Bosnian Chronicle

by Ivo Andrić

  “This, then, is the story we would like you to tell over there, so that our name will be kept alive in that brighter and more civilized world which is forever crashing and dimming, forever shifting and changing, but which will never perish and will always exist somewhere for some men. Tell that world that we carry it in our hearts, that even here we serve it in our own fashion, that we feel ourselves part of it, although we are hopelessly and eternally separated from it. And this is not vanity or an idle wish, but a genuine need and a plea from the bottom of our hearts.”

  That, more or less, would have been what Solomon Atias might have told the French Consul on the eve of his leaving Travnik forever, at the moment when Solomon gave him his hard-earned ducats to enable him to travel. That, or something like it, is what he might have said. But none of it was very clear or explicit in his own mind, still less was it ripe for saying; it all lay inside him, a living, kicking fetal weight as it were, dumb and inexpressible. And was there a man alive who could express his subtlest feelings and his noblest yearnings? No one, or almost no one. So how could a hide merchant of Travnik give tongue to them, a Spanish Jew who was no longer at home in any language? And even had he spoken all the languages of this world, what use would they have been, since even in his crib they had not let him cry out loud, let alone speak freely and clearly during his lifetime? But that was the reason and the import, hard though it was to decode it, of his stammer and trembling during his last visit to the French Consul.

  If the making and furnishing of a house is as hard and slow a job as going up a hill, the dismantling of an institution or a household is as quick and easy as going downhill.

  Sooner than he could have hoped, Daville received an answer from Paris. They granted him a three-months leave of absence, but he was to take his family with him right away and leave D’Avenat to deputize at the Consulate. The question of liquidating the French Consulate at Travnik would be settled when he got to Paris.

  Daville requested an audience with the Vizier, to advise him of his departure.

  Ali Pasha now wore the look of a sick man. He was unusually friendly toward Daville. It was plain that he had been informed of the imminent shutdown of the Consulate. Daville made him a present of a hunting rifle, and the Vizier gave him a fur-lined cloak, which meant that he considered Daville to be leaving for good. They parted as two people who did not have a great deal to say to each other, since both were preoccupied with themselves and burdened with their own worries.

  The same day Daville sent von Paulich the gift of a gun, a valuable carbine of German workmanship, and several bottles of Liqueur Martinique. He enclosed a long letter in which he let him know that he and his family would be leaving Travnik in a few days, on “an extended leave of absence which, God willing, may become permanent.” Daville requested the necessary visas and letters of recommendation to the Austrian frontier authorities and to the quarantine commander at Kostaynitsa.

  “I hope,” wrote Daville further, “that the treaties now being negotiated in Paris will give the world peace, as just and durable as the Peace of Westphalia, and so vouchsafe the present generation a long, deserved respite. I hope and wish that our great European family, united and at peace, will henceforth desist from giving the world a sorry example of discord and strife. These, as you know, were my tenets of belief before the last war, during the war, and they are that today, more than ever before.”

  “Wherever I may be,” wrote Daville, “wherever destiny chooses to send me, I shall never forget that in the barbarous land where I was condemned to live, I found the most enlightened and most amiable man in Europe.”

  As he was finishing the letter on this note, Daville decided to leave without a personal good-bye to von Paulich. He felt that of all the difficulties he had to bear, the hardest would be the self-possessed and victorious visage of the Colonel.

  Reporting to his own Court Chancellery about the imminent closure of the French Consulate-General at Travnik, von Paulich added the recommendation that the Austrian Consulate-General be closed down as well. The Consulate was no longer warranted, he wrote, not only because the French would cease to be active in these parts, but also because, judging by the straws in the wind, Bosnia might be convulsed at any moment by internecine violence and an open struggle for power between the Vizier and the begs. The struggle would consume all their attention and energies, and therefore no armed forays against the Austrian frontier might be expected in the foreseeable future. Intelligence concerning these internal Bosnian affairs might easily be obtained by Vienna through the friars or special agents at all times.

  To this proposal of his von Paulich attached a copy of Daville’s letter. In the margin, against the passage where Daville had written of him flatteringly, von Paulich added in his own hand: “I have often had occasion in the past to draw attention to M. Daville’s luxuriant imagination and his tendency to exaggerate.”

  Daville spent a whole summer afternoon with D’Avenat, putting the papers in order and giving him instructions.

  D’Avenat was his usual lugubrious self, the muscles on his cheeks knotted and tense. According to Paris, his son had been detailed to the Embassy office in Istanbul, but the actual appointment had been delayed in the great flurry of take-over in France, and Daville now promised to use his influence at the Ministry to see it through. Thinking only of his son, a bright and goodlooking youth of twenty-two, D’Avenat assured the Consul that he would carry out the liquidation in good order and pack everything away, down to the last pen and the smallest scrap of paper, even if they hacked him to pieces.

  As they were still not finished by dinnertime, they continued to work after dinner. About ten D’Avenat went home.

  Remaining alone, Daville looked around the half-empty room in which a solitary burning candle flickered in vain against the gathering gloom. The windows were bare, curtainless. The white walls were checkered in pale rectangles, where pictures had hung till yesterday. A watery purl flowed into the room through an open window. Two of the clock towers chimed some kind of Moslem hour, first the one in the neighborhood, then a distant one in the lower bazaar, as if mocking the first.

  The Consul was worn out, but his excitement, a tingling sort of energy in its own right, kept him awake and alert, and he went on making order among his personal papers.

  In a hard binding tied with green ribbons, there was the manuscript of his epic poem about Alexander the Great. Out of the twenty-four cantos he had originally planned, seventeen were already written, although even those were not in final form. In the past, writing of Alexander’s military campaigns, he had always had “the General” before his eyes, but for over a year now, ever since he had begun to identify the downfall of the living conqueror with his own personal destiny, he had felt incapable of saying anything about the rise and fall of the long-dead conqueror of his epic. And so here before him now was this half-finished work in all its absurdity of logic and time sequence: Napoleon had completed the great arc of his rise and fall and had once more landed on earth, while Alexander was still somewhere in mid-flight, storming the “Syrian passes” at Issus, with never a thought of falling. Daville had often struggled to get the thing going again, but was defeated each time by the realization that his poetry invariably lost tongue in the presence of real-life events.

  Here too was the beginning of a tragedy about Selim III, which he had started writing the year before, after the departure of Ibrahim Pasha, prompted by his long talks with the Vizier about the enlightened but hapless Sultan.

  Here also was a sheaf of those encomiums and verse letters penned on various gala occasions and celebrating various men and regimes. Poor orphaned verses, dedicated to lost causes and personalities who today meant less than the dead.

  Finally, there were stacks of bills and personal letters, tied up with a string, yellow and dogeared. As soon as he tore the string, the papers fell apart in tatters. Daville recognized single letters at a glance. He saw the regular, firm handwriting of one of his be
st friends, Jean Villeneuve, who had died on a ship the year before within sight of Naples. The letter was written in the year 1808, in reply to some agitated communication from Daville himself.

  “. . . Believe me, mon cher, your dark broodings and fears have no basis in fact, and less today than ever before. The great and extraordinary man who now guides the destiny of the world is laying the cornerstones of a better and lasting order for generations to come. That is why we must rely on him unquestioningly. He himself is the best guarantee of a happy future, not only for each of us but our children as well, and the children of our children. So be quiet in your mind, my dear friend, as I am, whose peace of mind rests firmly on the acceptance of the foregoing. . . .”

  Daville lifted his eyes from the letter and gazed at the open window where the night moths, attracted by the light, were darting into the room. And then from the nearby Moslem quarter a song arose, faintly at first, then growing stronger. It was Musa the Singer, coming home. His voice was short-winded and hoarse, and his song fitful, but drink had not yet finished him; he was still alive, and alive inside him too was what von Mitterer once had called “Urjammer.” Now Musa had turned the corner of his alley, because his voice sounded fainter and fainter, spaced out more and more, like the throttled cries of a drowning man. It rose again to the surface, to cry out once more, then sank again deeper than before.

  Now the singer must have staggered into his courtyard, for his voice was heard no more. Once more silence was complete, unruffled by the gurgle of water, which only made it fuller and more even.

  And so too everything else was drowned out. It was the way “the General” had drowned and, before him, so many other powerful men and great movements!

  Left once more in the steady silence of the night, Daville sat on a few moments, with his arms crossed and his eyes vacuous, as if transfixed. He was wrought up and thoughtful, but no longer frightened or lonely. In spite of the uncertainty and difficulties that still lay in wait, it seemed to him as if, for the first time since he had come to Travnik, the air around him was growing lighter and a fragment of a road was looming dimly ahead.

  Since that February day, more than seven years before, when, after his first audience with Husref Mehmed Pasha, he had returned upset and humiliated to the room of Baruch’s ground floor and sunk down on the hard sofa, all his work and struggles with Bosnia and the Turks had conspired to drag him earthward, to shackle and weaken him. Year by year, the coursing of the “oriental poison” had mounted in his veins and sapped him—that poison which dims a man’s vision and eats at his will, with which the country had plied him from the very first day. Neither the proximity of the French army in Dalmatia nor all the dazzle of great victories could reverse the process. And yet now, when, after defeat and collapse, he was getting ready to leave everything and face an uncertain future, he felt a stirring of will and purpose such as he had not known in these seven years. His worries and needs were greater than ever, but strangely enough they no longer drove him out of his mind as once they used to, but rather they honed his thoughts to a keener edge and broadened his outlook; they no longer pounced on him unsuspected, like a curse and a calamity, but were part of the mainstream of his life.

  At that moment a sound of rustle and scratching could be heard from the next room, like a mouse in the wainscoting. It was his wife, tireless and methodical as always, wrapping and putting away the remaining things. In this same house were his children, now asleep. They too would grow up one day (he was determined to do all he could to see them grow up good and happy), and they would set off in quest of the road which he himself had never succeeded in finding; and even if they never found it, they would at least go after it with more strength and dignity than he had been able to marshal. Asleep now, they were growing. Yes, there was life and movement in this house, no less than in the world outside, where prospects were opening up and new possibilities were ripening in the sun.

  As if Travnik were already far behind him, he no longer thought of Bosnia, of what it had given him or how much it had taken away. All he felt was an undercurrent of new strength and patience surging back into him, and a resolve to save himself and his family. He went on making order among the faded papers, tearing up all that was outdated and superfluous, saving and filing away anything that might be of some use in the changed circumstances of life in France.

  And playing over this humble, mechanical chore was a vague but obstinate thought, like a recurring tune: that somewhere out there the “right road,” the one he had sought all his life in vain, must nevertheless exist. And not only did it exist, but sooner or later someone was bound to stumble on it and throw it open to all men. He himself had no idea how, when, or where, but it was sure to be found some time, perhaps in his children’s time, or by his children’s children, or by a generation still to come.

  Like a soundless inward melody, that thought lightened his work.

  Epilogue

  For three weeks now the weather had held fairly steady. The begs had already started going out for coffee and a chat on the Sofa at Lutva’s coffeehouse, as they did every year. But their talk was restrained and cheerless. Throughout the land the silent consensus was growing that the time was ripe for rebellion and resistance against the mad and intolerable government of Ali Pasha. In the minds of people the idea was already as good as settled, and now it was coming to a head by itself. Ali Pasha, too, was speeding up the process by his own actions.

  On this day, the last Friday in the month of May 1814, all the begs were present in force and the conversation was lively and earnest. They had all heard the news of the defeat of Napoleon’s armies and of his abdication; now they were merely comparing, swapping, and checking their information. One of the begs, who had talked to the Residency staff that morning, said that all arrangements had been made for the departure of the French Consul and his family; moreover, according to a dependable source, he would soon be followed by the Austrian Consul, who had been sitting it out in Travnik on account of the Frenchman anyway. So it was quite safe to assume that before the summer was out Travnik would be rid of the consuls and the consulates, and of everything they had brought with them and started here.

  They all received the news as though it were the tidings of some victory. Although in the course of years they had in many ways grown accustomed to the presence of foreign consuls, they were all pleased, nevertheless, at the thought of their going. The foreigners’ way of life was alien and outlandish, and they had been arrogant enough to meddle in Bosnian affairs.

  They speculated who would take over the “Dubrovnik Depot,” which now housed the French Consulate, and what would become of the big Hafizadich house when the Austrian Consul too left Travnik. They all raised their voices a little so that Hamdi Beg Teskeredjich, who was sitting on the fringe of the gathering, might also hear what was going on. He had grown very old and wizened, fallen in like a disused, ancient house. He was getting hard of hearing. He had trouble lifting his eyelids, which had grown heavier of late, and had to throw back his head when he wanted to take a better look at someone. His lips were bluish and tended to stick together when he talked. The old man raised his head and asked the last speaker: “When was it they came, these . . . consuls?”

  The company exchanged glances and there was some loud guessing. Some replied that it was six years ago, others that it was longer than that. After a brief argument and some counting, they agreed and established that the first Consul had arrived more than seven years before, three days before the Bairam of Ramadan.

  “Seven years, eh?” Hamdi Beg said thoughtfully, drawling a little. “Seven years! And do you remember what a hue and cry there was over these consuls and over that . . . that Bonaparte! Bonaparte here, Bonaparte there. He was going to do this, he was going to do that. The world was too small for him. His strength was boundless, no one could match him. So this infidel rabble of ours lifted up their heads like some cobless corn. Some hung on to the coat tails of the French Consul, others to th
e Austrian, and the third lot waited for a Russian. The rayah went plain off their heads and ran amuck. Well, that was that and it’s over. The emperors got together and smashed Bonaparte. Travnik is sweeping out the consuls. The people will talk about them another year or two. The children will play at consuls and kavasses down by the river, riding on wooden sticks, and afterwards they too will forget them as if they’d never existed. And everything will be the same again, just as, by the will of Allah, it has always been.”

  Hamdi Beg stopped, as his breath gave out, and the others remained silent in case he had anything more to say. And as they drew on their pipes, they enjoyed their relaxed, victory-scented silence.

  A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  IVO ANDRIĆ was born in 1892 in Travnik in northern Bosnia. At the outset of the First World War, while he was still a student, Andrić was arrested for his participation in a revolutionary movement which opposed the Habsburg regime and sought unity and independence for the South Slavic peoples. He was in prison for three years. After his release, he completed his studies, and received a doctorate in history from the University of Graz in Austria. He then entered his country’s diplomatic corps and served in a number of European capitals, including Berlin, where he was stationed at the outbreak of hostilities between Yugoslavia and Germany in 1941. During the Nazi occupation of Yugoslavia, Andrić remained under virtual house arrest in his Belgrade apartment, and devoted himself to writing. The publication of his Bosnian Trilogy—of which this volume serves as the centerpiece—in 1945 firmly established his reputation in his native land. In 1961 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. He died in 1975.