Not long ago I received my first and last telegram. It was from Rebecca West.
I had better explain. Earlier this month I picked up a battered Penguin paperback of Black Lamb and Grey Falcon at the fall book sale of the Georgetown public library. I had wanted to read West’s massive travelogue for years, and so when I came home I threw myself into an armchair and began immediately. I am hardly the first to say this, but the book is engrossing. West is a master of excursus, the difficult art of lifting off out of the narrative into a higher plane of historical digression, philosophical speculation, and literary criticism before lightly touching back down into the story. Her style is well suited to her material, the disjointed nation of Yugoslavia on the eve of World War II. West makes a compelling case that the fate of modern Europe was decided in the Balkans.
But what interested me most about Black Lamb and Grey Falcon was something else entirely. About three hundred pages in, I found this telegram tucked into a passage on the Jewish community in Sarajevo:
NOT COMING UP TO LONDON THIS WEEK IF YOU CAN COME DOWN LUNCH EXCEPT THURSDAY 29 DELIGHTED TRAIN 12.15 MARYLEBONE = CICILY ANDREWS
Cicily Andrews is Rebecca West’s real name. The recipient of the telegram was Ann Cottrell Free, the first female D.C. correspondent for Newsweek, who died in 2004. She also happened to be the former owner of my book. Why had West cabled her? And why had Free kept her note?
The answer begins on the pages between which the telegram was wedged. While in Sarajevo, West was introduced to two Orthodox Jews, Selim, and his wife, a beautiful woman whom everyone called the Bulbul (Persian for nightingale). They were singers. The Bulbul especially made an impression on West. “Listening to her, one might believe humanity to be in its first unspoiled morning hour,” she wrote. “Yet she was accomplished, she used her music with skill, and she was wise.” Most of all, the Bulbul was pure. She loved her husband absolutely: “She was as virginal as any dedicated nun, and that for the sake not of renunciation but of consummation.” To West’s delight, the couple’s love shone on anyone within their orbit. She recounts one afternoon in Sarajevo where the Bulbul, Selim, and a gathering of other Jews drank, laughed, and performed scenes from Götterdämmerung goofily intercut with songs from Carmen. The Bulbul had designed it all for her English guests’ pleasure. “I think her idea of perfect happiness,” West wrote, “would have been to find herself simultaneously feeding every mouth in the universe with sugar plums.”
The Bulbul plays only a minor role in a 1200-page book that is filled with hundreds of other little characters. She sings, she smiles, and she is gone. Of the “enslaved or dead” friends to whom West dedicated Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, most readers probably assume that she was among the dead. In any case, it is hard not to speculate. Much of the story’s fascination derives from the imminent doom hanging over its characters. West visited Yugoslavia for six weeks in 1937, but she didn’t publish her account until 1941, shortly after the German invasion. By that point, the café culture she had encountered, the all-night dinner parties, the grand old hotels still coasting on the fumes of the Austro-Hungarian Empire—all were gone. And the Jews? The Nazi-backed Independent State of Croatia did its work thoroughly: of the region’s fourteen thousand only two thousand remained by the war’s end.
But back to the telegram. The Bulbul did not die in the war. In 1947, Ann Cottrell Free found her—quite by chance—living in a Yugoslav refugee camp on the Sinai peninsula. Her husband was dead, many of her friends too. Her beauty was undimmed, but her voice had taken on a tragic quality. “She sang to us in the desert and my heart stopped,” Free recalled many decades later. “Oh, that voice. I felt like I was hearing the songs of the ages, of the centuries.”
Two years later Free was on assignment in London and she remembered the Bulbul. She had no idea what had become of her. Still, she wanted to help. So she wrote to West explaining the camp, the Bulbul, the song. West cabled back immediately, summoning her. Free caught the 12:15 train at Marylebone. She rode it out to West’s estate in Buckinghamshire, where she was met by a chauffeur in a Rolls Royce. Over lunch the two women discussed what to do about the Bulbul. Free suggested that West find her a teaching job in England because, like many Yugoslavs, she was a polyglot. West said that she would do what she could.
But then something awkward happened.
“What train do you want to take to go back?” West asked.
Free had not expected this treatment. She felt as if she were being dismissed. West gave her a brief tour of the house, and showed her the big bedroom where she did all her writing. Then she sent her packing. Free returned to London that night.
Later, Free wrote again. Had West been successful? Was the Bulbul safe? The author never replied.
“Rebecca West didn’t give a snap about me,” Free sighed. In the end, she learned from other people that West had used her influence; she had secured a teaching post for the Bulbul. No credit given to Ann Cottrell Free. And why would there be? “Rebecca West would use anybody,” she said. “She was a smart, ruthless woman.”
Still, Free kept the telegram. It remained between the pages of West’s book for more than twenty years after Free’s death, waiting for someone to find it. Were it not for blind chance—my picking up Black Lamb and Grey Falcon at a used book sale—its little story likely would have fallen into oblivion. Yet much remains unexplained. Try as I might, I have not been able to find any record of the Bulbul outside of West’s travelogue and Free’s personal reminiscences. Like so many others, her life and deeds have fallen irretrievably into the past. C’est payé, balayé, oublié.
