The Bridge on the Drina (41 page)

There his Stana was waiting for him. She too had grown older and had lost some of her physical strength, but she was still a formidable and outspoken woman. He complained bitterly to her about the young Turks who said things they should not have said and had
asked him about Tripoli, which until a few days ago he had not even known existed. But Stana, as always, would not understand him or console him, but went on saying that it was he himself who was at fault and even deserved to have insults shouted at him.

'If you were a real man, which you are not, you would have hit their ugly phizzes with your chisel or your hammer. Then those ragamuffins would not even think of jeering at you but would get to their feet when you cross the bridge.'

'Eh, Stana, Stana,' said Maistor-Pero good-humouredly and a little sadly, 'how could a man hit another in the face with a hammer?'

So those years passed in a succession of greater or lesser sensations, or in the constant need of them. So it came to the autumn of 1912; then 1913 with the Balkan wars and the Serbian victories. By a strange exception, just these things which were of such great importance to the fate of the bridge and the town and all who lived in it came silently and almost unnoticed.

Flushed with red at sunrise and sunset, golden at midday, the October days passed over the town, which was waiting for the maize crop and the new season's plum brandy. It was still pleasant to sit on the 
kapia 
in the noonday sun. Time, it seemed, was holding its breath over the town. It was just then that it happened.

Even before the literates in the town could find their way through the contradictory newspaper reports, the war between Turkey and the four Balkan States had already broken out and followed the well-worn paths across the Balkans. Before the people had fully grasped the sense and import of this war it was practically over as a result of the victories of the Serbian and Christian armies; all was ended far from Višegrad, without fires on the frontiers, without the grumble of the guns and without heads on the 
kapia. 
As it had been with trade and money, so it was with those more important things also; everything happened far away and unbelievably quickly. Somewhere far away in the world the dice had been thrown, the battles fought, and it was there that the fate of each one of the townsfolk was decided.

But if the outward appearance of the town remained peaceful and unchanged, these events stirred up in the minds of men whole tempests of the greatest enthusiasm and the deepest depression. As in the case of everything else that had happened in the world m recent years, they were looked on in the town with diametrically opposed feelings by the Serbs and the Moslems; only in their intensity and depth were they perhaps equal. These events surpassed all the hopes of the one; all the fears of the others appeared justified. Those desires which for hundreds of years had flown before the slow pace of history could now no longer keep pace with it but outdistanced it by
some fantastic flight along the road to the most daring realization.

Everything that the town could see or feel directly of that fateful war took place incredibly simply and with the swiftness of an arrow.

At Uvce where the frontier between Austro-Hungary and Turkey followed the little river Uvac, and where a wooden bridge separated the Austrian gendarmerie barracks from the Turkish blockhouse, the Turkish officer with his small guard crossed to the Austrian side. There, he broke his sword with a theatrical gesture on the parapet of the bridge and surrendered to the Austrian gendarmes. At that moment the grey-clad Serbian infantry came down from the hills. They replaced the old-fashioned 
askers 
along the whole frontier between Bosnia and the Sanjak. The triangle between Austria, Turkey and Serbia disappeared. The Turkish frontier which only the day before had been about nine miles from the town was suddenly withdrawn more than 600 miles, somewhere far beyond Jedrene (Adrianople).

So many and such important changes, carried out in so short a time, shook the town to its foundations.

For the bridge on the Drina this change was fateful. The railway link with Sarajevo had, as we have seen, reduced its connection with the West and now, in a moment, its connection with the East also ceased. In fact the East, which had created it and which had up to the day before still been there, greatly shaken and weakened no doubt, but still as permanent and real as sky and land, had now vanished like an apparition. Now the bridge in reality no longer linked anything save the two parts of the town and those dozen or so villages on one or the other side of the Drina.

The great stone bridge which, according to the ideas and the pious intentions of the Grand Vezir from Sokolovići, was meant to link the two parts of the Empire, and 'for the love of God' make easier the passage from West to East and from East to West, was now in fact cut off from both East and West and abandoned like a stranded ship or a deserted shrine. For three whole centuries it had endured and experienced everything and, unchanging, had truly served its purpose, but human needs had altered and world conditions changed; now its task had betrayed it. By its size, its solidity and its beauty, armies might pass across it and caravans follow one another for centuries to come, but thus, by the eternal and unforeseen play of human relations, the Vezir's bequest suddenly found itself abandoned and, as if by some magic spell, outside the main stream of life. The present role of the bridge in no way corresponded to its eternally young appearance and its gigantic but harmonious proportions. But it still
stood the same as when the Grand Vezir had seen it in his inward vision behind closed eyes and as when his masons had built it; powerful, beautiful and enduring, beyond all possibility of change.

It needed time, it needed effort, before the townspeople understood all that has been said here in a few lines and what had in fact taken place in a few months. Not even in dreams did frontiers change so quickly or go so far away.

All that had lain quiescent in men, as ancient as that bridge and equally dumb and motionless, now suddenly came alive and began to influence their everyday life, their general mood and the personal fate of every individual.

The first summer days of 1913 were rainy and oppressive. On the 
kapia 
by day sat the Moslems of the town, morose and disconsolate, about a dozen elderly men grouped around a younger one who read to them from the newspapers, interpreting foreign expressions and unusual names and explaining the geography. All smoked peacefully and gazed unwaveringly in front of them but could not completely conceal that they were anxious and shaken. Hiding their emotion, they bent over the map which showed the future partition of the Balkan Peninsula. They looked at the paper and saw nothing in those curving lines, but they knew and understood everything, for their geography was in their blood and they felt biologically their picture of the world.

'Who will get Uskub (Skoplje)?' asked one old man, apparently indifferently, to the youth who was reading.

'Serbia.'

'Uh!'

'And who will get Salonica?'

'Greece.'

'Uh! Uh!'

'And Jedrene?' asked another in a low voice.

'Bulgaria, probably.'

'Uh! Uh! Uh!'

These were not loud and mournful wailings, like women or weaklings, but deep and stifled sighs which were lost with the tobacco smoke which drifted through their moustaches into the summer air. Many of these old men had passed their seventieth year. In their childhood, the Turkish power had stretched from the Lika and the Kordun right to Stambul and from Stambul to the uncertain desert frontiers of far off and illimitable Arabia (that Turkish power had been the great, indivisible and indestructible unity of the Moslem faith, all that part of the terrestrial globe where the muezzin called the faithful to prayer). They remembered that well, but they also
remembered how, later on, in the course of their lives, that Turkish power had withdrawn from Serbia into Bosnia and then from Bosnia into the Sanjak. And now, now they lived to see that power like some fantastic ocean tide suddenly withdraw and pass away somewhere far out of sight, while they remained here, deceived and menaced, like seaweed on dry land, left to their own devices and their own evil fate. All this came from God and was, without doubt, envisaged in the ordinances of God, but it was hard for men to understand; their breath came short, their consciousness was troubled, they felt as if the solid earth was being drawn irresistibly away from under their feet as if it were a carpet, and how frontiers which should have been firm and lasting had become fluid and shifting, moving away and lost in the distance like the capricious rivulets of spring.

With such thoughts and feelings the old men sat on the 
kapia 
and listened vaguely to all that the newspapers wrote. They listened silently though the words in which the papers spoke of kingdoms and states seemed to them mad, impudent and out of place, and their whole manner of writing as something godless, contrary to the eternal laws and the logic of life, something which would 'get no better' and with which no decent or honourable man could become reconciled. Above their heads floated clouds of tobacco smoke, and in the skies cruised white, fleecy clouds of a rainy summer, casting quick broad shadows on the earth.

At night on the 
kapia 
youths from the Serbian houses sat till the small hours, singing loudly and provocatively the song about the Serbian gun and no one came to fine or punish them. Amongst them could often be noticed students from the universities or secondary schools. They were mostly thin, pale youths with long hair and black shallow hats with wide brims. That autumn they came very often, though the school year had already commenced. They came by train from Sarajevo with instructions and recommendations, passed the night here on the 
kapia, 
but were no longer in the town at dawn next day for the young men of Višegrad sent them on by underground routes to Serbia.

With the summer months, at the time of the school holidays, the town and the 
kapia 
became lively with schoolboys and students, born in the town and returning to their homes. They influenced the whole life of the town.

At the end of June a group of students from the Sarajevo secondary school arrived in the town and in the first half of July students of law, medicine and philosophy from the Universities of Vienna, Prague, Graz and Zagreb, began to arrive one by one. With their arrival even the outward aspect of the town began to change. Their
young faces could be seen in the market-place and on the 
kapia 
and they were easily distinguishable by their bearing, their speech and their clothes from the established customs and unchanging clothing of the townspeople. They wore clothes of dull colours and the latest cut. This was the 'Glôckenfaçon' then considered the height of fashion and the best of taste in all Central Europe. On their heads they wore soft Panama hats with turned down brims and ribbons of six different but discreet colours; on their feet wide American shoes with sharply turned up toes. Most of them carried very thick bamboo canes and in the lapels of their coats they wore metal Sokol badges or those of some student organization.

The students brought with them new words and jokes, new dances from the balls of the previous winter, and especially new books and pamphlets, Serbian, Czech and German.

It had happened earlier too, in the first years of the Austrian occupation, that young men from the town had gone away to study, but not in such large numbers nor inspired by this sort of spirit. In those first few decades a few of them had finished at the Teachers' Training College at Sarajevo, and two or three had even read philosophy at Vienna, but these had been rare exceptions, modest youths who had passed their examinations quietly and without advertisement and once their studies had been completed had been lost in the grey and countless ranks of the state bureaucracy. But for some time past the number of students from the town had suddenly increased. By the help of national cultural institutions even peasants' sons and the children of petty artisans went to the university. The spirit and character of the students themselves changed.

These were no longer those one-time students of the first years after the occupation, mild and timid youths devoted to their studies in the closest sense of the word. But neither were they the ordinary town dandies and goodfellows of an earlier time, future landowners and shopkeepers who at a certain period in their lives wasted their excess of youth and strength on the 
kapia 
till their families said of them: 'Marry him off and stop his squalling!' These were a new sort of young men, educated in various cities and states and under various influences. From the great cities, from the universities and schools which they attended, these young men came back intoxicated with that feeling of proud audacity with which his first and incomplete knowledge fills a young man, and carried away by ideas about the rights of peoples to freedom and of individuals to enjoyment and dignity. With every summer vacation they brought back with them free-thinking views on social and religious questions and an enthusiastically revived nationalism which recently, especially after
the Serbian victories in the Balkan wars, had grown to a universal conviction and, in many of these youths, to a fanatical desire for action and personal sacrifice.