SOURCE: Hawkesworth, Celia. “Devil's Yard.” In Ivo Andrić: Bridge between East and West, pp. 189-205. Dover, N.H.: Athlone Press, 1984.

[In the following excerpt, Hawkesworth addresses Andrić's examination of the nature of art in The Devil's Yard.]

More than is the case with many of Andrić's other works, the sense of Devil's Yard¹ depends closely on its intricate structure.

The composition is one that Andrić had used earlier for another story in the Brother Petar group: “Torso”. It is a system of concentric circles forming successive frames, focusing increasingly on the central point of the tale. The Petar stories in any case all have a similar outer frame, since each of them is explicitly the “story of a story”. Petar is a man with a particular gift for story-telling:

In everything he said there was something cheerful and wise at the same time. But, besides, there hovered around each of his words a special kind of tone, like a halo of sound, which you do not find in the speech of others and which remained quivering in the air even after the spoken word had faded. Because of this each of his words conveyed more than it meant in ordinary speech.²

This description comes from the beginning of “Torso”. In Devil's Yard there is a reminder of the particular quality of Petar's speech, although here it is much less distinct:

And now, as he looked at his grave in the snow, the young man was actually thinking of Petar's story-telling. And he would have liked for a third and fourth time to say how well he could tell stories. But it cannot be said.³

In the context of Andrić's work as a whole these hints and suggestions from part of a continuing discussion on the nature of art, and the particular quality of the statements of individual artists which impose themselves on the minds of their readers or audience. More particularly, they contribute to Andrić's reflections on the nature of story-telling, the varying situations in which stories are told, the varying needs they fulfil and the varying manner in which they are related. In Devil's Yard this theme is developed in some detail since the story is told by four separate narrators, and is set in a prison where the recounting of anecdotes is virtually the sole occupation of the inmates.

In this work Andrić gives quite a detailed account of the narrative style of Petar and the other main narrator, Haim. They are different, but Andrić's point, as elsewhere in his work, is that “it is best to let a man tell his story as he will”, without interference, interruption or question. Petar lends his tales particular emotional and psychological colouring by virtue of his standing as a monk and his great age—his stories are all told from his cell bed where—old, ill, but full of wisdom and experience—he selects episodes from his long life which acquire an added dimension of seriousness because of the context in which they are told. The qualities Petar then brings to his tales are balance, tranquillity, sympathy and a quiet optimism. Sensitive to the feelings and situation of others and with no personal axe to grind, Petar is a wholly reliable observer. But in Devil's Yard Andrić's also gives an example of a quite different kind of story-teller: one who will always invent where he does not know the facts, but whose talents should not therefore be dismissed. In a long parenthesis, which forms an introduction to the core of the work, Andrić makes a direct comment on the need for variety and open-mindedness in assessing works of art:

We are always more or less inclined to condemn those who talk a lot, particularly about things which do not concern them directly, even to speak with contempt of them, as chatterboxes and tedious gossips. And we tend not to remember that this human, so human and so common, failing has its good sides as well. For what would we know about the minds and hearts of others, about other people and consequently about ourselves, about other places and sights, which we have never seen and shall never have the opportunity of seeing, if it were not for people like this who have a need to communicate in speech or writing what they have seen and heard, and what they felt or thought in that connection? Little, very little. And, if their accounts are imperfect, coloured by personal passions and needs, or even inaccurate, we are ourselves possessed of reason and experience and we can assess them and compare them one with another, accept or reject them, in part or wholly. In this way, something of human truth is always left for those who listen or read patiently.⁴

As in the other tales told by Brother Petar, the outer framework of his cell is established before the story itself is told. We have seen already that it is Andrić's intention always to remove the story as far as possible from himself, to leave it on its own to communicate its full significance without his personal intervention. The various devices used to this end in Andrić's works serve to increase the objectivity of his tone. They also contribute to one of the recurrent themes of his work: that no episode or individual is of intrinsic significance; individual stories tend to be placed in a context wider than themselves, making their own significance relative. In Devil's Yard this relativity is most explicitly developed. The outer frame is used to establish just that relative insignificance of individual lives vividly. Petar has died, and a young monk watches from the old man's cell window as the grave is covered in snow. The snow deprives everything of its true shape, giving it one colour and one form:

All that could be seen was the trace of a narrow path through the fresh snow; the path had been trodden out the day before during Brother Petar's funeral. At the end of the path a thin line of trodden snow widened out into a uneven circle, and the snow around it was coloured pink with softened clay, and it all looked like a fresh wound in the general whiteness which stretched as far as the eye could see and merged imperceptibly with the grey desert of the sky still full of snow.⁵

The snow blurs the features of individuals and events and causes them to merge into a more or less amorphous, monochrome generality. This is the broadest scale, the immediate process of obliteration in the uninterrupted succession of events which buries the past in a mass of accumulated moments as surely as the snow. The image of the all-enveloping snow is not therefore left on its own. The immediate reality is illustrated by the activity of the monks who are making an inventory of all Petar has left behind him. Life goes on, declaring that whatever we regarded as our own in the material world was simply borrowed, as was the brief span of our life. The consistency of Andrić's message and method can be seen in the closing paragraphs of Devil's Yard, where he returns to the outer frame. The first paragraph of this closing page consists of a wholly negative statement:

And this is the end. There is nothing any more. Only the grave among the invisible graves of the other monks, lost like a snowflake in the deep snow which spreads like an ocean and transforms everything into a cold desert without name or sign. There is no more story nor story-telling … There is nothing. Only the snow and the simple fact that we die and go under the earth.⁶

But then the finality of this statement is characteristically reduced, because even at this stage Andrić removes himself: “So it seemed to the young man by the window …”⁷

It is reduced still further because the final words of the work describe the gradual fading of the story the young monk has been recalling, and the steady impingement on his consciousness of the sounds of the monks' counting and the clattering of Petar's tools.

The second frame is formed by the young monk's recollection of Petar's stories about his time in the Constantinople prison known as Devil's Yard. These memories have a special quality because Petar spoke more, and more compellingly, about these two months than any other episode in his life. Petar then takes over the narrative directly, to describe the prison and its inmates, and the circumstances in which he met the young Turk whose story forms the core of Devil's Yard. Petar's role here is similar to that of Andrić's ideal narrator: that of an observer and listener who acts as a passive vehicle for stories which are then seen as self-contained entities, not as part of Petar's own experience. This is not the case in all the stories that concern him but it is true of “Torso”, whose composition also falls into separate frames and in which, again, Petar is simply the audience of a strange tale which he later relates to others. This structure clarifies the outline of the central tale. In “Torso” there are three frames: the cell, the circumstances of Petar's life in which the episode occurred, and the focal point—Petar's observation, through a window, of the strange figure whose story is then told him by a third party.

This basic structure is more complex in Devil's Yard: Petar meets the young Turk, Kamil, and hears much of his tale directly. There is a further narrator, however, the character Haim, whose verbose story-telling technique was described above. From the point of view of the story itself Haim's function is to inform Petar of the details of Kamil's past (known to him because they are both from Smyrna) and of his last days in prison—information to which Petar could not have access. More important, however, is his function in the structure of the whole work: the texture is deliberately fragmented, broken up into eight distinct chapters, an introduction and an epilogue. Each chapter is related by a separate narrator: the first is Petar's necessary account of the prison, which has no place in the central scheme of seven chapters in which the fourth acquires its full force as the focal point by virtue of its position. The six chapters surrounding this central chapter are related alternately by the two main narrators: Petar, Haim, Petar—Kamil—Petar, Haim, Petar. The effect of this fragmentation is to slow down the pace of the work and ensure the prominence of the central chapter, and also to reinforce the nature of the work as the “story of a story”.

We have seen that in many of Andrić's works the setting of a particular tale is designed to establish a state of mind in the reader, which then determines his response to the story itself. The settings thus tend to have a significance beyond themselves: to be more or less allegorical. In Devil's Yard this pattern is clear and the allegorical setting is involved in the central theme.

The image of the “prison” had a special resonance for Andrić as a result of his prison experience during the First World War. We have some evidence as to how freshly this experience remained in his mind in the fact that, of the four published sketches which describe it, three were published only long after the War, in 1952 and 1960.⁸ These sketches are concerned largely with an external description of incidents affecting the young prisoner who is the protagonist, and there is a recurrent theme of the contrast between the brilliant sun outside and the small patch on the cell floor that alters its shape according to the angle of the sun through the bars on the little window. For a clearer understanding of the way in which Andrić's prison experience became internalized, we have to return to Ex Ponto and Anxieties. From these prose poems we gain some insight into the degree to which Andrić's immediate experience of imprisonment affected his response to the world beyond the physical walls of the gaol as well. Bosnian Story is also distinctly coloured by the theme of confinement: within a determined space, a role, official and private obligations, and a culture.

In Devil's Yard this theme is explored both as an external setting and as a more general expression of the kinds of restrictions placed on human lives which informs not only Bosnian Story but so many of Andrić's shorter works.

The Turkish prison in Constantinople—a detention centre in which criminals and suspects are held before being sent to trial or exile or before they are released—is described in terms that lend the whole work its special flavour. The first striking feature of the prison, which is very large—a whole town of prisoners and guards”⁹—is the haphazard nature of its population. People are arrested on the merest suspicion on the principle that it is easier to release an innocent person than to search through Constantinople for the guilty. We know already that Petar is there fortuitously: “All because of a misfortune that befell Brother Petar, through no fault of his own, by a crazy conjunction of circumstances, in that troubled period when authority ceases to distinguish the innocent from the guilty.”¹⁰

Some of the terms in which the prison is described are familiar from elsewhere in Andrić's work. These are the terms in which Andrić describes the natural world in general: “So the Yard ceaselessly sifts the variegated crowd of its population and, always full, it is constantly being filled and emptied anew.”¹¹ These words are reminiscent of the account of life itself given in The Bridge on the Drina: “Life constantly spends itself, and yet endures …”

It is implicitly suggested that we should read the description of the prison as an account of the world itself, but it is a world which has specific qualities. In making their arrests, and thereby determining the population of the prison, the police work according to some logic of their own. This idea is again familiar from Andrić's description of the natural world elsewhere. The existence of some “logic” inaccessible to human reason is tantamount to denying the reality of such “logic”. When the wind blows “the whole of that Devil's Yard reverberates and roars like a vast child's rattle in a giant's palm and the people in it dance, writhe, collide with one another and knock into the walls like grain in that rattle”.¹²

The key figure in the prison is its governor, Latifaga, known as “Karagöz” after the grotesque character in the Turkish shadow theatre. Karagöz has a dual role. Most clearly he represents that arbitrary logic that governs the natural world and human destiny. He has evolved a system of behaviour towards the prisoners which is entirely unpredictable. He can appear in the Yard at any moment and start his idiosyncratic “interrogation”. His manner is always different. At one moment he will suddenly announce to one prisoner that he is free without explanation, and at the next he will tell another protesting his innocence that it is precisely “innocent” prisoners whom the authorities now require, and he has therefore just condemned himself.

At another level, however, Karagöz's role is apparently almost reversed: he represents authority—

This strange, endless game of his was incomprehensible but it seemed that in fact he never believed anyone; not only the accused or witnesses, he did not even believe himself, and for this reason he needed a confession as the only point which was at all fixed and from which one could in this world, in which everyone was guilty and worthy of condemnation, maintain at least the appearance of some kind of justice and something resembling order. And he sought this confession, hunted it, squeezed it out of a man with a desperate effort, as though he were fighting for his own life and disentangling his hopelessly confused accounts with vice and crime and cunning and disorder.¹³

In other words, the purpose of authority is to impose a semblance of order on chaos, and its endeavour is not seriously undermined by its awareness of its own arbitrariness. The population of the prison accepts the prevailing method of government: “They were all accustomed to Karagöz; they had grown used to him in their own way. They grumbled about him, but in the way one grumbles about one's fate and the life one loves.”¹⁴

Like the vast majority of peoples everywhere, the prison inmates accept the particular style of government imposed on them, regardless of its strength or justice.

The allegorical setting of this work is thus complex: it involves external, arbitrary restrictions on all aspects of individuals' lives, from the most general to the most concrete; and authority, its ultimate illogicality and the consequent blindness of its power.

The setting is established in detail in the first chapter and referred to frequently throughout the narrative, reinforcing the other main strands of the work, and giving Andrić the chance to make general comments of various kinds. An instance is the statement that Petar talked “a great deal about the life of the Yard as a whole and about the interesting, comic, pathetic, disturbed people in it; they were closer to him and better known than the thieves, murderers and sinister criminals whom he tried to avoid as far as possible”.¹⁵ These words provide an adequate description of the kind of characters to which Andrić is frequently attracted in his writing.

One of these “interesting, pathetic, disturbed” people is the young Turk Kamil, who beds down next to Petar one night. There is a certain air of mystery about the young man: as he thinks about him Petar is never able to remember the exact moment when he arrived, just as he is unable to recall certain other facts about him. The first thing Petar remembers noticing about him is a small leather-bound book.

From his first glance at his face, Petar realizes that the young man is in some way ill, not physically, but Petar recognizes his eyes: “He had seen similar eyes. There are people like this who are afraid or ashamed of something, or who wish to hide something.”¹⁶ As we know from Andrić's work as a whole, characters who are more or less disturbed mentally have a privileged position in his world. They are more susceptible than those who are fully balanced, and adjusted to currents underlying the surface of life. Their angle of vision is distorted, but it allows them an insight into an aspect of the forces governing human life which are usually not directly acknowledged. So we may suspect from the first that Kamil's “illness”, which isolates him from his fellow-human beings, also colours his experience of the world is a particular way to the exclusion of any others. A bond of sympathy is immediately established between the two men, enabling Petar to enter into Kamil's world with a special warmth.

Since the work is the “story of a story”, reference is made throughout to the process of story-telling; the initial frame in Petar's cell sets the tone. After this, in the Yard itself, one of the prisoners' chief occupations is the relating of anecdotes. These are generally stories whose purpose is to illustrate the prowess or virility of the teller rather than to entertain his audience. The prisoners do not really listen to one another, dismissing the idle boasts of their fellows as a temporary distraction, not worthy of their full attention. The second main narrator, Haim, stands out from this background as a man with a particular gift for story-telling, and a particular need to talk. In fact, Petar considers that his talkativeness has brought him to the prison. The undisciplined nature of his speech makes him an unreliable witness, but his account is not coloured by any particular passion: he is a Jew and shares the privileged position of Jews generally in Andrić's work, that of being freer than other individuals whose allegiance is usually either Christian and Western or Moslem and “Oriental”. Petar virtually shares this non-sectarian objectivity, since he refuses to be affected by artificial barriers between men.

Haim is described by a generalization typical of Andrić:

One of those who are involved their whole life in a hopeless quarrel lost in advance, with the people and society they spring from. In his passion to say and explain everything, to disclose all people's mistakes and wrong-doings, to unmask the evil and acknowledge the righteous, he went far beyond what an ordinary healthy person can see and discover … And he did not simply describe the people he talked about, but entered into their thoughts and desires, of which they were often not themselves aware, and which he revealed to them …¹⁷

Andrić's own direct comment in parenthesis suggests that we should not dismiss such an exaggerated interest in others as unreliable, since we can always learn from it something about our fellow-men and consequently about ourselves. What seems to be implied here is that we should not refuse to pay attention to stories, and by extension to works of art, with which we do not feel complete sympathy: Petar becomes irritated by Haim's perpetual suspicion of others and by his manner, and yet acknowledges that he is a vital source of information.

What Kamil communicates to Petar, through their mutual sympathy, is quite different in kind from Haim's information. Kamil's own story is superficially unremarkable: born in Smyrna, the son of a beautiful Greek girl and a Turkish pasha, he showed an early predilection for books and learning. When prevented by the Greek community from marrying the Greek girl of his choice he turned entirely to his studies, associating only with scholars like himself.

Several issues are involved even in this brief outline: first the familiar fact that the circumstances of an individual's birth determine the course of his life in a way which is beyond his control. The fact that Kamil's mother, when a young and beautiful widow, had refused many Greek suitors and chosen instead a sixty-year-old Turk explains the hostility of the Greek community towards young Kamil and their refusal to let the old Turk take a second Greek girl from them now, through his son. To Kamil their behaviour is quite incomprehensible. Through his parents, then, Kamil is caught up not merely in a local quarrel between families, but in the whole universal quarrel between Islam and Christianity, between East and West. Kamil is a solitary figure, cut off from his fellow-men by ideas he cannot accept through no choice of his own, drawn instead to the world of scholarship. The future course of his life is determined by this innocent predilection and the fact that it is intellectuals like himself whom people in authority suspect and resent, because the outlook of these people tends to be limited by their own self-interest, and their insistence on “law and order” cuts them off completely from the world of the imagination. We have been prepared already by the description of Karagöz, the prison governor, for the notion that “law and order” are ultimately an arbitrary fabrication, imposed on the chaotic forces of life to give them an artificial semblance of logic. The extraordinary narrow-mindedness of the mistaken “cause” is also illustrated in the fanaticism of the father of the girl Kamil wishes to marry: “I am a small man in reputation and possessions, but I am not small in my faith and my fear of God. And I prefer to lose my life and to despatch my daughter, who is my only child, into the sea, rather than give her to an infidel.”¹⁸ A similar narrow-mindedness characterizes the attitude of all the representatives of authority with whom Kamil comes into contact.

For Kamil is arrested and sent to the prison in Constantinople because his preoccupation with books eventually arouses suspicion. That comes about through a combination of the natural antipathy of those in authority towards a man such as Kamil, and malicious gossip, to which any individual whose behaviour deviates from the accepted norm is everywhere exposed. The rumour is spread that Kamil has become obsessed with one particular theme of his research to the point where he believes himself actually to be the historical figure who has become the object of his special interest: the Turkish prince Cem, younger brother of Sultan Bayazid. To the ears of those in authority, men of strictly limited imagination and intelligence, the mere mention of an interest in the Ottoman throne, albeit of a fifteenth-century monarch, is enough to condemn a man as potentially dangerous. It so happens that the relevant official in Smyrna is hard and zealous, “an obtuse and pathologically distrustful man, who trembled even in his sleep lest any political malpractice, plot or the like should escape him”.¹⁹ He has the most dangerous attribute of a man of power. He is himself insecure and fearful, interpreting all government directives as a direct criticism of his personal inadequacy.

Eventually Kamil is interrogated, while held in Devil's Yard. Like their superior, Karagöz, the two officials are interested only in eliciting a confession from their prisoner, regardless of its basis in any facts. Their requirements and expectations are totally at variance with Kamil's experience and understanding of the world. Any meaningful discussion between them is a priori impossible.

“Nothing you say has any connection whatsoever with me or with my ideas”,²⁰ Kamil states in despair, knowing that nothing he says can alter his situation. But the situation in which the three men find themselves has its own inexorable pattern: the interrogators goad Kamil until he gives them what they require, a “confession” that he is identical with Sultan Cem, “that is with a man who, more unfortunate than any man, has entered an impasse, with no possible escape, and who does not want, and is not able, to deny himself, not to be what he is”.

And Kamil suffers the common fate of intellectuals who arouse the suspicion and hostility of the machinery of power in an absolutist regime: he disappears without trace.

Kamil's story, suggestive and moving as it is, is not in itself particularly unusual except in the degree to which he does indeed identify himself with Cem, the Turkish prince. In the scheme of Devil's Yard the central chapter, the fifth, is Kamil's own account of the life of Cem. Just as Kamil's story gains clarity of outline by being divided between the two narrators, Petar and Haim, so Cem's story too stands out here as a separate entity, a story complete in itself, a story which can be transmitted down the generations.

Cem's story is powerful, archetypal in the extremity of the situation it describes. This quality is explicit in the words with which it opens:

It is, in a new and solemn form, the ancient story of two brothers. From time immemorial, there have always been and are constantly reborn and renewed in the world—two rival brothers. One of them is older, wiser, stronger, closer to the world and real life … The other is his absolute opposite. A man of short life, ill fortune and a false first step, a man whose aspirations always go far beyond what is necessary and above what is possible …²¹

Briefly, Cem, the younger son of Mehmed the Conqueror and favoured by the old sultan to succeed him, claims half the empire from his brother Bayazid. After his inevitable defeat, Cem takes refuge on the island of Rhodes under the protection of Pierre d'Aubusson and his Knights of St John. He thus unwittingly places himself at the centre of a complex web of international intrigue and Great Power politics, involving the kings of France and Hungary, the Sultan of Egypt and the Pope, in which he remains caught up until the end of his life. He is used as a bargaining point by Bayazid and the Western powers in their negotations with and campaigns against one another. The restrictions placed on him are thus absolute: his initial misfortune seems to have been conditioned in part by the qualities of his own character, and in part by the role imposed on him by the circumstances of his birth and the primordial pattern of strife between brothers. As he endeavours to escape the restrictions of this pattern he becomes entrammelled in the strife between countries and ideologies which makes him physically a prisoner for the rest of his life:

The whole of the known and inhabited world, divided into two camps, Turkish and Christian, contains no refuge for him. For here or there, he can be one thing only: a sultan. Victorious or defeated, alive or dead. That is why he is a slave for whom there is no longer any escape, even in his thoughts or dreams …²²

The scale of his ambition is echoed in the scale of his fall: “I wanted to make an instrument of all that the world is and contains, with which to conquer and subdue the world, but now this world has made an instrument of me.”²³

Cem's story finds a ready response in Kamil not because he has any worldly ambitions whatever, or for any superficial similarity of their situations, but because it describes a concentrated and extreme form of the kind of limitations to his choices and actions which Kamil himself has experienced in his own modest way. Kamil was, like Cem, born with certain characteristics into a world divided according to ideologies and interests which have no meaning for him. When faced with the absolute barrier dividing him from the woman of his choice, Kamil suddenly sees clearly “just how much there was that could divide a man from the woman he loved, and in general people from each other”.²⁴

The extent to which the archetypal “legend” of Sultan Cem, with its additional dimension of itself repeating a timeless pattern, arouses such a strong feeling of recognition in Kamil contributes towards a clearer understanding of the place of “legend” in Andrić's works. The implication appears to be that in our day-to-day lives we should not expect to come upon situations which are strikingly reminiscent of those “few main legends of mankind” to which Andrić refers in “Conversation with Goya”. Indeed, if we read through all Andrić's works with this explicit intention of his in mind, we might not be able to discover obvious examples of situations repeating themselves with any exact correspondence. It is the central, emotional parallel to which Andrić refers.

Kamil's sense of identification with Cem's story is, however, particularly intense by virtue of a further dimension, notably the whole question of identity. Kamil is arrested and imprisoned simply because of what he is: a man drawn to the world of books and learning, in which scholars can communicate freely regardless of their beliefs and origins. The malicious gossip which leads to Kamil's arrest is founded not on any action of his but on the charge that he purports actually to be a pretender, claimant to a fifteenth-century throne. To a degree that is almost the case, since Kamil feels such profound sympathy for the prince that it virtually amounts to imagining himself fully in his situation. To this extent Kamil is prepared to make the statement that his interrogators demand of him: that he is in fact Cem. Kamil's perspective is entirely different from that of his interrogators; to him the statement means an expression of emotional and intellectual affinity, while to the officials it is an admission of guilt.

Two main issues are involved here: the irrevocable, binding nature of the spoken word and its consequent power for good or ill, and the degree to which the identity of an individual is determined in the eyes of others by their interpretation of his words. One of the author's parentheses expresses this central idea of Devil's Yard:

(I!—Weighty word, which in the eyes of those before whom it is spoken determines our place, fatefully and unalterably, often goes far beyond or lags far behind what we know about ourselves, beyond our will and above our strength. A terrible word, which, once spoken, binds and identifies us for ever with all that we have imagined and said and with which we never thought of identifying ourselves, but with which we have in fact long been one.)²⁵

Kamil's whole crisis depends on this issue. In Petar's sympathetic eyes Kamil has endangered himself, not for the same reason that the authorities pursue him, but because he feels that the young man's obsession with Cem is unbalanced. Petar does not remember exactly when, but at some point in his account of the prince's life Kamil begins to speak in the first person. To the rational outside world Kamil's direct, unequivocal statement “I am he” seems to suggest insanity. In fact it is the expression of a fundamental attitude which has made the development and function of myth and legend so vital in human culture. Andrić is no doubt here making a direct reference to Thomas Mann's “formula of myth”—“Ich bin's”. The essential feature of categorical statements such as “I am the son of God”, “This is my flesh and blood”, is their mystery. Kamil is quite clearly not Cem, and his statement is consequently disturbing. His identification should not, however, be thought of as “real”, but mythical. It is through a masterly, understated suggestion along these lines that Devil's Yard is transformed from a bleak indictment of authority, and an account of the strict limitations on an individual's freedom of action, into a sober statement of faith, albeit ambiguous, in the power of the imagination.

Petar is fascinated by Kamil's obsession, to the point that he is unable to act as reason dictates he should and try to deflect the young man from the brink of “madness”: “What is not, what cannot and ought not to be was stronger than all that is, that exists, obvious and real, as the only possibility.”²⁶

Andrić is always concerned with the truth underlying apparent reality. Kamil's obsession is expressed in terms of his having allied himself with that underlying truth to the extent of cutting himself off from superficial reality. Petar's sympathy for Kamil enables him to respond to him in a way that Haim cannot, and the existence of the two narrators now contributes to the theme of the function of the imagination. Haim's role is to convey information, which does not involve him emotionally, and then to pass on. Petar's is in a way, and to a lesser degree, to parallel Kamil's obsession with Cem, and so to give his story continuity. For Kamil settles in Petar's imagination, as Cem has in Kamil's.

In this way the work can be seen as, among other things, a meditation on the nature of the artistic process; on the different ways of telling stories, the varying degrees of involvement of the artist with his material, the various human needs to which different works of art correspond.

One of the essential characteristics of Petar's meetings with Kamil is their mysterious quality. Kamil arrives in the half-light, at dusk, and Brother Petar cannot remember any details of his arrival:

When he thought about him, later, often, Brother Petar could never remember exactly when he had come, or how he had come, looking for a little space, nor what he had said. With people who become close to us, we usually forget all those details of our first contact with them; it seems as though we had always known them and they had always been with us.²⁷

Later, as they talk, Kamil appears vague, absent-minded: “He did not complete a single thought, even the most trivial. He would often stop in the middle of a sentence. His glance kept straying into the distance.”²⁸ Kamil is portrayed as not quite of this world: he makes no movement or sound when he arrives, he scarcely even breathes. He barely touches his food.

As their friendship grows Kamil talks to Petar about Cem, but, again, Petar can never remember when or how he began. Petar's last sight of Kamil is of the young man disappearing round a corner in the yard. Once again it is dusk.

Kamil's physical presence has been reduced to a minimum, emphasizing the extent to which he no longer belongs to the “real” world. His reality is his identification with Cem. The same essentially mysterious quality surrounds the way in which Petar later remembers Kamil: in the half-light of dawn, Petar seems to see Kamil in the cloud of smoke from his cigarette. The two men talk. Petar addresses him as he used to speak “to the young monks in the monastery when they were overcome by taedium vitae”.²⁹ He tries gently to persuade Kamil not to despair: it is dawn and there will be a dawn after every darkness; Kamil will recover. Protesting that “one cannot recover from oneself”³⁰, Kamil is irrevocably imprisoned in his darkness; he simply cannot see the beauties of God's sunlit morning which Petar points out to him. The monk's last thoughts in connection with Kamil can perhaps be seen as a statement of his religious faith:

I repeat to myself that there is another, different world besides this Yard, that this is not all, nor for ever. And I endeavour not to forget this and to hold on to this idea. But I feel that the Yard drags a man, like a whirlpool, down towards some dark depths.³¹

Perhaps, however, in the context of the whole allegory of the Yard, it would be legitimate to see this other world as being the world of the imagination, the world of books and stories, which gives human life continuity, despite the apparent finality of the disappearance of Petar's grave under the snow.

Such a brief account of this complex work cannot do it justice. Its intricate writing touches on a number of different issues and raises questions which are never answered. Apparent conclusions are always questioned or countered, so that they become as elusive and tenuous as the whole question of an individual's identity touched on in the central parenthesis.

Notes

1. Prokleta avlija (Novi Sad, 1954). Collected works, vol. 4.

2. “Trup”, Žed (vol. 6), p. 105.

3. Prokleta avlija, p. 11.

4. Ibid., p. 54.

5. Ibid., p. 9.

6. Ibid., p. 121.

7. Ibid.

8. “Sunce” (1952); “U ćeliji broj 115” (1960).

9. Prokleta avlija, p. 15.

10. Ibid., p. 12.

11. Ibid., p. 15.

12. Ibid., p. 24.

13. Ibid., p. 35.

14. Ibid., p. 36.

15. Ibid., p. 41.

16. Ibid., p. 46.

17. Ibid., p. 53.

18. Ibid., pp. 58-9.

19. Ibid., p. 62.

20. Ibid., p. 100.

21. Ibid., p. 77.

22. Ibid., pp. 95-6.

23. Ibid., p. 95.

24. Ibid., p. 59.

25. Ibid., p. 92.

26. Ibid., p. 93.

27. Ibid., pp. 44-5.

28. Ibid., p. 47.

29. Ibid., p. 115.

30. Ibid.

31. Ibid., p. 116.