Review
This tale is one of the best known and artistically the most successful Andrić’s short stories. The story is about "Turkish times" and places of main events are Doboj, Banjaluka and Sarajevo. It is published for the first time in 1923. The protagonist is a soldier who has achieved a hero’s reputation because of his brave exploits in Hungary. His return to his native Bosnia is anticipated eagerly. Like that of Đerzelez, and the people’s disappointment when confronted with the reality is similar. Mustafa is profoundly changed by his experience. The change is manifested outwardly in the fact that he can no longer play his flute, and in his inability to sleep. When he does fall into a fitful sleep he is tormented by dreams of the brutality he has been forced to witness in the course of his life as a soldier. The life he chose and the brutality it entails take complete control of his body and its demands now govern his behavior absolutely.
The story illustrates the clear distinction Andrić makes between the body, whose realm is the night, and the spirit, which can flourish only by day. The tenuous survival of Mustafa’s spirit is expressed through his flute playing, but his experience as a soldier comes to dominate his life entirely. It appears that such uncontrolled and unbalanced physical violence brutalizes the whole personality and leads ultimately to self-destruction. The coherence of Mustafa’s personality is fractured by his experience. This fragmentation, and the restlessness that will take him relentlessly on an increasingly destructive course, are expressed in his outward behavior: "He did not dare stand still. He had to keep moving, because he was equally afraid of sleeplessness as of his dreams, if he fell asleep... He could no longer endure it, but saddled his horse and left the village, in the dark, and silently as a criminal."
To the extent that Mustafa does not understand his actions and cannot control them, he can be included among the "bewildered". A mark of his incomprehension in the face of his experience is his repetition of a formula: "The world is full of swine." That is Mustafa’s formula to register his essential experience of the world.
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.