The Bridge on the Drina (13 page)

Gone too were those wooden water-mills and the hovels in which travellers in case of need had spent the night. In their place stood the firm and luxurious caravanserai which received the travellers who daily grew more numerous. They entered the
han 
through a wide gateway of harmonious lines. On each side was a large window with a grille, not of iron but carved in a single block of limestone. In the wide rectangular court was space for merchandise and baggage and around it were ranged the doors of thirty-six rooms. Behind, under the hillside, were the stables; to general amazement they too were of stone, as if built for the Sultan's stud. There was not such another 
han 
from Sarajevo as far as Adrianople. In it every traveller might remain for a day and a night and receive, free of all cost, fire, shelter and water for himself, his servants and his beasts.

All this, as the bridge itself, was the bequest of the Grand Vezir, Mehmed Pasha, who had been born more than sixty years before up there behind the mountains in the hillside village of Sokolovići, and who in his childhood had been taken away with a crowd of other Serbian peasant boys as blood tribute to Stambul. The expenses for maintaining the caravanserai came from the 
vakuf, 
the religious endowment, which Mehmed Pasha had founded from the rich properties seized in the newly-conquered territories of Hungary.

Thus many troubles and inconveniences disappeared with the erection of the bridge and the foundation of the 
han. 
There disappeared too that strange pain which the Vezir in his childhood had brought from Bosnia, from the Višegrad ferry; those dark shooting pains which from time to time had seemed to cut his breast in two. But it was not fated that Mehmed Pasha should live without those pangs or long enjoy in his thoughts his Višegrad bequest. Shortly after the final completion of the work, just when the caravanserai had begun
to work properly and the bridge to become known to the world, Mehmed Pasha once again felt the 'black knife' in his breast. And that for the last time.

One Friday, when he went with his suite to the mosque, a ragged and half-demented dervish approached him with his left hand stretched out for alms. The Vezir turned and ordered a member of his suite to give them. But the dervish then drew a heavy butcher's knife from his right sleeve and violently stabbed the Vezir between the ribs. His suite cut the dervish down, but the Vezir and his murderer breathed their last at the same moment. The dead assassin, big, red-faced, lay with outstretched arms and legs as if still exalted by the impulse of his senseless blow; and beside him the Grand Vezir, with his robe unbuttoned on his chest and his turban flung far away. In the last years of his life he had grown thin and bowed, almost withered and coarser in feature. And now with half-bared chest, bareheaded, bleeding, twisted and crumpled, he looked more like an ageing and battered peasant of Sokolovići than the dignitary who until a short time before had administered the Turkish Empire.

Months and months passed before the reports of the Vezir's assassination reached the town and then not as a clear and definite fact but as a secret whisper which might or might not have been true. For in the Turkish Empire it was not permitted to spread reports or to gossip about bad news and tragic events even when they had taken place in a nearby country, much less so when they took place on its own soil. Furthermore, in this case, it was in no one's interest to talk much about the Grand Vezir's death. The party of his adversaries, which had at last succeeded in overthrowing him, hoped that with his solemn funeral every livelier memory of him would also be buried. And Mehmed Pasha's kin, collaborators and supporters in Stambul had for the most part no objection to saying as little as possible about the one-time Grand Vezir, for in this way their own chances of conciliating the new rulers and having their own past overlooked were increased.

But the two fine buildings on the Drina had already begun to exercise their influence on trade and communications, on the town of Višegrad and the whole country around, and they went on doing so without regard for the living or the dead, for those who were rising or those who were falling. The town soon began to move downwards from the hillside to the water's edge and expand and develop more and more about the bridge and around the caravanserai, which the people called the Stone Han.

Thus was born the bridge with its 
kapia 
and so the town developed around it. After that, for a period of more than 300 years, its role in
the development of the town and its significance in the life of the townspeople was similar to that which we have described above. And the significance and substance of its existence were, so to speak, in its permanence. Its shining line in the composition of the town did not change, any more than the outlines of the mountains against the sky. In the changes and the quick burgeoning of human generations, it remained as unchanged as the waters that flowed beneath it. It too grew old, naturally, but on a scale of time that was much greater not only than the span of human existence but also than the passing of a whole series of generations, so that its ageing could not be seen by human eye. Its life, though mortal in itself, resembled eternity for its end could not be perceived.

V

The first century passed, a time long and mortal for men and for many of their works, but insignificant for great buildings, well conceived and firmly based, and the bridge with its 
kapia 
and the nearby caravanserai stood and served as they had on their first day. So too would a second century have passed over them, with its changes of seasons and human generations, and the buildings would have lasted unchanged; but what time could not do, the unstable and unpredictable influence of faraway affairs did.

At that time, at the end of the seventeenth century, much was sung, spoken and whispered about Hungary, whence the Turkish armies after a hundred years of occupation were about to withdraw. Many Bosnian 
spahis 
(landowners who held their lands on military tenure) had left their bones on Hungarian soil, defending their properties in the battles preceding the withdrawal. They were, it might be thought, the lucky ones for many of the other 
spahis 
returned as bare as a finger to their former Bosnian homeland, where there awaited them sparse soil and a straitened and penurious life after the rich lordliness and spaciousness of life on the great Hungarian estates. The far off and uncertain echo of all this penetrated as far as Višegrad, but no one there could ever have imagined that distant Hungary, a land of legend, could have any connection with the real, everyday life of the town. But with the Turkish retreat from Hungary there remained outside the frontiers of the Empire also those properties of the 
vakui 
(the religious endowment) from the revenues of which the caravanserai at Višegrad was maintained.

Both the people of the town and the travellers who had made use of the Stone Han for the past 100 years had become accustomed to it and had never even considered by what means it had been maintained, how the revenues had been founded, or from what source they came. All had made use of it, profiting by it as from a blessed and fertile roadside orchard which was both nobody's and everybody's; they repeated mechanically 'peace to the Vezir's soul' but
did not stop to think that the Vezir had died 100 years before, nor did they ask who now preserved and defended the imperial lands and the 
vakuf. 
Who could ever have dreamt that the affairs of the world were in such dependence upon one another and were linked together across so great a distance? So at first no one in the town even noticed that the income of the 
han 
had dried up. The attendants worked and the 
han 
received travellers as before. It was thought that the money for its upkeep had been delayed, as had happened before. But the months passed and even the years, and the money did not come. The 
mutevelia 
(the administrator of the bequest), Dauthodja Mutavelić, for the people so called him after his appointment and the nickname stuck, applied to everyone he could think of, but received no reply. The travellers had to look after their own needs and cleaned up the 
han 
as much as they found necessary for their own convenience, but as each one went his way he left behind manure and disorder for others to clean up and put right, even as he himself had tidied up whatever he had found dirty and in disorder. But after each traveller there remained just a little more dirt than he himself had found.

Dauthodja did all that he could to save the 
han 
and keep it going. First he spent his own money and then he began to borrow from his relatives. So he patched things up from year to year and kept the precious building in its former beauty. To those who reproached him for ruining himself trying to preserve what could not be preserved, he replied that he was investing the money well for he gave it as a loan to God and that he, the 
mutevelia, 
should be the last to desert this bequest which it seemed all others had deserted and abandoned.

This wise and godfearing, stubborn and obstinate man, whom the town long remembered, allowed no one to turn him from his vain effort. Working devotedly, he had long become reconciled to the idea that our destiny on this earth lies in the struggle against decay, death and dissolution and that man must persevere in this struggle, even if it were completely in vain. Sitting before the 
han 
which was falling into dissolution before his eyes, he replied to all those who tried to dissuade him or pitied him:

'There is no need to feel sorry for me. For all of us die only once, whereas great men die twice, once when they leave this world and a second time when their lifework disappears.'

When he was no longer able to pay day-labourers, he himself, old as he was, rooted up the weeds around the 
han 
with his own hands and carried out minor repairs to the building. So it was that death overtook him one day when he had climbed up to repair a cracked
slate on the roof. It was natural that a small town 
hodja 
could not maintain what a Grand Vezir had founded and which historical events had sentenced to disaster.

After Dauthodja's death the 
han 
rapidly began to fall into ruins. Signs of decay appeared everywhere. The gutters began to crack and to smell nasty, the roof to let in the rains, the doors and windows the winds, and the stables to be choked with manure and weeds. But from without the perfect building still looked unchanged, calm and indestructible in its beauty. Those great arched windows on the ground floor, with grilles as delicate as lace cut in soft stone from a single block, looked peacefully out upon the world, but the simpler windows on the floor above already showed signs of poverty, neglect and internal disorder. Little by little travellers began to avoid spending the night in the town or, if they did, stayed at Ustamujić's inn and paid for their night's lodging. They came more and more rarely to the caravanserai, even though they had not to pay but only to wish peace to the Vezir's soul. At last, when it become clear that the money would never come, everyone abandoned any pretence to care for the building, even the new 
mutevelia, 
and the caravanserai stayed mute and deserted and fell into ruin and disrepair as do all buildings in which no one lives and which no one looks after. Wild grasses, weeds and thistles grew around it. Ravens nested on the roof and crows gathered there in dense black flocks.

Thus before its time and unexpectedly forsaken (all such things seen to happen unexpectedly) the Vezir's Stone Han began to disintegrate and fall to pieces.

But if the caravanserai, due to unusual circumstances, was forced to betray its mission and fall into ruin before its time, the bridge, which needed neither supervision nor maintenance, remained upright and unchanged, linking the two banks and bearing across the river burdens dead and alive, as it had in the first days of its existence.

In its walls the birds nested and in the invisible cracks opened by time grew little tufts of grass. The yellowish porous stone of which the bridge was built hardened and contracted under the alternate influence of moisture and of heat. Eternally beaten by the winds which blew up and down the river valley, washed by the rains and dried by the fierce heats of summer, that stone in time turned white with the dull whiteness of parchment and shone in the twilight as if lighted from within. The great and frequent floods, which were a heavy and continual menace to the town, were unable to do anything against it. They came every year, in spring and autumn, but all were not dangerous and fateful to the town beside the bridge. Every year, once
or perhaps twice, the Drina rose in tumult and its muddied waters roared down, bearing through the arches of the bridge torn-up fences from the fields, uprooted stumps of trees, and dark earthy waters filled with leaves and branches from the riverside forests. The courtyards, gardens and storerooms of the houses nearest the river suffered. But everything ended there. At irregular intervals of between twenty and thirty years came great floods which were afterwards remembered as one remembers insurrections or wars and were long used as a date from which to reckon time, to calculate the ages of citizens or the term of men's lives ('Five or six years before the great flood. . . .' 'During the great flood. . . .').