The Bridge on the Drina (14 page)

After these great floods little movable property remained in that larger part of the town which lay on the low sandy strip between the Drina and the Rzav. Such a flood threw the whole town several years back. That generation spent the rest of its life in repairing the damage and the misfortune left by the 'great flood'. To the end of their lives men, talking amongst themselves, recalled the terror of that autumn night when, in the chill rain and hellish wind, to the light of an occasional lantern, they would take out their goods, each from his own shop, and carry them to higher ground at Mejdan and there store them in the shops and warehouses of others. When the next day, in the cloudy dawn, they looked down from the hillside on the town that they loved as strongly and as unconsciously as their own blood, and saw the darkened muddied waters rushing through the streets at roof level, they would try to guess whose house it was from which the foaming waters were noisily tearing the roof plank by plank and whose house still remained upright.

On feast days and festivals and during the nights of Ramazan the grey-haired toilworn and anxious fathers of families would grow lively and talkative when the conversation turned to the greatest and hardest event of their lives, to the 'great flood'. After the interval of fifteen or twenty years in which they had once more restored their fortunes and their homes, the flood was recalled as something great and terrible, near and dear to them; it was an intimate bond between the men of that generation who were still living, for nothing brings men closer together than a common misfortune happily overcome. They felt themselves closely bound by the memory of that bygone disaster. They loved to recall memories of the hardest blow dealt them in their lives. Their recollections were inexhaustible and they repeated them continually, amplified by memory and repetition; they looked into one another's eyes, scelerotic and with yellowing whites, and saw there what the younger men could not even suspect. They were carried away by their own words and drowned all their
present everyday troubles in the recollection of those greater ones which they had experienced so long ago.

Sitting in the warm rooms of their homes through which that flood had at one time passed, they recounted for the hundredth time with special enjoyment moving and tragic scenes. And the more harrowing and painful the recollection the greater pleasure was there in recollecting it. Seen through tobacco smoke or a glass of plum brandy, such scenes were often transformed by distance and imagination, magnified and embellished, but not one of them ever noticed that this was so and would have sworn that it had in fact so happened, for they all shared in this unconscious exaggeration.

Thus there still lived a few old men who remembered the last 'great flood', about which they could still speak among themselves, repeating to the younger men that there were no longer such disasters as in time past, but no such blessings and good living either.

One of the very greatest of all these floods, which occurred in the second half of the eighteenth century, was especially long remembered and became the subject of countless tales.

In that generation, as the older men later said, there was practically no one who remembered the last great flood well. None the less, on those rainy autumn days all were on the alert, knowing that 'the waters were hostile'. They emptied the warehouses closest to the river and wandered by night, by the light of lanterns, along the banks to listen to the roar of the waters, for the older men affirmed that they could tell by some special moaning of the waters whether the flood to come would be one of those ordinary ones which visited the town every year and caused minor damage, or whether it would be one of those, happily rare, which flooded both the bridge and the town and carried away everything that was not on firm foundations. Next day the Drina did not rise and the town that night slept soundly, for men were tired out from lack of sleep and the excitement of the night before. So it was that the waters deceived them. That night the Rzav rose suddenly in a manner never before remembered and, red with mud, piled up at its confluence with the Drina. Thus the two rivers overwhelmed the whole town.

Suljaga Osmanagić, one of the richest Turks in the town, then owned a thoroughbred Arab horse, a chestnut of great value and beauty. As soon as the reinforced Drina began to rise, two hours before it overflowed into the streets, this chestnut began to neigh and did not calm down until it had awakened the stable-boys and its owner and until they had taken it out of its stall which was beside the river. So the greater part of the inhabitants were awakened. Under the chill rain and the raging wind of the dark October night began a
flight and a saving of all that could be saved. Half-dressed, the people waded up to their knees, carrying on their backs their wakened and complaining children. At every moment dull crashes could be heard when the tree stumps which the Drina washed down from the flooded forests struck against the piers of the stone bridge.

Up at Mejdan, which the waters had never in any circumstances been able to reach, windows were all alight and flickering lanterns danced and quivered in the darkness. All the houses were open to welcome those who had suffered and who came drenched and despondent with their children or their most precious belongings in their arms. In the stables burned fires by which those unable to find a place in the houses could dry themselves.

The leading merchants of the town, after they had placed the people in the houses, Turkish in Turkish homes and Christian and Jewish in Christian homes, gathered in the great ground-floor room of Hadji Ristić's house. There were the 
mukhtars
(the Moslem leaders) and the 
kmets 
(the Christian headmen) of all the quarters, exhausted and wet to the skin, after having wakened and moved to safe quarters all their fellow citizens. Turks, Christians and Jews mingled together. The force of the elements and the weight of common misfortune brought all these men together and bridged, at least for this one evening, the gulf that divided one faith from the other and, especially, the 
rayah 
from the Turks: Suljaga Osmanagić, Petar Bogdanović, Mordo Papo, the big, taciturn and witty parish priest Pop Mihailo, the fat and serious Mula Ismet, the Višegrad 
hodja, 
and Elias Levi, known as Hadji Liacho, the Jewish rabbi well known even far beyond the town for his sound judgment and open nature. There were about ten others, from all three faiths. All were wet, pale, with clenched jaws, but outwardly calm; they sat and smoked and talked of what had been done to save the people and of what still remained to be done. Every moment younger people entered, streaming with water, who reported that everything living had been taken to Mejdan and to the fortress and put in houses there, Turkish and Christian, and that the waters down in the valley were still rising and invading street after street.

As the night passed—and it passed slowly and seemed enormous, growing greater and greater like the waters in the valley — the leaders and rich men of the town began to warm themselves over coffee and plum brandy. A warm and close circle formed, like a new existence, created out of realities and yet itself unreal, which was not what it had been the day before nor what it would be the day after, but like a transient island in the flood of time. The conversation rose and strengthened and changed subject. They avoided speaking of past
floods known only in tales, but spoke of other things that had no connection with the waters and with the disaster which was at that moment taking place.

Desperate men make desperate efforts to appear calm and indifferent, almost casual. By some tacit superstitious agreement and by the unwritten but sacred laws of patronal dignity and business order which have existed since olden times, each considered it his duty to make an effort and at that moment at least externally to conceal his fear and his anxieties in face of a disaster against which he could do nothing and to talk in a light tone about unrelated things.

But just as they began to grow calm in this conversation and to find in it a moment of forgetfulness, and thereby the rest and energy that they would need so greatly in the day to come, a man entered, bringing with him Kosta Baranac. That young merchant was wet through, muddied to the knees and dishevelled. Dazzled by the light and confused by the numbers present, he looked at them as if in a dream, wiping the water from his face with his open hand. They made room for him and offered him plum brandy, which he was unable to raise to his lips. His whole body shivered. A whisper ran through the room that he had tried to leap into the dark current that now flowed in a sandy torrent immediately above the spot where his barns and granaries had been.

He was a young man, a recent settler, who had been brought to the town twenty years before as an apprentice, but had later married into a good family and become a merchant. A peasant's son, he had in the last few years by daring speculation and ruthless exploitation become rich, richer than many of the leading families of the town. But he was not used to loss and was unable to support disaster. That autumn he had bought large quantities of plums and walnuts, far beyond his real resources, reckoning that in winter he would be able to control the price of both dried plums and walnuts and so clear his debts and make a good profit, as he had done in previous years. Now he was ruined.

Some time was to pass before the impression made on them by the sight of this ruined man could be dispelled, since all of them, some more some less, had been hit by this flood and only by inborn dignity had they been able to control themselves better than this upstart.

The oldest and most prominent amongst them once again turned the conversation to casual matters. They began to tell long stories of former times, which had no sort of connection with the disaster that had drawn them hither and surrounded them on all sides.

They drank hot plum brandy and embarked on recollections of earlier days, about the eccentric characters of the town and every
kind of strange and unusual event. Pop Mihailo and Hadji Liacho set the example. When the talk inevitably returned to earlier floods, they recalled only what was pleasant or comical, or at least seemed so after so many years, as if they wanted to cast a spell upon the waters and to defy the flood.

They talked of Pop Jovan, who had once been parish priest here, who his parishioners had said was a good man but did not have 'a lucky hand' and that God had paid little heed to his prayers.

At the time of the summer droughts which often ruined the whole harvest, Pop Jovan had regularly led a procession and read the prayers for rain, but the only result was still greater drought and stifling heat. When one autumn, after such a dry summer, the Drina began to rise and threaten a general flood, Pop Jovan had gone out to the banks, collected the people, and began to read a prayer that the rain should cease and the waters recede. Then a certain Jokić, a drunkard and ne'er-do-well, reckoning that God always did exactly the opposite from what Pop Jovan prayed for, shouted:

'Not that one, father! Read the summer one, the one for rain; that will help the waters dry up.'

Fat and well-fed Ismet Effendi spoke of his predecessors and their struggles with the floods. At one of these disasters long ago a pair of the Višegrad 
hodjas 
went out to read a prayer to stay the disaster. One of these 
hodjas 
had a house in the lower part of the town, the other one on the hillside where the waters could not reach. The first to read was the 
hodja 
from the house on the hillside but the waters showed no sign of receding. Then a gipsy whose house was already half disintegrated in the waters shouted:

'Ama, 
fellows, let the 
hodja 
from the market-place, whose house is under water like ours, read. Can't you see that that fellow from the hill only reads with half his heart?'

Hadji Liacho, red-faced and smiling, with riotous tufts of white hair showing from under his unusually shallow fez, laughed at everything and said mockingly to the priest and 
hodja:

'Don't talk too much about prayers against floods, or else our people might remember and drive all three of us out in this downpour to read prayers for them.'

So they ranged story against story, all insignificant in themselves but each with a meaning for them and their generation though incomprehensible to others; harmless recollections which evoked the monotonous, pleasant yet hard life of the townsmen, their own life. Though all these things had changed long ago they still remained closely bound up with their lives, although far from the drama of that night which had brought them together in that fantastic circle.

Thus the town's leaders, accustomed from childhood to misfortunes of every kind, dominated the night of the great flood and found enough strength in themselves to jest in face of the disaster which had come upon them and thus mastered the misery that they were not able to avoid.

But within themselves they were all greatly anxious and each of them, beneath all the jokes and laughter at misfortune, as if under a mask, turned over and over in his mind anxious thoughts and listened continually to the roar of the waters and the wind from the town below, where he had left all that he possessed. The next day in the morning, after a night so spent, they looked down from Mejdan to the plain below where their houses were under water, some only half submerged and others covered to the roof. Then for the first and last time in their lives they saw their town without a bridge. The waters had risen a good thirty feet, so that the wide high arches were covered and the waters flowed over the roadway of the bridge which was hidden beneath them. Only that elevated part on which the 
kapia 
had been built showed above the surface of the troubled waters which flowed about it like a tiny waterfall.