After the personal, confessional nature of the early prose poems, the first impression conveyed by Andrić’s short stories is of their objectivity. Andrić as an individual, with a particular life's path and expirience, is remarkably absent from his prose fiction. But this objectivity is only on the surface. The many characters and situations portrayed all tend to illustrate those fundamental facts of human existence with which Andrić is concerned in his verse. The extent to which all his works are indeed part of one and the same work becomes clear as the symbolic quality of the stories emerges. Andrić’s first collection of short stories entitled “The Journey of Ali Đerzelez” was published in 1920. In the interwar period Andrić published three books of stories simply entitled as “Short stories”, in 1924, 1931 and in1936; the collection of stories “New Short Stories” in 1948, “Panorama” in 1950, “Faces” in 1960 and “The House on Its Own”, posthumously, in 1976.

The major part of his fiction consists of short stories, comprising eight volumes of the collected works if one includes the novella, “Damned Yard“, as opposed to the four novelas. The stories cover a range of themes, although many of them, and the majority of those published before the Second World War, are set in Bosnia at different points in its history. The subsequent course of Andrić's life as a diplomat is quite removed from his central interests as a writer. Some aspects of his public life are reflected in the stories published in this period but these are only settings; the the intricacies of diplomatic life and writer's own activity in it play no part..

The stories do, however, arrange themselves into groups, and this is how they have been printed in the collected works, with the author's agreement. There is, for example, one volume entitled “Children“, which contains tales concerning children or seen through their eyes. There is a whole series of stories, set in the little town of Višegrad, which are similar to the individual and more or less self-contained chapters of the novel “The Bridge on the Drina”. There are also stories connected with Sarajevo and with Travnik. In these stories set in Bosnia there is a strong sense of history, some dramatic moments recur, such as Serbian uprising of 1804 and the uprising in Višegrad in 1878. They are, mainly, written in the period 1920-1941. There are also some stories, written between 1945-1960, like pieces of fantasy which are close to Andrić's prose poetry or reflctive prose than to conventional narrative fiction.

{tab Review}

Andrić’s first short story, published in 1920. Its protagonist is the hero of a large number of Moslem heroic ballads. Bearing in mind the special place accorded to “legend” and “fairy-tale” in Andrić’s statements about art, we should consider exactly what form “the grain of truth contained in legend” takes in this tale.

The traditional ballads concerned with Alija deal exclusively with his prowess on the battlefield. Andrić refers to his fame in just one sentence: "He was renowed for many battles and his fearful strength... " and immediatelly takes him off his horse, setting him down in a context where he appears awkward because he is not used to being on the ground, or to normal social interaction. His stature is a t once diminished: “In a few days the magic circle around Đerzelez had quite disappeared. “There is no clear reason why the label “hero“ should have attached itself to this particular person. He is small, unprepossessing and ungainly as soon as he dismounts, awkward and uninteresting in conversation. He is slow-witted and chronically lacking in imagination. But he is also obsessive. Once he sees a beautiful woman he can think of nothing else but possessing her. Or he abandons himself wholeheartedly to the singing of a particularly fine traditional singer: “Đerzelez felt that the singer tugging at his soul and that any moment now, he would expire, from excessive strength, or excessive weakness. “

Đerzelez can flourish only in circumstances where his simple-minded strength energy can be expressed in the immediate violent ways he understands. He is quite baffled by more intricate social relationships and by the whole deeply disturbing question of women. Andrić here exploits the comic possibilities exposing a renowned hero to the demands made on men by their ballads about Marko Kraljević

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translated by Joseph Hitrec, George Allen and Unwin Ltd, London, 1969

(...)

Farther away, in the semi-darkness, Djerzelez was lunging after the last of the Gypsy woman and trying to corner Zemka. He forced himself to run as fast as his legs would carry him and was already gaining on her when she suddenly wheeled left and vanished on the path that led down between the ploughed fields. Djerzelez had not expected so sudden a turn heavy, rigid and drunk as he was, having started running he could not stop. He went over the rounded edge of the slope and ran down the high steep bank toward the brook. At first he managed to stay on his feet, but as the incline grew steeper he lost his balance and tumbled like a log all the way down and into the brook. Feeling wet stones and silt under his hands, he began to pick himself up right away. The glare of the blaze was still in his eyes, but down here it was dark. He scooped some water and cooled his hands and forehead. He sat like this for a long while. The night was wearing on.

After a time he felt chilly and was seized by an unpleasant shiver; collecting himself, he resolved in his fuzzy head to drag himself out of the brook. He clambered up the slope, holding on to grass and bushes, using his knees, bearing more and more to the left where the bank was less steep; and all this he did as in a dream.

After a lengthy and strenuous effort, he found himself on the edge of the meadow, which for some time now had been utterly deserted. It was dark up there. He felt the even, hard ground underfoot and only then gave in to exhaustion. He dropped to his knees, broke his fall with his hands, and felt something warm and soft under him; he had landed on the spot where the haystack had burned down. Nausea stirred in his gorge. Under him, in the heap of black soot, a spark glowed here and there. One could hear the dogs snarling and gnawing at the leftover bones. From one of the pines, a cone tumbled down and rolled toward him. He grinned.

"Stop pelting me, Zemka, you, wildcat-come 'ere!"

Try as he might, he could not collect himself. He remembered he'd wanted to fight someone; he wanted to ask what happened... The night was late, the sky overcast; and there wasn't a soul around him: there was no one to ask, no one to fight with.

(...)

As always when he came face to face with womanly beauty, he at once lost all sense of time and proportion, as well as all understanding of his reality that separated people one from another. Seeing her so young and full like a bunch of grape, he never for an instant doubted his rights; all he had to do was stretch out his hand!

With his right eye screwed his legs apart, he looked on for a second, then chuckled softly and, opening his arms and all but skipping, started toward her. The girl saw him in time, tugged the old man's sleeve and pulled her into the doorway. The lithe and ample movements of the ripe lass filled Djerzelez's eyes with dazzle-then, there was a bang and he saw nothing more except, before his very nose, the broad white surface of the outer door, behind which the lock clicked and the stanchion made a grating sound. And there he stood. On his face remained a ghost of a smile, by then quite meaningless. He turned around.

"See!"

In helpless wonderment, he repeated the foolish word several times, like a man who had accidentally bumped into something.

(...)

Her name was Katinka and she was the doughter of Andrew Poljaš. About her beauty songs were sung all over Bosnia, but to her it was a source of unhappiness. Because of it, men besieged her house, and she dared not to go out. On holidays, she would be led at daybreak to the early mass in the Latin Quarter, shrouded in a big shawl like a Turkish woman so that no one should recognize her. She seldom ventured even into her own courtyard, for right next to it was the military academy, towering above their own house by a whole floor, and the cadets, young men poorly fed and much whipped, spent long hours on the windows, wan with desire, hungrily watching her as she moved around. And whenever she did go down, she would see behind a certain window the leering face of the mad Ali, a yellow-skinned half-wit with missing front teeth, who was a janitor in the academy.

It happened sometimes, after a stormy evening, when the soldier and local lads had whooped and coughed pointedly under her windows and banged on the front door, that her mother would scold her, blameless and upright though she was, and wonder aloud whom she'd "taken after" that the whole town should lose its wits over her and their home invite so much harassment, and the girl would listen to her, buttoning the waistcoat over her breast, without a ray of comprehension in her big eyes. Often she wept all day long, not knowing what to do with her life and with her wicked beauty. She cursed herself and fretted, and struggled vainly in her great innocence to fathom that "brazen and Turkish thing" about her that turned the heads of men and made the soldiers and tramps rut and prowl around her house, and because of which she had to hide and feel ashamed, and her own folk had to live in fear. And she grew more lovely by the day.

From then on, Djerzelez spent all his afternoons in the halvah shop. Several local men began to congregate there too. The young Bakarević also came, and so did Derviš Beg from Širokača, red-haired and bloated with drink, and now, because of the fast, bad-tempered like a lynx to boot; and Advik Krdžalija, frail, haggard, and keen like a tongue of fire, a notorious manslayer and lady-killer. Here in the twilit halvah shop where every single thing had tarnished and become sticky from sugar and sweet vapors, they would wait for the cannon shot that announced the breaking of the fast, and would carry on long conversations about women in order to forget their thirst and still their craving tobacco. Djerzelez listened to them, while his parched mouth felt bitter and every muscle twitched with a kind of aching restlessness; he laughed and sometimes joined in their chatter, but was apt to maunder and could not articulate his feelings. And in all that time Katinka's house, with its padlocked door and empty windows, loomed silently before him.

(...)

Djerzelez had known her for some time.

She was taken aback by being visited in broad daylight; she rose to her feet, and he said quietly from the door:

"Yekaterina, here I am."

"Good, good-welcome," she said, meekly setting the bolsters for him.

He lowered himself onto a short cushion, while she remained on her feet, bending a little. Without another word, he began and unbuckle and loosen his clothing.

Afterwards he lay with his head on her lap, while she stroked his sunburned neck. He pressed his face into the thin fabric of her pantaloons; behind his lids there was a steady throbbing of red rings sent up by his hapless blood and a shimmer of countless memories, now blamed and distant.

And this hand he felt on his body, was it the hand of the woman? Of the Venetian wrapped in fur and velvet, whose body, slender and aristocratic, was past imagining? Of the Gypsy Zemka, the bare-faced and crafty yet also loving animal? Of the fat widow? Of the passionate and devious Jewess? Of Katinka, the fruit ripening in the shade? No, it was the hand of Yekatreina. Just Yekaterina's! Yekaterina was the only one a man reached in  a straight line!

And once more he pondered a thought with which he'd gone to sleep a hundred times, an unclear thought, never pursued to the end, yet humiliating and depressing: Why was the path to a woman so tortuous and mystifying, and why was he, with all his fame and strength, unable to traverse it, when so many men worse than him did? So many-yet only he, in his vigorous and laughable prime, for ever held out his arms as in a dream. What was it women were after?

The tiny hand did not stop caressing him, deftly and expertly, up and down the spine. And the nightmare thought faded again, settling heavy and unsolved within him. He spoke absently, not moving.

"What a lot of the world I've seen, Yekaterina! How far I've wandered!"

He didn't know whether he meant this as a complaint or a boast; and he caught himself short. He lay quietly in the dreamy silence, in which the days and events of the past overlapped, blended, and made peace with each other. He forced himself to close his eyes, wishing to prolong this moment that was free of thought and desire, to rest as well as he could, like a man for whom a day was only a short pause and who had to resume his journey.

{/tabs}

The story published in 1921 can be seen as an enlarged episode of the novel "The Bridge on the Drina". Its protagonist Ćorkan, general scapegoat in Višegrad, a figure of fun who himself joins in the mockery. In this story he is shown obsessively pursuing an obviously unattainable ideal, in much the same way as Alija Đerzelez. The light and humorous tone of the story reflects Ćorkan’s personality. The object of his obsession is physically inaccessible: a tightrope walker in an Austrian circus company visiting Višegrad. The chaos caused by the circus eventually results in Ćorkan’s receiving a beating which seems to be a regular occurrence, having more to do with relieving the feelings of the official inflicting the punishment than the extent of the crime. When his wounds have healed Ćorkan emerges from the hayloft where he crawled to recover, laughing at the way he climbs down the ladder. Ćorkan’s resilience, good humor and spontaneity are always associated with the sun, the central symbol of positive forces in Andrić’s work. Indeed, the character can be seen to have grown out of the role played by the sun in Andrić’s writing.

{tab Review}

“Detachment of hard-breathing Tartars began to arrive more frequently....” That’s the way this story begins. It is published in 1922 as one of Andrić’s stories on Bosnia under the Turkish rule. It is rather interesting considering the main character Mula Jusuf, an eccentric and perverted man. Jusuf comes from Jedrene, finished his schooling in Istanbul, and used to work in Sarajevo where he came into conflict with prominent townsmen. That’s why pasha took him in service, in order to tease those respectful men from Sarajevo. He is one of Andrić’s aggressors, like Mustafa Madžar, a variation on the theme of an individual who inflicts suffering in the context of the systematic violence of an army. Mula Jusuf is a man with an obscure history of implication in uninvestigated acts of violence. He does not dominate the story in which he appears but remains a sinister presence in the background until the end, when he is given the task of taking a young Turkish woman, dispossessed by the war, back to her father. The pattern of his vicious behavior then reasserts itself. Alone with the woman, he forces her to strip and eventually stabs her to death.

{tab Fragment}

translated by Joseph Hitrec, George Allen and Unwin Ltd, London, 1969

(...)

The judge despaired over the mounting costs and the loafing. After a vexing and exasperating day at the courthouse, he would shut himself in his home and threaten not to come out again until the camp was moved; but next morning fear and impatience would drive him out once again. His house was in the center of the little town; the only occupants of the large dwelling were he and his wife and the servants, whom they changed frequently. The old curmudgeon's home was crammed to the rafters; the cellars, granaries, and barns were piled high with stores. The rooms, in which a wintry silence always reigned, were smothered in carpets, spreads, embroideries, boxes and chests of aromatic wood. But every where and over everything there lay that chilly spotlessness so often found in Bosnian homes that was intimidating and forbidding, that neither cheered nor served anyone. This wealth and cleanliness were guarded and protected all day long by the judge's wife, a flat-chested woman with missing teeth, contorted and rumpled from so much fussing around the rooms, from bickering with the servants, and from her excessive thrift. It was in this house that the girl refugee from Trebinje was sheltered.

She had been kidnapped from her father's estate by the rebel-brigand Špaljo Montenegrin, who then took her to the Tara monastery with the idea of having her baptized so that he could marry her. As the Turkish police were close on his heels, he had to flee with her from monastery to monastery, from accomplice to accomplice; he would leave her in hiding for a few days and go away to do his raiding, and then, without warning, in the middle of the day or in the dead of the night, come back and drag her away again. Eventually, a superior Turkish force had routed him on the highway between Goražde and Sokolac, and retaken the girl. They brought her to Višegrad, where the town elders decided to send her back to her father at the first opportunity, and until then to put her up in a home where there were no children. And so she was allotted to the judge.

This tall girl was quite deranged by her terrible and disastrous experiences. She had lost her power of speech and now started dully and fixedly in front of her, incapable of recognizing or comprehending anything.

The dreadful Špaljo, who had swooped down on her family's manor like lightning and killed everyone and dragged her away with him, had been all skin and gristle, cold and hard. Then there had been those peasants huts full of smoke and goat droppings. Then the icy monasteries that smelled of pork fat and incense, and gray-haired monks with sepulchral voices and beards yellowed by tobacco. And betweentimes, those head-long night flights when under the blackness of the mountains one's will and wits crumbled and tree branches whipped one's eyes. In that terror, hardness, and cold, she had lost all sense of herself. Since they had brought her to the judge's house, she had calmed down a little. She still did not open her mouth but did not weep either, and spent the whole day sitting in the small garden that was enclosed by high walls; it was damp there and full of fiercely tangled undergrowth. As soon as they led her indoors, she would back into a corner of a room and crouch there with her hands pressed between her knees. Days passed and the judge waited in vain till the Pasha sent for her as he had promised. Supplies had still not arrived. The army camped on.

It was only toward the end of the second week that everything suddenly took a turn for the better. To begin with, the temperature dropped sharply on Friday evening and streams of cold air soughed loudly into the valley and broke the stagnation. The sky shook with thunderclaps; bolts of lightening vaulted across the slopes one after another. When night fell, there was a heavy cloudburst. Sheets of water hit the ground with such force that they turned to vapor, swept this way and that by the wind. All things vanished and lost their voice, save for the downpour that fell all night like a dream and a respite.

Next morning, the greater part of supplies arrived in town. The day was damp and clean-washed; the views acquired new depth, the horizons were clear. The forests on the high slopes looked like new. It was decided to break camp at dawn next morning, to move out and send a detachment for the balance of the supply train, which was then to proceed directly to Srebrenica. The Pasha summoned the judge again; the girl was moved from the latter's house to a furnished inner room at the Suleiman Beg blockhouse. Mullah Yusuf took upon himself the responsibility of sending her that evening to Sarajevo in the company of old Avdaga and some mounted men, and from there, through his friend Munir Effendi, who was a dispatcher of mails, to deliver her to her father at Trebinje.

The camp echoed with noise, preparations, and livelier singing. After a brilliant day the dusk was gathering fast, with only a fleeting afterglow, when Mullah Yusuf came down to the blockhouse to see the girl.

The old woman Fatima had gone home. The girl sat in a corner, wrapped in a shawl. He addressed her gently, hastening to assure her that he would say a prayer over her in order to cure her and send her home; but for that she would have to take off the wrap. She rose for a moment, as if wavering.

"Better take it off, daughter. Go on."

She threw off the shawl and stood tall and motionless before him, somehow bigger and handsomer now that she was set fully against the small, low-ceilinged room; surprising and dumbfounding him with her good looks and well-shaped body. Her neck shone palely; darkened neither by hair nor shadows, it looked extraordinarily smooth and white.

"You must take off the jacket too. Yes, the jacket. Otherwise it can't be done."

His voice quavered and he smiled fixedly.

With a meek air of helplessness, the girl raised her arms (as if about to be crucified) and peeled off her short sleeveless jacket. The movements of those arms, white and ample and yet drained of all strength and will, overpowered and shattered the trembling mullah, and he came up to her to untie the sash of her pantaloons.

"This, too, daughter. Off with everything, everything!"

She resisted weakly, with gestures that were stunted and mechanical as in a dream.

Here the hand could wander at leisure , over those things and hips. No end to it, ever! It was warm there, and smooth like ice. His mouth twisted and gathered in a pucker, as if from raspberries; he felt weak-kneed and the muscles of his left cheek twitched visibly. The girl stood there absently and permitted everything with an air of grave, dull apathy that brought the lecher back to his senses and spurred a desire to prolong and sharpen the thrill, to draw forth some protest and movement. He reached up to a low shelf for a barber's razor. He was breathing hard and felt chilly from head to heels: yet kept slavering and using his hands.

"I have to shave you first."

At that point, however, the girl unexpectedly slipped away, gave a stifled shriek, and began to dash around the room. She was only in her shirt, and now that she was in motion it seemed as if every part of her had swelled and was brimming and spilling. She fought back, stumbled and fluttered across the room like an unfurled banner, while the mullah, thin and darkly flushed, lunged at her and sprang after her, keeping up a disjointed mutter and brandishing the razor.

"Stop! A shave first, stop...!

Her shirt split on the right side and the shoulder gleamed up, once more white, round and plump beyond belief. In the tussle and struggle, he accidentally grazed the naked shoulder with razor, and the shallow cut filled with blood.

The mullah stopped short, his head lolling, the face ashen; his dark-blue lids came down low. A pair of teeth flashed through his parted lips. He remained like this for a second, then shivered and hurled himself furiously at the girl. She screamed, but in a choked and thin voice (a mute animal), waiting for him and repulsing him like a battlement, hard, white, and naked. She pounded the walls and rattled the locked door. And through the stampede of their feet and through their panting this sound of her big strong body could still be heard-clear, resonant, almost metallic. Disfigured beyond recognition, the mullah raged on. His turban slipped all the way to the back of his head and his breath came in an exultant rasp.

"Kh-kh-kh!"

There was blood on her again, now on the other shoulder, and presently it gushed out of her throat in a spate. She doubled over, slopped to the floor and filled the corner of the room, while the mullah dropped alongside and mingled with her indistinguishably.

{/tabs}

“Love in the Small Town” written in 1923, one of Andrić’s earliest stories, may be seen even in its title, as an introduction to the Višegrad ‘cycle’. It begins with detailed description of the geographical setting: “The town lies in a hollow. The Rzav hills, the rocks of Olujaci and the crest of Liještani enclose it in a high, almost regular circle, the diameter of which is no more than half an hour's walk. On the sandy, flood-prone confluence of two mountain rivers of inconstant current, which threaten and ravage it with floods twice a year, so confined by its wreath of muntains that its last houses lean against their foothills, ravaged by droughts in summer, by avalanches in winter, by unexpected frosts in spring. “

The landscape is bleak and constricting, the climate harsh. The narrator then proceeds meticulously to draw a parallel between the town’s inhabitants and their environment: “Its closed horizon, its thin soil, its rough climate, the frequent devastation and wars, give even the children the special look of the town, aggressive and crazed.” The landscape itself foreshadows tragic fate of Rifka Papo, a Jewish girl, who attempted to cross the barrier of religion and prejudice. In the mind of Ledenik, her flippant Christian lover, she is closely related, and almost identified, with the image of Višegrad bridge. For him they are the only two things capable of comforting him and cheering him in his Bosnian desolation.

This story has less conspicuous pattern then other Andrić’s tales. After the central drama where a beauty from kasaba fell in love with a former Austrian officer who was only playing with her as Onyegin used to play with Tatyana, the author intimates that another girl now crosses the business district and attracts the attention of the shopkeepers, just as the main character, Rifka, had done before. The message of life going on after elimination of the disturbing factor is here combined with the message of that other type of short story, in which the immutability and eternal course of life emphasized.

{tab Review}

This tale is one of the best known and artistically the most successful Andrić’s short stories.  The story is about "Turkish times" and places of main events are Doboj, Banjaluka and Sarajevo. It is published for the first time in 1923. The protagonist is a soldier who has achieved a hero’s reputation because of his brave exploits in Hungary. His return to his native Bosnia is anticipated eagerly. Like that of Đerzelez, and the people’s disappointment when confronted with the reality is similar. Mustafa is profoundly changed by his experience. The change is manifested outwardly in the fact that he can no longer play his flute, and in his inability to sleep. When he does fall into a fitful sleep he is tormented by dreams of the brutality he has been forced to witness in the course of his life as a soldier. The life he chose and the brutality it entails take complete control of his body and its demands now govern his behavior absolutely.

The story illustrates the clear distinction Andrić makes between the body, whose realm is the night, and the spirit, which can flourish only by day. The tenuous survival of Mustafa’s spirit is expressed through his flute playing, but his experience as a soldier comes to dominate his life entirely. It appears that such uncontrolled and unbalanced physical violence brutalizes the whole personality and leads ultimately to self-destruction. The coherence of Mustafa’s personality is fractured by his experience. This fragmentation, and the restlessness that will take him relentlessly on an increasingly destructive course, are expressed in his outward behavior: "He did not dare stand still. He had to keep moving, because he was equally afraid of sleeplessness as of his dreams, if he fell asleep... He could no longer endure it, but saddled his horse and left the village, in the dark, and silently as a criminal."

To the extent that Mustafa does not understand his actions and cannot control them, he can be included among the "bewildered". A mark of his incomprehension in the face of his experience is his repetition of a formula: "The world is full of swine." That is Mustafa’s formula to register his essential experience of the world.

{tab Fragment}

translated by Joseph Hitrec, George Allen and Unwin Ltd, London, 1969

(...)

Morning overtook him on the heights above Sarajevo, while he was trying to find his way through some plum orchards. The horse faltered at every step, his ribs fallen in, his shanks torn in bloody. The whole sky was aglow and the sun kindled the thin clouds. The town lay under a blanket of fog, pierced only here and there by minarets that resembled the masts of sunken ships. He passed a hand over his dew-moist face. In vain he swatted at a pair of dark orbs through which the radiance of the day and the town beneath it appeared to him dimly. He rubbed his temples, and turned left and right, but the orbs shifted together with his moving glance and, through those orbs, everything before him appeared misty, shivering, and dusky. The silence was deep, and in it he could hear his blood rearing and breaking and crashing with a dull roar against the nape of his neck. He could not remember where he was, or what day it was. He thought the town below might be Sarajevo, but his mind swirled and confused it with certain towns in the Caucasus that had minarets just like these. At times his sight gave out completely.

He had enormous trouble finding his way through the maze of fences and plum orchards, and as he climbed down to the nearest Muslim quarter he stopped the hours in front of a coffeehouse where, on a wide and green terrace beside a fountain and a cemetery, some Turks were already sitting over black coffee. He dismounted and went in. Rumpled, muddied, he steeped gingerly through the twilight that hovered before his eyes. He observed the faces around him, but in the next instant they had melted away unaccountably, only to reappear again greatly multiplied and jumbled. He sat down. Through the hum of blood in his ears he listened to their talk, yet couldn't make head to tail of their words. They were talking about the repression carried out by Sultan's emissary, Lutfi Beg.

After many protracted wars, the number of loafers and drunkards had multiplied to a point where there was a marked increase in plunder, killing, and violence of every type, not only in Sarajevo but throughout the rest of Bosnia as well. Unable to ignore the complaints of the people any longer, the Sultan had dispatched a special envoy with unlimited powers. This tall man, who rode through the streets like a hermit pale-faced and stooped-shouldered, with thin, drooping mustaches, was implacable, cunning, and swift. Never had the severity of government been felt so strongly. If anyone was caught drunk or loitering, or denounced as a killer or looter, the emissary had him thrown into the Yellow Dungeon where his Anatolian hangmen strangled him with a hard leather cord, without examination or trial. There were times when up to sixty felons were done away with in the course of a single night. The Christian populace rejoiced secretly, but the Turks were beginning to grumble at his harshness. He retorted by ordering the arrest and strangulation of two Sarajevo merchants who criticized him publicly, before anyone could intercede for them. In the streets one could see the corpses of those who, in drunkenness or wrath, had perished defending themselves against the envoy's constables. Blood was seen everywhere and people were terror-stricken. At no time before had death been so easy to come by.

Now these Turks in the coffeehouse were discussing the envoy's campaign of repression. Not daring to say aloud what was really on their minds, they kept lamenting the fact that so many Turks had lost their lives, among them some famous soldiers and noted fighters. One of the men at the table said ruefully:

"The Christians will swamp us, by Allah! Our own kind is dying and the baptized scum are breeding like rabbits; there's no end to them!"

As the words reached Mustapha, they seemed in an addled way to be connected with his own thoughts. he made a great effort to concentrate.

"Baptized and circumcised, both," he said. "The world is full of scum."

They all turned in the direction of the voice, which was uncommonly hoarse and raspy, like a magnified whisper. Looking him over, they noticed his disheveled appearance and the streaks of dried mud and greenish-yellow stains of wet grass on his clothes. His face was puffed up and dark. They observed, too, that his eyes were completely bloodshot and his pupils mere pinpricks in the center, that he clenched and unclenched his hands, that his neck, uncollared and bare, was swollen, and his left mustache gnawed off and noticeably shorter. They glanced at one another and then back at him.

Behind his curtain of blood, Mustapha was dimly aware of the faces craning in his direction and he got the idea that they were getting ready to attack him. He reached for his saber. They all sprang up; the older men backed to the wall, while two younger ones, brandishing knives, came toward him. He cut down the first one, but then, almost blinded, missed the second. He upset the mortar in which coffee was pounded. Defending himself, he staggered blindly into the street; the Turks charged after him. Passers-by stopped to watch. Some thought that the scramble was caused by the envoy's constables trying to run down a drunken bully, others that the crowd was turning the tables on the envoy's men. In recent weeks they had gotten used to daily commotions such as this, and they all took part in them with a kind of blood-thirsty alacrity, no matter on whose side they were.

Unseeing, Mustapha stumbled between some door posts, and the Turks from the coffeehouse and those from the street cornered him all at once. They stripped him of his tunic, down to his shirt. His turban fell, his shirt tore and gave way. Struggling frantically, he did not let go of his saber. The weight of so many bodies pressing against the thin door boards caused it to give way with a loud crash; the human mass rocked and fell, and Mustapha wrenched himself free. With his sword raised, he darted down the steep incline of the street, the mob hard on his heels.

He ran on, unable to see in front of him, bald-headed, naked to his waist, and hairy. The mob yelled after him.

"Get him!" He's mad!"

"He killed a man!"

"Cutthroat!"

"Grab him, don't let him escape!"

A few passers-by tried to stop him, but in vain. He struck down a constable who tried to intercept him. Many didn't know why they were chasing him, why they were chasing him, but the pack kept growing; newcomers ran out of doorways and joined. The crowd was egged on by the shopkeepers along the way, who also joined in the chase with clubs and chains. Frightened dogs scampered beside Mustapha, chickens fluttered and screeched. Heads poked out of windows of the houses along the streets.

Assaulted and buffeted from all sides, Mustapha's darkening mind cleared for one more fleeting moment: The scum have overrun the earth! They're everywhere!

And although he was no longer master of his strength and life, he withstood the blows and ran much faster than any of them. He was already coming closer to the wooded cemetery at the far end of the street, when out of a smithy came a Gypsy who, seeing a half-naked man pursued by a mob, threw himself at the man with a rusty poker, caught him on the temple, and felled him on the spot.

A huge comet streaked across the dark, narrow sky and the smaller stars withered in its wake. In another second the last one was snuffed out. There was darkness and hard ground beneath. Hardening. That was his last sensation. The pack was closing in.

{/tabs}

{tab Review}

In this story published in 1923 the central hero is the monk Brother Marko, the protagonist of other three tales. The story “In the Guest House” describes his position in the monastery. He is a peasant of limited intellect, given to expressive language quite inappropriate to his calling. He is profoundly confused by the complexities of the vocation thrust upon him by his relatives. He does, however, find himself a niche in the life of the monastery that suits his temperament. He is given charge of overseeing work on the monastery lands, of the animals and wines, and of attending to the needs of the travelers who stay in the monastery guest- house.

Although he is confused by the dogma of his religion, Marko finds that he is sometimes granted moments when he feels in perfect communion with his God. These moments occur most frequently when he is working on the land, digging or planting out cabbages. Marko’s faith is subjected to a severe test when a Turkish visitor is brought into the guest-house fatally ill. His companions leave him in Marko’s care, ostensibly to seek help, but they do not return. As he tends the sick man, Marko is overcome by a desire to save the soul of the dying infidel. His eagerness gives him a new eloquence and he surprises himself with the fluency with which he half remembers phrases this onslaught silently, but when at last he is about to die and incapable of speech Marko brings a crucifix for him to kiss. Summoning his last strength, the Turk spits at it. Marko is appalled he seizes the cross and rushes out into the summer night, his head throbbing with fury.  But the monk has the image of a Christian God willing to accept all sinners, whatever this professed religion.

{tab Fragment}

translated by Joseph Schallert, Dereta, Belgrade, 2000

(...)

The Turk had fallen silent; his closed eyelids occasionally twitched. Brother Marko had leaned right over him. He was observing him closely but was unable to make out what he was thinking. His face was just as it always was - thin and oval, with pouting lips like a defiant boy's.

'Just say: Saviour be a help into us. Say it, Osmo,' whispered Brother Marko to him as softly and sweetly as he could. The Turk was silent. From him came only heavy breathing and the bobbing of his Adam's apple.

Thinking that perhaps he was unable to speak, Brother Marko took the little crucifix on the rosary which hung at his waist and brought it to the Turk's lips.

'Kiss it, Osmo, this is your Saviour and mine. Kiss it and He will forgive your sins and receive you into Him.'

The Turk's face moved almost imperceptibly, his eyelids began to tremble and he moved his lips as if he wanted to say something. Then he pursed his lips tightly and with a great effort - he spat. The spittle filtered down through his beard.

Swiftly Brother Marko pulled away the cross, leapt up, and ran outside growling.

That vast monotonous hum of a summer night. Only towards the end of summer are the stars so big and the sky so low. He gripped the fence with his hands, clenching his fingers. The blood rushed to his head from anger and would not quiet down but rather kept throbbing up again. He gazed though the dark tree trunks, far away into the depths of the sky where the stars were starting to appear and spoke as usual, to himself: 'There's not a brother who's worse than me, nor a Turk that's filthier than that Osmo. I try to baptise him, and he - oooohhh!'

He shook the fence in torment.

But gradually he calmed down. He began to lose himself in the quiet night, in the gaze of innumerable stars. He slowly forgot himself. Waves from him trebling body carried over onto everything around him and he felt as though he were sailing swiftly over an ocean in the dark. The sky above him rocked perceptibly. There were sounds all around. He clasped the railings tightly.

Everything was on this great moving ship of God's: the village and the fields, the monastery and the guest-house.

'I know that You do not forget anyone, not even stuttering Marko or that sinful Osmo Mameledžija. If someone does spit on Your cross, it is only like a bad dream. There is still room for everyone on Your ship. Even for that crazy Kezmo, if he hadn't gone away...'

(...)

{/tabs}

{tab Review}

"The Bridge on the Žepa", published in 1925, is one of the stories richest in ideas which recur elsewhere in Andrić’s work. It provides a preliminary sketch for "The Bridge on the Drina", in a concentrated form. A Bosnian-born Grand Vizier in Constantinopole whose experience is similar to that of the great Mehmed Pasha, builder of the bridge on the Drina – he was taken, like Mehmed, from his native village at the age of nine – wishes to endow his native village with a building that will be enduring use. He is told of the regular destruction of the wooden bridges built over Žepa and resolves to have a stone bridge built. The bulk of the story consists of the description of the dedication of the master-builder, planning and building the bridge. Having made his initial plans and dispatched them to Constantinople, he builds himself a cabin and settles there, buying simple foods from the neighboring peasants and preparing them himself, spending the whole day investigating the river and its currents, examining the stone he intends to use, carving and sketching. When work begins, it is at first interrupted by a sudden storm that fills the river and sweeps away the preliminary structure. As in the "The Bridge on the Drina", the villagers interpret this as the will of the river, rejecting all human innovation. But the building starts again, the work stopping with the onset of winter when the master-builder remains in his hut, scarcely emerging, poring in solitude over his plans and calculations. Eventually, halfway through the following summer, the building is completed and the bridge emerges at last from the scaffolding.

The portrait given here of the master-builder suggests a devotion to an ideal conventionally associated with religious fervour. This gives his work a mysterious, almost supenatural quality. He works with single-minded, self-denying dedication to create something which will transcend the vagaries of the natural world and the ravages of a human time-scale. The ideas and the creative genius of the master-builder will long outlive him in his work.

In addition to the main theme – that the bridge emboides a complete statement requiring no further comment – there is another important idea. The Vizierćs initial desire to build something enduring in his native village is promped by his experience of imprisoment following a political upheavel in Constantinopole. The winter months he spent in prison brought a new thoughtfulness, a new awareness of the marrow dividing line between life and death, and a new gratitude for being alive and liberty. In prison, he remembered his native land and thought of the villagersć houses where his glory was frequently spoken of, without any realization of the price of that glory or other side of success. His decision to build the bridge was an expression of this new perspective.

The end of the story can be seen as a metaliterary frame as the narrator-writer tells how and when he decided to write the story: "This happened one evening when he was returning from the mountains and, feeling weary, had sat of summer when the days were scorching but the nights had a nip to them. As he leaned against the stonework, he noticed cool breeze was blowing in off the Drina pleasant and somehow unexpected was the touch of that warm hewn stone. There was an instant rapport between them. He then decided to write its story."

{tab Fragment}

translated by Joseph Hitrec, George Allen and Unwin Ltd, London, 1969

In the fourth year of his term as Grand Vizier, Yusuf committed a political indiscretion and, falling victim to a dangerous intrigue, unexpectedly fell into disfavor. The struggle lasted a whole winter and spring. It was a wicked and cold spring, which refused to let the summer begin. But in May, Yusuf emerged from banishment as victor. And so life went on as before, glorious, peaceful, and undisturbed. But from those winter months, when the margin between life and death, glory and ruin, amounted to little more than the sharp edge of a knife, there remained in the victorious Vizier a sense of something fretful and subdued. It was something that could not be expressed, something that men of experience who have suffered harbor inside them like a hidden treasure, and which unconsciously, and only at times, is reflected in a look, a movement, or in speech.

While he had lived in confinement, in solitude and in disgrace, the Vizier's memories of his origins and of his old country had grown more vivid, for disappointment and pain always turn the mind back to the past. He recalled his mother and his father. (They had both died while he was still a modest assistant to the Sultan's Master of the Horse; he had since ordered their graves to be edged with stone coping and marked by white tombstones.) He recalled Bosnia and the village of Žepa, from which he had been taken when he was nine.

It was pleasant in his unhappiness to think of that distant country and the scattered village, where tales of his success and glory in Istambul were told in every house, and where nobody knew or even suspected the reverse side of the medal of glory, or the price at which success was to be attained.

That very summer he had had an opportunity to talk to people coming from Bosnia. He questioned them, and they told him what they knew. After many rebellions and wars, the country had been convulsed by riots, scarcity, starvation, and all kinds of epidemics. He ordered substantial help for all his relatives who were still at Žepa, and at the same time instructed the officials to find out what was most needed in the way of building work. He was told that the family Šetkić still had four houses and were the wealthiest in the village, but that both the village and surrounding countryside had become impoverished, that the mosque had fallen into disrepair and become damaged by fire, and that the wells had gone dry; but their worst predicament was that there was no bridge over the river Žepa. The village stands on a hill right above the confluence. No matter what kind of plank bridge they threw across, it was always swept away by the waters; for either the Žepa would rise quickly and unexpectedly, as mountain streams are wont to do, and weaken the bridge and sweep away the logs, or else it was the Drina that swelled suddenly and rushed into the channel of the Žepa and backed its flow, so that its level rose and bore the bridge away as it had never been. Then again, in the winter the planks became iced and slippery, so that both men and beasts of burden came to grief. Thus, were anybody to built them a bridge, he would do them the greatest service.

The Vizier gave six rugs for the mosque and as much money as was needed to built a fountain with three spouts in front of it. At the same time he decided to built the villagers a bridge.

In Istanbul at that time there lived an Italian master builder who had put up several bridges near the city, and so had made a name for himself. He was now engaged by the Vizier's treasurer and sent to Bosnia with two men from the Court.

They arrived at Višegrad before the last snows of winter had melted. For several days afterwards the astonished people of Višegrad watched the master builder as, stooping and grayhaired but with a pink and youthful face, he inspected the great stone bridge there, knocking on it, crumbling the joints' mortar between his fingers and tasting it on his tongue, measuring the arches with his steps. Then he went to spend a few days at Bania, at the quarry from which the stone for the Višegrad bridge had come. He hired day laborers to clear out the quarry, which had become partially filled with earth and overgrown with bushes and hemlock saplings. They went on digging until they found a wide, deep vein of stone that was harder and whiter than that which had been used for the Višegrad bridge. Then the master builder walked down the bank of the Drina as far as the Žepa and determined the spot where the stone would be ferried across the river. Whereupon one of the Vizier's men went back to Istanbul with an estimate and plans.

The Italian remained behind to await their return, but he did not want to stay either at Višegrad or in any of the Christian houses overlooking the Žepa. He built himself a log cabin on a rise in the triangle between the Drina and the Žepa-the remaining Vizier's man and a Višegrad clerk acting as his interpreters-and there he lodged. he cooked for himself, buying eggs, cream, onions, and dried fruit from the peasants. He never once bought meat, it was said. All day long he dressed sample blocks of stone, made drawings, experimented with various kinds of rock, and studied the course and the currents of the Žepa.

In the meantime, the other official returned from Istanbul with the Vizier's approval and one third of the necessary funds.

Work on the bridge started. The people's wonder at the unusual spectacle knew no bounds. What was happening before their eyes in no way resembled a bridge. The man sank massive pine trunks diagonally across the Žepa, and between them a double row of piling, plaited together with brushwood and reinforced with clay, so that the whole thing looked like a trench. In this way the river diverted and one half of the river bed was drained. But one day, just when this work was completed, there was a cloudburst somewhere in the mountains and in no time at all the Žepa changed color and rose. That same night it broke the middle of the newly finished dam. By dawn the following morning the water had receded, but the wattle was broken through, the piles torn up, and the beams knocked askew. Among the workers and the people it was whispered that the Žepa did not want a bridge thrown over itself. But three days later the master builder ordered new piles to be driven in, this time deeper, and the remaining beams to be repaired and secured. Once more the rocky bottom of the river bed echoed to the din of the mallets and workmen's cries and rhythmical blows.

Only when everything had been set and made ready, and the stone from Bania delivered, did the stone cutters and masons arrive-men from Herzegovina and Dalmatia. They built themselves wooden huts, in front of which they chipped away at the stone, coated with dust and as white as millers. The master builder went from one to another, bent down over them, constantly checking their work with a drafting triangle of yellow tin and a lead plumb bob on a green thread. When the steep and rocky banks had been cut through on a both sides, the money suddenly ran out. The workmen began to grumble and rumor arose among the local people that nothing would come of this bridge. Some men who had just arrived from Istanbul reported having heard that the Vizier had had a change of heart. No one knew what was the matter with him, whether he was ill or beset by other troubles, but he was becoming more and more inaccessible and was neglecting or abandoning public works which he had begun in Istanbul itself. Yet a few days later one of the Vizier's men arrived with the remainder of the money, and the work went on.

A fortnight before St. Demetrius' Day, the people crossing the Žepa by the plank bridge a little distance above the new works noticed for the first time a white, smooth wall of hewn stone, decked with scaffolding like a spider's web, and jutting out of the dark-gray slate on both banks of the river. From then on it grew every day. Before long, however, the first frosts began, and work was suspended. The masons went home for the winter, while the master builder ensconced himself in his log cabin, from which he hardly ever emerged. All day long he pored over his plans and expense ledgers, and went out from time to time to inspect the bridge works. When, just before the spring, the river ice began to crack, he was often seen puttering around scaffolding and the dams, a worried look on his face. Sometimes he would even do this at night, with a torch in his hand.

Just before St. George's Day, the masons returned and work was resumed. And exactly at midsummer the bridge was finished. Gaily the workers took down the scaffolding, and from behind the maze of beams and boards there appeared a white and slender bridge, spanning the two rocky banks in a single soaring arch.

Few things would have been harder to imagine than such a wonderful structure in so ravaged and bleak a place. It seemed as if the two banks had each spurted a foaming jet of water toward one another, and these had collided, formed an arch, and remained thus for a moment, hovering above the chasm. Through the arch, at the farthest point of vision, one could see a small blue stretch of the Drina, and deep down beneath it was gurgling Žepa, now tamed and froth-speckled. For a long time one's eyes could not get used to the slender and beautifully conceived line of that arch, which looked as if in its flight it had momentarily got caught on that prickly and harsh landscape full of bramble and hemlock, and that at the first opportunity it would take off again and disappear.

(...)

{/tabs}

{tab Review}

“The Pasha’s Concubine” (1926) is the story of a young girl who catches the eye of a Turkish army officer and is summoned to his house. She appeals to him because of her extreme youth – she is not quite sixteen and the reason he gives for finding this stage attractive establishes one of the themes of the story: “This is the right moment in her life. She was separated from her family, frightened, alone, dependent entirely on him. From time to time she seemed to him like a little animal, which, driven against a cliff, stared at him wide-eyed aand trembling.” The woman’s vulnerability acts as a provocation, a magnet drawing the stronger element by logic of its own.  In the story the concubine herself are woven two further tales of victimization of woman, so that together they form a complete statement of the plight of woman as an innocent victim. The theme of the pursuit of a wild animal is developed in the subsidiary account of the rape of a ten-year-old, lured out of town by two youths with a promise of sugar. And in the household where Mara ends her days one of the women has a violent husband who has beaten her regularly since their wedding night.

The story of Mara the concubine is developed, as is that of Mustafa Magyar, in such a way as to make them not only vivid individuals in specific circumstances, but also in a way archetypal.

{tab Fragment}

translated by Joseph Hitrec, George Allen and Unwin Ltd, London, 1969

(...)

In the forenoon of the second day, as he was returning from the drill field, the Pasha and his escort found themselves in the bazaar. They rode cautiously over the thawing ice. It was a market day, and in front of the Garić Bakery their way was blocked by some peasants' horses laden with wood. While the flustered farmers began to hop and skip around the stubborn horses, the Pasha cast a glance into the bakery. Next to the closed brick oven stood the old baker Ali, stoop-shouldered, with rheumy, wizened eyes out of which tears kept oozing on his great white mustache. At the wide-open shopwindow, among the bread loaves and pans of meat and pies, was his daughter Mara. On her knees and propped on the counter with one arm, she had stretched the other for a platter on a shelf underneath. When she heard the shouts of the soldiers and the stamping of the peasants' horses, she lifted her head, and the Pasha, seeing her wrapped like this around the counter, fell in love with her round, childish face and her merry eyes.

When he rode that way again in the afternoon, the bakery was deserted, the window half-shuttered, and on the sill was a purring cat with signed white hair.

He gave orders that the girl be found and brought to him. The noncommissioned officers and town constables ran eagerly to carry them out. He stayed over till noon of the third day, when they reported that the matter could be arranged. The girl had no one except her father. Her mother had been well-known Jelka, named Hafizadić after the old Mustaybey Hafizadić, who had kept her for several years and then married her off to this Garić, a quiet and simple-minded young man, to whom he had also given money to open the bakery.

The Pasha left some money and entrusted the matter to his old acquaintance Teskeredžić. And toward the end of March, on another market day, they brought the girl to him at Sarajevo.

The Pasha had not been wring in his judgment. She was the kind of woman he had always sought and particularly esteemed, the only kind that still attracted him. She was not quite sixteen. She had big eyes of a dovelike shade and muted porcelain luster, which moved languidly. Her hair was quite fair, heavy, and thick, such as was seldom seen on women in this region. Both her face and her arms were covered with a fine, light down that was noticeable only in sunlight. What was unusual about her was that even those parts of her skin which were not exposed to the sun and air, were not uniformly white and dun, as is usual with blonde women, but her whole body glowed with a bright, burnished hue that changed only in the shadowy hollows or with a sudden and irregular onrush of blood, when it turned even richer. Her hands were perfectly childlike, short and pink.

The Pasha was buoyed up. In the first few days he was occupied only with her. He also found it pleasant to think that now too, as once before, he could tell by an outstretched hand the kind of woman her owner was, and her true worth. Had he brought her in earlier, it would have been no good; while three to  four months later, it seemed to him, the bloom would have been over. This was exactly the right time. She was cut off from her own kin, frightened and isolated, dependent only on him. At times she appeared to him like a young animal which, driven to the edge of a precipice, quivers in her whole body, her pupils contracting. This fanned the passion of his love and, in the contradictory ways of the male heart, evoked in him the impulse to be generous, to make her happy, to protect her.

She lived not far from the Pasha's residence, in a separate cottage which he had rented and furnished. Except for her visits to the Pasha, she went nowhere and received no visitors, save for Hamša the Gypsy, who kept house for her, and baba Anuša from Bistrik, who was distantly related to her and who lived with her two grandchildren in great poverty. She spent all her days in two poorly lighted rooms, doing those sundry little chores that are so inconspicuous and yet so easily fill a woman's day. At dusk the Pasha's equerry would come for her, and she would wrap and veil herself up to her eyes and then, with a bowed head, accompany him to the Residence.

In the beginning, after they had just brought her from Travnik, she felt utterly lost. Physical pain took complete hold of her; and it was only when this pain, after the first few nights, began to fade that there arose in her mind, like a torment, a vague yet dark and nagging thought of sin and shame. She was afraid of the Pasha, she loathed that Jewess of his, Sarah, and shied away from daylight and from people. She could not sleep, yet even in her dreams felt herself damned.

Nevertheless, she gradually came to terms with Sarah, who was taciturn and good and who did her work and helped in everything with a kind of melancholy friendliness. Getting accustomed to the Pasha and his caresses was harder; even after the initial pain and fear had faded, she accepted those numbly, in childlike bewilderment. But after a while she began to get used to them. She grew especially fond of the smell of his skin. It was seldom that she could look into those unusually steady eyes without a certain timidity, or into that face with its dreadful patch of blight on the left cheek and its dark drooping mustache that was always a little damp and quivered when he spoke like tufted grass in a dark forest pond. But the waftings that his body sent out attracted her more and more, they thrilled and delighted her; and she inhaled them for hours with her eyes closed, her head resting on his chest or in the palm of his hand.

The anguish came back to haunt her only at night when, as it often happened, he sent her to sleep alone. She would then wake up several times with a clear realization-such as can only come in the dark-of what and who she was now, and with a mouth choked with sobs she would press her face between the quilt and the pillows and stammer:

"Turk...!"

In the darkness, the racking thought would assume the shape of eternal punishment and hellish torture, not of earthly shame and ruin as in the daytime. But the next evening she would again face the Pasha with blushing cheeks and a wordless smile that seemed to be made entirely of glistening white teeth and sparkling eyes.

So it went every evening. He would come from an army exercise, or from a ride, flushed and a little sweaty, and she would wait for him with her hands crossed on her breast. he would then undress; Sarah would bring cold water, and a maid would take away his boots. After he had washed and cooled off, he would ask them to open the door and all windows that commanded a view of Sarajevo and the Trebević mountain. he would sit like this in the cool draft until Sarah brought a bottle of mastika and a tray of olives and thin strips of bread. alter the equerry Salih would come in with the nargileh on which the lighted tobacco heap would smolder a dark red, while in its crystal bottle, on the limped surface of water, there would float two crimson cherries. Then Sarah and the equerry would vanish, and from an adjoining room Mara would return, prepared, and sit on his lap. Between the two of them, this was called "sitting in the box".

(...)

{/tab}

{tab Review}

Among the stories published between the wars there are several characters who dominate the tales in which they appear and seem similarly to stand for a whole category of human experience. An example is the heroine of the of the story “Anika's Times“(1931). Anika is a woman who wreaks havoc in Višegrad through the unpredictable distribution of her favours. The impact she made is still spoken of when the story opens, several generations later. Anika is a self-willed creature whose defiance of convention – flouted initially out of pique with a particular young man – predictably brings her no happiness to the extent that she welcomes the prospect of the inevitable retribution her as a relief for herself and others: “It would be an act of charity of someone would kill me”, she repeats several times before her death. In this way Anika herself is not entirely in control of her destiny, but is the vehicle of an overwhelming power over men.

The story of Anika is given an additional dimension in the form of an explanatory introduction the exact meaning of which is perhaps not immediately clear, but emerges from the account of “Anika’s Times”. This introduction describes the growing schizophrenia of the parish priest of a village outside Višegrad and his obsessive, furtive watching of women. As long as the villagers speak of him they tend to be reminded also of Anika. There is only a tenuous connection between her and father Vujadin, so that the association of the two stories in the villagers’ minds seems to suggest a more profound link. Vujadin’s madness is not directly attributable to his experience of women; he has become cut off from his fellow-men by a variety of factors. But as he steadily loses touch with society, women seem to loom ever larger in his consciousness. In this aspect of his madness that seems to disturb the villagers and urge them to give it form in their recollection of the legend of Anika.

Within the framework of the story “Anika's Times“, this introduction appears as a kind of meditation on man's perennial need to control and account for his powerful response to woman, the need which led to the creation of the legend of Adam and Eve.

{tab Fragment}

(...)

St. Georges feast day that year was remembered in town as the day on which Anika "announced herself". By the time of the feast of St. Elias, only two months later, her banner was completely unfurled. Anika opened her home to men. She hired two women, village tramps, whose names were Yelenka and Saveta, as her companions. It was in this manner that the reign of Anika Krnoyelats began - a reign of a year and a half which Anika devoted herself to evil and disaster in much the same way that other people might occupy themselves with children, bread, their homes. She ignited men, set them afire, not only in the kasaba, but in the whole district of Vishegrad. Many details have been forgotten, and many a misfortune was never revealed, but it was not until Anika's times that the people of Vishegrad discovered what powers an evil woman possesses.

Little by little the yard in front of Anika's house came to resemble a camping site. No one could keep track of the many who came at night; young and old, bachelors and married men, neighbors from nearby Dobrun and travelers from distant Focha. And there were others who, bereft of shame or reason, came in full daylight and sat in the yard or, if allowed, in the house, or simply wandered about with their hands in their pockets, glancing from time to time up at Anika's window.

One of the most desperate and ardent of Anika's visitors was a certain Tane Kuyunjiya, a thin man with very wide eyes on a worn, tired face. He would sit on a crate behind the kitchen door, saying nothing, waiting patiently for Anika, looking up only when Yelenka and Saveta entered the kitchen. Going past him as though he did not exist, Yelenka and Saveta received their guests and proceeded with them to their rooms. When they threw him out of the kitchen, he would seat himself somewhere in the yard, bashfully smiling at Yelenka as she chased him out.

"Ah, let me be, bona. What am I doing to you?"

He would wait in the yard for hours, with a mournful expression, as though he found it hard to sit there for so long. Occasionally he would rise and leave without a word, only to come again the next day. At home he was scolded by his wife, Kosara, a robust woman of peasant stock with eyebrows that ran together.

"Have you been sitting in the bitches' yard again, you ugly duckling? You should stayed there!

"Eh, I should have stayed there." he repeated sadly, and his thoughts went back to the yard he had just left.

This indifference drove Kosara insane and she started a dreadful row, but Tane only waved his hand, as though awakened from a dream.

Some of Anika's company were quite mad, like Nazif, a big and retarded youth from the house of a beg. He was a quiet fool, deaf and dumb. He would pass under Anika's window and call to her in his unintelligible language at least twice a day. He offered her a handful of sugar, and she jested with him about it.

"That isn't enough, Nazif, not enough," Anika called from above, smiling. Somehow or other the idiot understood what she had said, ran home, stole some money from his brothers, bought two half-pecks of sugar and returned to the window. Grinning with happiness, he offered her his fortune in sugar. Anika roared with laughter and indicated to him, through signs, that he had still brought enough, and he left mumbling sadly.

From that day on he came every morning, carrying a basket filled with sugar, as well as additional amounts under his wide sash and in his pockets. Anika soon grew bored with the joke. The madman's persistence angered her, and she sent Saveta and Yelenka to chase him away. He defended himself and then left muttering incoherently, only to appear bright and early the following day with even more sugar. They chased him away again. All day long he carried the sugar around the town, twittering and murmuring. Children followed him, teased him, and stole sugar from the basket which he clutched so passionately.

There were, of course, men who, lacking the courage to come in the daytime, waited for night to make their regular appearance, although many of them had no prospects of even entering Anika's house. They would simply sit there, on the trough by the fountain, waiting and smoking all night long. A man could arrive at night unseen by anyone; and he could leave in the same way. On the following morning a small heap of wood shavings and cigarette butts would appear where he had been sitting. He must have been an unhappy young man, God only knew which one; Anika certainly did not know him, and he knew her only by sight. For they were not all there just to see Anika. Some came simply because they were drawn to evil things, other because they had been from birth lost and tormented. Everything that was questionable, and contrary to God's will, assembled around that house and in that yard. The circle of men around Anika's house was rapidly expanding, and in time embraced not only the weak and the wicked, but the healthy and the wise too.

In the end, there were but few young men in the kasaba who had not been to Anika or who had not tried to approach her. First, they went to her stealthily, at night, obliquely and individually. They talked of her as something shameful and horrible, but at the same time distant and almost beyond belief. But the more they talked and gossiped about her, the more comprehensible her evil seemed. At first they pointed a stern finger at those who went there, but in the end it was those who did not go to Anika's who attracted scorn. Since only a small group of men managed to reach Anika at first try, and the rest had to content themselves with Yelenka and Saveta, envy, male pride, and vanity began taking their toll. Those who had been rejected came again, hoping to make up for the double humiliation of having gone and been rejected all in one night; and those who had been received once could no longer stop themselves, but as if under a spell went back again and again.

(...)

{/tab}

{tab Fragment}

translated by Joseph Hitrec, George Allen and Unwin Ltd, London, 1969

(...)

For months past there had been a lot of talk in Sokolac about this man Lazar. She had heard awful tales of his cruelty, how he tortured in the most brutal ways the peasants who wouldn't yield to him, and shot gendarmes from ambush, stripped their bodies to the skin, and left them naked on the road. And now she was witnessing how the gendarmes repaid him in kind. Could this possibly go on forever? It seemed to her that they were all rushing toward some kind of abyss and that they would all perish together in a night just like this, destined never to see the light of dawn, in blood, in thirst, among unspeakable horrors.

She thought now and then of waking her husband and begging him to dispel, with a word or a smile, all of this horror as though it were a hideous dream. But she could not bring herself to move nor to arouse her husband, and remained stock-still on the edge of the bed almost as if the body beside her were that of a dead man, and listened to the voice in the cellar, alone with her terror and her questions. She even thought of saying the prayers of another, forgotten and vanished life, and they gave her no clue or comfort. As if making peace with her own death, she resigned herself to the thought that the wailing man would go on wailing and imploring forever, and the man sleeping and breathing beside her would thus sleep and remain still forever.

The night kept pressing in from all sides, growing thicker and more ominous. This was no longer an ordinary night, one of the countless ones in the string of days and nights, but a long drawn-out and perpetual desert of gloom in which the last man alive was moaning and crying for help, begging hopelessly and in vain for a drop of water. Yet in the whole of God's wide world with its waters, rains and dew there was not a single hand to offer it. All the waters had run dry, all mankind pined away. Only the frail rush-light of her consciousness still flickered, like a solitary witness to it all.

At last came the dawn. Not daring to trust her own eyes, the woman watched the slow paling of the wall, at the same spot where it always paled at daybreak, and saw how the morning twilight, first pearly and then pink, spread through the room bringing shape and life to all the objects in it.

If she strained hard she could still make out the bandit's voice, but from a great distance as it were. The cursing and oaths had stopped. There was only an occasional dull "A-a-ah!" And she inferred that rather than actually heard it.

Although the daylight was growing brighter, the woman had no strength to move. Doubled and rigid all over, with her chin cupped in her hands, she was crouching on the edge of the bed and never even noticed that her husband had woken up.

He opened his rested eyes and his gaze fell on his wife's curved back and on the milky white nape on her neck. At that moment, when the haze of sleep first cleared from his eyes a sense of joyful reality flooded back into him, washing over him like a warm, luxuriant wave. He wanted to call his wife, to sing out her name, but changed his mind. Smiling, he raised himself a little, making no sound, then propping himself on his left elbow reached out with his free right hand, and without a word, suddenly took her shoulders, pulled her over, and brought her down under him.

The woman struggled briefly and in vain. The unexpected and irresistible embrace was dreadful to her. It seemed blasphemous and unthinkable that she should betray so quickly and easily, and without any explanation, the world of night in which up to that moment she had existed and suffered alone with her anguish. She wanted to hold him back and convince him that it was not possible, that there were grave and painful things which she had to tell him first and over which one could not pass so lightly into everyday life. Bitter words rose to her tongue, but she could not speak a single one. Her husband never even noticed this sign of her resistance, this fragmentary sound that never hardened into a word. She would have pushed him away, but her movements were not nearly as strong as her bitterness, or as swift as her thoughts. The very heat of that awakened and vigorous body crushed her like a great weight. The bones and muscles of her young body gave way like an obedient machine. her mouth was sealed by his lips. She felt him on her like a huge rock to which she was lashed, and together with which she was plunging downward, irresistibly and fast.

Losing all recollection not only of last night but of all her life, she sank into the deaf and twilit sea of familiar and ever-new pleasure. Above her floated the last traces of her nighttime thoughts and resolutions and all human compassion, dissolving into air one after another like watery bubbles over drowning person.

The white, gaily draped room quickly filled with the vivid light of day.

{/tabs}

The work which most obviously spans the categories of fact and fiction, history and legend is the “Conversation with Goya” (1935). Here, the author’s identification with his subject is complete. The ideas attributed to Goya are in fact Andrić's own reflections on the nature of art, provoked by an affinity with the painter's work. Had Andrić been interrogated as Ćamil was, he would have had to reply: "I am he".

The form of this piece, which has been used by other modern writers, brings it closer to a work of art than an essay. Goya's physical appearence is described briefly with particular attention to his hands, the bridge between the painter's physical existence and the world of his imagination. The "conversation", like so many of Andrić's works, is set in a frame with two dimension: the timelessness of a small French café, and the reference to a circus being set up outside it. The fact that the café is near Bordeaux rather than in Spain suggests the insignifiance of man-made geographical divisions.

The main idea presented in the essay is that the situation of the artist described  as ambiguous and often painful. He is resented as suspect, concealed behind a number of masks. The artist's destiny "insincerity and contradiction, uncertanity and a constant vain endeavour to bring together things which cannot be joined".

{tab Review}

This story, written in 1936, can be seen as a further elaboration of the theme of man's powerful, irrational reponse to woman. It is told in a gently ironic tone and offers an example of Andrić’s subtle humor. It is the tale of a wise old dervish, widely respected and admired. As he lies dying in the monastery, people come from miles around to hear his last words of wisdom. Finally the time comes for him to part from the world and he stops speaking in a moment of silent meditation. Those with him watch reverently as the great man evidently offers up his soul to God, and then ceases to be without a further word. What they cannot know is that Alidede, in his final moments, is preoccupied not by a serene prayer but by two memories, the only two incidents from his long life that come to him at that moment of exceptional significance. Each incident involves a disturbing experience with a woman. The first is his discovery, as a child, of the body of a drowned woman. He was so upset that he found himself unable ever to speak of it. The second is his hearing, as a young monk, the running footsteps of a young woman beat on the monastery gate – her only hope of escape – but Alidede, who witnessed the scene from his cell window, could not bring himself to go down and open the gate which would have brought him into direct contact with her. His last, unspoken words do indeed take the form of a prayer, but one that is very different in content from what those watching imagine.

It may be seen that there is a certain pattern in the stories discussed so far. Alidede’s insight into the fundamental forces of life is made possible by the single-minded devotional life he leads. His experience is very limited and his mind uncluttered: he is able to see the world more clearly than others who may be too involved in their own complex affairs.

{tab Fragment}

translated by Felicity Rossalyn, Forest Books, London&Boston, Dereta, Belgrade, 1992

(...)

His memory worked rapidly and vividly. Only twice in his life had he been moved by the appearance of the woman, and these were inconspicuous events, meaningless and unimportant, the sort which take place in secret, unknown and unseen by anyone else, and are eventually forgotten even by ourselves. But now, out of his whole long and industrious life, only those two incidents confronted him: two small and senseless anxieties which had filled a few days of his boyhood and youth, now grown into two distinct ghosts, which swept aside all the rest, his life, body, and thought, and merged into one single feeling of pain which filled him entirely. Yet all of this was less than the point of the sharpest needle-the last trace of consciousness and the last proof of his existence.

He was ten or eleven years old. Their house was outside the town, isolated among fields and plum orchards in the place where the river Bosnia takes a sharp bend, and skirts Zenica. In spring and autumn when the water rose, the Bosnia grew muddy and swollen and came up to the house itself, sweeping their garden fence away and carrying along the fences of other people, broken off from God knows where. It rolled down logs and roots, depositing a thick sediment of mud, branches, rags, broken barrels and sawn wood. For children it was a new world to delight in, foreign and mysterious, which they spent days exploring after every flood.

That spring the water was unusually capricious, subsiding suddenly and suddenly rising again on the same day. Early one evening the water had subsided after a startling and muddy inundation which had swept through their garden that morning. The sky was low and cloudy, and from the mountains came a distant, muffled roar announcing a new flood. The child was wandering by himself and, with a long stick, drawing patterns at random in the soft reddish mud left behind by the water. Right by the fence he noticed a short, round beam half buried in mud, leaves and pebbles. He was as pleased with it as with an unexpected toy and immediately climbed onto it; carefully, for it was still wet and slippery. He was supported by his stick against the fence and his feet on the log., and so he wavered, losing and then quickly regaining his balance, wholly taken up with those peculiar movements which adults think so senseless and dangerous, but which for children are imposed by the demands of their growing bodies and awakening imaginations. But children's bodies tire easily and their imaginations are quickly satisfied. The child threw away his stick, left himself down and sat astride the beam, feeling the deposit of sand and dry boughs with his left hand. Then his glance fell on something strange and puzzling. In the sand and branches he seemed to see a human ear and lock of hair. He turned around, and behind him he saw a naked female body caught between the beam and the fence, more than half buried in mud; but a shoulder protruded clearly from the sediment, and a little lower down a white hip stuck out. The knee was hidden in mud, but then a calf emerged and the toes. The child went suddenly still. After he had passed a second glance along the whole length of this body the flood had brought, he got slowly down from the beam and began to retreat through the garden, moving backwards without taking his eyes off the place where the drowned woman lay. When he reached the film, dry ground where the beehives were, he stopped; it was only there that he was seized by fear. Running towards the house, he was suddenly overwhelmed by a sense of shame he had never known before. Although he was tormented by fear and need to speak, he could not have found a single word in which to tell them of what he had seen. He wandered around the courtyard and they could scarcely draw him into the house. All the time he looked at his father, mother and brothers, he was thinking, 'Well, now I have to speak, now I shall tell them what I saw." But when he tried to find the first word and begin, his throat closed up and his lips were sealed. As long as it was light, he was in dread lest one of his brothers go into the garden and discover the secret.

(...)

He was around twenty-five years old. He had already been five or six years in Istanbul, the youngest of the teachers, highly respected, and unusually mature for his age.

The building he was living in had two aspects. The younger, main one looked onto the sea; the other onto a steep hillside with gardens and graveyards with solitary road leading down it.

One night, the young man stirred and woke up just at midnight. He got up, opened the window and, leaning his head against the wooden bars, breathed in the cold air of early spring. The night was moonless, but clear and starlit.

The cobblestones of the street ahead of  him gleamed as the road mounted the hill, bounded on both sides by a high wall and the dark gardens. His eyes began to close slowly from the fresh night air; he was about to shut the window and go back to bed when white figure appeared at the top of the street, making its way rapidly down it. He opened his eyes wide in a daze between sleeping and waking. The figure was approaching at great speed: it was a woman in white dress, or perhaps just a shift. A little later two dark male figures appeared from a corner at the top of the street; they were running too. The heavy thudding of their feet soon made itself heard. The woman was running straight towards the gate, which was right under the window; she was racing, sparing no effort, evidently mad with fear like a hunted animal. As she came close, she could be clearly seen to be disheveled, half-naked, her clothes torn.

The dull, weak sound of her body could be heard thudding against the heavy, locked gate. The young man leaned out and saw the woman as clearly as before, lying on the broad flagstones. Her head was resting on the threshold itself, and her hand stretched up vainly for the knocker, which she did not have the strength to reach.

Her pursuers, who were only twenty paces away from the building, stopped suddenly when they saw that woman had managed to reach the gate, and swiftly lost themselves in a narrow alley between the garden walls.

The young man did not dare glance down to the gate again. As if he too were playing his part in this strange nocturnal drama, he let go of the bar he was holding. Stepping backwards, he began slowly to retreat to his bed and quickly lay down.

He was utterly numbed, stiff, without a single thought, as if he what he had seen just now had no pierced his consciousness at all. The bed quickly warmed beneath him, and he fell into sleep as rapidly as a faint. He slept five minutes, possibly ten; then something painful and violent awoke him. Like someone else's rough hand. his own stomach roused him from sleep; and, immediately, before he opened his eyes, there flooded through him the painful twilight consciousness of some complicated misfortune. He had experienced something dreadful and terrible. Perhaps he had dreamt it? How wonderful that there is such a thing as consciousness-that a man can wake up and shake off his dreams! Or perhaps he had really experienced something painful, which would be waiting for him as soon as he opened his eyes? So he wavered between sleeping and waking for a while, until at last the heavy conviction grew in him that it had not been a dream, but reality. Awake, he clearly saw a dark, armed men once again chasing the half-naked woman, clearly heard her fall, and once again saw her arm stretched out for the knocker, which was too high. And her knocking might ring out at any moment.

(...)

And, here now, was his last minute, and with it this memory, the last gleam of his consciousness.

He tried in vain not to think of it, or to remember something else, anything. Nothing but these two dark memories and a pain which tears, groans or howls could not express. In an anguish hitherto unknown and unsuspected, his last strength was converted into a prayer such as no true believer, learned or simple, had ever made. This is how Alidede prayed under the unbearable pressure of his pain, while his lips moved simply from habit, for there were no longer any words upon them:

"Keeper of all things, Great and Only One, I have been Thin from my beginning, and held so firmly in Thy grasp that no harm could befall me. This knowledge, this peace which Thou gives those who forsake all else and give themselves wholly into Thy care - this is true Paradise. I have lived without hardship, floating like a little grain of dust that dances in the sun's rays; without weight it floats on upward, filled with sunshine, like a little sun itself. I did not know that this kind of bitterness could fill a man's soul. I had forgotten that at the exit from this world, as at the entry, stands woman like a gate. And now comes this bitterness which cleaves my heart in two to remind me of what, with my eyes on heaven, I had forgotten: that the bread which we eat is in fact stolen; that for the life which is given us we are indebted to takdirat, evil destiny, and sin; and that we cannot pass from this world to that better one until we have broken off like ripe fruit, fallen headlong in a painful drop and hit the hard ground. We probably bear the bruise from that fall even in Paradise. This is my thought, O gracious one, and Thou seest it, whether I speak it or not: it is a bitterer and harder thing that I knew to be enslaved to the laws of Thy world."

Seeing Alidede moving his lips, his disciples thought he was speaking his dying prayer and stopped wherever they happened to be, motionless and sad.

So he breathed his last. It was Friday evening, the night of a new moon, and by general agreement, his death was miraculous and holy and filled men with wonder, like his life itself.

{/tabs}

The hounting story, published in 1936, portraes a man who thrives in a violent situation. Its structure is one to which Andrić was to return in "Devil’s Yard". There is an outer frame of omniscient narration which describes the monk Brother Petar in his cell, recouting a story told to him by a servant in Asia Minor, where Peter was exiled for some years. The focal point is the figure Brother Petar sees framed in the window of the clock tower of a huge fortified mansion where he has been summoned to mend the clock. It is the figure of the man who once ruled Syria as ruthless tyrant, having been sent there to quell a rebellion. Eventually, after years of systematic brutality, a terrible revenge is wrought on him, and he is left – his limbs crushed and the features burned from his face – his limbs crushed and the features burned from his face – a grotesque torso, who is carried by his servants out into the garden to sit in the sun. His obvious harmlessness is emphasized before Petar realizes what he is seeing: "Something like a child, like an old woman was sitting there..."

This story is particularly concetrated, with each frame contributing a dimension to the meaning. Peter is a skilled mechanic who is particularly interested in clocks, of which he has a large collection in his cell. He is therefore seen to be on the side of time, in harmony with it and not trying to resist its passing. The servant who tells the story of Čelebi-Hafiz represents a pattern of survival regardless of the fluctuations of the fortunes of his masters. By contrast with these two passive vehicles of his story, Čelebi-Hafiz himself offers an extreme example of a pattern of rise and fall, power and ruin, abrupt change, interpreted by the people either as Divine Retribution of the workings of an Oriental Fate.

There is no real attempt to explain the tyrant’s fall, simply recognition that time and fortune inevitably brought change. The sevant introduces his account of the revenge of the tyrant’s prisoners with the words: "there is a cure for every ill, and that is that at every moment of a man's life there is a possibility that he will make a mistake, just one slight slip, but that is enough to cause his death and his absolute ruin." In addition, the instrument of the tyrant's downfall is a woman; the only creature for whom he ever felt real compassion or affection. But none of these possible human rationalizations is developed; Čelebi-Hafiz simply falls from power, just as cities and whole civilizations have flourished and perished throughout time.

{tab Review}

A reflection on the nature of intercultural relations in Bosnia is given in a piece published in 1946, under the “Letter from the Year 1920”. Throughout his work Andrić uses Bosnia, with its potential for intercultural conflict, as an image of the human world where the basic conditions of existence can be seen in an extreme, raw form. His frequent reference to the widespread and deep-seated hatred which he describes as characterizing the atmosphere of Bosnian life should be seen in these terms. Whether or not the story was written, or at least drafted, earlier, it is certainly no coincidence that it was published when it was, when the strife which Andrić had witnessed in the First World War was exaggerated systematically in the circumstances of open anti-Semitism and civil war.

This story is similar in flavour and manner to several published after the Second World War, in which the first-person narrator examines incidents from his own childhood and youth, usually expanding them into the more general statements. The degree to which these sketches and stories are actually autobiographical is in many cases uncertain, but together they add up to something approaching an account of the development of the writer’s imaginative life. In this story the references to the response of the narrator to the world of books are familiar. And it is likely that the character of Marks Levenfeld is based on someone known to Andrić as a young man. The substance of the piece, and letter itself, however, need have existed only in Andrić’s imagination, stimulated by his understanding of Bosnia and his knowledge of the repercussions there of both world wars. It is a lengthy reflection of the nature of hatred, seen as an organic force, the “correlative” of fear. In the context of Andrić’s experience of war the irrational fear characterizing human existence can be seen to have been channeled in a particular direction.

{tab Fragment}

translated by Lenore Grenoble, Forest Books, London&Boston, Dereta, Belgrade, 1992

(...)

My dear old friend,

(...)

But let me come straight to the point. Bosnia is a wonderful country, fascinating, with nothing ordinary in the habitat or people. And just there are mineral riches under the earth in Bosnia, so undoubtedly are Bosnians rich in hidden moral values, which are more rarely found in their compatriots in other Yugoslav lands. But, you see, there's one thing that the people of Bosnia, at least people of your kind, must realise and never lose sight of- Bosnia is a country of hatred and fear.

But leaving fear aside, which is only correlative of hatred, the natural result of it, let us talk about hatred. Yes, about hatred. And instinctively you recoil and protest when you hear that word (I saw it that night at the station), just as every one of you refuses to hear, grasp, and understand it. But it is precisely this that needs to be recognized, confirmed, and analyzed. And the real harm lies in the fact that no one either wants or knows how to do it. For the fatal characteristic of this hatred is that the Bosnian man is unaware of the hatred that lives in him, shrinks from analyzing it and - hates everyone who tries to do so. And yet it's fact that in Bosnia and Herzegovina there are more people ready in fits of this subconscious hatred to kill and be killed, for different reasons, and under different pretexts, than in other much bigger Slav and non-Slav lands.

I know that hatred, like anger, has its function in the development of society, because hatred gives strength, and anger provokes action. I know that there are ancient and deeply rooted injustice and abuses which only torrents of hatred and anger can uproot and wash away. and when these torrents dwindle and dry up, room for freedom remains, for the creation of better life. The people living at the time see the hatred and anger far better, because they are the sufferers by them, but their descendants see only the fruits of this strength and action. That I know well. But what I have seen in Bosnia - that is something different. It is hatred, but not limited just to a moment in the course of social change, or an inevitable part of the historical process; rather, it is hatred acting as an independent force, as an end in itself. Hatred which sets man against man and casts both alike into misery and misfortune, or drives both opponents to the grave; hatred like a cancer in an organism, consuming and eating up everything around it, only to die itself at the last; because this kind of hatred, like a flame, has neither one constant form, nor a life of its own: it is simply the agent of the instinct of destruction or self destruction. It exists only in this form, and only its task of total destruction has been completed.

Yes, Bosnia is a country of hatred. That is Bosnia. and by a strange contrast, which in fact isn't so strange, and could perhaps be easily explained by careful analysis, it can also be said that there are a few countries with such firm belief, elevated strength of character, so much tenderness and loving passion, such depth of feeling, of loyalty and unshakable devotion, or with such a thirst for justice. But in secret depths underneath all this hide burning hatreds, entire hurricanes of tethered and compressed hatreds maturing and awaiting their hour. The relationship between your loves and your hatred is the same as between your high mountains and the invisible geological strata underlying them, a thousand times larger and heavier. And thus you are condemned to live on deep layers of explosive which are lit from time to time by the very sparks of your loves and your fiery and violent emotion. Perhaps your greatest misfortune is precisely that you do not suspect just how much hatred there is in your loves and passions, traditions and pieties. And just as, under the influence of atmospheric moisture and warmth, the earth on which we live passes into our bodies and gives them colour and form, determining the character and direction of our way of life and our actions - so does the strong, underground and invisible hatred on which Bosnian man lives imperceptibly and indirectly enter into all his actions, even the best of them. Vice gives birth to hatred everywhere in the world, because it consumes and does not create, destroys, and does not build; but in countries like Bosnia, virtue itself often speaks and acts through hatred. With you, ascetics derive no love from their asceticism, but hatred for the voluptuary instead; abstainers hate those who drink, and drinkers feel a murderous hatred for the whole world. Those who do believe and love feel  a mortal hatred for those who don't, or those who believe and love differently. And, unhappily, the chief part of their belief and love is often consumed in this hatred. (The most evil and sinister-looking faces can be met in greatest numbers at places of worship - monasteries, and dervish tekkes). Those who oppress and exploit the economically weaker do it with hatred into the bargain, which makes that exploitation a hundred times harder and uglier; while those who bear these injustices dream of justice and reprisal, but as some explosion of vengeance which, if it were realised according to their ideas, would perforce be so complete that it would blow to pieces the oppressed along with the hated oppressors. You Bosnians have, for the most part, got used to keeping all the strength of your hatred for that which is closest to you. Your holy of holies is, as a rule, three hundred rivers and mountains away, but the objects of your repulsion and hatred are right beside you, in the same town, often on the other side of your courtyard wall. So your love remains inert, but your hatred is easily spurred into action. And you love your homeland, you passionately love it, but in three or four different ways which are mutually exclusive, often come to blows, and hate each other to death.

In some Maupassant story there is a Dionysiac description of spring which ends with the remark that on such days, there should be a warning posed on every corner: "Citoyens! This is spring - beware of love!" Perhaps in Bosnia men should be warned at every step in their every thought and their every feeling, even the most elevated, to beware of hatred - of innate, unconscious, endemic hatred. Because this poor, backward country, in which four different faiths live cheek by jowl, needs four times as much love, mutual understanding and tolerance as other countries. But in Bosnia, on the contrary, lack of understanding, periodically spilling over into open hatred, is the general characteristic of its people. The rifts between the different faiths are so deep that hatred alone can sometimes succeed in crossing them. I know that you could argue, and with sufficient reason, that a certain amount of progress can be seen in this direction; that the ideas of the nineteenth century have done their work here too, and after liberation and unification all this will go much better and faster. I'm afraid that this is not quite so. (In these past few months I think I have had a good view of the real relationships between people of different faiths and nationalities in Sarajevo!) On every occasion you will be told, and wherever you go you will read, "Love your brother, though his religion is other", "It' s not that marks the Slav", "Respect others' ways and take pride in your own", "Total national solidarity recognises no religious or ethnic differences."

But from time immemorial in Bosnian urban life there has been plenty of counterfeit courtesy, the wise deception of oneself and others by resounding words and empty ceremonies. That conceals the hatred up to a point, but doesn't get rid of it or thwart its growth. I'm afraid that in these circles, under the cover of all these contemporary maxims, old instincts and Cain-like plan may only be slumbering, and will live on until the foundations of material and spiritual life in Bosnia are altogether changed. And when will that time come, and who will have the strength to carry it out? It will come one day, that I do believe; but what I've seen in Bosnia does not indicate that things are advancing along that path at present. On the contrary.

I have thought this over and over, especially in the last few months, when I was still struggling against my decision to leave Bosnia for ever. Of course a man obsessed with such thoughts cannot sleep well, and I would lie in front of an open window in the room where I was born, while the sound of the Miljacka alternated with the rustling of the leaves in the early autumn wind.

Whoever lies awake at night in Sarajevo hears the voices of the Sarajevo night. The clock on the Catholic cathedral strikes the hour with weighty confidence: 2am. More than a minute passes (to be exact, seventy-five seconds - I counted) and only then with a rather weaker, but piercing sound does the Orthodox church announce the hour, and chime its own 2 am. A moment after it the tower clock on the Bey's mosque strikes the hour in a hoarse, faraway voice, and that strikes 11, the ghostly Turkish hour, by the strange calculation of distant and alien parts of the world. The Jews have no clock to sound their hour, so God alone knows what time it is for them by the Sephardic reckoning or the Ashkenazy. Thus at night, while everyone is sleeping, division keeps vigil in the counting of the late, small hours, and separates these sleeping people who, awake, rejoice and mourn, feast and fast by four different and antagonistic calendars, and send all their prayers and wishes to one heaven in four different ecclesiastical languages. And this difference, sometimes visible and open, sometimes invisible and hidden, is always similar to hatred, and often completely identical with it.

(...)

{/tabs}

For Andrić an essential feature of human relationships remains attack and defense, and he examines this now in his depiction of family life, where one partner in the marriage is seen as the aggressor. One situation is developed in several stories as a symbol of such covert aggression. “Mistreatment” (1946) is a typical instance.

This story opens with a statement of general hostility towards Anica, the wife in one of these ostensibly unexceptionable marriages, and criticism of her having left her husband: “No one could understand why Anica, the wife of Andrija Zereković, one day left her home and husband. There was no obvious reason or reasonable justification for such an action”.

This story offers an example of the balance between individual experience and generalization that typifies Andrić’s technique of characterization. The generalization is deliberately intensified in this story to heighten the contrast between the familiarity of the pattern, the expectations of outsiders and the reality of the marriage itself.

The nature of the harassment to which Anica is exposed is then described. The first hints lie in the way her husband looks on her arrival in his household as a new acquisition, the crowning touch to a perfectly successful life. He likes to refer to “his wife” as often as possible in conversation with others, implying that he is more concentrated with the sound of the world as a boost to his public image than with the woman herself.

The striking common feature of all the stories portraying these various kinds of violence is that its vehicle is speech. It is through words that Andrija persecutes his wife; another character compensates for the humiliation of his working life as a civil servant. A supervisor on a state farm tyrannizes an employee through words which alternate with unpredictable periods of silence.

{tab Review}

The introduction to this story published in 1947, makes its figurative quality explicit in a general statement about the particular nature of Bosnian stories. It is woven through with references to the telling of tales and blatant lies, the discrepancy between an event and its later elaboration, the need to invent what cannot be known. One of the subsidiary variations of the main theme is quite incidental, but carries wide implications.

The main line of this story is, then, the tale of a particularly ruthless vizier whose arrival in Travnik is preceded by terrible accounts of his cruelty, but who is himself never seen in the town at all. This fact simply increases the townspeople’s anxiety, so that when the Vizier acquires an elephant, their resentment of the innocent creature is the more intense. The Vizier’s young elephant seems larger than he really is because he reflects the people’s fear of the Vizier himself. There are several elements of importance in the development of the story such as the obvious innocence of the animal, which causes havoc in the narrow streets of Travnik because of its size and youthful exuberance, its need of play and exercise.

The central point of the story is made in a manner typical for Andrić. The narrative focuses on one character, Aljo, who sits on a hillside above the town, and from this new perspective is able clearly to see the nature of the impasse in which he had his fellow-citizens are trapped. So, he decided to visit Vizier in order to tell him that “it was enough with the elephant”. But on the way to the Vizier’s konak “he loses so much of himself, fear consumes him to such an extent that his life is worth nothing”.  He goes back down the hill to become once more the old Aljo, who loves a good joke. In its limited way, with the scope for action at its disposal, Aljo’s spirit triumphs. He has shown more courage than his fellow-citizens in his willingness to complain to the Vizier about the elephant and, when this mission proves impossible, after his initial reaction his old zest for life returns.

The story is a particularly apt illustration of its introductory remarks. The wry humor with which it treats the surface content, the elephant and the townspeople’s inept reactions, cannot relieve the underlying account of the price of life under occupation which is vividly evokes.

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translated by Celia Hawkesworth, Forest Books, London&Boston, Dereta, Belgrade, 1992

The towns and villages of Bosnia are full of stories. Under the guise of improbable events masked by invented names, these tales, which are for the most part imaginary, conceal the true, unacknowledged history of the region, of living people and long-vanished generation. These are those Eastern lies which the Turkish proverb holds to be 'truer than any truth'.

These stories live a strange, hidden life. In this they resemble the Bosnian trout. There is a particular kind of trout in the streams and brooks of Bosnia; not large, dark backed, with two or three large red spots. It is unusually greedy, but also unusually cunning and quick, and it will be rush blindly onto a hook in a skilful hand, but cannot be caught or even seen by those who are not familiar with these waters or this kind of fish.

It is the same with the stories. You can live for months in a Bosnian village without hearing one of them properly or to the end, but it can happen that you chance to spend the night somewhere and hear three or four stories, of that quite implausible kind which tell you most about a place and its people.

It is the people of Travnik, the wisest in Bosnia, who know the greatest number of such stories, but they rarely tell to strangers, just as it is the rich who are most reluctant to part with their money. But as a result each of their stories is worth three of anyone else's. According to them, that is.

Such a tale is the story of the Vizier's elephant.

(...)

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A posthumously published collection of eleven stories written between 1972 and 1974, represents Andrić’s last major creative effort in short fiction. It clearly demonstrates that his prodigious talent was not exhausted in the last years of his life, as some critics suspected. On the one hand “The House on Its Own” is a deeply retrospective work, a rich résumé of Andri ć’s most characteristic and pervasive themes, motifs and character types. Yet it is an innovative work as well, fundamentally different in composition from all of his other prose. This is Andrić’s first attempt to create a “closed” cycle of interconnected stories.

Andrić links the stories explicitly through the narrator-writer whose presence weaves through the entire cycle. In the introduction the writer, allegedly Andrić himself, appears in the first person to define the compositional framework of the collection. He identifies the stories as recollections associated with an eclectic house in Bosnia. The cycle is constructed as a series of ghostly visitations by tormented souls who intrude upon the writer in this setting in order to tell their stories. These alienated beings are familiar figures from Andrić’s literary landscape: ruthless rulers, libertines, social outcasts, dreamers and recluses. Whether the result of a single traumatic experience, hereditary degeneracy, social decay or all-consuming passion, physical and spiritual suffering permeates the universe of Andrić’s fiction? But in the midst of this seemingly hopeless existence, even in pain and degradation, there are moments of ecstasy and release. Andrić’s message in “The House on Its Own” is not pessimistic. It is disquieting and deeply moving yet always life-affirming. Although tormented in life, in death the ghostly visitors receive their due through the cathartic process of storytelling.

“The House on Its Own” is clearly one of Andrić’s most complex and innovative works. It operates in two frames of reference, fictional and metaliterary. For the first time Andrić is baring the artifice of writing fiction and exploring the art of storytelling. These apparitions from the past are not “real” ghosts, but ghosts of imaginary characters explicitly identified as the writer’s own creations. “The House on Its Own” is thus both a final successful endeavor in the genre of the short story as well as a very personal, even autobiographical study of the artist’s craft, a testament to his life and art.

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Introduction

It is a two-storey house on the steep slope of Alifakovac, right near the top, a little distance from any others. On the ground floor, where it was warm in winter and cool in summer, there is a spacious hall, a large kitchen and two small, dark rooms at the back. Upstairs there are three quite large rooms, one of which, the one in the front that looks over the open Sarajevo valley, has a broad balcony. Its size and construction are reminiscent of the Bosnian 'divanhana', but it is not built as they are natural wood, but painted dark green, and its balustrade is not made of round railings, but of flat boards cut as on the balconies of Alpine houses. It was built in the nineties - 1887 to be precise - when local people began to build houses 'according to plan', designed and laid out in Austrian style, and where half-successful in this. Had it been built just half a dozen years earlier, this house would have been built entirely in the old Turkish way, like most of the houses on Alifakovac, and not in the 'German style of the buildings along the banks of the Miljacka. Then the broad entrance hall on the ground floor would have been called an 'ahar' and the balcony a 'divanhana' and the whole thing would not have had this hybrid appearance of a building in which intention and will had gone in one direction towards something new and unknown, and hands, eyes and whole inner being dragged in another, towards the old and customary. The nature and arrangement of the furniture, the colour of the walls, the Viennese chandeliers, of crystal and brass, the earthenware Bosnian stoves, with their ceramic tiles, and locally made rugs in the rooms symbolise that duality. Inside as well as out, one may clearly read the collision of two epochs and the arbitrary mixture of styles, and yet it all blends into the atmosphere of a warm human habitation. It is evident that the people who live in this house do not care much for the external appearance of things, or for their names, but that they know how to take all that those things have to offer for a modest, tranquil and comfortable life to people who care more for life itself  than for what may be thought, spoken or written about it. Here things and buildings in their primeval namelessness and perfect modesty simply serve naturally modest and happily nameless people for their few, simple needs. Over it all reigns the kind of peace that we always wish for but rarely achieve in our lives, and that we even often run away from without real need and to our lives, and that we even often run away from without real need and to our own detriment.

It is good to live and work in these Sarajevo houses. A few years ago I spent a whole summer in the one described here. These are my memories of that house and that time. More exactly, they are just some of those memories; ones about which I am able to say something.

(...)

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Only three Andrić’s stories deal directly and exclusively with the War itself, and of these one is in fact a sketch for a passage from the longest of three, “Zeko”, published in 1948. Describing the experience that led the inadequate Zeko, dominated by an aggressive wife and collaborator son, to become involved in illegal activities in the Resistance in occupied Belgrade, it has something of the uneven quality of the “The Woman from Sarajevo”. In the novel the protagonist becomes almost a caricature among characters whose treatment is realistic. In “Zeko”, the situation is reserved. The main character’s credibility is undermined initially by the almost grotesque figures of his wife and son, and his later development lacks conviction. Nevertheless, the story contains some vivid passages, particularly those describing life by the Sava River and the bombing Belgrade.

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The story is published in 1950, portrays the agonized fear of the Jewish owner of a little bar in Sarajevo on the one hand and the development of the brutal inadequate personality of a young Fascist, or “Ustasha”, on the other. The material is superficially as directly a product of the specific circumstances of the Second World War.

“The Titanic Bar” describes the situation in Sarajevo in the early stages of the War before the systematic removal of the Jewish population to work camps or extermination, when individual members of the Ustasha movement took advantage of the times to rob and persecute individual Jews. Some of these “Ustasha” acquired large sums of money or jewellery through blackmail or in return for helping some Jews and their families to leave the country. Andrić describes the dignity, squalid little bar owned by Mento Papo, so small that only half-a-dozen customers can stand in it at one time; and the character of Papo himself, the black sheep of the Sephardic community of Sarajevo, who took up with petty gamblers and drinkers at an early age and is generally regarded as having disgraced the Jews. The portrait of the young man in Ustasha uniform, Stjepan Ković is given as an inadequate, dissatisfied and consequently potentially dangerous personality. He is a man who needs some outward sign of importance: he has to carry something as he walks through the town. Ković suffers from a painful, obsessive desire to be something other than he is, above all to be seen to be important.

This story is a satisfactory coincidence of universal, generalized themes of fear and persecution with the specific circumstances of the Second World War in Bosnia, with both aspects of the whole developed. As in the case of the victims in earlier stories, Papo’s vulnerability acts as a magnet, a provocation to Ković’s aggression, which is turn functions as compensation for his own sense of uneasy dissatisfaction.

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In the quarter between the electric plant and the tobacco factory, which at one time was called Hisieta, there was a honey-comb of forlorn little streets containing several cafés and tiny bars, even though the neighbourhood was stagnant and not particularly noted for its human traffic. Some of these cafés had bad reputations, which meant that they were well known and well frequented; they were regularly patronised even by people from the other parts of town.

On the very edge of the park that enclosed the tobacco factory, in Mutevelić Street, was the hindmost of these bars. It was a two-storied house with peeling plaster that reminded one of a loathsome skin disease, and its windows, flowerless and bare of curtains, were like some festering eyes shorn of lashes and brows. Its building style harked back to the middle period of Austrian rule, and was a bastard offspring of the architecture of Central Europe and of the Near East of that time, suffering from anemia and weak breath. Its visage was one of poverty, but poverty stripped of all charm and picturesqueness: the architectural expression of a life without thought or vision. Beside the main entrance on the ground floor there was an other, narrower one, topped by an overlarge green board with a red-letter sign on it:

B A R  T I T A N I C

Prop. Mento Papo    

The little bar-café, boasting the name of the tragically capsized English transoceanic ship, was a dark hole-in-the-wall some six yards long and two yards wide, without any chairs, so that the five-or six-odd guests it might accommodate always stood at the bar counter, though the owner would produce accrete or a beer barrel as a seat for his more elderly customers. Men given to drink and bar life are fond of just this kind of bare and cramped space, which gives one the sense of being a casual visitor, forever in transit; the kind of room in which none of the furnishing can distract a guest's attention from the essential business at hand-drinking and the exchange of maudlin conversation. At the far end of the bar, a green drape concealed a door that led by way of a corridor to two larger rooms. One of these was Mento's quarters, the other was empty, save for a bare table and several rudimentary chairs. This was the gambling room. Its windows faced onto the garden, which in reality was a combination of hen coop, stable, garbage heap, and children's playground. The pair of windows were always covered with cotton curtains, mildewed and already quite stiff with age and dust, which were never drawn aside as all gambling was done by electric light.

(...)

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The story is published in 1954. It is one of Andrić's short stories that is far removed from either the Bosnian setting or its thematics and symbolism. This has led more than one critic to remark that Andrić had bid his farewell to Bosnia and was concentrating more successfully on contemporary stories with non-Bosnian setting.

The central character is the forty-eight ex-opera-singer Marta L, beautiful and successful lady. She spends her holiday on the seaside, and lying on the beach, she is thinking about herself. Marta L. is in the zenith of her life, and she has an inkling of the old age approaching. She doesn’t want to admit her fear, so she goes back to her childhood and youth, and revives the days of waking her sexuality. The very thought on the old age fills her with horror; in the hot summer day the ex-beauty can’t stop thinking that the best days of her life passed away, and that the time when she will be the old lady is coming. Marta L. can’t find own peace, except in sunbathing or swimming.  In those moments, when she feels her body, Marta L. is tranquil. The end of the story tells that: “She felt herself as light and big and powerful as the world which itself changes and remains always the same, calm and happy in the lap of the benign, momentary respite.”

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(...)

There are those women, like this one, in whom the feeling for colour and chromatic harmony is highly developed, as if inborn. Like plants, they live and talk in colour. Around such women colours sing, as it were, inaudibly and yet in such unison that they seem to be part of cosmic harmony scaled down to a women's being and the power of human senses. Women like this seem to gather new colours from nature, and to create new relationships between them, and new iridescences; actually, all they do is to uncover them to our eyes, which otherwise wouldn't know how to see them. Slowly and calmly, as unerringly as nature herself, they spread about them, according to their age and possibilities and the circumstances in which they live, their own colours, as if that were all they had to communicate about themselves to other people.

Very little more could be said about this woman who lay at some distance from the rest of the bathers, her hands clasped on her breasts, stretched out and slender, with her eyes shut, like one of the stone duchesses on a sarcophagus.

We know next to nothing about people who pass by us or lie next to us. Was there anything more one might added about this woman, laid out like a statue, Martha L., an opera singer on her vacation, in her forty-eight year? She herself was trying to forget who and what she was, and how long she had been around. Drowsily she gave herself to the sun's fire and to the dim memories and daydreams that welled in her aimlessly and against her will. Vague stirrings, words clearly spoken and yet unintelligible, silences of an unknown meaning, all this mingled inside her, ebbed swiftly and came back again, refusing to fade into limbo. Though not asleep, she was dreaming. And now she was clearly: a strange image out of her past life, one that she had never suspected was still alive in her memory. She was sitting on a garden wall.

(...)

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The temperament of the children through whose eyes have been seen all the stories mentioned so far is striking similar, and its particular predilections are developed in the story “Panorama”, published in 1958, which contains the least equivocal statement of the positive power of the imagination.

The tale describes a source of great excitement in the childhood of the first-person narrator. For about a year during the boy’s schooldays in Sarajevo there was a permanent “Panorama of the world”: a series of still photographs which could be seen enlarged and brilliantly vivid through a series of special binoculars arranged in a circle. The photographs would be rotated at intervals so that each spectator could look at each one in turn.

For the child the world seen through these binoculars – Rio de Janeiro, Lisbon, Ceylon – became the only reality – “real, glorious, bright life” – and the life of his little Bosnia town seemed “like a bad dream”.

The style of the story conveys its mood of excitement through short sentences and exclamations. The child’s reaction are evoked by his constantly relating what he sees to his own childish experience.

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“Summer in the South”(1959) is, in fact, an elaboration of a recurrent idea of Andrić’s found in “Unrest” and “Signs by the Roadside”. Sometimes by the sea, which he loved, Andrić found himself thinking of the perfect salvation of simply dissolving into its salty, iodine evaporation.

The story describes a staid and apparently very ordinary Austrian teacher on holiday on the Southern Adriatic coast. The sensation of renewal and refreshment from the sea, sun and salt air is described in physical terms: “Refreshed by swimming, the sun and the sea-water, he felt as though he were dressed in light, festive, flower-white and scented clothes, and that he was himself blossoming and growing together with them and with everything around him.” Increasingly, the teacher becomes susceptible to tricks of the air, and the smoke of the cigarette that seems intoxicating in these surroundings: he begins to feel himself part of the heady atmosphere itself. The teacher disappears without trace, mystifying not only his wife and the local police but the whole population of the little town, who find the uncertainty surrounding the whole curious affair disconcerting and uncomfortable.

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When Professor Alfred Norgess and his wife Anna arrived in the little town on the Adriatic coast, they were met by sweltering heat and pretty disappointments of all kinds. Everything looked crude and forbidding. Everything–beginning with the porter who brought their luggage and took his money without even saying "Thanks" to the ailing landlady who, standing in front of them with her arms limp at her sides, answered all their questions with helpless shrugs. The room was like a darkened and suffocating oven, for the green wooden shutters had been kept closed. What was worse, the town's water supply had run low; instead of water, the little faucet above the wash basin emitted a sadly mocking hiss. The landlady assured them with a perfectly straight face that the water would be turned on before dawn and would run for a couple of hours; one would have to catch it then. In the air, and over the furnishings, lay on odour of neglect and lassitude.

The professor watched his wife as she took her things out of the valise, and wished he could run far away from there, in any direction, for it seemed to him that the place lacked not only water and freshness but was devoid also of order and life. Still, in his usual old way, he didn't say a word.

After an hour, this first impression underwent a change. In the last glow of the afternoon sun, they had a short swim in the sea and felt refreshed, then took a short walk around the lighted town square, and after supper lingered a long time on their apartment terrace, which was fringed with flowers and partially roofed over with a dense vine arbor.

In the morning, after getting up early, they had breakfast on the terrace, with a view of the sea, in the freshness and shade of the summer morning. That early hour promptly displayed for them all the radiance and glory of the region, and won them over completely. In the wake of this came an unexpected and swift transformation. Their bad humour of the day before disappeared without a trace, as did the thought of running away; and they wished only one thing: that this beauty met their old friends from Vienna, who spent every summer in this place and who, in fact, had recommended it to them. Nothing seemed important or difficult any more, not the sweltering room nor the water system that produced a tepid dribble during a few short night hours, nor the slow service in the restaurant. On the contrary, they now began to discover fresh beauties in this sojourn by the seaside.

(...)

The days passed. It was already the end of August, the finest time of the year on the coast. The long investigation of the professor's disappearance had still not produced any clues. Neither the sea nor the land had yielded up his body. The authorities continued to inquire and search. The tiny seaside resort lived under the shadow of the mysterious disappearance. Walking along the street one would often hear a couple of house wives, on their way back from market, ending their conversation with a shake of their hands.

"Still nothing. What do you make of it?"

One guessed right away that the topic was the halpless vanished professor. And the other townsmen, too, when chatting among themselves or with the visitors, remembered the fate of the missing man. From the sudden embarrassed pauses in their conversation and the troubled glances they stole unconsciously toward the sea, one could infer, even without words, that they were all anxious to have some kind, any kind, of explanation of the baffling disappearance, that they were waiting for it impatiently, as though it were something on which the inner peace of every single one of them depended.

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The story (1962) belongs to the inter-war period. It is the expression of an abstract idea in concrete terms, suggesting the force with which quite abstract notions and vague impressions can impose themselves on the imagination, demanding to be recognized as no less real than “reality”.

This is the story about disappearing woman – a story which in other contexts has seemed puzzling, if not downright insubstantial, but which is greatly improved by being viewed as an allegory of the life of art. Jelena like Eurydice is a supremely beautiful woman, but the narrator does not live for her illusory visits because he desires her, but because life itself is transformed when she arrives. Life is infinitely rich and significant in her presence, and he is happy with no cause; without her, he despairs, in a wasteland of insignificance. She is really all the artist’s nighttime visions contained in a single figure, and she is gloriously beautiful than anything that could actually exist. The narrator concedes from the start that she is only an illusion, but this is a fact he has recovered from ‘like an illness you only catch once in a lifetime’ and his whole imaginative efforts is to glimpse the illusion as often as possible – to win his Eurydice again and again over the threshold between dreams and realities. Orpheus must continually expect her, or she will never come. She is always and only the product of the artist’s lyre. As such she is immortal, for art is immortal; but if he views her as daylight reality she slips back over the threshold, and becomes part of that world of transience where Hades has entire dominion.

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From the Very Beginning

In the silent and still air of the summer day there appeared from somewhere an unexpected and invisible movement, like a single, errant wave. My half-open window knocked several times against the wall. Tak-tak-tak. Not raising my eyes from my work, I merely smiled like a man who feels confident in his surroundings and who lives peacefully in a state of contentment not interrupted by surprises. Without a word or sound, with a single movement of the head I gave a sign that the ploy was a success, that she can enter, that I am expecting her joyfully. She always comes that way, with some sort of charming mischief, with music or with fragrance. (With the music of a random, lonely sound which seems unusual and significant, with the fragrance of an entire landscape or the northwind which portends the first snow). Sometimes I hear a hardly comprehensible conversation, as if at the gate she were asking directions to my apartment. Sometimes I see only her willowy and inaudible shadow flash by my window and again I neither turn my head nor raise my glance, so certain am I that it is she and that she will now enter. In that split second I experience an indescribable and unspeakable joy.

Of course, afterwards she never enters, nor do my eyes catch sight of her, whom they have never seen. But I have become accustomed not to expect her really but to submerge totally in the bliss induced by the endless moment of her arriving. I have gotten over the fact that she won't show up, that she does not exist, as one gets over an illness which one goes through only once in life.

Observing and recalling for days and years her appearance in various shapes, always strange and unexpected, I succeeded in finding in them a certain regularity, some order. Above all, the illusion is connected with the sun and its path. (I call this an illusion for the sake of you to whom I am telling all this; personally, it would be both ludicrous and insulting to call my greatest reality by that name which really means nothing. Yes, she appears almost exclusively from the end of April to the beginning of November. During the winter she very rarely shows up, and even then in connection with sun and light. As the sun grows, her appearances become frequent and more lively. In May they are rare and irregular. In July and August almost daily. But in October, when the afternoon sun is fluid and when one drinks it endlessly and tirelessly as though drinking thirst itself, she hardly moves away from me while I sit on the terrace covered by the netting of sun and shadows of leaves. I sense her presence in the room by a hardly audible rustling of the pages of my book or by a barely noticeable creaking on the parquet. But most often she stands invisible and inaudible somewhere behind my shadow and I live for hours in the awareness of her presence, which is much more then the eyes and ears and all the poor senses can give.

But when the sun's path begins to shorten and when there are fewer leaves, and a lighting-fast squirrel, whose fur is already changing, darts on the shiny-smooth bark of the trees, the apparition begins to pale and to disappear. Increasingly rare are those minute sounds which I had become accustomed to hearing behind me in my room, and the jokes known only to the carefree youth and to the eternal world of dreams. The invisible and dies without a sign or a farewell as apparitions and phantoms disappear. She never existed. Now she is not.

Taught by long experience, I know that she sleeps in my shadow as on a wondrous couch, from which she arises and greets me irregularly and unexpectedly, by logic which is difficult to comprehend. Moodily and unpredictably, as one can expect from a creature which is both a woman and an apparition. Just as it happens with woman of flesh and blood, from time to time with her, too, suspicious and anxiety and melancholy come into my life, with no relief or explanation.

(...)

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