Death and the Dervish by Meša Selimović

Author:Meša Selimović [Selimović, Meša]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, mobi
Tags: Literary, Fiction, General
ISBN: 9780810112964
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
Published: 1996-10-14T23:00:00+00:00

PART 2

10

He who defiles his soul will be unhappy.1

A CHILD SPOKE ABOUT HIS FEAR, LONG AGO. IT RESEMBLED A little song:

In the attic

there’s a beam that hits you on the head,

there’s a wind that bangs the shutters,

there’s a mouse that peeps out of the corner.

He was six years old. His cheerful blue eyes watched the soldiers with admiration, and me as well, a young dervish-warrior. We were companions and friends. I do not know whether he ever loved anyone so much in his life as he did me, because I always met him joyfully and never acted as if I were older than he.

It was summer, and rain alternated with hot weather. We were bivouacked in tents on a plain full of mosquitoes and croaking frogs, an hour’s walk from the Sava,2 near a building that used to be an inn, where the boy lived with his mother and half-blind grandmother.

We had already been there three months since the spring, occasionally attacking the enemy, who had dug in along the bank of the river. At first we lost many men, and so we held back, as we knew that we could do nothing against them at such strength. The rest of our troops were tied down on God-knows-which other battlefields of the vast empire, and so both we and the enemy had gotten bogged down, each an obstacle and hindrance to the other.

That wearisome situation dragged on. The nights were steamy and hot, and the plain breathed quietly in the moonlight, like the sea; countless frogs in the invisible swamps cut us off from the rest of the world with their piercing voices, flooding us with a terrible drone that was calmed only by the misty dawns, while white and gray vapors drifted over us like at the very beginning of the world. Hardest to bear was the punctuality of these changes, their changelessness.

In the morning the mists turned roseate, and the most pleasant part of the day began, without the steamy heat, without the mosquitoes, without the tortures of nights spent half-awake. At that time we would fall into a deep sleep, as if into a well.

When it rained, it was even worse. The horizon narrowed around us. We squatted together and said nothing, tormented by the cold, as if winter were already setting in, or we just talked about anything at all, or sang, irritable and dangerous, like wolves. Our tents leaked and gray rain dripped down on us; water seeped up under our cots. The ground turned into an impassable quagmire, and we were trapped in our misery, as always.

The soldiers drank, played dice under canopies of blankets, quarreled and fought. It was a dogs life, which I led with outward calm, in no way showing that it was hard for me, sitting still, even when the rain drenched me, even when our tent turned into a madhouse, a cage of wild beasts. I forced myself to endure all that unpleasantness and nastiness without a word; I was young and thought that it was a part of sacrifice, but I knew that it was unpleasant and nasty.

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