The Bridge on the Drina (38 page)

As soon as the repair work on the bridge was finished, work began on a water supply. Till then the town had had wooden fountains of
which only two on Mejdan gave pure spring water; all the others, down on the level, were connected with water from the Drina or the Rzav and ran cloudy whenever the water of those two rivers was cloudy, and dried up altogether during the summer heats when the river level fell. Now engineers found that this water was unhealthy. The new water was brought right from the mountains on the other side of the Drina, so that the pipes had to be taken across the bridge into the town.

Once again there was noise and commotion on the bridge. Flagstones were raised and a channel dug for the conduits. Fires burnt on which pitch was boiled and lead melted. Hemp was plaited into ropes. The townspeople watched the work with distrust and curiosity as they had always done before. Alihodja was irritated by the smoke which drifted across the square to his shop, and spoke disdainfully of the 'new' unclean water which passed through iron pipes so that it was not fit to drink or for ablutions before prayer and which not even horses would drink if they were still of the good old breed that they once were. He laughed at Lotte who brought the water into her hotel. To everyone willing to listen he proved that the waterworks were only one of the signs of the approaching evil which sooner or later would fall upon the town.

However, next summer, the water supply was installed, even as so many earlier works had been introduced and completed. Clean and abundant water, which was no longer dependent either on drought or flood, flowed into the new iron fountains. Many brought the water into their courtyards and some even into their houses.

That same autumn the building of the railway began. That was a much longer and more important task. At first it did not seem to have any connection with the bridge. But that was only apparent.

This was the narrow gauge railway described in newspaper articles and official papers as the 'eastern railway'. It was to link Sarajevo with the Serbian frontier at Vardište and the boundary of the Turkish-held Sanjak of Novi Pazar at Uvce. The line ran right through the town which was the most important station on it.

Much was said and written about the political and strategic significance of this line, of the impending annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, of the further aims of Austro-Hungary through the Sanjak to Salonica and all the complicated problems connected with them. But in the town all these things still seemed completely innocent and even attractive. There were new contractors, fresh hordes of workmen and new sources of gain for many.

This time everything was on a grand scale. The building of the new line, 166 kilometres long, on which were about 100 bridges and
viaducts and about 130 tunnels, cost the state seventy-four million
 
crowns. The people spoke of this great number of millions and then looked vaguely into the far distance as if trying in vain to see there this great mountain of money which went far beyond any calculation or imagining. 'Seventy-four millions!' repeated many of them knowingly as if they could count them on the palm of their hand. For even in this remote little town where life in two-thirds of its forms was still completely oriental, men began to become enslaved by figures and to believe in statistics. 'Something less than half a million, or to be accurate 445,782.12 crowns per kilometre.' So the people filled their mouths with big figures but thereby neither became richer nor wiser.

During the building of the railway, the people for the first time felt that the easy, carefree gains of the first years after the occupation existed no longer. For some years past the prices of goods and everyday necessities had been leaping upward. They leapt upward but never fell back and then, after a shorter or a longer period, leapt up again. It was true there was still money to be made and wages were high, but they were always at least twenty per cent less than real needs. This was some mad and artful game which more and more embittered the lives of more and more people, but in which they could do nothing for it depended on something far away, on those same unattainable and unknown sources whence had come also the prosperity of the first years. Many men who had grown rich immediately after the occupation, some fifteen or twenty years before, were now poor and their sons had to work for others. True, there were new men who had made money, but even in their hands the money played like quick-silver, like some spell by which a man might easily find himself with empty hands and tarnished reputation. It became more and more evident that the good profits and easier life which they had brought had their counterpart and were only pieces in some great and mysterious game of which no one knew all the rules and none could foresee the outcome. And yet everyone played his part in this game, some with a smaller some with a greater role, but all with permanent risk.

In the summer of the fourth year the first train, decorated with green branches and flags, passed through the town. It was a moment of great popular rejoicing. The workmen were served with a free luncheon with great barrels of beer. The engineers had their pictures taken around the first locomotive. All that day travel on the railway was free ('One day free and a whole century for money,' mocked Alihodja at those who took advantage of this first train).

Only now, when the railway had been completed and was working, could it be seen what it meant for the bridge and its role in the life of the town. The line went down to the Drina by that slope below Mejdan, cut into the hillside, circumvented the town itself and then went down to the level ground by the farthest houses near the banks of the Rzav, where the station was. All traffic, both passengers and goods, with Sarajevo and beyond Sarajevo to the rest of the western world, now remained on the right bank of the Drina. The left bank, and with it the bridge, was completely paralysed. Only those from the villages on the left bank now went across the bridge, peasants with their little overburdened horses and bullock carts or wagons dragging timber from distant forests to the station.

The road which led upwards from the bridge across Lijeska to Semeć and thence across the Glasinac and Romania ranges to Sarajevo, and which had at one time echoed to the songs of the drovers and the clatter of packhorses, began to be overgrown with grass and that fine green moss which gradually accompanies the decline of roads and buildings. The bridge was no longer used for travelling, farewells were no longer said on the 
kapia 
and men no longer dismounted there to drink the stirrup-cups of plum brandy 'for the road'.

The packhorse owners, their horses, the covered carts and little old-fashioned fiacres by which men at one time travelled to Sarajevo remained without work. The journey no longer lasted two whole days with a halt for the night at Rogatica, as up till now, but a mere four hours. That was one of those figures which made men stop and think, but they still spoke of them without understanding and with emotion, reckoning up all the gains and savings given them by speed. They looked with wonder at the first townsmen who went one day to Sarajevo, finished their business, and returned home again the same evening.

Alihodja, always mistrustful, pig-headed, plain-spoken and apart in that as in all else, was the exception. To those who boasted of the speed with which they could now finish their business and reckoned how much time, money and effort they had saved, he replied ill-humouredly that it was not important how much time a man saved, but what he did with it when he had saved it. If he used it for evil purposes then it had been better he had never had it. He tried to prove that the main thing was not that a man went swiftly but where he went and for what purpose and that, therefore, speed was not always an advantage.

'If you are going to hell, then it is better that you should go slowly,' he said curtly to a young merchant. 'You are an imbecile if you think that the Schwabes have spent their money and brought their machine
here only for you to travel quickly and finish your business more conveniently. All you see is that you can ride, but you do not ask what the machine brings here and takes away other than you yourself and others like you. That you can't get into your head. Ride then, my fine fellow, ride as much as you like, but I greatly fear that all your riding will lead only to a fall one of these fine days. The time will come when the Schwabes will make you ride where you don't want to go and where you never even dreamt of going.'

Whenever he heard the engine whistle as it rounded the bends on the slope behind the Stone Han, Alihodja would frown and his lips would move in incomprehensible murmurs and, looking out slantwise from his shop at the unchanging bridge, he would go on elaborating his former idea; that the greatest buildings are founded by a word and that the peace and existence of whole towns and their inhabitants might depend upon a whistle. Or so at least it seemed to this weakened man who remembered much and had grown suddenly old.

But in that as in all else Alihodja was alone in his opinions like an eccentric and a dreamer. In truth the peasants too found it hard to grow accustomed to the railway. They made use of it, but could not feel at ease with it and could not understand its ways and habits. They would come down from the mountains at the first crack of dawn, reaching the town about sunrise, and by the time they reached the first shops would begin asking everyone they met:

'Has the machine gone?'

'By your life and health, neighbour, it has gone long ago,' the idle shopkeepers lied heartlessly.

'Really gone?'

'No matter. There'll be another tomorrow.'

They asked everyone without stopping for a moment, hurrying onwards and shouting at their wives and children who lagged behind.

They arrived at the station running. One of the railwaymen reassured them and told them that they had been misinformed and that there were still three good hours before the departure of the train. Then they recovered their breath and sat down along the walls of the station buildings, took out their breakfasts, ate them, and chatted or dozed, but remained continually alert. Whenever they heard the whistle of some goods engine they would leap to their feet and bundle their things together, shouting:

'Get up! Here comes the machine!'

The station official on the platform cursed them and drove them out again:

'Didn't I just tell you that it was more than three hours before the
train comes? What are you rushing for? Have you taken leave of your senses?'

They went back to their old places and sat down once more, but still suspicious and distrustful. At the first whistle or even only at some uncertain noise they once more leaped to their feet and crowded on to the platform, only to be repulsed once more to wait patiently and listen attentively. For however much the officials told them and explained to them, they could not get it into their heads that the 'machine' was not some sort of swift, mysterious and deceitful contraption invented by the Schwabes which slipped away from anyone inattentive enough to wink an eye and which had only one idea in its mind: how to cheat the peasant and leave without him.

But all these things, the peasants' stupidity and Alihodja's bad-tempered grumbling, were things of no importance. The people laughed at them and at the same time soon grew accustomed to the railway as they had to everything else that was new, easy and pleasant. They still went out to the bridge and sat on the 
kapia 
as they had always done, and crossed it on their everyday affairs, but they travelled in the direction and manner imposed on them by the new times. Quickly and easily they grew reconciled to the idea that the road across the bridge no longer led to the outside world and that the bridge was no longer what it once had been: the link between East and West. Better to say, most of them never thought about it.

But the bridge still stood, the same as it had always been, with the eternal youth of a perfect conception, one of the great and good works of man, which do not know what it means to change and grow old and which, or so it seemed, do not share the fate of the transient things of this world.

XVII

But there, beside the bridge, in the town bound to it by fate, the fruits of the new times were ripening. The year 1908 brought with it great uneasiness and a sort of obscure threat which thenceforward never ceased to weigh upon the town. In fact this had begun much earlier, about the time of the building of the railway line and the first years of the new century. With the rise in prices and the incomprehensible but always perceptible fluctuations of government paper, dividends and exchanges, there was more and more talk of politics.

Till then the townspeople had concerned themselves exclusively with what was near to them and well known, with their gains, their pastimes and, in the main, only with questions of their family and their homes, their town or their religious community, but always directly and within definite limits, without looking much ahead or too far into the past. Now, however, more and more frequently in conversation questions arose which lay farther away, outside this narrow circle. In Sarajevo religious and national organizations and parties were founded, Serbian and Moslem, which immediately set up their sub-committees in Višegrad. New papers were started in Sarajevo and began to arrive in the town. Reading rooms and choral societies were founded; first Serbian, then Moslem and finally Jewish. Students from the secondary schools and the universities at Vienna and Prague returned to their homes in the vacations and brought with them new books, pamphlets and a new manner of expression. By their example they showed to the younger townsfolk that they did not always have to keep their mouths shut and keep their thoughts to themselves as their elders had constantly believed and affirmed. Names of new organizations began to come into the conversation, religious and national, on wide bases and with bold aims, and finally workers' organizations also. Then the word 'strike' was heard in the town for the first time. The young apprentices became more serious. In the evenings on the 
kapia 
they carried on conversations incomprehensible to others and exchanged little paper-backed pamphlets with such titles as: 'What is socialism?', 'Eight hours of work, eight hours of rest, eight hours of self-improvement' and 'Aims and ways of the world proletariat'.