The Bridge on the Drina (11 page)

'See, see, I can do this . .. and this. . ..!'

When that night they finally decided to tell Abidaga what had happened, he replied coldly and abruptly:

Take the madman to Plevlje and let them keep him chained up in his own house there, so that he does not play the fool round here. He was not the man for a job like that!'

So was it done. But as their leader was unable to keep still, his guards were forced to bind him to the cart in which he was sitting. He wept and defended himself and as long as he was able to move any part of his body, he struggled and shouted: 'See, see!' Finally they had to bind his arms and his legs, so that now he sat in the cart upright like a sack of wheat swaddled in ropes. But, since he was no longer able to move, he began to imagine that they were impaling him on the stake and writhed and resisted with desperate cries:

'Not me, not me! Catch the 
vila! 
No, Abidaga!'

From the last houses on the outskirts of the town, people rushed out excited by his cries, but the cart with the guards and the sick man was swiftly lost to sight in the thick mist along the Dobruna road through which the sun could just be glimpsed.

The unexpected and pitiable departure of the man from Plevlje instilled still greater fear into men's bones. It began to be whispered that the condemned peasant had been innocent and that this had preyed on the mind of the man from Plevlje. Among the Serbs in Mejdan the women began to tell how the 
vilas 
had buried the dead body of the hapless Radisav below Butkovo Stijene and how at night a plenteous light fell upon his grave, thousands and thousands of lighted candles which flamed and quivered in a long line reaching from heaven to earth. They had seen them through their tears.

All sorts of things were whispered and believed, but fear was stronger than all else.

Work on the bridge was carried on quickly, smoothly and without interruption or hindrance. It went on somehow or other until the beginning of December when an unexpectedly hard frost came, against which even Abidaga's power could do nothing.

There were unheard-of frosts and blizzards in that first half of December. The stones froze into the ground and the wood cracked. A fine crystalline snow covered everything, tools and whole huts, and the next day a capricious wind would drive it to another side and bury another part. Work ceased of itself and the fear of Abidaga paled and finally disappeared. Abidaga tried to fight against it for some days but finally gave way. He dismissed the workers and
stopped the work. In the midst of the heaviest snowfall he rode away with his men. That same day Tosun Effendi set out on a peasant's sleigh heaped with straw and blankets, and after him Mastro Antonio, in the opposite direction. And all that camp of forced labourers dispersed into the villages and the deep valleys without a sound and as imperceptibly as water soaked up by the earth. The building works remained like a discarded toy.

Before setting out Abidaga again summoned the leading Turks. He was depressed by his angry impotence and told them, as in the previous year, that he left everything in their hands and that theirs was the responsibility.

'I am going away but my eyes remain here. Take heed; better that you cut off a score of disobedient heads than that a single nail of the Sultan's should be lost. As soon as spring breaks I shall be here once more and shall call everyone to account.'

The leaders promised everything as they had the year before and dispersed to their homes, filled with anxiety and wrapped in their cloaks, capes and shawls, thanking God to themselves that God had given winter blizzards to the world and had in that way shown that His power was able to put a limit to the power of the mighty.

But when spring broke again, it was not Abidaga who came, but a new representative of the Vezir, Arif Beg, together with Tosun Effendi. What he had so much feared had happened to Abidaga. Someone, someone whom he knew well and had worked near him, had sent to the Grand Vezir detailed and accurate reports of his work on the Višegrad bridge. The Vezir had been accurately informed that for those two years between two and three hundred workmen had been summoned for forced labour every day without a single para of pay and very often bringing their own food, and that Abidaga had taken the Vezir's money for himself (the amount of money that he had up till then managed to embezzle was also reckoned). He had covered up his dishonesty, as is so often the case in life, by excessive zeal and exaggerated severity, so that the people of the whole district, not only the 
rayah 
but also the Turks, instead of giving thanks for this great bequest, cursed both the hour when it had been begun and the man for whom it was being built. Mehmed Pasha, who had been struggling all his life with the peculations and dishonesty of his officials, had ordered his unworthy servant to reimburse the whole sum and take what remained of his fortune and his harem and go at once to a small town in Anatolia, and never to let himself be heard of again unless he wanted a worse fate to befall him.

Two days after Arif Beg, Mastro Antonio also arrived from
Dalmatia with the first workers. Tosun Effendi presented him to the new chief, and on a warm sunny April day they inspected the construction works and settled the order for the first work. After Arif Beg had withdrawn, leaving the other two alone on the bank, Mastro Antonio looked attentively at the face of Tosun Effendi who, even on so sunny a day, was huddled up in a wide black mantle.

'This is quite another sort of man. Thanks be to God! I only ask myself who was so smart and so brave as to inform the Vezir and have that animal removed?'

Tosun Effendi only looked straight in front of him and said quietly:

'There is no doubt, this one is better.'

'It must have been someone who knew Abidaga's affairs well and who had access to the Vezir and enjoyed his trust.'

'Certainly, certainly, this one is better,' replied Tosun Effendi without looking up and wrapping his mantle even more closely around him.

So the work began under the new chief, Arif Beg.

He was, indeed, quite a different sort of man. Exceptionally tall, stooping, bald, with salient cheekbones and slit-like black laughing eyes, the people at once nicknamed him Misir-Baba —Old Baldie. Without shouting, without a staff, without big words or visible effort, he gave orders and set everything in order good-humouredly and casually with confident authority; he never overlooked anything or lost track of anything. But he also brought with him a feeling of strict attention to everything that was the Vezir's will or order, but like a calm, normal and honest man who had nothing to be afraid of and nothing to conceal, so that he had no need to frighten or persecute anyone. The work went on at the same speed (since speed was what the Vezir wanted), faults were punished with similar severity, but unpaid forced labour was stopped from that day. All the workers were paid and received rations in flour and salt, and all went quicker and better than in Abidaga's time. Also, mad Ilinka vanished; during the winter she had disappeared somewhere into the villages.

The construction work grew and extended.

It could now be seen that the Vezir's bequest was not for a bridge only, but also for a 
han 
or caravanserai, in which travellers from afar who intended to cross the bridge could find shelter for themselves, their horses and their goods should they arrive at nightfall. On Arif Beg's order the construction of this caravanserai was commenced. At the entry to the market-place, 200 paces from the
bridge, just where the road to Mejdan began to rise steeply, there was a level space on which until then the Wednesday stock-market had been held. On this level space the building of the new 
han 
began. Work went on slowly, but from the very start it could be seen that it would be a solid and grandiose building conceived on a grand scale. The people scarcely even noticed how, slowly but surely, a great stone 
han 
was rising, for their attention was wholly centred on the building of the bridge.

What was now being done on the Drina was so complicated, all the work so interlocked and complex, that the loungers in the town, who watched the building work from the two banks as if it were some natural phenomenon, could no longer follow it with understanding. There were always fresh embankments and trenches running in various directions, and the river was divided and split up into side-currents and backwaters and its main course moved from one to another. Mastro Antonio brought from Dalmatia especially skilled cordwainers and collected all the hemp even from the districts around. In special buildings the master-workmen twisted ropes of exceptional strength and thickness. Greek carpenters, according to designs of their own or those drawn up by Tosun Effendi, built huge wooden cranes with pawls, erected them on rafts and thus, with these ropes, raised even the heaviest blocks of stone and transported them to the piers which, one by one, began to rise out of the bed of the river. The transport of each one of these huge blocks from the bariks to its position in the foundations of the bridge-piers lasted four days.

Watching all this, day after day, year after year, the townspeople began to lose count of time and of the real intentions of the builders. It seemed to them that the construction had not moved an inch forward but was becoming more and more complicated and involved in auxiliary and subsidiary workings, and the longer it lasted the less it looked like what it was intended to be. Men who do not work themselves and who undertake nothing in their lives easily lose patience and fall into error when judging the work of others. The Višegrad Turks again began to shrug their shoulders and wave their hands when they talked of the bridge. The Christians remained silent, but watched the building work with secret and hostile thoughts, wishing for its failure as for that of every Turkish undertaking. It was about this time that the 
iguman 
of the monastery at Banja near Priboj wrote on the last blank page of one of his sacred books: 'Be it known that about this time Mehmed Pasha undertook the building of a bridge over the Drina at Višegrad. And great oppression fell upon the Christian people with hard labour. From the sea came master-masons. For three years they built and many 
aspers 
were spent in vain. They divided the waters into two and into three but they were unable to complete the bridge.'

Years passed; summer and autumn, winter and spring, followed one another; the workers and the master-masons came and went. Now the whole Drina was conquered, not by the bridge but by the wooden scaffoldings which looked like a complicated and senseless conglomeration of pine beams and planks. From both banks rose high wooden cranes fastened on to firmly fixed rafts. On both sides of the river fires smoked, on which lead was being melted in order to be poured into the holes in the stone blocks binding them invisibly to one another.

At the end of the third year occurred one of those accidents without which great buildings are rarely completed. The central pier, which was a little higher and wider at the top than the others, since on it the 
kapia 
was to rest, was just being completed. During the transportation of a great stone block, work suddenly came to a stop. The workmen swarmed about the great rectangular stone which, held by thick ropes, hung above their heads. The crane had not been able to lift it accurately over its place. Mastro Antonio's assistant, the Arab, rushed impatiently to the spot and began with loud angry cries (in that strange composite language which had been evolved in the course of years between these men from all parts of the world) to give orders to those handling the crane on the waters below. At that moment, for no known reason, the ropes gave way and the block fell, first by one corner and then with its full weight on to the excited Arab who had not even troubled to look above his head but only down at the water. By a strange chance the block fell exactly into position, but in its fall it caught the Arab and crushed the whole lower part of his body, Everyone began to rush around, to give the alarm, to shout for help. Mastro Antonio arrived quickly. The young Negro, after his first unconsciousness, had come to himself; he groaned through clenched teeth and looked, sad and frightened, into Mastro Antonio's eyes. Frowning and pale, Mastro Antonio gave orders to summon the workmen, bring tools and try to lift the block. But all was in vain. A flow of blood suddenly poured out, the young man's breath came short and his eyes glazed over. Within half an hour he died, feverishly clutching Mastro Antonio's hands in his.

The Arab's funeral was a solemn event which was long remembered. All the Moslem males turned out to escort him and each for a few paces carried the bier on which lay only the upper half of the young body, for half had remained under the stone block. Mastro Antonio raised over his grave a fine memorial, made of the same
stone from which the bridge was built. The death of this young man, whom he had befriended as a child living in poverty in Ulcinj, where a few negro families still lived, had shaken him. But the work did not cease even for a moment.

That year and the next the winter was mild and work went on until mid-December. The fifth year of the work began. Now that wide irregular circle of wood, stone, auxiliary equipment and all sorts of material began to contract.

On the level space beside the Mejdan road the new 
han, 
freed from its scaffolding, already stood. It was a large building, constructed of the same sort of stone of which the bridge was made. Work was still going on both inside and out, but already from a distance it could be seen how much it excelled in size, the harmony of its lines and the solidity of its construction, anything that had ever been built or even thought of in the town. That building of clear, yellowish stone, with its roof of dark red tiles and a row of finely carved windows, seemed to the townsmen a thing unheard of, which from now on must become an integral part of their everyday life. Built by a Vezir, it looked as though only Vezirs could inhabit it. The whole building shone with a sense of grandeur, taste and luxury which bewildered them.