Rum for Corkan the One-Eyed: Tale for an Icy Day

December 2, 2006--This is lengthy, but if you stick through till the end, well worth the read.

I have spent the past three days holed up at home due to, as the conventions of rhetoric would phrase it, our inclement weather.

It has been a wonderful opportunity to retreat into reading. My late maternal grandmother—a  bitter woman who I feared as a child, only to finally understand that her bitterness had been fueled by a lifetime of disappointing circumstances and a secret struggle with turbulent brain chemistry—shortly before her death instructed my mother to bring me her collection of writings whose authors were awarded, throughout the 20^th century, the Nobel Prize in Literature.

How she knew that this was the perfect gift for me, I really don’t know. The books themselves had never been read—I could tell by their condition, by the uniform placement in each volume of a well-pressed ribbon bookmark, and pages that gently clung together at the edges.  Over the years, we were never close. But she gave this remarkable set of books to her oldest child, my mother, with instructions to pass them on to me, my mother’s youngest child.

So, I pulled from the shelves one of the volumes I had not yet read, and it has kept me well occupied these past few snowy days. I read the novel Barabbas, by a Swedish existentialist, who brought me into the haunted conscience of the legendary condemned inmate whose life Pilate spared in exchange for that of Christ.

And since yesterday I have been reading 'The Bridge on the Drina' by Ivo Andric, the only Bosnian to have been recognized by the Nobel Committee. He received the prize in 1961. I am about halfway through this epic of historical fiction in which Andric tells the long history of his hometown over a span of 5 centuries. Some have compared it to Garcia Marquez’ One Hundred Years of Solitude, although remarking that its scope is much larger. It focuses not on one family, but on the lives of a whole community, through generations, witnessed, as it were, by a remarkable, silent, stone bridge built by slave labor in the 1500s, a bridge which today still spans the Drina River.

Here is a portion of this remarkable novel. In this section set in the years before World War One, the narrator brings us inside a  local tavern, and inside the heart and head of one of the local drunkards. It is appropriate reading for a cold, icy homebound day….

…There are always such people in a town, singers, jesters, buffoons, eccentrics. When one of them grew threadbare or died, another replaced him, for besides the notorious and well known there developed fresh ones to shorten the hours and make gay the lives of new generations. But much time would have to pass before such another appeared as Salko Corkan the One-Eyed.

When, after the Austrian occupation, the first circus had come to the town Corkan had fallen in love with the tight-rope walker and because of her had behaved so madly and eccentrically that he had been beaten and sent to prison, and the local worthies who had heedlessly led him astray and encourage him to lose his head had had to pay heavy fines.

Some years had passed since then, the people had grown accustomed to many things and the arrival of strange players, clowns and conjurers no longer excited such universal and contagious sensation as had the first circus, but Corkan’s love for the dancer was still remembered.

For a long time he had wasted his strength in doing odd jobs by day and by night helping the local begs and rich men to forget their cares in drinking and brawling.  So it went from generation to generation. As some sowed their wild oats and withdrew, got married and settled down, other and younger ones who wanted to sow theirs took their places. Now Corkan was washed out and old before his time; he was far more often in the inn than at work and lived not so much from what he earned as from free drinks and snacks given him by the customers.

On rainy autumn nights the guests in Zarije’s inn were overcome by boredom. Their thoughts came slowly and were all concerned with melancholy and unpleasant matters; speech came with difficulty and sounded empty and irritating, faces were cold, absent or mistrustful. Not even plum brandy could enliven and improve their mood. On a bench in a corner of the inn Corkan drowsed overcome by fatigue, the moist heat and the first glasses of plum brandy; it was raining cats and dogs.

Then one of the sullen guests at the main table mentioned, as if by chance, the dancer from the circus and Corkan’s unhappy. Love. They all glanced at the corner but Corkan did not budge and pretended to go on dozing. Let them say what they liked; he had firmly decided that very morning, after a heavy night’s drinking, not to reply to their jeering and mocking and not to let them play crude jokes on him as some of them had done the night before in that very inn.

“I believe that they still write to each other,” said one.

“So you see, the bastard writes love-letters to one while another is on her knees to him here!” retorted another.

Corkan forced himself to remain indifferent but the conversation irritated and excited him as if the sun were burning his face; his only eye seemed as if it forced itself to open and all the muscles of his face stretched into a happy laugh. He was no longer able to maintain his motionless silence. At first he waved his hand in a casual and indifferent gesture and then said:

“All that is over, over long ago.”

“All over, is it? What a wretch this fellow Corkan is! One girl is pining away for him somewhere far away while another is going made for him here. One is all over, this one here will soon be the same and then it will be the turn of a third. What sort of a fellow are you, you wretch, to turn their heads one after the other?”

Corkan leaped to his feet and approached the table. He had forgotten his drowsiness and fatigue and his decision not to be drawn into conversation. With hand on heart he assured the guests that it had not been his fault and that he was not so great a lover and seducer as they made out. His clothes were still damp and his face streaked and dirty, for the color of his cheap red fez ran, but it was lighted up with a smile of alcoholic bliss. He sat down near the table.

“Rum for Corkan!” shouted Santo Papo, the fat and greasy son of Mente and grandson of Morde Papo, leading hardware merchants.

Corkan had recently begun to drink rum instead of plum brandy whenever he could get hold of it. The new drink was as if made for such as he; it was stronger, quicker in effect and pleasantly different from plum brandy. It came in small flasks of two decis each, with a label showing a young mulatto girl with luscious lips and fiery eyes with a wide straw hat on her head, great golden earrings and the inscription beneath: Jamaica. (That was something exotic for a Bosnian in the last stages of alcoholism bordering on delirium. It was made in Slavonski Brod by the firm of Eisler, Sirowatka and Co.)  When he looked at the picture of the young mulatto girl, Corkan also felt the fire and aroma of the new drink and at once thought that he would never have been able to know this earthly treasure had he died even a year before. “And how many such wonderful things there are in this world!” He felt deeply moved at this thought and therefore always waited for a few pensive moments before he opened a bottle of rum. And after the satisfaction of that thought came the delight of the drink itself.

This time too he held the bottle before his face as if conversing with it unheard. But he who had first managed to draw him into conversation asked him sharply:

“Why are you dreaming about that girl, you wretch; are you going to take her as your wife or play about with her as you did with all the others?”

The girl in question was a certain Pasa from Dusce. She was the prettiest girl in the town, poor and fatherless, a seamstress as was also her mother.

During the countless picnics and drinking bouts of the past year the young bachelors had talked and sung much about Pasa and her inaccessible beauty. Listening to them, Corkan had gradually and imperceptibly become enthusiastic too, he himself did not know how or why. So they began to tease him about her.

One Firday they took Corkan with them for asikovanje (to flirt with the town girls in the Turkish manner) when from behind the courtyard gates or the window lattices muffled giggles could be heard and the whispering of the unseen girls within.  From one courtyard where Pasa and her friends lived a spring of tansy was thrown over the wall and fell at Corkan’s feet. He hesitated in confusion, not wanting to tread on the flower and undecided whether to pick it up. The youths who had brought him clapped him on the back and congratulated him that Pasa had chosen him from so many and had shown him greater attention than anyone else had ever obtained from her.

That night they had gone drinking beside the river under the walnut trees at Mezalin and continued until dawn. Corkan sat beside the fire, solemn and withdrawn, now joyous, now pensive. That night they would not let him serve the drinks or busy himself preparing coffee and snacks.

“Don’t you know, fellow, the meaning of a sprig of tansy thrown by a girl?” said one of them. “It means that Pasa is telling you: I am pining away for you like this plucked flower; but you neither ask for my hand nor allow me to go to another. That is what it means.”

They all began to talk to him about Pasa, so lovely, so chaste, alone in the world, waiting for the hand that should pluck her, and that the hand for which she was waiting was Corkan’s and his alone.

They pretended to get angry and hsoulted loudly; how did she come to cast her eye on Corkan? Others defended him. As Corkan went on drinking he came almost to believe in this marvel, only to reject it at once as an impossibility. In conversation he insisted that she was not the girl for him, and defended himself against their jeers by saying that he was a poor man, that he was growing old and not very attractive, but in his moments of silence he let his thoughts dwell on Pasa, her beauty and the joy that she would bring, heedless whether such joy were possible for him or not. In that wonderful summer night which with the plum brandy and the songs and the fire burning on the grass seemed endless, everything was possible or at least not completely impossible. That the guests were mocking and ridiculing him he knew; gentlemen could not live without laughter, someone had to be their buffoon, it always had been and always would be.  But if all this were only a joke, his dream of a marvelous woman and an unattainable love, of which he had always dreamed and still dreamed today, was no joke, There was no joke in those songs in which love was both real and unreal and woman both near and unattainable as in his dream. For the guests all that too was a joke, but for him it was a true and sacred thing which he had always borne within himself and which had beome real and indubitable, independent of the guests’ pleasure, of wine and of song, of everything, even of Pasa herself.

All this he knew well and yet easily forgot. For his soul would melt and his mind flow like water.

So Corkan, three years after his great love and the scandal about the pretty German tight-rope walker, fell into a new and enchanted love and all the rich and idle guests found a fresh game, cruel and exciting enough to give them cause for laughter for  months and years to come.

That was in midsummer. But autumn and winter passed and the game about Corkan’s love for the beautiful Pasa filled the evenings and shortened the days for the merchants from the market-place. They always referred to Corkan as the bridegroom or the lover. By day, overcome by the night’s drinking and lack of sleep, when Corkan did odd jobs in the shops, fetching and carrying, he was surprised and angered that they should call him so, but only shrugged his shoulders. But as soon as night came and lamps were lit in Zarije’s inn, someone would shout “Rum for Corkan!” and another sing softly as if by chance:

                “Evening comes and the sun goes down:

                On they face it shines no longer…”

then suddenly everything changed. No more burdens, no more shrugging of shoulders, no more town or inn or even Corkan himself as he was in reality, snuffling, unshaven, clothed in rags and cast-off clothing of other men. There existed a high balcony lit by the setting sun and wreathed in vines, with a young girl who looked for him and waited for the man to whom she had thrown a sprig of tansy. There was still, to be true, the coarse laughter around him and the crude jests, but there were all far away, as in a fog, and he who sang was near him, close by his ear:

                “If I could grow warm again

                In the sunlight that you bring me…”

and he warmed himself in that sun, which had set, as he had never been warmed by the real sun which rose and set daily over the town.

“Rum for Corkan!”

So the winter nights passed. Towards the end of that winter Pasa got married. The poor seamstress from Dusce, in all her beauty of not quite nineteen years, married Hadji Omer who lived behind the fortress, a rich and respected man of fifty-five—as his second wife.

Hadji Omer had already been married more than thirty years. His wife came from a famous family and was renowned for her cleverness and good sense. Their property behind the fortress was a whole settlement in itself, progressive and rich in everything. His shops in the town were solidly built and his income assured and large. All this was not so much due to the peaceable and indolent Hadji Omer, who did little more than walk twice a day to the town and back, as to his able and energetic, always smiling wife. Her opinion was the last word on many questions fro all the Turkish women of the town.

His family was in every way among the best and most respected in the town, but the already ageing couple had no children. For long they had hoped. Hadji Omer had even made the pilgrimage to Mecca and his wife had made bequests to religious houses and given alms to the poor. The years had passed, everything had increased and prospered, but in this one most important matter they had received no blessing. Hadji Omer and his good wife had borne their evil fortune wisely and well but there could be no longer any hope of children. His wife was in her forty-fifth year.

The great inheritance which Hadji Omer was to leave behind him was in question. Not only his and his wife’s numerous relations had concerned themselves in this matter, but to some extent the whole town also. Some had wanted the marriage to remain childless to the end, while others had thought it a pity that such a man should die without heirs and that his good should be dispersed among the many relations, and had therefore urged him to take a second, younger wife while there was still a chance of heirs. The local Turks were divided into two camps on the question. But the matter was settled by the barren wife herself. Openly, resolutely and sincerely, as in everything she did, she told her undecided husband:

“The good God has given us everything, all thanks and praise to Him, concord and health and riches, but He has not given us what he gives to every poor man; to see our children and to know to whom to leave what shall remain after us. That has been my bad fortune. But even if I, by the will of God, must bear this, there is no reason why you should do so. I see that the whole market-lace is concerning itself with our troubles and urging you to marry again. Well, since they are trying to marry you off, then it is I who want to arrange your marriage for you, for no one is a greater friend to you than I.”

She then told him her plan; as there was no longer any likelihood that they two could ever have children, then he must bring to their home, beside her, a second wife, a younger one, by whom he might still be able to have children. The law gave him that right. She, naturally, would go on living in the house as “the old hadjinica”  and see that everything was done properly.

Hadji Omer long resisted and swore that he asked no better companion than she, that he did not need a second wife, but she stuck to her opinion and even informed him which girl she had chosen. Since he must marry in order to have children, then it were best that he take a young, healthy and pretty girl of poor family who would give him healthy heirs and, while she was alive, would be grateful for her good fortune. Her choice fell on pretty Pasa, daughter of the seamstress from Dusce.

So it was done. At the wish of his older wife and with her assistance, Hadji Omer married the lovely Pasa and eleven months later Pasa gave birth to a healthy boy. So the question of Hadji Omer’s inheritance was settled, the hopes of many relations were extinguished and the mouths of the market-place sealed. Pasa was happy and “the old hadjinica” satisfied, and the two lived in Hadji Omer’s house in concord like mother and daughter.

That fortunate conclusion of the question of Hadji Omer’s heir was the beginning of Corkan’s great sufferings. That winter the principal amusement of the idle guests in Zarije’s inn was Corkan’s sorrow at Pasa’s marriage. The unfortunate lover was drunk as he had never been before; the guests laughed till they creid. They all toasted him and each one of them got good value for his money. They mocked him with imaginary messages from Pasa, assuring him that she wept night and day, that she was pining for him, not telling any9one the real reason for her sorrow. Corkan was in a frenzy, sang, wept, answered all questions seriously and in detail and bewailed the fate which had created him so unprepossessing and poor.

“Very well, Corkan, but how many years younger are young than Handji Omer?” one of the guests would begin the conversation.

“How do I know? And what good would it do me even if I were younger?” Corkan answered bitterly.

“Eh, if I were to judge by heart and youth, then Hadji Omer would not have what he has, nor would our Corkan be sitting where he is,” broke in another guest.

It did not need much to make Corkan tender and sentimental. They poured him rum after rum and assured him that not only was he younger and handsomer and more suitable for Pasa but that, after all, he was not so poor as he thought or as he seemed. In the long nights these idle mean over their plum brandy thought up a whole history; how Corkan’s father, an unknown Turkish officer, whom no one had ever seen, had left a great property somewhere in Anatolia to his illegitimate son in Visegrad as sole heir, but that some relations down there had stayed the execution of the will; that now it would only be necessary for Corkan to appear in the rich and distant city of Brusa to counter the intrigues and lies of these false heirs and recover what rightly belonged to him. Then he would be able to buy up Hadji Omer and all his wealth.

Corkan listened, went on drinking and only sighed. All that pained him but at the same time did not stop him from sometimes thinking of himself so, and behaving as a man who has been cheated and robbed both in this town and over there somewhere in a distant and beautiful land, the homeland of his supposed father. Those around him pretended to make preparations for his journey to Brusa. Their jokes were long, cruel and worked out ot the smallest detail. One night they brought him a supposedly complete passport, and with coarse jokes and roars of laughter pulled Corkan into the center of the inn and turned him round and examined him, I order to inscribe his personal characteristics on it. Another time they calculated how much money he would need for his trip to Brusa, how he would travel and where he would spend his nights. That too passed a good part of the long night.

When he was sober Corkan protested; he both believed and disbelieved all he was told, but he disbelieved more than he believed. When he was sober he believed, in fact, nothing at all but as soon as he was drunk he behaved as though he believed it all. For when alcohol got a grip on him he no longer asked himself what was true and what was a lie. The truth was that, after the scond little bottle of rum, he already seemed to feel the scented air from distant and unattainable Brusa and saw, a lovely sight, its green gardens and white houses. He had been deceived, unfortunate in everything from birth, in his family, his property and his love; wrong had been done to him, so great a wrong that God and men were alike his debtors. It was clear that he was not what he appeared to be or as men saw him. The need to tell all those around him tormented him more with every glass, though he himself felt how hard it was to prove a trutyh that was to him clear and evident, but against which cried out all that was in him and about him. After the first glass of rum, he explained this to everyone, all night long, in broken sentences and with grotesque gestures and drunkard’s tears. The more he explained the more those around him joked and laughed. They laughed so long and heartily that their ribs and their jaws ached from that laughter, contagious, irresistible and sweeter than any food or drink. They laughed and forgot the boredom of the winter night, and like Corkan drank themselves silly.

“Kill yourself!” shouted Mehaga Sarac who by his cold and apparently serious manner best knew how to provoke and excite Corkan. “Since you have not been man enough to seize Pasa from that weakling of a Hadji Omer, then you oughtn’t to live any longer. Kill yourself, Corkan; that is my advice.”

“Kill yourself, kill yourself!” wailed Corkan. “Do you think I haven’t thought of that? A hundred times I have gone to throw myself into the Drina from the kapia and a hundred times something held me back.”

“What held you back? Fear held you back, full breeches, Corkan!”

“No, no. It was not fear, may God hear me, not fear!”

In the general uproar and laughter Corkan leaped up, beat his breast and tore a piece of bread from the loaf before him and thurst it under the cold and immobile face of Mehaga.

“Do you see this? By my bread and my blessing, it was not fear, but…”

Suddenly someone began to hum in a low voice:

                “On they face it shines no longer…”

Everyone picked up the osng and drowned Mehaga’s voice shouting at Corkan.

“Kill…kill…your---self…!”

Thus singing they themselves fell into that state of exaltation into which they had tried to drive Corkan. The evening developed into a mad orgy.

One February night they had thus awaited dawn, drinking themselves mad with their victim Corkan, and themselves victims of his folly. It was already day when they came out of the inn. Heated with drink, with veins swollen and crackling, they went to the bridge, but along the narrow stone parapet shining under the thin coating of ice.

“Corkan dares!” shouted one of the drunkards.

“Corkan? Not on your life!”

“Who daren’t? I? I dare to do what no living man dares,” shouted Corkan beating his breast noisily.

“You haven’t the guts! Do it if you dare!”

“I dare, by God!”

“Corkan dares!”

“Liar!”

These drunkards and boasters shouted each other down, even though they could scarcely keep their feet on the broad bridge, staggering, teetering and holding on to one another for support.

They did not even notice when Corkan climbed on to the stone parapet. Then, suddenly, they saw him floating above them and, drunk and disheveled as he was, begin to stand upright and walk along the flagstones on the parapet.

The stone parapet was about two feet wide. Corkan walked along it swaying now left now right. On the left was the bridge and on the bridge, there beneath his feet, the crowd of drunken men who followed his every step and shouted words at him which he scarcely understood and heard only as an incomprehensible murmur; and on the right a void, the unseen river; a thick mist floated upwards from it and rose, like white smoke, in the chill morning air.

The few passersby halted, terrified, and with wide-open eyes watched the drunken man who was walking along the narrow and slippery parapet, poised above the void, waving his arms frantically to retain his balance. In that company of drunkards a few of the more sober who still had some common sense watched the dangerous game. Others, not realizing the danger, walked along beside the parapet and accompanied with the cries the drunken man who balanced and swayed and danced above the abyss.

All at once, in his dangerous position, Corkan felt himself separated from his companions. He was now like some gigantic monster far above them. His first steps were slow and hesitating. His heavy clogs kept slipping on the stones covered with ice. It seemed to him that his legs were failing him, that the depths below attracted him irresistibly, that he must slip and fall, that he was already falling. But his unusual position and the nearness of great danger gave him strength and hitherto unknown powers. Struggling to maintain his balance, he made more and more little jumps and bent more and more from his waist and knees. Instead of walking he began to dance, he himself did not know how, as free of care as if he had been on a wide green field and not on that narrow and icy edge. All of a sudden he felt himself light and skillful as a man sometimes is in dreams. His heavy and exhausted body felt without weight. The drunken Corkan danced and floated above the depths as if on wings. He felt as if a gay strength flowed through his body which danced to an unheard music and that give him security and balance. His dance bore him onward where his walk would never have borne him. No longer thinking of the danger of the possibility of a fall, he leaped from one leg to the other and sang with outstretched arms as if accompanying himself on a drum.

                “Tiridam,  tiridam…hai…hai…”

In that unusual and dangerous position, exalted above all the others, he was no longer Corkan the One-Eyed, the butt of the town and the inn. Below him there was no longer that narrow and slippery stone parapet of that familiar bridge on which he had countless times munched his bread and, thinking of the sweetness of death in the waves beneath, had gone to sleep in the shade of the kapia.

No, this was that distant and unattainable voyage of which they had spoken every night at the inn with coarse jokes and mockery and on which now, at last, he had set out. This was that glorious long-desired path of great achievements and that in the distance at the end of it was the imperial city of Brusa with its real riches and his legitimate heritage, the setting sun and the lovely Pasa with his son; his wife and his child.

So, dancing in a sort of ecstasy, he passed the parapet around the sofa and then the second half of the bridge. When he came to the end he leaped down and looked confusedly about him, in wonder that he had once again landed on the hard and familiar Visegrad road. The crowed which till then had accompanied him with encouragement and jokes welcomed him. Those who had halted in fear rushed up. They began to embrace him, to clap him on the back and on his faded fez. All of them shouted together:

“Aferim, bravo, Corkan, our falcon!”

“Bravo, hero!”

“Rum for  Corkan!” yelled Santo Papo in a raucous voice with a Spanish accent, thinking that he was in the inn.

In this general uproar and commotion someone proposed that they stay together and not go home, but go on drinking in honor of Crokan’s exploit.

Those children who were then in their eighth and ninth years and were that morning hurrying across the frozen bridge to their distant school stopped and stared at the unusual sight. They opened their mouths in astonishment and little clouds of steam rose from them. Tiny, muffled up, with slates and schoolbooks under their arms, they could not understand this game of the grown-ups, but for the rest of their lives they would remember, together with the lines of their own bridge, the picture of Corkan the One-Eyed, that man so well known to them who now, transfigured and light, dancing daringly and joyously as if transported by magic, walked where it was forbidden to walk and where no one ever dared to go.

[exerpted from The Bridge on the Drina by Ivo Andric]