[In the following excerpt, Mukerji explores the relationship between human interaction and the individual psyche in forming perceptions of reality.]

When we form a judgment about people, their behavior and dispositions, it is necessary to bear in mind that people, for different reasons that do not depend on them, cannot speak the truth everywhere, always and about everything. Some do not see it, others see it upside down, which is the same or still worse, and yet others simply do not have the strength for that feat, because for people of that sort it is indeed a feat for which a certain minimal strength that is not given to them is required.

—Andrić, Signs by the Way¹

A novella about institutionalized tyranny and human frailty, focusing on the distant past of a Bosnian Franciscan's prison months in Istanbul, The Damned Yard suggests the close connection between personality and individual perceptions of reality. The rhetoric of fiction² communicates Andrić's artistic vision, which consists in part of a judgment on what his characters see, while it leaves the reader to infer from the intellectual and moral qualities of the character-narrators their reliability as spokesmen and interpreters of experience.

Fra Petar's capacity to endure and survive speaks for itself. His description of what is virtually “an entire township of prisoners and guards” (page 15) contains a psychological evaluation that has the weight of individual-collective experience behind it:

The very location of the Damned Yard was strange, as if calculated on the torment and greater suffering of prisoners. … From the Yard nothing of the city is seen nor of the pier and the abandoned arsenal on the shore below it. Only the sky, grand and cruel in its beauty, in the distance something of the green Asian shore from the other side of an invisible sea, and just the occasional tip of an unknown mosque or gigantic cypress behind the wall. All vague, nameless, and alien. That way a foreign person has the constant feeling that he is somewhere on an infernal island, beyond everything that signified life for him till then, and without hope that he will descry it soon. And besides all the other miseries, the prisoners who are from Istanbul are punished even more in that they do not see and do not hear anything of their city; they are in it, but as if they are a hundred castles away from it; and that illusory distance torments them just as the actual one. Because of all this, the Yard quickly and imperceptibly bends a person and subdues him to itself, so that he begins to lose himself. He forgets what he was and thinks less and less of what will be, and to him both the past and the future sink into one single present, in the unusual and dreadful life of the Damned Yard.

[22-23]³

Fifteen, twenty and thirty to a cell, the reactions induced in the détenus by a particular kind of stress reveal more about existence and endurance in the Yard:

… when it happens that the sky becomes cloudy and there starts to blow a mild and noxious south wind, which wafts the stench of sea rot, city filth and the fetor from the invisible pier … and the wind moans … tranquil people get upset and … start to move angrily, looking for quarrels. A burden to themselves alone, the prisoners provoke their fellow sufferers or the guards who are themselves irritable and resentful at everything during those [two or three] days. Nerves are strained to ache or give way suddenly in dangerous outbursts and insane acts. … And while some rage and clash with everyone … others, older and retiring people, crouch for hours, separately, and settle things with their invisible adversaries in an inaudible whisper or with just grimaces and feeble movements of the arm and head. … In those hours of general agitation, madness, like a contagion and a quick fire, spreads from room to room, from person to person, and is transmitted from people to animals. … Dogs and cats get upset. Enormous rats start to weave frequently and swiftly from wall to wall. People shake doors and clang tin pots with spoons. … In moments everything calms down from a general, morbid exhaustion. But then at once in some closed cells, with the initial darkness, a general screaming begins. … In such hours that entire Damned Yard groans and roars like an enormous children's rattle in giant hands and the people in it tremble, contort, clash among themselves and strike against the walls like the small bodies in that rattle.

[23-24]

On “the big stage” (29) of the Yard, which betrays the legal code whose mechanism it preserves, Latifaga the warden, called by the nickname Karadjoz,⁴ is a man who plays many parts. With sophistic satisfaction he justifies the jail's population:

No one is here by accident. If he has crossed the threshold of this Yard, he is not innocent. He is to blame for something, even if it was in his sleep. If nothing else, his mother, when she carried him, thought something evil.

[32]

To Karadjoz are sent, among others, innocent people, international swindlers, mentally retarded and lost men, pickpockets, professional gamblers, blackmailers, petty thieves, drunks, drug addicts, perverts, murderers, and exiles “from the western provinces” (16); the Yard also serves as a “reservoir from which the police select false witnesses” and agents provocateurs “for their needs” (15). Karadjoz works on prisoners with an inside knowledge of crime accruing from his own teenage escapades, which he was not punished for but instead taken into the police force:

With all of his hundred okes of weight, he was, if it was necessary, as animated and quick as a weasel, and in moments like that his heavy and flabby body developed a bullish vigor. Behind the sleepy and like-dead face and closed eyes, the ever vigilant attention and devilishly restless and ingenious thought was hidden. On that face of a dark olive color no one ever saw a smile, not even when Karadjoz's entire body would shake from a gross inner laughter. That face could contract and dilate, alter and transform, from an expression of extreme loathing and terrible suffering to one of deep understanding and genuine condolence. The play of the eyes in that face was one of Karadjoz's greatest arts. The left eye was usually almost completely shut, but between the composed eyelashes a glance watchful and sharp as a razor was felt. And the right eye was wide open, large. It lived only for itself and swivelled like some searchlight; it could come out of its socket to an incredible extent and retreat into it just as quickly. It attacked, challenged, confused the victim, riveted on a spot and penetrated the hiddenmost recesses of his thoughts, hopes and plans. From that the entire face, freakishly cross-eyed, acquired the now frightful now comic appearance of a grotesque mask.

[29-30]

Brutality, violence and self-assertion become adjuncts of his professional personality. Karadjoz bellows, whispers, “plays the fool or the bloodthirsty oppressor” alternately and “with the same sincerity and conviction” for hours “in his ‘game’” (34) with a man accused of theft, embezzlement, rape, a serious violation or murder. Mistrusting everybody, including himself, with desperate persistence he applies himself to extorting a confession, hunting for it and wringing it from a person. This is for Karadjoz the one “fixed point from which he can in this world, in which all are guilty and deserving of condemnation, keep up at least an illusion of some justice and some order” (35).

Zaim, a diminutive, bowed, timid-looking man, flatters his ego in his own idiosyncratic way. Addicted to dispersing counterfeit money, and arrested in that connection on previous occasions, he worries about being sentenced. This, however, makes him voluble; preoccupied with projecting an identity, Zaim asserts:

—I took a loan and got married in Adapazar. I had a good and an intelligent wife. People respected me a lot and my paint store was the best in town. … The devil induced me to take yet another wife. And from that day everything started going wrong. … The brothers of my first wife had begun to pursue me. … And I, having seen that I was losing my reputation and customers, and that I would lose my head too … sold off those goods and tools secretly and cheaply and moved again in the world. … [The wealthy widow I married in Trapezunt] guarded me like the apple of her eye. It was here that I lived four years among all the best things! But, to my misfortune, the woman fell ill and died, and out of grief I could not stay here, but again sold everything and moved into the world. I worked everywhere and they appreciated and loved me everywhere because of my hands of gold. I came as far as Salonika. And here I got married. … I know four trades and married eleven times. … Her relatives, Yids, had cheated me. If I were to collect today just half of what they owe me, I would be a rich man. And I would have easily freed myself from the false charge and extricated myself from here. … I had an Egyptian woman. She was older than I, and took care of me, my own mother could not have done better. Two years we lived happily. And I had a reputation in the civic community. But what can you do? One day …

[19-22]

With “the same thing” (19) repeated over, exaggerated and multiplied, Zaim gives his past a story-line humoring his dreams of “a quiet life with a perfect woman” (22).

Sadness written all over him, Haim, a worried Jew from Smyrna who feels his place is definitely not “with this riffraff” (51), is a compulsive talker, paradoxically both the victim as well as the privileged clairvoyant of his active imagination. Lowering his voice to a mumble from time to time, he looks about him searchingly “like a man whom many are pursuing and who does not trust anybody” (54). His suspicions aroused by two Bulgarian businessmen in the cell, Haim leaves the place beside Fra Petar that another Smyrnaean, Ćamil, had occupied before him, and warns the Bosnian to beware of others too since “every one of them can be” (69) a spy. Haim's loquacity, however, interests Fra Petar, prompting a generalization:

We are always more or less inclined to criticize those who talk a lot, particularly about matters which do not concern them directly, we even speak with contempt about those people as about babblers and dull chatterboxes. But we do not think that this human, so human, and familiar foible has even its good side. For what should we have known about other souls and ideas, about other people, and accordingly about ourselves also, about other milieux and regions we never see nor will ever have the opportunity to see, if there were not such people who have a need to relate orally or in writing what they saw and heard, and what they experienced or thought in connection with that? … And as for their narrations being imperfect, colored by personal passions and needs, or even incorrect, that is why we have reason and experience and can judge them and compare some with others, in order to accept or reject them, partially or in their entirety. That way, some of the human truth always remains for those who listen or read them patiently.

[54]

As an omniscient narrator with mimetic powers Haim impresses his listener:

He was able to relate down to incredible details and trifles the scenes that had taken place between two people without witnesses. And not only did he describe the people whom he was talking about but he entered into their thoughts and desires, and then often into those which they themselves were not conscious of, but which he had discovered. He spoke from within them. And he had the strange talent of imitating the speech of the person being discussed with just a slight inflection in the voice, and to be now a vali, now a beggar, now a Greek beauty; and with entirely insignificant movements of the body or only of the facial muscles he could show the gait and attitude of a man or the motion of an animal or even the appearance of a dead object on the whole.

[53]

Haim's detailed narration hinges on the predicament of the individual in a hostile world: the love of a young Turk, Ćamil, for a Greek merchant's daughter is nipped in the bud by parental tyranny emanating from religious, communal zeal; the disenchanted Ćamil's sole passion for scholarly work and history is deemed eccentric by his former circle of friends, who dub him Jem Sultan,⁵ and appears highly questionable to the perverse Izmir valija who is responsible for his detention in the Yard. On guilt and innocence the governor supplies the false logic and a Muslim judge—Ćamil's father's friend who intercedes on the bachelor's behalf—a corrective:

The first thing that the valija thought while listening to the information regarding Ćamil, and because he would not even think about the young man, was the fact that the current sultan also had a brother who he had declared mentally retarded and who he kept in confinement. … That similarity disturbed him. And it was in those days when, in connection with certain intrigues and riots in the European part of Turkey, from Constantinople to all governors a stern circular letter was sent by which the authorities in the entire country were admonished to watch out better for numerous troublemakers and agitators who unasked were debating affairs of state and even daring to besmirch the sultan's name, the valija felt personally offended, as did any bad official. It seemed clear to him that that warning could only refer to his vilajet, and since there was not any “case” in his vilajet, it then [referred] only to Ćamil's case. … [The kadija] stated Ćamil's whole case to him: That he was without vices, that with his way of life he could serve as an example of a good young man and a true Muslim, that he was thrown into some rapture and melancholy on account of an unfortunate affection and devoted himself completely to scholarly work and books, and if in that he had perhaps gone too far, then it was necessary to view it more as a sickness than as some bad and malicious deed, and that he deserved consideration and compassion and not persecution and punishment. … What he was occupied with, that was history, scholarly work, and there could be no harm from scholarly work. …

—I shall not, effendi [the valija said], rack my brains about that. History, or how all that is called, I do not know. And it would be better, it seems to me, for him also that he did not know it either and that he did not probe much of what some sultan formerly did, but that he obeyed what this present one commands.

—But that is scholarly work, those are books! interrupted the kadija, who knew from experience how harmful, and dangerous both for society and the individual, people can be who believe unboundedly in their own intellect and discernment and in the correctness of every one of their opinions and conclusions because of their own narrow-mindedness.

—Well, it means, books are not good for him. Jem Sultan! The Pretender! Vying for the throne!—The word has come, and when the word comes once, it does not stop any more, but it goes further. … I was not the reason for those words, but he was; let him answer for them also. … I neither read books nor will I think for another. Let each think for himself. Why should I worry because of him? In my vilajet each should watch what he does and says. I only know one thing: order and law. … Yes, order and law. And whose head sticks out above that, I will cut it off. … I do not put up with one single sore spot here, and the suspicious erudition of this young effendi either. … A regulation is a regulation, and the regulation does not enjoin in that way, but exactly in this way. He spoke about Emperors and Imperial affairs, let him answer on the Imperial threshold. There is Stamboul for him, well let him explain there all that he has read and written and what he has told the world. Let them rack their brains about that. If he is innocent, there is nothing to be afraid of.

(62-65)

Ćamil himself, from the beginning, gives Fra Petar the impression of being an unhappy “sick person” (47). In his puffed, pallid face with a ten-day sorrel stubble and a lighter, drooping moustache, the moist, fervid blue eyes, telltale bruise-like rings around them, remind the friar of the eyes of “people who are afraid or shy of something, want to conceal something” (46). Ćamil's blinking or mechanical, slow, nodding acknowledgment of Fra Petar's remarks, his unfinished sentences on the commonest thoughts, glances running into the far distance, together with his anorexia and long and absent-minded chewing upon a morsel, all point to a state of mental withdrawal. In time, however, as “the unusual friendship” between the two men grows “quickly and unexpectedly, as it could only in these kind of exceptional circumstances” (74), the friar becomes privy to a crisis of confused identity. What brings this on is Ćamil's obsession with “Jem's happy and unhappy days, his encounters and clashes, loves, hates and friendships, the attempts at fleeing from Christian servitude, the hopes and despair, the musings behind the protracted insomnia and tangled dreams in the short hours of sleep, his proud and bitter replies to bigwigs in France and Italy, the angry soliloquies in loneliness and captivity” (92). Andrić parenthetically remarks tragic implications of Ćamil's switch from “indirect narration of another's destiny” (92) to the first-person confessional:

I!—a grave word, which in the eyes of those before whom it is spoken defines our place, fatefully and unalterably, often far ahead of or behind what we know about ourselves, outside of our own will and above our powers. A terrible word which, once pronounced, ties and identifies us forever with all that we have imagined and said and with which we never even intended to identify, while in fact, in ourselves, we have long since been one with it.

[92]

Detained in the Yard because of “an absurd concurrence of circumstances, in troubled times” (12) but not interrogated nor notified about anything by anyone from outside, Fra Petar has his moments of weakness. Time hangs heavily on his hands, he has no one to converse with after Ćamil. Idle, without books and tools, he is “frightened of insanity as of a contagious disease and by the thought that even the healthiest man here starts to become unsettled and sees visions in the course of time” (116). Watching a brilliant sun rise in the Stamboul sky, Fra Petar feels faint as he smokes, hallucinating Ćamil is beside him and he is talking to him “cordially and easily” (114) this once. The sound of a scream and two men fighting rouses him. Willing himself to remember who he is and what he is, where he came from and how he got here, the Bosnian tells himself repeatedly “there is another and a different world” (116), sensing “how the Yard drags a man to some dark depths like a whirlpool” (116).

In The Damned Yard Andrić weaves an intricate narrative from the interaction between people, projecting the human psyche's irresistible urge to assert itself as well as the emotive, volitional, irrational needs of men. The mature Andrićean breadth and serenity that marks the novella has much to do with the author's recognition of prisons as “one of the realities of human life”⁶ and with his personal experience and understanding of the extreme psychological pressures under which human beings live in captivity.

Notes

1. Znakovi pored puta, Sabrana djela, XVI, p. 239.

2. The phrase is borrowed from Wayne C. Booth's Rhetoric of Fiction (1961; reprinted Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983).

3. It is interesting to note Andrić's comment in Znakovi pored puta, p. 155: “Prisons … have something in common with Hell (or Purgatory). A compulsory linkage with fixed space, suffering of different degrees and forms. … Prisons … are one of the realities of human life, and hell and purgatory are fables of Christian belief. Now a man asks himself: which has served which as the model, for hell the prison or for our prison the idea of hell?”

4. “Karadjoz” is, perhaps, applied ironically to Latifaga since in Karagoz—a traditional Turkish shadow-puppet play—the eponymous character who represents Turkish Everyman or ordinary man is clearly “good” as opposed to the “bad” deuteragonist Hacivat, usually represented as an indolent or self-important and officious character.

5. Jem Sultan was the younger son whom Sultan Mehmed II favored in spite of the right of primogeniture. Jem staked his claim to the throne unsuccessfully against Bayezid II. He sought the protection of the Order of St. John of Jerusalem, the Knights of Rhodes, only to become a hostage in the hands of Christendom against Ottoman attacks and a pawn in the diplomatic intrigues of contending princes. He died en route to Naples, poisoned by the Borgia king to spite the Frankish king, and with the connivance of his own brother.

6. See Znakovi pored puta, p. 155.