The Bridge on the Drina (18 page)

Around Salko had gathered a number of merchants' sons, young men who laughed at him and played crude jokes on him.

The air smelt of fresh melons and roasting coffee. From the great flagstones, still warm from the day's heat, and sprinkled with water, rose moist and scented the special smell of the 
kapia 
which filled men with freedom from care and evoked lively fancies.

It was the moment between day and night. The sun had set but the great star which rose over Moljevnik had not yet appeared. In such a moment, when even the most ordinary thing took on the appearance of a vision filled with majesty, terror and special meaning, the first refugees from Uzice appeared on the bridge.

The men were for the most part on foot, dusty and bowed, while the women wrapped in their veils were balanced on small horses with small children tied to the saddle-bags or to boxes. Now and again a more important man rode a better horse, but with lowered head and at a funereal pace, revealing even more clearly the misfortune which had driven them hither. Some of them were leading a single goat on a short halter. Others carried lambs in their laps. All were silent; even the children did not cry. All that could be heard was the beat of horseshoes and footsteps and the monotonous chinking of wooden and copper vessels on the overloaded horses.

The appearance of this overtired and destitute procession dampened the gaiety on the 
kapia. 
The older people remained seated on the stone benches, while the younger stood up and formed living walls on both sides of the 
kapia 
and the procession passed between them. Some of the townsmen only looked compassionately at the refugees and remained silent, while others greeted them with 
'merhaba', 
tried to stop them and offer them something. They paid no attention to the offers and scarcely responded to the greetings, but hurried on to reach their post for the night at Okolište while it was still light.

In all there were about 120 families. More than 100 families were going on to Sarajevo where there was a chance of being settled, while fifteen were to stay in the town; they were for the most part those who had relatives there.

One only of these dog-tired men, poor in appearance and apparently alone, stopped for a moment on the 
kapia, 
drank his fill of water and accepted an offered cigar. He was white all over from the dust of the road, his eyes shone as if in fever and he was unable to keep his glance fixed on any single object. Vigorously puffing out smoke, he looked around him with those shining disagreeable glances, without replying to the timid and humble questions of individuals. He only wiped his long moustaches, thanked them curtly and with that bitterness which overtiredness and a feeling of being outcast leaves in a man he muttered a few words looking at them with one of those sudden unseeing glances.

'You sit here at your ease and do not know what is happening behind Staniševac. Here we are fleeing into Turkish lands, but where are you to flee when, together with us, your turn will come? None of you knows and none of you ever thinks of it.'

He suddenly ceased. Even the little he said was much for those who till then had been so carefree, and yet little enough for his own bitterness which would not allow him to stay silent yet at the same time prevented him from expressing himself clearly. It was he himself who cut short the heavy silence by saying farewell and hurrying away to catch up with the rest of the procession. All stood up to shout good wishes after him.

All that evening the mood on the 
kapia 
remained heavy. All were silent and downcast. Even Salko sat dumb and motionless on one of
the stone steps surrounded by the husks of the water-melons he had eaten for a bet. Depressed and silent he sat there with downcast looks, absent-mindedly, as though he were not looking at the stone before him but at something far distant which he could scarcely perceive. The people began to disperse earlier than usual.

But next day everything was as it had always been, for the townsmen did not like to remember evil and did not worry about the future; in their blood was the conviction that real life consists of calm periods and that it would be mad and vain to spoil them by looking for some other, firmer and more lasting life that did not exist.

In those twenty-five years in the middle of the nineteenth century the plague raged twice at Sarajevo and the cholera once. When this happened the town kept regulations which, according to tradition, had been given by Mohammed himself to the faithful for their guidance in the event of an epidemic: 'While the Pestilence rages in some place do not go there, for you may become infected, and if you are already in the place where it rages then do not depart from that place lest you infect others.' But since men do not observe even the most salutory of regulations, even when they derive from the Apostle of God himself, if not forced to do so by 'the power of the authorities', then the authorities on the occasion of every 'plague' limited or completely stopped all travel and postal communications. Then life on the 
kapia 
changed its aspect. The people of the town, busy or at leisure, thoughtful or singing, disappeared, and on the empty 
sofa, 
as in times of war or revolution, once again sat a guard of several gendarmes. They stopped all travellers coming from the direction of Sarajevo and waved them back with their rifles or shouted loudly to them to retreat. The post they accepted from the messenger but with every measure of precaution. A small fire of 'aromatic woods' was lit on the 
kapia 
and produced an abundant white smoke. The gendarmes took each individual letter in a pair of tongs and passed it through this smoke. Only such 'purified' letters were sent onward. Goods they did not accept at all. But their main task was not with letters but with living men. Every day a few arrived, travellers, merchants, bearers of news, tramps. A gendarme awaited them at the entry to the bridge and from a distance signalled with his hand that they might not go farther. The traveller would halt, but begin to argue, to justify himself and explain his case. Each of them considered that it was absolutely necessary to let him into the town and each of them swore that he was healthy and had had no connection with the cholera which was there somewhere in Sarajevo. During these explanations the travellers would edge little
by little halfway across the bridge and approach the 
kapia. 
There, other gendarmes would take their part in the conversation and as they talked at several paces distance they all shouted loudly and waved their arms. Those gendarmes also joined in who sat all day on the kapia sipping plum brandy and eating garlic; their service gave them this right for it was believed that both these were good antidotes against infection, and they made abundant use of their privilege.

Many a traveller would grow tired of pleading with and trying to convince the gendarmes and would return downcast, his work unfinished, along the Okolište road. But some were more persistent and persevering and remained there on the 
kapia
hoping for a moment of weakness or inattention or some mad and lucky chance. If it so happened that the leader of the town gendarmes, Salko Hedo, were there, then there was no likelihood that the traveller would achieve anything. Hedo was that true conscientious official who does not really see or hear whomever he talks to, and who only considers him in so far as it is necessary to find the place for him set out by the regulations in force. Until he had done this he was deaf and blind and when he had done it he become dumb as well. In vain the traveller would implore or flatter:

'Salik-Aga, I am healthy....'

'Well then, go in health whence you came. Get along, out of my sight. . . .'

There was no arguing with Hedo. But if some of the younger gendarmes were alone, then something might still be done. The longer the traveller stood on the bridge and the more he shouted and talked with them, told all his troubles, why he had set out and all the problems of his life, the more personal and familiar he seemed to become and less and less like a man who might have cholera. In the end, one of the gendarmes would offer to take a message for him to whomever he wished in the town. This was the first step towards yielding. But the traveller knew that the message would never be delivered for the gendarmes, always suffering from a hangover or half drunk as they were, remembered things with difficulty and delivered messages inside out. Therefore he went on indefinitely with his conversation, implored, offered bribes, called upon God and his soul. All this he did until the gendarme whom he had marked down as the most lenient remained alone on the bridge. Then the business was finished somehow or other. The soulful gendarme would turn his face to the raised wall as if to read the ancient inscription on it, with his hands behind his back and the palm of his right hand extended. The persevering traveller would put the agreed sum of
money into the gendarme's palm, glance right and left, and then slide across the other half of the bridge and become lost in the town. The gendarme went back to his post, chewed a head of garlic and washed it down with plum brandy. This filled him with a certain gay and carefree resolution and gave him fresh strength to keep vigil and guard the town from cholera.

But misfortunes do not last forever (this they have in common with joys) but pass away or are at least diminished and become lost in oblivion. Life on the 
kapia 
always renews itself despite everything and the bridge does not change with the years or with the centuries or with the most painful turns in human affairs. All these pass over it, even as the unquiet waters pass beneath its smooth and perfect arches.

VIII

It was not only the wars, pestilences and migrations of the times which broke against the bridge and interrupted life on the 
kapia. 
There were also other exceptional events which gave their name to the year in which they took place and were long remembered.

Left and right of the 
kapia 
in both directions, the stone parapet of the bridge had long become smooth and somewhat darker than the rest. For hundreds of years the peasants had rested their burdens on it when crossing the bridge, or idlers had leant shoulders and elbows upon it in conversation while waiting for others or when, solitary and leaning on their elbows, they looked in the depths below them at the waters as they went foaming swiftly past, always new and yet always the same.

But never had so many idle and inquisitive people leant on the parapet and watched the surface of the water, as if to read in it the answer to some riddle, as in the last days of August that year. The water was clouded by the rains though it was only towards the end of summer. In the eddies below the arches a white foam formed, which moved in circles with twigs, small branches and rubbish. But the leisurely and leaning townsmen were not really looking at the waters which they had always known and which had nothing to tell them; but on the surface of the water and in their own conversations they searched for some sort of explanation for themselves and tried to find there some visible trace of an obscure and cruel destiny which, in those days, had troubled and surprised them.

About that time an unusual thing had taken place on the 
kapia 
which would long be remembered and which was not likely to happen again as long as the bridge and the town on the Drina existed. It had excited and shaken the townspeople and the story of it had passed beyond the town itself, to other places and districts, to become a legend.

This was, in fact, a tale of two Višegrad hamlets, Velje Lug and Nezuke. These two hamlets lay at the extreme ends of that amphi-theatre formed about the town by the dark mountains and their green foothills.

The great village of Stražište on the north-eastern side of the valley was the nearest to the town. Its houses, fields and gardens were scattered over several foothills and embowered in the valleys between them. On the rounded flank of one of these hills lay about fifteen houses, buried in plum orchards and surrounded on all sides by fields. This was the hamlet of Velje Lug, a peaceful, rich and beautiful Turkish settlement on the slopes. The hamlet belonged to the village of Stražište, but it was nearer to the town than to its own village centre, for the men of Velje Lug could walk down to the marketplace in half an hour, had their shops there and did business in the town like the ordinary townsmen. Between them and the townsmen there was indeed little or no difference save perhaps that their properties were more solid and lasting for they stood on the firm earth, not subject to floods, and the men there were more modest and did not have the bad habits of the town. Velje Lug had good soil, pure water and handsome people.

A branch of the Višegrad family of Osmanagić lived there. But even though those in the town were richer and more numerous, it was generally considered that they had 'degenerated' and that the real Osmanagićs were those of Velje Lug whence the family had come. They were a fine race of men, sensitive and proud of their origin. Their house, the largest in the district, showing up white on the hillside just below the crest of the hill, turned towards the southwest; it was always freshly whitewashed, with a roof of blackened thatch and fifteen glazed windows. Their house could be seen from afar and was the first to catch the eye of a traveller coming to Višegrad and the last that he saw on leaving it. The last rays of the setting sun behind the Liještan ridge rested there and shone on the white and shining face of this house. The townsmen were long accustomed to look at it from the 
kapia 
in the early evening and see how the setting sun was reflected from the Osmanagić windows and how the light left them one after the other. As the sun set and the town was in shadow its last rays, falling on one of the windows, as it broke through the clouds, would shine for a few moments longer like a huge red star over the darkened town.