Death and the Dervish (Writings From An Unbound Europe) (2 page)

Selimović died at home in 1982: in his will he left everything to his beloved Darka and the two daughters he had by her, failing even to mention the daughter he had had by his first wife. As with Andrić, the Yugoslav literary establishment eulogized him upon his death, and he, and especially his greatest novel, have been the subject of considerable scholarly interest to the present.

The plot of
Death and the Dervish
is simple: Ahmed Nuruddin’s brother, Harun, has been arrested by the corrupt establishment of the town on fabricated charges. In fact he knows something he should not, and to prevent his making use of it he is quickly and quietly put to death. As a pillar of the local order, Sheikh Ahmed Nuruddin agonizes over an appropriate response to his brother’s incarceration, until it is too late. Then, wracked with guilt for his indecisiveness, he concocts a plot that brutally disposes of the powers that ordered his brother’s death, eventually taking over in their place. But hatred engenders hatred, and soon he is the victim of an even more devious scheme to hurt him by targeting his one and only faithful friend, Hassan. In a monumental repetition of the pusillanimity that had allowed his brother to go uncontested to his death, Ahmed Nuruddin even signs the papers that order Hassan’s execution. The final scene, with its radical change of tone and complex denouement, is as depopulated as a Shakespearean tragedy’s
—Hamlet
comes
to mind for more than one reason—and indeed the drama of the plot, though worked out slowly over some four hundred fifty pages, is as intense and inexorable as
Hamlet
’s
.

In many ways it is remarkable how popular
Death and the Dervish
has been with the Yugoslav reading public (eventually, a film was made of it as well). It is not an easy read: it is long; it is full of meditations, reflections, and flashbacks; only one voice narrates throughout the whole novel; the dialogue is so sparse that on occasion the reader might have to check back to see who is speaking; the colorful Bosnian milieus that Andrić had so popularized are completely absent; even exotic vocabulary is kept to a spare minimum (though to the outsider this might not seem the case). Episodes do occur, small side trips are made, but they seem lush only in comparison to the austerity of the main plot:
Death and the Dervish
is a hard book to extract freestanding passages from; virtually every line and paragraph in the book derive their power not so much from the charge they carry within themselves as from their inextricable relationship to everything that precedes and follows them. One very astute critic, Thomas Butler, has called the novel’s structure
poetic,
this is indeed the case, and not just in the prose’s rhythmicity, its repetitions, its similes becoming metaphors, and its polysemous language.
Death and the Dervish
is in effect one very long poem, circular in fact, with its end becoming its beginning, and with every part interconnected to all the others. Moreover, it is a holy poem, or at least the text partakes of the essence of a holy text: each word is intentional, weighty, meaningful, unchangeable, and consequential. It is not an easy read, but it is a worthwhile and rewarding read, and that might in part account for its popularity.

But critics have also suggested another reason for its unusual success, one even more important for its universal appeal wherever it has appeared in translation (and this first full English translation is probably the last into a major world language, the others having been done decades ago).
Selimović’s Bosnia is extraordinarily uniform. In this regard it bears no resemblance whatsoever either to the colorful variegatedness of Andrić’s Bosnia, or to the reality of the country, which once was celebrated as a multiethnic, multicultural, multireligious society and now is being punished for it. Selimović’s Bosnia is precisely what the ethnic cleansers, the sectarians, the fundamentalists, the dogmatists hope to achieve: one people, under one code, bowing to one authority. It is a nightmare (how much of the novel takes place at night!), it is darkness at noon, it is a twentieth-century horror set in a past age that mercifully lacked many (but not all!) of the means to impose such rigidity on living human beings. Ahmed Nuruddin is the pillar that supports this society, and he is the instrumentality that brings it down, by taking the fundamentalism he professes to its logical conclusion. Professing love, he experiences fear and nurtures hate. He is capable of sacrificing his brother and his friend, but, unlike Abraham sacrificing Isaac (the fugitive is named Is-haq—Isaac!), there is no loving God to stay his murderous hand. Murder begets hate, and hate more hate. And the only one to survive is the one who can escape this vicious circle. Some, of course, do escape, but at a price, as the finale of the novel sadly suggests.

Selimović’s Ottoman Bosnia is a microcosm of post-World War II Yugoslavia, and postwar Yugoslavia was (it is no more) a microcosm of life in this century.
Death and the Dervish
was received in Yugoslavia as an antitoxin against the fears and hatreds of both the war and the postwar regime, and it can function that way as well for those who do not know Yugoslavia at all. The point, made slowly, in a complex, poetic way, and coming only at the very end of the novel, is disarmingly simple: the love of brothers, as between Ahmed and Harun; the love of parents and children, as between Hassan and his father; the love of friends, as between Ahmed and Hassan; and finally erotic love, whose absence in his life sends Ahmed down the road toward
death—all will indeed remove fear, destroy hate, exorcise the past, generate new life, allow the sun in, bring peace. None of that is actually depicted in
Death and the Dervish.
It had been Selimović’s fond hope to do so in the two following novels of the trilogy he had planned, and indeed, in
The Fortress
, the second and only other complete volume of the trilogy, he did move in this direction. But the suggestion may have been more important than the depiction:
Death and the Dervish
remains Selimović’s masterly and most successful expression of an ancient wisdom that may prove salvific yet.

Henry R. Cooper, Jr.

TRANSLATORS’ NOTE

Death and the Dervish
has its fair share of stylistic and linguistic idiosyncrasies, complicating the task of remaining faithful to the original while producing a fluid translation. Selimović uses numerous words and expressions of Arabic, Turkish, and Persian origin, which give the original subtle stylistic and sometimes semantic nuances. As many have no simple equivalents in English, we have kept them if they preserve the flavor of the original and do not affect the translation’s readability. Generally our criterion for inclusion was whether these words occur in the
Oxford English Dictionary,
however, we have taken into account their meanings specific to the local vernacular in Bosnia and Herzegovina. We have provided a Glossary at the end of the volume; terms marked with an asterisk may be found here. Since the word
dervish
itself is among them, we were faced with a problem at the very outset, as we obviously could not footnote the title. We assume, though, that the term, which refers to a member of any of various Muslim religious orders, is familiar to the English-speaking reading public—at least through the notion of “whirling” dervishes, to whose very order the novel’s hero in fact belongs.

The novel’s Koranic language and references to Islam deserve special comment. The motto at the beginning of each chapter is based on a text of the Koran. Other quotations and quasi-quotations occur in various places. Many of Selimović’s quotations are less than exact, others are taken out of context, and some consist of lines from different chapters
(
suras
), grafted together. Therefore we have in general followed his versions instead of relying on any English translations of the Koran itself. We have footnoted all the quotations we could identify.

We would like to express our gratitude to Henry R. Cooper Jr. and Vasa D. Mihailovich, who reviewed the manuscript and provided many helpful comments, and to Yusuf Nur, whose assistance with quotations from the Koran proved invaluable.

The preparation of this work was made possible in part by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, an independent federal agency. We acknowledge their support with gratitude.

Finally, we dedicate this translation to Mirna Dickey, with whom it all began, and to the memory of Nikola Rakić.

PART 1

1

      
Bismilâhir-rahmanir-rahim!
¹

      
I call to witness the ink, the quill, and the script, which flows from the quill;

      
I call to witness the faltering shadows of the sinking evening, the night and all she enlivens;

      
I call to witness the moon when she waxes, and the sunrise when it dawns.

      
I call to witness the Resurrection Day and the soul that accuses itself;

      
I call to witness time, the beginning and end of all things—to witness that every man always suffers loss
²
.

I BEGIN MY STORY FOR NOTHING, WITHOUT BENEFIT FOR myself or anyone else, from a need stronger than benefit or reason. I must leave a record of myself, the chronicled anguish of my inner conversations, in the vague hope that a solution will be found when all accounts have been settled (if they may ever be), when I have left my trail of ink on this paper, which lies in front of me like a challenge. I do not yet know what will be written here. But in the strokes of these letters at least some of what was in me will remain, no longer to perish in eddies of mist as if it had never been, or as if I had never known what happened. In this way I will come to see how I became what I am—this self that is a mystery even to me. And yet it is a mystery to me that I have not always been what I am now. I know these lines are muddled;
my hand trembles at the task of disentanglement that I face, at the trial I now commence. Here I am everything: judge, witness, and accused. I will be as honest as I can be, as honest as anyone ever could be, for I have begun to doubt that sincerity and honesty are one and the same. Sincerity is the certitude that we speak the truth (and who can be certain of that?), but there are many kinds of honesty, and they do not always agree with one another.

My name is Ahmed Nuruddin. It was given to me and I took what was offered with pride. But now, after a great many years which have grown on me like skin, I think about it with wonder and sometimes with a sneer, since calling oneself
“Light of Faith”
evinces an arrogance that I have never felt and of which I am now somewhat ashamed. How am I a light? And how have I been enlightened? By knowledge? By higher teachings? By a pure heart? By the true path? By freedom from doubt? Everything has been cast into doubt and now I am nothing but Ahmed, neither
sheikh*
nor Nuruddin. Everything has fallen from me, like a robe or a suit of armor, and all that remains is what was at the beginning, naked skin and a naked man.

I am forty years old, an ugly age: one is still young enough to have dreams, but already too old to fulfill any of them. This is the age when the restlessness in every man subsides so he can become strong by habit and by the certainty he has acquired of the infirmity to come. But I am merely doing what should have been done long ago, during the stormy flowering of my youth, when all the countless paths seemed good, all errors as useful as the truth. What a pity that I am not ten years older, then old age would protect me from rebellion; or ten years younger, since then nothing would matter. For thirty is youth that fears nothing, not even itself. At least that is what I think now that thirty has moved irretrievably into the past.

I have just spoken a strange word: rebellion. My pen hesitates above this straight line, upon which a dilemma has
been impressed, but all too easily uttered. This is the first time I have so named my anguish, and I have never before thought of it in this way. Where did this dangerous word come from? And is it only a word? I have asked myself if it might not be better to stop writing, so as not to make everything harder than it already is. What if writing, in some inexplicable way, draws from me even things that I do not want to say, things that I have not intended, or that have hidden in the darkest depths of me, just waiting to be stirred up by my present agitation—a feeling that is hardly likely to obey me? If that happens, then writing will be a merciless interrogation, a hellish affair. And maybe it would be better to break the reed that I have so carefully sharpened at the tip, and toss the ink out on the stone tiles in front of the
tekke.*
That black stain would remind me never again to take up the magic that wakes evil spirits. Rebellion! Is it only a word, or a thought? If it is a thought, then it is my thought, or else my delusion. If it is a delusion, then woe to me! If it is the truth, then woe to me even more!

And yet I have no other path to take, I can tell all of this to no one except myself and the paper. Therefore I will continue to write these irrepressible lines, from right to left, from margin to margin, from thought to thought as if from one chasm to the next. The long rows of these lines will remain as a testimony, or an accusation. But whose accusation, almighty God, you who have abandoned me to the greatest of all human miseries, which is to face oneself? Whose accusation is it? And against whom? Against me or against others? No matter, there is no longer any way out, this writing is as unavoidable as life or death. What must be will be, and my guilt lies in being what I am, if that can be guilt. It seems that everything is changing completely; everything in me is shaking right down to my very foundations. And the world sways with me, because it cannot be in order if there is no order in me. But still, everything that is happening and has happened has one and the same cause: what
I want, and what I must do, is respect myself. Without that I could not find the strength to live like a man. It might seem absurd, but yesterday I lived like a man. I want to live like a man today, which is a different day, perhaps even contrary to the old one. This does not disturb me, because a man changes constantly, and it is a sin to ignore your conscience when it speaks.