managed to obtain that spring. When they told her that Frau von Mitterer had come to visit her, she took the news as though it were an interruption of nature or freak weather, and went in to change.

  In a sunny warm alcove, where even the windows and walls were draped in white, the two consuls’ wives sat down to exchange many pleasantries and fine sentiments. Anna Maria supplied both in abundance, for her eloquence and intensity of feeling all but mesmerized Mme Daville. The main topic was the Emperor’s marriage, about which Frau von Mitterer knew every last detail. She knew the exact number and rank of the persons present in the church during Napoleon’s wedding rites, the length of Marie Louise’s imperial mantle, which was held up by five real queens and was made of heavy velvet, nine feet long, embroidered with bees in thread of gold, the same ones the Barberini family use in their coat of arms, a family which, as is well known, has given the world a great many Popes and statesmen, who in turn, as is well known . . .

  Frau von Mitterer’s talk drifted further and further into the hoary past and ended with cries of enthusiasm that were less pertinent than they were heartfelt. “Oh, aren’t we fortunate to be living in these great times, even if we’re not always aware of them, and don’t appreciate their true greatness?” said Anna Maria and embraced Mme Daville, who submitted to it without protest, as she could not turn away or ward it off. Madame Daville had always been content to get along without imperial weddings and historic particulars, as long as her children remained healthy and everything in her home was in good order.

  Then came the tale of the dashing Emperor who, like any ordinary traveler, dressed only in a simple uniform, raced down the road at breakneck speed and stormed into the carriage of his imperial bride, throwing all protocol to the winds.

  “Oh really . . .” said Mme Daville, who could not quite see the point of the story or its reference to greatness, since her natural inclination would have been to see the bridegroom wait for the bride in a place duly selected for the purpose and not to upset the arrangements.

  “Ah, it was magnificent . . . simply magnificent!” sighed Anna Maria and flung the light cashmere shawl from her shoulders. Her enthusiasm had made her feel quite warm, although she wore only a thin rose-colored dress that was much too light for the time of the year.

  Madame Daville would have liked, if only out of courtesy, to say something equally nice and pleasant to Frau von Mitterer, so as not to be thought lacking in enthusiasm. But the whims and ways of rulers and great personages were to her strange and remote things, of which she had only the vaguest idea and on which she hardly knew how to comment, even if she had been willing to lie and pretend. Still, in order to say something at least, she told Anna Maria about her plans for a new type of very showy hyacinth, indicating, not without zest, how striking they would look in four rows of different colors down the middle of the whole garden. She showed her the boxes that contained the lumpy, rough, brown tubers of the future hyacinths, divided according to the color of flowers.

  In a separate box she had the bulbs of a particularly choice variety of white hyacinth that a courier had brought from France, of which she felt especially proud. A strip of these was to be planted diagonally across the four other beds so as to tie them in a white band. No one here in Travnik had ever seen such a fine variety, nor such color, smell, or size. She spoke about the trouble she had had in procuring this treasure and added at the end that, taken all in all, the whole thing was quite inexpensive.

  “Oh, oh!” cried Anna Maria, still in the throes of her wedding excitement. “Oh, isn’t that magnificent! We shall have Imperial Hyacinths in the wilderness! Oh, chère madame, let us christen this variety and name it ‘Wedding Joy’ or ‘Imperial Bridegroom’ or . . .”

  Enraptured by her own words, Anna Maria thought up a whole series of new names, and Mme Daville agreed to all of them automatically, as if she were talking to a child whom it was better not to contradict if the conversation was ever to come to an end.

  After this their talk was bound to falter. When two people converse, one word usually sparks another and together they light a flame, but here the words missed one another and went off in different directions. It could hardly have been otherwise. Anna Maria thrilled to things that were remote, strange, and outside her life; Mme Daville only to what was near and intimately bound up with herself and her family.

  In the end—and this was how every conversation with Mme Daville always ended—her children came in to meet the visitor and say good morning. They were boys, two of them; the baby girl, still only two months old, having just been fed and warmly wrapped, slept in her crib of white tulle.

  The eight-year-old Pierre, slight and pallid in his dark blue velvet suit and white lace collar, was pretty and demure like an altar boy. He led in his younger brother Jean-Paul, a sturdy robust child with blond locks and pink cheeks, who had been born at Split and had just turned three.

  Anna Maria did not like children, while Mme Daville could not imagine anyone’s being indifferent to them. Time spent in the company of children filled her with a sense of desolation and boredom. These soft, childish bodies that were still growing repelled her as something unformed and immature and gave her a feeling of almost physical queasiness and ineffable fear. She was ashamed of this feeling (she herself did not know why) and tried to disguise it with sweet words of endearment and playful cries, which was her stock approach to children in general. But in herself, deep inside, she shrank from children and feared them, those little people who stared at one with their big new eyes, in that unflinching, quizzical way of theirs, as if in cold, dispassionate judgment—or so at least it seemed to her. As a rule she broke away from those long childish gazes and dropped her eyes, which never happened to her with the grownups, perhaps because the grownups were either easier to bribe and cajole into assent or were more willing accomplices to
one’s weaknesses and vices.

  And now Anna Maria felt the same boredom and queasiness in front of the Daville children. In default of genuine delight in these little people, she kissed them passionately and loudly, summoning the necessary enthusiasm from her inexhaustible surfeit of transport over the imperial wedding in Paris.

  When she finally took her leave, she marched down the path between the newly dug flowerbeds to the tune of the wedding march, while Mme Daville and her astonished children watched her from the threshold of the doorway. She turned once more at the garden gate and, with a wave of her hand, called that they must see each other more often now, and talk some more, much more, about the lovely, lovely, and great things that were happening.

  This soaring mood of his wife struck Colonel von Mitterer as being out of keeping with the directive he had received, but he and the whole household were happy that Anna Maria had found a distant, harmless, and more or less steady object for her enthusiasm. For a whole year Travnik and the petty, tedious life of the Consulate ceased to exist for Anna Maria. She seemed to forget about wanting her husband to transfer and lived entirely in a cloud of imperial married bliss and peace on earth and mystical visions of universal harmony. This was reflected in her talk, her bearing, and her music. She knew the names of all the ladies in waiting of the new Empress of France, the value, shape, and quality of all the wedding presents, and Marie Louise’s way of life and her daily program. She followed the career of the divorced ex-Empress Josephine with sympathy and understanding, so that even her need to cry from time to time was now focused on a remote but worthy target, which meant that the Colonel was spared many a trying moment.

  Life in the French Consulate that year passed off without excitement and dislocation. Toward the end of summer Daville sent his oldest son to a lycée in France. At his recommendation, D’Avenat’s son was also accepted as a state scholar and sent off to Paris.

  D’Avenat was overjoyed and immensely proud, but being dry and burnt out like a cinder, he was incapable of showing and articulating his joy like other people; he trembled in his whole body as he thanked Daville, assuring him that he was ready to lay down his life for the Consulate whenever necessary. So great was his love for his son and his longing to secure for the boy a better, finer, and worthier life than he himself had had.

  As the year wore on, monotonously and peacefully, and nothing untoward happened, one had every reason to call it a good year.

  There was peace in Dalmatia, the frontiers were mercifully quiet. The Residency was becalmed. The consuls met during the holidays as heretofore, avoiding cordiality and more intimate contact, and watched each other closely on working days, though without excessive zeal or spite. The people of all faiths slowly grew accustomed to having the consuls around. Seeing how the troubles and difficulties with which the consuls had had to contend so far had not been enough to drive them from Travnik, the people reconciled themselves and began to collaborate and reckon with them in business and include them in their workaday existence.

  So the life of the town and the consulates flowed on placidly, from summer to autumn and from winter to spring, with no other changes save the usual ones brought about by the daily round and the march of the seasons.

  But the chronicle of quiet and happy years is brief.

  19

  The same courier who, in the month of April 1811, brought to Travnik the newspapers announcing that a son had been born to Napoleon who was to bear the title King of Rome, also brought von Mitterer an order that recalled him from Travnik and placed him at the disposal of the Ministry of War. Here, then, was the rescue which the Colonel and his family had been awaiting these past years. And now that it was here, it all seemed rather simple and self-evident; and like most rescues, it came both too late and too soon—too late because it could not change or mitigate all they had gone through while waiting to be rescued, and too soon because, like all uprooting, it raised a host of new problems (moving, money, further career prospects), to which so far no thought had been given.

  Anna Maria, who in the last few months had settled down wonderfully and become much quieter, burst into tears—for, like most people of her temperament, she was prone to cry from sickness as well as cure, from yearning as well as its fulfillment. It was only after a stormy scene with the Colonel in which she blamed him for all those things which by rights he ought to have blamed her for (had he been so inclined) that she gathered enough strength and purpose to begin packing.

  A few days later the new Consul-General, Lieutenant-Colonel von Paulich, who till then had commanded a frontier regiment at Kostaynitsa, arrived to take over from von Mitterer.

  The entry of a new Austrian Consul, on a sunny April morning, was a colorful and impressive event, even though the Vizier did not send a particularly large escort to meet him. Tall and youthful-looking, riding a fine horse, von Paulich drew all eyes and aroused curiosity and grudging admiration even in those who would never be caught admitting it. And not only he, but his retinue too, was exceptionally well got out, spruce and trim, as if they were on parade. Those who saw him told those who happened to be away from the bazaar at the time what a handsome, upstanding fellow the new Austrian Consul was (“Infidel though he is!”).

  And when, two days later, he and von Mitterer passed in a ceremonial procession on their way to a reception at the Vizier’s, an unexpected miracle occurred.

  The people actually watched the procession, stared at the new Consul, and turned to gaze at him long after he had passed. The Moslem women looked from behind their window grilles, the children clustered on fences and walls, but no voices were raised, not a single disparaging word was heard anywhere, even though the Moslems in the shops along the way remained impassive and dour as ever.

  Such was the public reception of the new Consul. And the same thing happened again on the return trip from the Residency.

  Earlier von Mitterer had told von Paulich how both he and his French colleague had been treated on their first arrival in Travnik a few years back, and he was now disappointed at the change. In a huff that was more than a little tinged with envy, he filled the new Consul’s ears with details of the abuse he himself had been exposed to at the time. He spoke of it ruefully, with an undertone of reproach in his voice, as if he, von Mitterer, had by his humiliation, smoothed the way for this pleasant passage of his successor.

  But the new Consul, in fact, was a type of person before whom all roads seemed to open up smoothly.

  Von Paulich came from a rich Germanized family in Zagreb. His mother had been an Austrian from Steiermark, from the prominent family von Niedermayer. He was thirty-five years old and strikingly handsome. He was tall, fine-complexioned, with a small brown mustache over his mouth, large eyes in which a pair of dark blue pupils shone with a steady light, and a shock of naturally wavy hair that was cropped and combed in military fashion. The whole man radiated a cool, self-possessed, almost monkish air, without, however, a trace of those inner conflicts and strife that so often leave their tortured imprint on the visage and bearing of monks. This exceptionally handsome creature seemed to move and live, as it were, in a sort of icy armor, behind which all sounds of a personal life and human weakness and needs faded and grew inaudible as in a shell. His conversation was like that too—factual, affable, and quite impersonal; and so were his deep voice and the smile that sometimes played over his regular, white teeth and flitted over his stony face like frosted moonlight.

  This imperturbable man had once been the precocious child of a comfortable family, developed beyond his years and gifted with a remarkable memory, one of those exceptional schoolboys who turn up once in a generation, to whom studies are no problem whatever and who can cram a two-year course into one scholastic year with the greatest of ease. The Jesuit fathers, with whom this unusual boy was studying, quickly saw that he was developing into one of those perfectly rounded, commanding personalities who stand like cornerstones at the base of their Order. At the age of fourteen, however, the bo
y turned his back on the Order, betrayed the hopes of the Jesuits, and showed an unexpected interest in a military career.

  His parents encouraged him, especially his mother, whose family had a strong military tradition. And so, from a boy who amazed his humanities teachers with the quickness of his intelligence and the extent of his knowledge, he progressed to a lanky, bluff cadet with an apparently brilliant career ahead of him, then to a young subaltern who did not drink or smoke, had no love affairs, no trouble with his superiors, no duels, and no debts. His company was the best kept and the best outfitted, he took the lead in all examinations and drills, yet without any of that visible zeal which follows ambitious men in their climb like a harsh shadow.

  After he had completed all courses and passed first in all examinations, von Paulich again startled his superiors by opting for service on the frontier, a domain usually reserved for officers of inferior qualifications and middling ability. He learned the Turkish language, familiarized himself with the territory and methods of work, with the local people and conditions. And when von Mitterer’s repeated pleas for a transfer finally came to the attention of his superiors, von Paulich was luckily available as the “familienloses Individuum” (man without a family) for whom the Colonel had appealed so fervently from Travnik.

  And now von Mitterer, weary and intimidated by life’s multiplicity, could sit back and observe this young man and his extraordinary professional ways. Under his eyes and hands, it seemed, every job became transparently clear and was settled easily and simply, at the proper time and in its proper place, so that there was no crowding or confusion, no pressure or delay. Every piece of work was liquidated smoothly and thoroughly, like an account without outstanding balances. And the man himself seemed to stand above and outside everything, inscrutable and hard to reach, and took part in the work merely as a brooding presence and an energy that supervised, instructed, and made decisions. He was quite innocent of those doubts and irresistible waverings, those partisan sentiments and idiosyncrasies, all those emotional shadings that lie athwart the business of men and so often baffle, upset, and immobilize one, even sometimes warp the task itself in an undesirable way. He was not hampered by any of these—or at least so it seemed; the man functioned like a disinterested higher spirit or like unfeeling nature herself.