Where Life is Like Fiction

Sun (Auckland), Volume I, Issue 173, 12 October 1927, Page 8

Where Life is Like Fiction

An Englishwoman in the Balkans Life in the Balkans is like a series of short stories; every event, every incident, seems to end in the bizarre and the unexpected, write Mary Gordon West in the “Daily Mail.” My first short story happened to me when I reached Cat :aro, at the edge of the Black Mountains, on my way across Montenegro to Albania. At 2 a.m. a boat deposited me on a quay beset by monstrous dark hills and deserted except for a dozen ragged, fierce-looking fellows who clamoured for my suitcases. When they heard that 1 wanted a certain hotel, every one claimed to be a porter of that hotel. They are like that in the Balkans. Two insisted on being engaged, one for each case; and the remainder having nothing else to do at that time of the morning, came with us. Through stony, dim-lit, deserted streets we clattered, the whole thirteen of us—through a town of the dead, so silent was the night. At the hotel an old woman, after peering at the thirteen of us through a porticullus in a massive wall, admitted the thirteen of us, and by the light of a candle the thirteen of us shuffled and scrambled up a stone stair to find me a room. I had no sooner entered it and observed its four beds than the candle went out.

Silence and the breathing of a dozen men at the door of my room. Suddenly, in the silence, a loud hammering sounded from under my window, followed by the rasp of a saw. “What on earth is this?” I asked.

The candle flickered to life again. “Oh, it is nothing,” said the old woman, beaming at me reassuringly. “Vjekslau, the waiter, died this morning: they are making him a beautiful coffin. ’Tis nothing, gospoda.” They were still making poor Vjekslau his coffin under my window when I fell asleep from nervous; exhaustion at 5 a.m.

When I left Cattaro to cross Montenego I was told: “Do not take much luggage. It is hard travelling with much luggage-” So I left my two suitcases in charge of the hotel proprietor, and because of his vociferous assurances that they would be safe with him I locked in one of them a sum of emergency money which I might need later. When I returned weeks later I asked

for the cases, and the proprietor led me to the public bathroom, where the cases were lying under the bath. I commented that this was scarcely a safe place. “Safe!” he exclaimed in genuine amazement. “Safe! Why, gospoda, this is the safest place in the house. A bath costs 60 dinara (ss) here. Nobody ever goes near the bathroom.”

I went across the mountains to Cetinje with the Government motor mail, which had an escort of two armed soldiers. At the top, as far as my eyes could carry me, was a barren desolation of grey and black mountains, jagged, horrible peaks* stony, sun-stricken valleys. We stopped for water. “Why is it necessary to have an armed guard?” I asked a soldier, wishing to be reassured. “Are there bandits?”

He spat. “Bandits?” he said. “No such luck. This Government has cured Montenegro of bandits. There is nothing for us to do except this.” And he raised his rifle and shot at an inoffensive crow to relieve his feelings. The crow continued its flight without the slightest concern. The women of Montenegro wear black clothes. It is the men who are gay in their red caps, magenta waistcoats, blue trousers, white leggings, and white string shoes. I commented on this to an elderly Montenegrin. “Yfcs, they are in mourning for battle,” he said.

“Ah, the war,” I said comprehensively. “War?” he queried. “Oh, not that war. They are in mourning for the men who fell at Kossovo.”

The Battle of Kossovo against the Turks was fought in 1389, when half Montenegro died. I know that when 1 return I shall miss this dramatic quality of life. I am growing used to living short stories instead of merely reading them! Life in England will seem more like a novel, a rather long Victorian novel, with an ending somewhere in the dim future. Only in the Balkans do they know how to live in vignettes.