Books: Heaven and Earth in the Balkans

BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON—Rebecca West—Viking ($7.50).

One day in 1934 British Novelist Rebecca West, who was listening to the radio in a hospital, called her nurse and said:

“I must speak to my husband at once. A most terrible thing has happened. The King of Yugoslavia has been assassinated.”

“Oh dear!” said the nurse, “did you know him?”

“No.”

“Then why do you think it’s so terrible?”

The nurse’s question made Rebecca West remember that the word “idiot” comes from a Greek root meaning a private person, and that idiocy is a “female defect” of women intent on leading their own lives.

The assassination of Alexander led Novelist West: 1) to think back to other political murders she remembered from her youth; 2) to go to a private projection where she had the newsreel of the murder of Alexander run over & over again; 3) to make a trip to Yugoslavia; 4) to write Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, an omnibus record of her journey—part travelogue, part history, part philosophical and political asides—one of the most passionate, eloquent, violent, beautifully written books of our time.

Three Murders. The murder of Alexander is only the first sinister chord struck in this intensely symphonic book. First of Author West’s youthful memories was the assassination of the Empress Elizabeth by the anarchist Luccheni in 1898. “He was an Italian born in Paris of parents forced to emigrate by their poverty and trodden down into an alien criminal class: that is to say, he belonged to an urban population . . . which wandered often workless and always traditionless, without power to control its destiny. It was indeed most appropriate that he should register his discontent by killing Elizabeth, for Vienna is the archetype of the great city which breeds such a population. . . . Luccheni said with his stiletto to the symbol of power, ‘Hey, what are you going to do with me?’ He made no suggestions. … It was the essence of his case against society that it had left him unfit to offer suggestions. . . .”

When Novelist West was ten, “Alexander Obrenovitch, King of Serbia, and his wife Draga were murdered in the Palace at Belgrade, and their naked bodies thrown out of their bedroom into the garden. . . . The crime lingered in my mind only because of its nightmare touches. The conspirators blew open the door of the Palace with a dynamite cartridge which fused the electric lights, and they stumbled about blaspheming in the darkness, passing into a frenzy of cruelty that was half terror. The King and Queen hid in a secret cupboard in their bedroom for two hours, listening to the searchers grow cold, then warm, then cold again, then warm, and at last hot, and burning hot. The weakly King was hard to kill: when they threw him from the balcony they thought him doubly dead from bullet wounds and sword slashes, but the fingers of his right hand clasped the railing and had to be cut off before he fell to the ground, where the fingers of his left hand clutched the grass.

.. . “But now I realize that when Alexander and Draga fell from that balcony the whole of the modern world fell with them. It took some time to reach the ground and break its neck, but its fall started then.”

Alexander Obrenovitch was succeeded on the throne by the father of Alexander II, at whose murder in the newsreel Author West peered “like an old woman reading the tea-leaves in her cup. … I could not understand this event, no matter how often I saw this picture. I knew, of course, how and why the murder had happened.

Luccheni has got on well in the world. . . . Luccheni is Mussolini, and the improvement in his circumstances can be measured by the increase in the magnitude of his crime.”

This is the first grim movement in the symphony of Black Lamb and Grey Falcon.

Evidence of Things Unseen. When the train bearing Author West and her husband made its first stop in Yugoslavia, an elderly white-haired man trotted along the platform, calling softly: “Anna! Anna! Anna!” It was raining, and “he held an open umbrella not over himself but at arm’s length. He had not brought it for himself, but for the beloved woman he was calling. He did not lose hope when he found her nowhere in all the long train, but turned and trotted all the way back, calling still with anxious sweetness: “Anna! Anna! Anna!” Says Author West: “I was among people I could understand.” With these words begins the vast architectonic of her book.

She went to Croatia, Dalmatia, Bosnia, Old Serbia, Macedonia, Montenegro. She climbed mountains, visited Roman and Venetian ruins, tuberculosis sanatoria, Turkish mosques, shrines, churches, monasteries, tombs, hovels, homes. She talked with intellectuals, professors, lawyers, peasants, poets, censors, soldiers, politicians, anti-Serb Croats, fanatical Serb nationalists, Bosnian Moslems and unassimilated Turks.

The things they told her, the things she said to them, above all the things she observed and thought fill two volumes of some 1,181 pages. But two things which impressed and distressed Novelist West had a special meaning as symbols of death and life—Ovche Polye and Kossovo Polye—the Sheep’s Field and the Field of the Blackbirds.

The Sheep’s Field was in Macedonia. “Of the surrounding hills one stood alone, magnificent in sharp austerity of cliff and pyramid: it is called ‘the witness of God.’ ” Author West and her friends arrived at the Sheep’s Field by car. “When we got out we were so near the rock that we could see its colour. It was a flat-topped rock . . . rising to something like six feet above the ground, and it was red-brown and gleaming, for it was entirely covered with the blood of the beasts that had been sacrificed on it during the night. . . . The colour of spilt blood is not properly a colour, it is in itself discoloured, it is a visible display of putrescence. In every crevice of the red-brown rock there had been stuck wax candles, which now hung down in a limp fringe of greasy yellow tails, smeared with blood. . . .

“It would have been pleasant to turn round and run back to the car . . . but the place had enormous authority. It was the body of our death, it was the seed of the sin that is in us, it was the forge where the sword was wrought that shall slay us.”

A young gypsy climbed on to the rock with a black lamb struggling in his arms. He fetched a little 18-month-old girl from a rug where she was sitting. “Now the man who was holding the lamb took it to the edge of the rock and drew a knife across its throat. A jet of blood spurted out and fell red and shining on the browner blood that had been shed before. The gypsy had caught some on his fingers, and with this he made a circle on the child’s forehead. Then he got down again and went round the rock another three times, carrying another black lamb.”

A bearded Moslem standing by explained, “His wife got this child by coming here and giving a lamb, and all children that are got from the rock must be brought back and marked with the sign of the rock.” Rebecca West was disgusted.

The night before she had watched Moslem women embrace and kiss a phallic stone, had embraced it herself. “All I had seen the night before was not discreditable to humanity. . . . When the Moslem women in the Tekiya put out their arms to embrace the black stone and dropped their heads to kiss it, they made a gesture . . . [which] is an imitation by the body of the gesture made by the soul in loving. It says, T will pour myself in devotion to you, I will empty myself without hoping for return, and I can do this serenely, for I know that as I empty myself I shall be filled again.’ Human beings cannot remind themselves too often that they are capable of performing this miracle, the existence of which cannot be proved by logic. . . .”

“But the rite of the Sheep’s Field was purely shameful, . . . Those who had invented it and maintained it through the ages were actuated by a beastly retrogression, they wanted again to enjoy the dawn of nastiness. . . . They wanted to put their hands on something weaker than themselves and prod its mechanism to funny tricks by the use of pain. … I knew this rock well. I had lived under the shadow of it all my life. All our Western thought is founded on this repulsive pretence that pain is the proper price of any good thing.”

Kossovo Polye, the Field of the Blackbirds, sounds to the Serbs like the tolling of a bell. There in 1389 the Turks destroyed Tsar Lazar and the Serb empire, and reduced the Serbs to serfdom for 500 years. Kossovo is a field of four battles; not like Fredericksburg or Manassas, fields of quick successive battles, but like Antietam, which is a legendary battlefield of the Indians.

Author West was “stilled by the stillness of Kossovo. . . . The land lies loosely, like a sleeper, in a cradle of featureless hills. . . . There a shoulder rises, here a hand supports the sleeper’s head. . . . Thousands of men and women, even tens of thousands, lived and worked and sweated on Kossovo. But the plain absorbed them and nullified them by its own indifference, and there was shown before our eyes the first of all our disharmonies, the basis of our later tragedies: the division between man and nature. . . . The earth is not our mother’s bosom. … It makes us, its grass is our flesh, it lets us walk about on it, but this is all it will do for us; and since the earth is what is not us, and therefore a symbol of destiny and of God, we are alone and terrified. Kossovo, more than any other historical site I know, arouses that desolation.”

At Kossovo Author West heard that song which Serbian boys learn as soon as they can speak:

There flies a grey bird, a falcon,

From Jerusalem the holy,

And in his beak he bears a swallow. . . . The grey falcon comes to Tsar Lazar at Kossovo and says:

Tsar Lazar, of honourable stock,

Of what kind will you have your kingdom?

Do you want a heavenly kingdom?

Do you want an earthly kingdom? If you want an earthly kingdom, says the grey falcon, saddle your horses and drive out the Turks. If you want a heavenly kingdom, build a church at Kossovo,

For all your soldiers shall be destroyed,

And you, prince . . . with them. . . . Lazar chose a heavenly kingdom since

An earthly kingdom lasts only a little time,

But a heavenly kingdom will last for eternity and its centuries. . . . Then the Turks overwhelmed Lazar, And the Tsar Lazar was destroyed, And his army was destroyed with him, Of seven and seventy thousand soldiers. All was holy and honourable And the goodness of God was fulfilled. The song annoyed Novelist West. Her first remark was: “So that was what happened, Lazar was a member of the Peace Pledge Union.” To herself she said: “Lazar was wrong, he saved his soul and there followed five hundred years when no man on these plains, nor anywhere else in Europe for hundreds of miles in any direction, was allowed to keep his soul. He should have chosen damnation for their sake.”

Later Author West tells how from be leaguered England she watched the Yugoslavs struggle against themselves to save their soul and meet certain defeat at the hands of the Nazis. “In this hour the Yugoslavs often repeated the poem of Tsar Lazar and the grey falcon. . . . ‘All was holy, all was honourable,’ they quoted, looking down from the tall tower of prescience on the field of their coming fate, ‘and the goodness of God was fulfilled.’ ” Then she was sure that it was a poem of life, not of death.

She was surer when in Marseille the conquered French, hearing of Yugoslavia’s defiance, gathered the flowers in their gardens and took them down to the Cannebiere. The police guessed what was up, hustled them off the street. But they hopped on the streetcars. The motormen drove very slowly so that the people were able to heap their flowers on the spot where Alexander of Yugoslavia was murdered.