Fragment

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.

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.

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.

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...'

(...)

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.

(...)

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.

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.

(...)

Fragment

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.

(...)

Fragment

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.

(...)

Fragment

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.

(...)

Fragment

(...)

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.

(...)

Fragment

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.

Fragment

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.

(...)