Ivo Andri THE RED FLOWER The Latin and homeroom teacher was a middle-aged man, originally from

someplace in Vojvodina. His name was ... Now I realize that it is not very easy in one day to say what his name was. In his childhood he was called Vasilije okrljan. When he was still in high school, he felt that his last name sounded rough, both ugly and ridiculous, like a treacherous acoustic trace of low and indistinct family origins, which he was ashamed of both in his sleep and in his waking hours and tried to cover up and conceal whenever he could and as much as he could. Forever displeased with everything about and around himself, he decided to alter at least that which could be altered. At university, he started signing his last name as okrljanovi, but, as it was not much better or more genteel, when he became a teacher, he decided to change it to Vasiljevi. Thus, as a new man, Vasa Vasiljevi, he came to Bosnia and the Sarajevo grammar school about ten years ago. Yet, just as a dog always carries on his leg a mark of the chain from which it has unshackled itself, thus his former name, okrljan, followed him like a blunder from his youth and an object of derisive gossiping. But the students called him neither by his old nor by his new name, but by a nickname that they had given him themselves: Durchzug.1 He came from a small place in Vojvodina; a son of a constable, he was the last in a long line of children that had all died early. His father was a drunk and a bully, a petty, subordinate officer within the huge and complex administration of the vast Austrian Empire. A crouched and stooping man, as if carrying on his back the whole monstrous structure of all clerical classes and ranks, each being higher than his, he performed his duty within legal limits. However, within these limits he took revenge on everything and everyone because of his heavy burden and low rank. He scared away children. He beat arrested men as much as he dared and could and he beat his wife always and whenever he felt like it. He did no greater evil simply because he had never had a chance, because no one had ever asked him to, but in his soul he was ready for it. He got drunk frequently, that is, whenever the villagers and townspeople who depended on his goodwill in some trifling matter bought him drinks. Alcohol promoted him to the momentary and unreal clerical ranks of which he fantasized when he was sober, which lasted just as long as his drunkenness and required ever more drinks. The only son of this alcoholic policeman distinguished himself in school by having a good memory and even more by being extremely obedient. One of his teachers, a well-off and eccentric man, helped the boy to finish grammar school and get a scholarship to university. Thus the constable's son went to study at Vienna. Following the advice of his teacher and patron, he chose to study classical philology. He studied all the required subjects with the same antlike diligence as in his grammar school, never understanding the purpose and greatness of science and remaining desirous of everything city life has on display but never gives to a poor student from an out-of-the-way place and a pitiable family. By the time he had
1

Durchzug is German for "draft."

finished his studies, both his father and mother had died. He became a teacher of Latin just as he could have become a police officer or a forester with "a university degree." After several years of teaching, he moved to Bosnia, where teachers had slightly higher salaries and better chances of promotion. There he cocooned in his life as a teacher-bureaucrat, like the majority of high school teachers in Sarajevo at that time. There generations of Bosnian boys, high school students, passed through his hands and he filled their heads in his own manner with the basics of the Latin language and classical culture. He was a bachelor and a loner, a low-spirited and dissatisfied man, who grayed early, or rather, became somehow ashen. His teaching method was imbued with utter boredom. From it the boys concluded that the thing called Latin was not a language that living people had ever spoken but, from its very beginning, "a school subject," a kind of punishment and curse, something like bars separating a boy from everything he found attractive or delightful. He taught the students Latin in such a way that it must have seemed to them that nothing in that language was connected by either rhythm or sense. There was no connection not only between certain nouns and verbs, but between the forms and cases of the same verb or noun. Each sentence was to be learned in isolation, with no connection whatsoever to the text from which it had been extracted and to the circumstances from which the text had sprung. His passive participle of the verb tangere stood on its own, isolated from living speech and sound human reasoning, like a scarecrow and a trap for any absent-minded or frightened boy, like the ring in a circus through which poor, trained dogs are made to run. Thus things lost their content and whatever was read remained meaningless and useless. Thus the students had a tough nut to crack, the difficult forms of a "dead" language, without ever understanding the content of what they were reading or being able to feel for at least a moment all the sensible, human and liberating ideas hidden in the text. He saw all the Roman and Greek classical authors only as a kind of senior officials, or as teachers superior to him only in rank. For him, all of them were in the same civil service as he, and all of them, together with him and the rest of the school system, represented a kind of obstacle along the way a student needed to run on from his childhood to his clerical career, that is, to his daily bread, position and reputation in society. All this was supposed to kill in a boy the exuberant life instincts, hide real life from his view as much as possible, break his will and embitter his life from the outset, so that he the milksop! could really see what a career was and how dearly one had to pay for it and so that he could ultimately appreciate it. He viewed all the heroes of Antiquity and even all the gods of mythology as high dignitaries "beyond any rank," as a kind of higher official institution of the state which he himself served. Generally, he viewed everything in this world, even the very science which he "served," through the texts of government ordinances and decrees, the class attendance register and his notepad, which encompassed all the world for him, arranged in alphabetical order and assigned marks from A to F.

Vasiljevi's pedagogical method consisted in catching students unawares and asking them questions when they least expected it and lurking in the streets to catch them make some petty boyish mistakes. He found greatest pleasure in ridiculing or punishing the students who showed any degree of originality in anything or a desire to take up any extracurricular activity, which he, with his police-like outlook, kept in check wherever and as much as he could. He regarded a slightest deviation from what was printed in the textbook as a serious violation and punished it. The punishment involved both his ironical remarks and bad grades, as well as any other means at his disposal. Any hint of freedom or novelty of thought or expression, any, even the most innocent, boyish rebellion against the authorities and social hierarchy precipitated his feverish, hysterical resistance and anger, an anger that was roughly the measure of his fear of the authorities and his respect for the hierarchy. One often wonders: where do petty people, those of little value both as persons and by their social position, get this blind attachment to the existing order, such fanatical reverence for established and ancient ideas and institutions that should by no means be close to their hearts, and such seething hate for anything new, for anything that might imply change and progress? But this disagreeable man also had a weak spot. He had a fear of drafts. The students, most of whom hated him, took advantage of his phobia ruthlessly and inventively, as only children can. This was the reason why he had been dubbed "Durchzug." Once, during a fit of anger, he used this German word for our word "draft." Since then the students had called him by no other name among themselves. His fear of drafts was abnormal, like a panic. This fear of wind and drafts seemed somehow to match his hate of novelty and change. In each class he had a student, one of those servile and zealous ones, whose task was to close all the windows meticulously before the teacher's arrival. But the other students often found a way to trick this "Cerberus," who watched over drafts, and unfasten a window latch unnoticed. When the teacher came through the door, a stream of air would push the unsecured window frame open and create a draft. No matter how weak the draft was, the teacher would hold his head in his hands and start yelling angrily and fearfully. "Shut it, you villains! Shut it, now!" There would be sniggering and choking from suppressed laughter. Those who laughed most loudly were the two or three boys who, feigning eagerness, would rush to shut the window and who were actually the ones who had perpetrated the prank. Such pranks were quite common. In the middle of Vasiljevi's class, which was always imbued with utter boredom, one of the impertinent students would suddenly get up, go to a window and pretend to be making sure that the window was tightly shut. Then he would go back to his seat with a serious expression on his face to general laughter and giggles from the rest of the students. The teacher would be biting his lips and looking at the youngster suspiciously, but could not do anything to him. The relations between the students and teacher Vasiljevi deteriorated with every passing year, until the key element of his pedagogical work had turned solely

into a fight against the youth and youthful cheekiness of his students, against their eternal need for playing games and laughing, for change and interesting novelties. It seemed as if he was capable of seeing only this side of them. He was forever fearful of student's sneers and this fear rendered him particularly comical. Their laughter made his throat tighten and his face ice cold. He was filled with hatred, which his feeling of impotence turned into fury. Sometimes, this healthy, contagious and unquenchable boyish laughter seemed to him like a mighty flood, which gushed not only from the boys' chests, but from the sky, from the earth and all the living creatures on it. And he hated not only these children, but also the sky and the earth and everything that lived in them and on them, everything that moved, breathed, shone or flew. At night, in his dreams, he would see a vast multitude of laughing faces threatening to flood him and sweep him away with their laughter, while he, choking, tried in vain to shout that which he had so many times repeated in class: "Only fools laugh without a reason, and I see no reason for laughter here." He saw this boyish laughter and restlessness both as his personal affliction, which no one understood, and as a universal menace, which threatened everything that was holy and serious, undermined the foundations of every work and the order at large, and, seemingly harmless, would ultimately overflow everything and turn life into mockery and derision and the world into a plaything. He found little understanding and support from other people in his profound repulsion and constant struggle, which further reinforced him in his idiosyncrasy and filled him with pessimism and the feeling of being lonely. It seemed to him that even the teachers, his colleagues, showed a lot of lenience and nonchalance in this matter. Most of them were not much different from teacher Durchzug and were essentially superficial, unemotional teachers and obedient bureaucrats. They too fought against the students' countless mischiefs; they too were often strict when giving marks and imposing punishment, but none fully shared his ludicrous worries and maniacal beliefs. They even mocked a little the somber bachelor and oddball, who looked on the tragic side of things. Only in his bachelor apartment, in a damp house in the shadowy Mjedenica neighborhood, did he find perfect peace and feel, at least temporarily, protected from the irony and restlessness of unruly youth. The house belonged to a retired post-office clerk, a Czech by origin. His landlady was a fat, morose and tidy woman. There were no children either in the house or among the closest neighbors. The teacher's apartment was always filled with damp semidarkness, in which there was deathly peace and mechanical order. But what use was it when the house was only an oasis and the time spent in it only a brief respite? As soon as he crossed the doorstep, waiting for him at every step were the raucous and restive youths, who only knew how to sneer and thought of nothing but pranks and frivolity. Sometimes it seemed to him that he was surrounded on all sides by this immature, insentient elemental force of youth, that the earth was seething with and pulsating from young blood, which compelled motion and sought ever new forms of restlessness. And each year new generations of children were born, as if sprouting from the ground, quickly grew up and became students, and while you were

unsuccessfully taming them, another wave was already advancing. In teacher Durchzug's eyes all of them were green, impertinent and unruly, grinning from ear to ear, and their thoughts scattered in a hundred directions; they were devoid of any sense of duty, had no respect for their seniors and no sense of order; they were disposed to every joke and amusement, deaf to advice, insensitive to reproach; they spared no one but could not take care of themselves; in winter, they were out skating; in summer, they went swimming; in the fall, they picked fruit; in spring, they pursued all kinds of fantasy and nonsense; in short, they were always involved in dangerous things, frivolity or buffoonery, far from his stern words and serious lessons. They were youths between the ages of eleven and nineteen, and he had been fighting this elemental force for years now, but he felt that he was getting weaker in this fight and gradually losing ground to this indestructible adversary. The orderly and perfectly serious life that he had been leading did not keep him strong and young. Quite the contrary, he was growing old fast and prematurely, faster than his colleagues who were less orderly and serious than him. At forty-five, the hair at his temples was gray, his scalp bald, his face thin and pallid, his neck swollen, his movements insecure, and the gaze of his fearful and sad eyes unsteady. He was tidy, but in some unpleasant way; his style of dress was frugal and oldfashioned; he wore a gray suit in summer and a black one in winter like a funeral parlor employee. When he stood before a class dressed like that, with one hand pressed against his desk and the other holding his chin, stifled giggling would immediately begin among the students in the back rows. However, when he told them in a voice muffled with anger that they were fools, that there was no reason for laughter in the world, but quite the opposite, quite the opposite ... the boys would go into spasms of laughter, trying in vain to suppress it by pressing their palms against their mouths and hiding their faces under the desks. The teacher would be standing motionless, all bristling like a sick crow, and, with hatred in his eyes and in a quivering voice, he would say caustically: "What's so funny? It's tragic!" And the class would shake with irrepressible, cheerful laughter. Such a man and educator was teacher Vasiljevi, called Durchzug. If someone had observed him and his work, they could have spent their whole life thinking about what this clerk-teacher had to do with pedagogy, which is supposed to bring up and create healthy and happy people and citizens, and about his connection to science or art, and would never have found the answer to these questions. But if the goal of the education system obtaining in the Austrian grammar schools in Bosnia of the time was to stifle in a young man and future citizen any germ of independence and kill his desire for anything original, creative, higher and more beautiful, this teacher was the perfect servant to this system. Rather, he tried with all his might to be one. On the morning of May 1, 1906, teacher Vasiljevi, was going towards his school, as always following the same route at the same hour. It was a few minutes before nine. The streets were unusually quiet and seemed deserted. Gendarmerie patrols were

cruising the streets and there was a city policeman on each corner. Everything was strangely silent. Sarajevo workers had decided that spring to celebrate the International Labor Day, May 1, for the first time. Of course, teacher Durchzug, who lived only for himself, that is, for his lonely, eccentric existence and his profession and we have seen how "professional" he was did not know what was going on and what had been brewing among Sarajevo workers, who were a faraway and unknown world to him. Admittedly, since the previous year, he had heard a thing or two about the workers' movement in Sarajevo. Newspapers had also reported about it, too, but he read them superficially and sporadically. It could not be said that he was indifferent to this issue. Quite the contrary, he was both angered and frightened by the thought of it the same as by the thought of any kind of disorder and any tendency to change, and it hurt him almost like a personal insult. One Sunday, when he had been taking his class to church, he had come across a group of young workers, both men and women, wearing red flowers. They were going somewhere fast and speaking animatedly. They were the "socialists." All of them were lively people, and there was, it seemed to him, an apprehensive, provocative expression on their faces. He felt profound repulsion towards those restive people. He saw something unhealthy and dangerous in their flowers, as if that bright color was telling something that should not be told and which, spoken, brought unrest and misfortune, as if from the buttonhole, out of which a carnation was protruding, the bloody entrails of every single man were gushing out. They agitated and annoyed him for a moment, but he forgot about them just as quickly. Like many people of his profession and position, he too observed from afar and condescendingly this workers' movement and the events and conflicts that accompanied it, very much as he observed all the other evils and troubles with which the state had to cope as something that did not concern him, for he was convinced that there were, within the huge state apparatus, those who were in charge of such things and who would tackle this evil and contain it, just as they contained epidemics and other evils and troubles. He would not have bothered with the issue at all had it not, on that day, May 1, come into his class and sought him out. For, if he was passing through life blind, deaf and mute, his seventh grade students were not. For three months now there had been talk in town that workers would not come to work on May 1, that on that day the socialists would organize a celebration and fly red flags, that the authorities would not allow that, that there would be clashes ... Sarajevo newspapers also carried polemics related to the news. On the eve of May 1, big posters announced that the government's Commissioner for the City of Sarajevo had banned any celebrations, any gatherings at all and any display of workers' emblems, red flags, red flowers, and suchlike inside the confines of the city on May 1. All that on pain of severe punishment. When the sunny and cool morning of May 1 came, a large majority of workers did not go to work, even though it was a workday, but, wearing their holiday clothes, poured into the streets of Sarajevo. All the police and gendarmerie were mobilized; the military were also in readiness. The policemen and gendarmes broke up even the smallest groups of workers, snatched any red token from their hands or chests,

and arrested both men and women for any act of disobedience or resistance. There were quite a few such minor conflicts, but the workers, obviously following a plan, avoided any contact with the police, pouring like water through every street and gate. Thus a large majority of them managed to sneak out all the way to Kovaii and, when the police remembered to block the bridges on the Miljacka River, thousands of workers with hidden emblems and folded flags had already managed to cross the Miljacka. On the road to Lukavac, which was outside "the confines of the city of Sarajevo," a vast procession suddenly formed; red flags were flying above it and each worker was wearing a carnation made from red paper. Outwitted, the police remained in the city. All the commanding officers were severely reprimanded and given stricter orders, which they passed on triple as harsh to their subordinates, so that now every constable went around bitter and exasperated, keeping a watchful eye so as not to miss a single idle worker or a tiniest red token. Outside the city, the gendarmes, divided into a large number of patrols, followed the procession by moving alongside it and, at Lukavac, surrounded the whole field in which the true gathering had started, all with the speakers and cheering. Teacher Durchzug was far from knowing or being aware of this, because he never read newspapers or flyers or ads, or spoke to other people or looked around himself in the street, but, with his head bowed low, he quickly crossed the short distance from his flat to the school. However, his seventh grade students knew all about this and had even seen most of it. Before coming to school, some of them had crisscrossed the city and seen the police breaking up the workers and snatching their red flowers. Many of them had run together with the workers, gleefully collecting the scattered carnations and shouting from side streets: "Down with the saber wielders! Long live May Day!" because the workers had been shouting that too. This was why some of them had been late for school and were now sitting in class on tenterhooks, still breathing heavily and flushed from excitement and pleasure, shouting and running. Therefore they kept whispering among themselves and giving furtive glances to one another, pretending to be listening to what was being said to them and answering questions absentmindedly, but it was obvious that at the same time they were listening attentively to the sounds coming from outside. The teacher was well aware of this increased restiveness in his otherwise always unruly class, even though he did not know its true source. The class was saturated with a stuffy and testy atmosphere, so that the teacher made an exception and had a window opened, the one at the back of the classroom, far from his desk, but no one and for no reason at all was to dare open the door at the same time. He sweated and squinted. He tried yelling and scolding them to attract their attention. "What's come over you today? Have you gone off your rocker?" Unable to pacify the students and make them concentrate on what he was saying or asking them, the teacher started scolding them harder and harder; he was calling them idiots, nincompoops, stink bugs and slackers when he suddenly got lost for words and his open mouth went stiff: somebody from the back desks had thrown from one end of the classroom to another a red flower, which arced across the whole room and disappeared among the students.

A red flower! That was it then! When he had seen the raucous group of socialists that Sunday and the red flowers on them, he felt disgust, hatred, some sort of itch in his muscles and the need to personally, with his own hands, help silence that mob and drive them back to work, so that there should no longer be those bright colors or impertinent words or boisterous laughter in the streets. But this now, in his class, that his students should be throwing a red flower among themselves as if they were locksmiths from the Station or brickmakers from Koevo, this devastated him. That is why he stood there like that for some time, with his mouth open, as if petrified. Then he pulled himself together, hissed something unintelligible and, all bristling, stooped and with his arms stretched forward and his fingers spread, he moved frontwards as if charging. He headed for the desk on which the flower had landed, but before he got there an invisible hand tossed it and, high above the teacher's head the flower flew in a red arc and landed at the other end of the classroom. The teacher did a quick about-face. Thus a strange game developed. Just as the ball in a game passes from hand to hand on its way to the goal, thus the students passed on the red carnation to one another, always succeeding in tricking the teacher's eyes. And he, as an ill-matched participant in this game, ran after the flower and turned around trying not to lose sight of it. He leapt ridiculously from one student to another. When it seemed to him that he had seen well next to which of the students the flower had landed, he would run to him, stand by him, give him a short piercing look and then suddenly order him to open his clenched fists. The young man would do it. His hands would be empty. The whole class would then burst into boisterous laughter. The teacher would keep running and stumbling. Carried away by his bitterness and true hunting passion, the teacher did not notice that one of the students in the back had managed to throw the flower through the open window. The students, delighted with the game, kept raising their hands, now one student now another, as if throwing something. Red lines were crisscrossing before the eyes of the heavy breathing and double-crossed teacher, through whose head blood was pumping violently as he ran from one spot to another trying to catch the flower that was no longer in the classroom. Finally, he had the window shut and all the students get up and raise their hands with their palms open while he crawled on all fours and, like a hound, looked for the red flower under the desks. Above him a forest of restless fingers undulated and the young men's faces contorted with spasmodic laughter and countless grimaces. When he would suddenly lift his head and look at them distrustfully, all the hands would go stiff, all the faces would become smooth and the eyes, humbly lowered, would gaze straight ahead. Tormented and bitter, the teacher ultimately abandoned his futile search, returned to his desk and said in a changed voice, on the verge of crying: "Alright. Alright, I'll show you that there is authority and that there must be order here." He was so excited that he could not remember any of his vilifications or all of them seemed too tame in this horrendous case. Fortunately, the bell rang at that moment. The teacher said no one must leave the classroom and no one would be going to lunch that day until they had found the one, the one ... that thing ... Because of his hatred and bitterness he was unable to say what, so he just made a

threatening gesture with his hand, took his notepad and slammed the door behind him. Durchzug made a big fuss in the teachers' room and the Principal's office. A red flower! They tried unsuccessfully to calm him down and ask him where the flower was. He just kept hissing and yelling through broken sentences that the matter was big and that they could not just let it go without an investigation and punishment. Some of the teachers laughed at the back of the teachers' room. The Principal himself, with his gold spectacles and a small salt-and-pepper beard, a man whose face had rarely seen a smile, kept shaking his head not knowing what to do as he listened to Durchzug talking seriously about his hunt for the red flower. When the Principal had gone out to decide on Durchzug's complaint in private, the teachers got even more bold, approached their colleague, who was still shaking with anger, and with mock sympathy asked him about the details of his fight with the students. The math teacher, a Slavonian, a passionate hunter, a big and full-blooded man, who loved eating and drinking well and was painfully blunt, approached him, making broad gestures, and said to him in his cordial manner: "Come on, colleague! Who knows whether it was a red carnation at all? Those fellows in the seventh grade are real pranksters I know them well and they are capable of inventing all kinds of mischief." Feeling offended, Durchzug straightened himself up. "I beg your pardon! I'm neither mad nor drunk. I don't drink alcoholic beverages. But, gentlemen, I must tell you that I will not leave the matter off and I will, if need be, in a higher place ..." At this, Durchzug's face suddenly grew a full hue darker, his blue, watery eyes changed color and something dangerous and hideous appeared in them. The math teacher did not wait for the sentence to end. The laughing gaze of his big, black eyes, the eyes of a hunter and a mathematician, suddenly died away and he stepped back as if he had trodden on a snake. The laughter in the teachers' room stopped. The whole class was indeed detained at school through lunchtime. The Principal himself conducted the investigation. The students admitted to nothing. The usual threat that everyone would be punished on account of one or two of them did not work this time. Those in the front desks, who may even have betrayed the culprits, did not actually know who had brought the flower, nor even that it had been a flower or that it had been red. They had only seen the teacher running and catching something invisible among the back desks. And those in the back desks did not admit to anything. There had never been a flower in the classroom nor had they been throwing it to one another. A window had been open and they had thought that the teacher had been angry and run back and forth because of the draft, so they had all waved, beckoning those who had been closest to the window to close it. That was all. Ultimately, when not only the incriminated flower could not be found, but there was also no way of proving that it had actually existed, the matter was concluded when all the class was reprimanded. Teacher Durchzug felt ill because of the red carnation affair. With his face bilious green, buttoned up as if it were October rather than May, he dragged himself

for two whole weeks like a wounded man and spoke in a thin, tormented voice. None of this, of course, upset his seventh grade students in the least. They kept laughing at him cruelly and mocking him at every step. Thus ended and was soon forgotten the commotion over the red flower that had appeared in the restless seventh grade of grammar school, where commotions were not uncommon. But this red flower actually a piece of twisted wire and some skillfully cut and folded red paper saw some further developments and became fateful for other people, who had nothing to do with the seventh grade or its homeroom teacher, Durchzug. For during fateful times,even the smallest thing can become fateful. (What we normally call "fateful" are the restless times of social upheaval and extraordinary events amid which we suddenly find ourselves but cannot fully comprehend them or properly express their causes, meanings and outcomes.) But all this will be dealt with in another place. Translated into English by Ivan Dela, July 2012