The Bridge on the Drina (7 page)

The common people easily make up fables and spread them quickly, wherein reality is strangely and inextricably mixed and interwoven with legend. The peasants who listened at night to the 
gusle 
player said that the 
vila 
who was destroying the bridge had told Abidaga that she would not cease her work of destruction until twin children, Stoja and Ostoja by name, should be walled into the foundations. Many swore that they had seen the guards who were searching for such a pair of children in the villages (the guards were indeed going around the villages but they were not looking for children but listening for rumours and interrogating the people in order to try and find out who were those unknown persons who were destroying the bridge).

A short time before, it had happened that in a village above Višegrad a poor stuttering half-witted girl, who was a servant, became pregnant, she herself would not say, or could not say, by whom!. It was a rare and almost unheard of event that a girl, and such a girl, should conceive and still more so that the father should remain unknown. The story was noised far abroad. In good time the girl gave birth, in some stable or other, to twins, both stillborn. The women from the village who helped her at the birth, which was exceptionally difficult, at once buried the children in a plum orchard. But on the third day after, the unfortunate mother got up and began to look for her children everywhere in the village. In vain they explained to her that the children had been born dead and had been buried. Finally, in order to be rid of her incessant questionings, they told her, or rather explained to her by gestures, that her children had been taken away to the town, down there where the Turks were building the bridge. Weak and distraught, she wandered down into the town and began to range around the ferry and the construction works, looking fearfully into the eyes of the men there and asking in incomprehensible stutterings for her children. The men looked at her in amazement or drove her away so that she should not hinder them at their work. Seeing that they did not understand what she wanted, she unbuttoned her coarse peasant shift and showed them her breasts,
painful and swollen, on which the nipples had already begun to crack and showed all bloody from the milk that flowed from them irresistibly. No one know how to help her and explain to her that her children had not been walled up in the bridge, for to all kind words and assurances, curses and threats, she only stuttered miserably and with sharp distrustful glances peered into every corner. Finally they gave up persecuting her and allowed her to wander about the construction work, avoiding her with a sorrowful compassion. The cooks gave her some of the workers' porridge which had got burnt at the bottom of the cauldrons. They called her mad Ilinka and, after them, the whole town did so. Even Abidaga himself passed by her without cursing her, turning his head away super-stitiously, and ordered that she be given alms. So she went on living there, a harmless idiot, by the construction works. And because of her the story remained that the Turks had walled her children into the bridge. Some believed it and others not, but none the less it was repeated all the more and noised afar.

Meanwhile the damage went on, now less now more, and parallel with it the rumours spread even more obstinately that the 
vilas 
would not permit a bridge to be built across the Drina.

Abidaga was furious. It enraged him that anyone could be found who dared to undertake anything against his work or his intentions despite his proverbial harshness which he cultivated as a special subject for pride. Also all these people disgusted him, the Moslems as much as the Christians; slow and unskilled in their work, they were quick enough for raillery and lack of respect and knew only too well how to find mocking and corrosive words for everything they did not understand or did not know how to do. He posted guards on both banks of the river. The damage to the earthworks then ceased, but damage to the construction work in the river itself continued. Only on moonlit nights was there no damage. That confirmed Abidaga, who did not believe in the 
vila, 
in his belief that this particular 
vila 
was not invisible and did not descend from on high. For a long time he would not, or could not, believe those who said it was due to peasant cunning, but now he was convinced that that was exactly what it was. And that excited him to still greater fury. But he none the less knew that he must appear calm and hide his fury if he wanted to snare these pests and finish once and for all with these tales about 
vilas 
and about stopping work on the bridge, which might become dangerous. He summoned the chief of the guards, a certain man from Plevlje, who had grown up in Stambul, a pale and unhealthy man.

The two men were instinctively hostile to one another, but at the
same time were continually drawn together and came into conflict. Between them incomprehensible feelings of hatred, repulsion, fear and distrust were woven permanently. Abidaga, who was mild and pleasant towards no one, displayed an unconcealed repulsion towards this pale-faced renegade. All that he did or said drove Abidaga into a frenzy and provoked him to curse and humiliate him, but the more that the man from Plevlje abased himself and was obsequious, the greater grew Abidaga's repulsion. From the first day of their meeting the leader of the guards was superstitiously and terribly afraid of Abidaga and this fear became in time an oppressive nightmare which never left him. At every step and movement, often in his dreams, he would think: what will Abidaga say about this? In vain he tried to please him and do what he wished. Everything that came from him Abidaga accepted with disdain. And that incomprehensible hatred hampered and disconcerted the man from Plevlje and made him still stiffer and clumsier. He believed that, because of Abidaga, he would one day lose not only his job and his position, but also his head. Therefore he lived in a state of permanent agitation and passed from dull discouragement to a feverish and cruel zeal. When now, pale and stiff, he stood before Abidaga, the latter spoke to him in a voice hoarse with anger.

'Listen, blockhead, you are clever with these sons of sows, you know their language and all their monkey-tricks. Yet for all that you are incapable of finding out what scab it is who has dared to spoil the Vezira work. That is because you are a scab yourself, the same as they are, and the only worse scab is whoever made you leader and a chief and has found nobody to reward you as you deserve. So I will do so, since there is no other. Know that I will put you under the earth so that you will not throw as much shadow as even the tiniest blade of grass. If all damage to the works does not cease within three days, if you do not catch whoever is doing this and do not put an end to all these silly stories about 
vilas 
and about stopping the work, then I will put you living on a stake on the highest part of the staging, that all may see you and take fright and get some sense into their heads. I swear this by my life and my faith, which I do not swear by lightly. Today is Thursday. You have till Sunday. Now go to the devil who sent you to me. Go! March!'

Even without this oath the man from Plevlje would have believed Abidaga's threat, for even in his dreams he used to shudder at his words and at his glance. Now he went out in one of his fits of panic-stricken terror and at once set desperately to work. He summoned his own men and, passing suddenly from dull torpor to mad rage, he began to curse them.
'Blind good-for-nothings!' raged the man from Plevlje, as if he were already placed alive upon the stake and yelling in the face of each of the guards. 'Is it thus that you keep watch and look after the Sultan's interests? You are quick and lively enough when you go to the cooking pots, but when you are on duty your legs are leaden and your wits are dull. My face burns because of you. But you will do no more slacking in my employ. I will massacre all of you; not a single one of you will keep his head on his shoulders if in two days this business does not end and if you do not seize and kill these bastards. You have still two days to live. I swear it by my faith and the Koran!'

He went on shouting in this way for a long time. Then, not knowing what else to say to them or with what more to threaten them, he spat at them one by one. But when he had played himself out and freed himself from the pressure of his fear (which had taken the form of rage) he set to work at once with desperate energy. He spent the night cruising up and down the banks with his men. At one time during the night it seemed to them that something was knocking at that part of the staging which was farthest out in the river and they rushed thither. They heard a plank crack and a stone fall into the river, but when they got to the spot they indeed found some broken scaffolding and a part of the masonry torn away but no trace of the miscreants. Faced with that ghostly emptiness the guards shivered from superstitious fright and from the darkness and moisture of the night. They called to one another, peered into the blackness, waved lighted torches, but all in vain. The damage had been done again, and they who had done it had not been caught and killed, as though in very truth they were invisible.

The next night the man from Plevlje arranged his ambush better. He sent some of his men over to the farther bank also and when night fell he hid guards in the scaffolding right out to the end and he himself with two others sat in a boat which he had drawn unnoticed in the darkness to the left bank. Thence in a few strokes they could be at one of the two piers on which construction had begun. In this way he could fall on the miscreants from two sides, so that they could not escape unless they had wings or could go under water.

All that long cold night the man from Plevlje lay in the boat covered with sheepskins, tormented by the dark thoughts whirling in his head; would Abidaga really carry out his threat and take his life which, under such a chief, was in any case no life but only terror and torment? But along the whole of the construction works not a murmur could be heard except the monotonous lapping and lisping of the unseen waters. Thus it dawned and the man from Plevlje felt in all his stiffened body that his life was darkening and shortening.

On the next, the third and last night, there was the same vigil, the same arrangements, the same fearful listening. Midnight passed. The man from Plevlje was seized with a mortal apathy. Then he heard a slight splash and then, louder, a blow on the oak beams which were placed in the river and on which the staging rested. There was a sharp whistle. But the leader's boat had already moved. Standing upright, he peered into the darkness, waving his hands and shouting in a hoarse voice:

'Row, row. .. .'

The men, half awake, rowed vigorously, but a strong current caught the boat earlier than it should have. Instead of reaching the staging, the boat turned down river. They were unable to make way against the current and it would have swept them far away had not something unexpectedly checked them.

There, right in the middle of the main current, where there were neither beams nor scaffolding, their boat struck something heavy and wooden which echoed dully. Only then did they realize that on the scaffolding above them the guards were struggling with something. The guards, local renegades, were all shouting at once; they fell over one another in the darkness in a medley of broken and incomprehensible cries:

'Hold there, don't let go!'

'Hey, fellows, here!'

'It's me! . ..'

Between the shouts some heavy object or human body could be heard splashing into the water.

The man from Plevlje was for some moments uncertain where he was or what was happening, but as soon as he had come to his senses he began to pull with an iron hook at the end of a long pole at the beams on which his boat had struck and succeeded in pulling the boat upstream nearer and nearer the scaffolding. Soon he was up to the oak piles and, taking heart, shouted at the top of his voice:

'Lights! Light a torch there! Throw me a rope!'

At first no one answered. Then, after much shouting, in which no one listened to or could understand anyone else, a weak torch glimmered uncertainly and fitfully above. This first spark of light only confused the eyes even more and mingled in an uneasy whirl, men, things and their shadows with the red reflections on the water. But then another torch flamed in another hand. The light steadied and men began to pull themselves together and recognize one another. Soon everything became clear and explicable.

Between the boat of the man from Plevlje and the scaffolding lay a small raft made of only three planks; at the front was an oar, a real
raftsman's oar, only shorter and weaker. The raft was moored with a bark cord to one of the beams under the scaffolding and was held thus against the swift waters which splashed about it and tried with all their force to pull it away downstream. The guards on the staging helped their leader to cross the raft and climb up to them. All were haggard and out of breath. On the planks a Christian peasant was lying. His breast was heaving quickly and violently and his eyes, starting out of his head, showed fear-stricken whites.

The oldest of the four guards explained to their excited leader that they had been keeping watch at various points on the staging. When they heard the sound of oars in the darkness, they had thought it was their leader's boat, but they had been clever enough not to show themselves and to wait and see what would happen. Then they saw two peasants who approached the piers and with some difficulty moored their raft to one of them. They let them climb up and come among them and then they attacked them with axes, overcame them and bound them. One, who had been struck unconscious by a blow from an axe, they had bound easily, but the other one, after pretending to be half-dead, had slipped from their grasp like a fish through the planks into the water. The frightened guard halted in his story and the man from Plevlje screamed: