What blighted those two men (although it also of course advantaged them) had to do with a strange faculty which Jovo Cirtovic had inherited from his own father, a hajduk* both brave and cheerless who after an almost abnormally long life was shot by Turkish Janissaries whom he had sought to ambush in a high meadow on the eve of Saint George’s Day.* Two of the hajduks, who happened to be the dead man’s brothers, carried him home. The mother commenced to scream and gash herself, while Maksim, the second son, cursed in obscenities of despair. The other sons sat stroking their beards; and presently Alexander said: Please describe those Turks. — To Jovo, the first living son, then fell that neck-pouch of greasy black lambskin, which his father had worn so invariably beneath his shirt that no one in the family even stopped to wonder what it might contain; after all, curiosity has killed tigers as dead as cats. Or had they wondered nonetheless? Gazing on their grim father, whose lips rarely moved, the sons might have wondered indeed, or even speculated, but it proved best to turn away from such courses. That the pouch was supposed to descend from eldest to eldest was all that anyone knew. Maksim had been the last empirical explorer of this subject; although he was hardly seven years old then, their father felled him with his fists, execrating and kicking him without pity; the boy had been lucky to lose nothing but a tooth. After that, whenever their father stepped away and reached into his shirt, they averted their faces. The uncles remarked that on the night of his slaying, Lazar Cirtovic’s hand kept creeping toward his throat, as if he desired the touchstone but denied himself; this was peculiar, and so was the fact that the Janissaries had killed him in near-darkness, at more than a hundred paces, with a single bullet. At any rate, the family held the funeral, then made that renowned toast to the better hour, meaning the rendezvous in the afterworld with our loved dead. By then the better hour of Jovo Cirtovic had already commenced; for, withdrawing himself into a shepherd’s cave, he untied the legacy from around his throat. The leather smelled like his father’s sweat. He unpeeled the half-rotten, salty clasp. Within lay an ovoid object not unlike a drop of sea-glass, or perhaps a mirror. At first it seemed greenish-black, like old bronze. Reader, if you have ever robbed a Roman grave, you might have won yourself twin fibulae like mushroom-gilled breasts of greenish-silver, ready to be yoked onto the chest of some miniature deity. But although metal-comparisons momentarily occluded Jovo’s mind, the object must be comprised of glass, for a fact, although its substance — talk about through a glass darkly! — was blacker than anything he had ever seen. The impossibility of any such night-clot being transparent was more patent than an axiom out of Euclid. But as he peered into it, not without a certain longing connected with his father, he began, so it seemed, to glimpse something moving fitfully within, although how that could be was equally mysterious; in any event, the matter waxed unpleasant to his consideration, for indeed the longer he looked, the greater grew his dread; and now the thing inside, whatever it was, briskened like a treetop in a freshening breeze, and he began to get the sense of a ball (although it could have been pear-shaped or even gourd-like) festooned with myriad kelpish appendages whose incessant flickerings were what so horribly drew his eye. It could have been an upturned many-branching tuber, or a strange tree with a round eye just below the crown, or a new-pulled tooth still attached its bloody root. As his sense of menace increased, the conviction stole upon him that these arms would presently draw away from the thing’s face, exposing it to him, and that this would be the most fearful thing in the world. His response was of course defiance — for he had been raised to be a true Serb.
He concluded that this entity must be either death itself, or something contingent to it. It unfailingly appeared to him in this molluscid form, it bore a texture like tortoise-shell, and on occasion its body was colored like quicksilver. Its prickle-studded head resembled a Turk’s cap; and yet there were nights when he could have sworn it was a triangular mask. To prove his courage to himself, he once tapped on the glass; at which the thing coiled up and shrank, as if fearful, then grew an angry purple, and began lashing out against the sides of the crystal. To him the worst part, which rarely occurred, was when it showed him the ultramarine radiance of its eyes.
As his father’s fate proved (or did not), to see death’s arrival is hardly to forestall it; for death’s minions are myriad; and just because we spy an army of Turks approaching over the plains does not guarantee a victory, as again is shown by the doom of Prince Lazar. Besides, death may come when we are sleeping.
Jovo of course had foreseen nothing, lacking the pouch while his father lived. There had been no dream of bloody banners.
Since he did of course believe in heaven, Christ and angels, one might wonder whether his mistake (if he made any) consisted in refraining from turning to those beneficent helpers. His eventual point of view, a matter of convenience as well as comfort to him, was that the dark-glass thing might be an angel, howbeit of an ominous cast; in any event, it was this gift which God had set before him to make the occupation of his life, and he must face it first, just as a fisherman must get his nets in trim before he rows out anywhere. Perhaps he should have laid the matter in the Church’s lap. But he declined to offer himself up any longer to other men’s misunderstanding; moreover, he cherished what his father had bequeathed to him, not only because it brought him riches and power, but also quite simply because it came from his father.
Toward him the father had been strangely lenient, permitting him to read and study every now and then with the priest, so long as neither goats nor sheep got lost. Whenever he took his mother’s honey into town, he returned with coins. In those days he sensed that something would be expected of him, but how can a child know himself? Had he expressed a more martial character, his father might have been prouder; certainly his brothers and uncles would have made more of him; to please them he killed his first Turk, an old woodcutter, before he was ten, and showed both quickness and courage on mountain raids, but his heart lay in his numbers and letters, so that in time his father gazed across the fire at him with a sad bewildered pride. As for the son, to his father he had been lovingly loyal always, even through his dread.
Now that he was the family head, they feasted him from silver cups and drank his health, all the time watching him, to see what he would do. His mother, who had patiently hated the race ever since the Turks whipped her brother to death on the market square in Mostar, laid out the corpse in silence, folding its arms across its shattered breast. They toasted Saint Lazar, recourse of the persecuted and defeated.
The priest arrived. They prayed to Saint Sava. Fumigating the coffin with sulphur, tow-wisps and good black powder, they lowered the dead father into it. Afterward they threw in coins. Jovo and Maksim nailed down the lid. The sisters were screaming. The brothers passed the coffin out the window and laid it in the horse-cart. Jovo led the family to the open grave. And finally, as I have said, they toasted the better hour. Drinking grimly, the uncles waited for something else to be uttered, and presently Maksim said it: Brandy is good in its way, but I’d rather drink Turkish blood!