With a hundred gold ducats and a high commendation in his pocket, the frontier officer, who had just passed his thirtieth year, indulged in all kinds of visions, but especially in the vision of a more peaceful, more attractive, and socially more rewarding way of life. He believed he had found the embodiment of such a life in a young Viennese girl. She was the daughter of a military judge, a Germanized Pole, and a landless Hungarian baroness. This pretty, romantic, and somewhat too lively young lady, Anna Maria, was promptly, and indeed rather hurriedly, given in marriage to the unassuming but worthy frontier officer from the Empire’s periphery. It was as if destiny had only waited to hang this woman around his neck to lash him completely and for good to the dead round of subordinate duties from which he yearned to escape at all costs. The marriage, which was to have opened the door to a finer and more congenial life, in fact closed it and tied him fast forever, robbing him even of his peace and equanimity, which are the only saving grace and dignity of humble and anonymous lives.
The information officer “who’d done it” soon discovered that there were things which no one could “reconnoiter” and foresee, namely the moods and caprices of a vain and restless woman. The “unhappy Polish-Hungarian-Viennese mixture,” as the commanding officer of the Zemun garrison described Frau von Mitterer, suffered from an excess of imagination and from a morbid, irresistible, and insatiable need for excitement.
Frau von Mitterer became excited over music, nature, misguided philanthropy, old pictures, new ideas, Napoleon, or anything else outside herself and her own circle, anything in fact that was inimical to her family life, her own good name, and the reputation of her husband. This unquenchable need for enthusiasm in the life of Frau von Mitterer often found an outlet in fleeting and impulsive love affairs. Driven by a mysterious and irresistible craving, this frigid woman of seething imagination occasionally developed a passionate attachment for a young man, usually younger than herself, imagining each time that in the particular young man of the moment, whom she felt to be endowed with a strong personality and an uncorrupted heart full of pristine emotions, she had found the model of her dreams and a kindred soul. By the unwritten law of such cases, they invariably turned out to be gifted but uninhibited young men with but a single thought in their mind, to sleep with her, just as they would with any other woman who came their way and offered no resistance. But after the first bloom of enthusiasm, when the first caresses inevitably revealed the vast chasm between her soaring esoteric passion and the man’s real intentions, Anna Maria would shrink back disenchanted. “Love” would quickly change to hate and disgust of the fallen idol, of herself, of love and life in general. After a slow convalescence, she would recover and cast about for a fresh object of enthusiasm and disappointment, thus gratifying her inner need for crises and renunciations. And so it went on until the next time, when everything would begin all over again.
Von Mitterer had tried many times to disabuse his wife of her illusions, to bring her to reason and protect her, but it had all been in vain. His “ailing child,” who was now getting on in years, succumbed every now and then, in the cyclic pattern of an epileptic, to new crises in her quest for pure love. The Colonel had learned to recognize both the advance symptoms and the probable course of each new “groping,” and could tell beforehand the exact moment when she would fling herself around his neck in tears of despair, sobbing that they were all after her but no one really loved her.
How could such a marriage exist and continue? No one would ever know how this sober and conscientious man managed to endure it and why he forgave it all in advance; it was one of those ineffable mysteries that so often cruelly divide two people and yet throw them together inseparably.
Already in the first year of their marriage, Anna Maria had gone back to her parents in Vienna, confessing that she had a mortal loathing of physical love and was quite unable to give her husband his connubial due. Agreeing to everything, the Captain managed to bring her around and take her back. Later, a daughter was born to them; but the truce was short-lived. Two years later it all started again. The Captain bowed his head and sought refuge in the hard work of the Zemun quarantine station and in his intelligence activities, reconciled to the fact that he had to live with a demon to which endless sacrifice must be offered, and which could only pay him back with fresh unhappiness and new alarms.
Like all unstable flighty women, the handsome, wayward, and extravagant Frau von Mitterer did what she pleased without ever quite knowing what it was she wanted. Rushing headlong into her enthusiasm of the moment, she would then flinch away in disenchantment. It was impossible to say which was harder for the Captain to bear or more painful for him to watch, her exaltations or her disappointments. He bore the one and then the other with a martyr’s patience. The fact was that he loved this woman, inflicted on him like an undeserved punishment, and he loved her staunchly and selflessly, as one loves a sick child. Everything about her, within her, and around her, down to the small inanimate objects that belonged to her, appeared to him as something rare and exquisite, deserving adoration and justifying every sacrifice. He suffered from her whims and lapses, he felt embarrassed before the world and ashamed before himself, but at the same time he trembled at the thought that this bewitching woman might leave him or do violence to herself and disappear from his home or from the world altogether. He rose in the service, his daughter grew up, a frail, earnest, and sensitive child, but Frau von Mitterer continued her erratic wanderings with undiminished energy, seeking from life all the things it couldn’t give, transforming everything into an object of enthusiasm or regret, and distilling from either fresh torment for herself and for those around her. The baffling and untamable fury that raged in this woman took new forms and directions as the years went by, but it showed no signs of weakening or abating.
When von Mitterer was somewhat unexpectedly appointed Consul-General at Travnik, Anna Maria, who just then was passing through one of her big depressions, began to rage and weep, saying that she would not leave the semioriental market town where she had languished up till then in order to go and live in a “real Turkish graveyard,” nor would she let her child go “to Asia.” The Colonel tried to calm his wife, explaining that the new appointment was a significant change and an important step forward in his career; it was a hard assignment, true, but the pay was much better and would enable him to assure the child’s future. Finally he proposed that if she absolutely refused to go, she should remain with the child in Vienna. Anna Maria first agreed to the compromise, then quickly changed her mind and decided to make the sacrifice. The Colonel, it seemed, was not to be granted a few quiet months of that paradise which was another name for the absence of his wife.
As soon as von Mitterer had found a house and fitted it out as best he could, Frau von Mitterer and the child also arrived. It was obvious at first glance that she was a woman who expected the world to give her a lot of elbow room. She was still handsome and looked as youthful as ever, though perhaps running to fat just a little. Her whole appearance, the glow of her flawlessly white skin, the strange brilliance of her eyes that graded from emerald to dusty gold, like the shimmery waters of Lashva, the color and style of her coiffure, her gait, movements, and imperious way of talking, all brought to Travnik for the first time something of the glamor and style which the local people ascribed to foreign consuls in their imagination.
At Frau von Mitterer’s side was her daughter Agatha, a thirteen-year-old girl who was quite unlike her mother. Wistful and silent, mature and sensitive beyond her years, with thin drawn lips and the fixed gaze of her father, she walked at her mother’s side like a constant mute reproof, never showing her feelings, almost as if she were unaware of the world around her. In reality, the child was bewildered and overwhelmed by her temperamental mother and by the things she guessed were going on between her parents; she loved her father, although that love was passive and undemonstrative. She was one of those delicate, fine-boned girls who develop early and become grown wom
en in miniature, so that they constantly surprise and mislead, with their intermittent visages of utter childishness and unexpectedly mature airs. The living opposite of her mother in everything, the girl had no ear for music and liked to be alone with her books.
Immediately after her arrival, Frau von Mitterer threw herself with all her energy into the arrangement of the house and garden. Furniture was sent from Vienna, workmen were brought in from Slavonski Brod. Everything was changed, moved around, turned upside down. (Over at the French Consulate, in the course of gossip about “those people on the other side of the river,” it was said that Frau von Mitterer was building “a new Schoenbrunn.” In her turn, Frau von Mitterer, who was fond of the French language and relished what she considered to be French wit, gave back as good as she got. Speaking ironically of Mme Daville’s furnishings, which included, as we have seen, a number of cleverly draped and disguised old Bosnian chests, she said that Mme Daville had decorated her house in the style of “Louis Caisse”—Louis the Coffin.) The garden was closed off with a high picket fence from the noisy, muddy courtyard of the town’s caravansary and its stables. In fact, the old family house of the Hafizadich was remodeled completely to Frau Consul’s specifications, of which no one could see the end or sense, except that they were in keeping, or were meant to be, with certain lofty ideas of perfection, grandeur, and gentility which were not clear even to herself.
As sometimes happens with women of this type, the passing years produced new eccentricities. Anna Maria now became a monomaniac for cleanliness. But although her mania was a burden to her, it was a greater burden to those around her. For her nothing was ever fresh enough or well enough washed, no one was ever clean enough. She waged war on filth and disorder with all the intensity of which she was capable. She changed servants, terrorized the inmates, dashed about, crackled like a rifle, and spent herself in her war against mud, dust, vermin, and the strange habits of the new milieu. This would be followed by days when Anna Maria, suddenly discouraged, lost faith in the outcome of her struggle; wringing her hands in despair, she shrank back from the dirt and confusion of the oriental jack warren that seemed to come at her from every side, that all but seeped out of the soil and rained down from the air, welling in through the doors and windows and through every cranny, and, gradually and inexorably, conquering the house and everything in it, things, people, livestock, and all. It seemed to her that, since she came to these backwoods, even her personal things had begun to exude a certain moldiness and rot and were slowly growing a patina of dirt which no rubbing or polishing could remove.
Very often she came back from her walks feeling shaken and quivering with fresh discouragement, because no sooner had she stepped out of the house than she came across a lame or mangy dog with a fearful and agonized look in his eyes, or a pack of street mongrels snarling over a lump of sheep’s guts as they tore and dragged it all over the street. She went riding out of town and tried, from her high black horse, not to look at what was immediately around her. But even that was no comfort.
One day, after a brief spring shower, she rode out with a groom along the main road. As they left the town behind them, they met a beggar. The man, a sickly barefoot halfwit in rags, sprang out of the way of the riders and clambered up a steep path than ran above the road but parallel with it. In this way his feet were almost level with the face of the lady on the horse. For a moment her field of vision was filled entirely with the pair of huge, dirty, naked feet, slogging over trampled clay, the feet of a workman, old before his time, who could work no longer. She only glanced at them for a moment, yet in her mind’s eye she would see those inhuman feet always: square, shapeless, gnarled, indescribably deformed by a lifetime of hard and endless plodding, dark and clotted with mud, with cracks like pine bark, crooked and lumbering as if they barely supported their own weight, feet whose stilted, maimed walk seemed to say with every step that the end of the road was near.
“Alas, a hundred suns and a thousand springtimes could do nothing to help those feet,” Anna Maria thought suddenly at that moment. “Neither care nor food nor medicines could change or cure them. No matter what beauty there was, no matter how many blossoms came and went on this earth, those feet would only get yellower, uglier, more terrible!”
The thought haunted her wherever she went; the painful, monstrous vision did not leave her for days. Whatever she thought or set out to do was chilled and paralyzed beforehand by the realization: “That still exists!”
Of such things was Anna Maria’s unhappiness compounded, and her anguish grew more acute in the knowledge that no one understood her feelings and repulsion or shared her longing for perfection and cleanliness. And in addition to this, and maybe for this very reason, she felt a gnawing need to talk about it and complained to everyone about the squalor of the town and the slackness of the servants, although she saw that no one understood her, no one was willing to help.
The parish priest at Dolats, the fat and coarse Fra Ivo Yankovich, listened to her plaints and bathos with an air of vacuous civility; then pretended to humor her as one humors a child, saying anything that came to his mind, declaring that people should bear their burden quietly and humbly and that, in the last analysis, even mud and filth “come from God.”
“As for the rest, it has been said long ago: Castis omnia casta—to the pure everything is pure,” the priest translated, with that perfunctory geniality which is characteristic of fat people and elderly clerics.
Afterwards Frau von Mitterer, cowed and disenchanted with everything, would remain indoors for days, shunning all contact with people and avoiding the sight of the town. She wore gloves all day long and sat in an armchair with a white dustslip that was regularly changed, allowing no one to come close when they spoke to her. In spite of all this she was haunted by the feeling that she was foundering in dirt and dust and foul odors. And when she couldn’t bear it any longer, which happened often, she would get up and rush in to her husband, interrupting him in his work, reproaching him bitterly for having brought her here and demanding in tears that they leave this wretched, unclean country forthwith.
And this was repeated over and over again until force of habit began to have its effect or until a new mania replaced the old one.
In the Austrian Consulate itself, the chief factotum after the Consul-General was the interpreter and chancery secretary Nicholas Rotta. He had previously served at the quarantine station at Zemun, from where von Mitterer had brought him to Travnik.
He was a small hunchbacked man, although his hump did not protrude conspicuously; he had a powerful barrel chest and a large head, set well back between the hunched shoulders, on which a wide mouth, a lively pair of eyes, and graying, naturally crinkled hair were prominent. His legs were short and spindly and he wore either low boots with roll-down cuffs or silk stockings and flat shoes with large gilded buckles.
In contrast to his superior, von Mitterer, who was a mild and approachable man with a gentle melancholy manner in his dealings with people, this first assistant was highhanded and short-tempered with the Turks and Christians alike. His churlish silences were every bit as brusque, unpleasant, and insolent as his talk. Short and deformed though he was, he managed somehow to look down his nose at even the tallest man, twice as big as himself. From that strong head tilted back between the hunched shoulders, his dark eyes, with their heavy drooping lids, looked out on the world with an air of jaded insolence, a kind of weary contempt, as if they saw it from a great distance or a great height. But when he found himself in the presence of important or influential personages (and he knew exactly whether they were or not, or whether they merely appeared to be) and was translating their conversation, then the eyes looked down at the ground and became chary, patronizing, and remote, one after another.
Rotta spoke many languages: Travnichani had figured out somehow that he spoke ten. His greatest skill, however, lay not so much in what he said as in his ability to silence his opponent. He had a way of tossing back his head, scan
ning his opposite through slitted eyes, as if from a distance, and saying in a rude dry voice. “Well? What then? What then?”
These meaningless words, uttered in Rotta’s particular manner, often disconcerted even the most forthright men, withered and lamed even the best argument and evidence, took the wind out of the most reasonable demands.
Only in César D’Avenat did Rotta find a match and a rival worthy of himself. Ever since D’Avenat, even before their arrival at Travnik, so effectively maneuvered with the commander at Derventa to hold up the firman and the exequatur, forcing them to languish there two whole weeks like any ragtag and bobtail, he had acquired a stature in Rotta’s eyes that was not to be taken lightly. Nor did D’Avenat underestimate Rotta, whose background he had thoroughly investigated among the merchants at Belgrade. The pair of them treated each other differently from the rest of the world. In their intercourse they always adopted a light jovial tone that was supposed to convey a nonchalant ease but which in fact served to mask a tense alertness and a secret unease. They sniffed at each other like two animals, sized each other up like a couple of thieves: sensing their own kind right away but unsure as yet of each other’s tricks and methods.
Their talks, which usually began in French and affected a cosmopolitan tone, liberally sprinkled with consular jargon, turned now and then into lusty brawls in the juicy pidgin Venetian that was the lingua franca of the Mediterranean. At those moments both interpreters tossed their genteel pretenses overboard and came to verbal grips in Levantine style, forgetting their rank and status, resorting to words of the earthiest kind and to most explicit gestures and grimaces.
“Most Reverend Father, bless the humble servant of holy Mother Church,” D’Avenat would say with a deep bow, mocking Rotta’s relations with the Bosnian friars.