The Bridge on the Drina (25 page)

Shemsibeg sat and smoked on a red rug, cloaked and buttoned up in summer as in winter, with his guests around him. Their conversation was usually about some new incomprehensible and sinister measure of the occupation authorities, or of those Turks who were more and more accommodating themselves to the new order. Before this harsh and dignified man, they all felt the need to give vent to their bitterness, their fears and their uncertainties. Every conversation ended with the questions: where is all this leading and where will it stop? Who and what were these strangers who, it seemed, did not know the meaning of rest and respite, knew neither measure nor limits? What did they want? With what plans had they come? What was this restlessness which continually drove them on, like some curse, to new works and enterprises of which no one could see the end?

Shemsibeg only looked at them and for the most part remained silent. His face was darkened, not by the sun, but by his inner thoughts. His glance was hard, but absent and as if lost. His eyes were clouded and there were whitish-grey circles around the black pupils as in an ageing eagle. His big mouth, with scarcely perceptible lips, was firmly set but moved slowly as if he were always turning over in his mind some word which he did not pronounce.

None the less, men left him with a feeling of comfort, neither
calmed nor consoled, but touched and exalted by his firm and hopeless intransigence.

Whenever Shemsibeg went down to the market-place on Fridays, he was met with some fresh change in men or buildings which had not been there the Friday before. In order not to have to look at it, he kept his eyes fixed on the ground but there, in the drying mud of the streets, he saw the marks of horses' hooves and noticed how alongside the broad rounded Turkish shoes the sharp-pointed bent Austrian horseshoes were becoming more and more common. So that even there in the mud his gaze read the same merciless judgment that he read everywhere in men's faces and in the things about him, a judgment of time which would not be halted.

Seeing that there was nowhere to rest his eyes, Shemsibeg ceased altogether to come down into the market. He withdrew completely to his Crnče and sat there, a silent but strict and implacable master, severe towards all but most of all towards himself. The oldest and most respected Turks of the town continued to visit him there, regarding him as a sort of living saint (amongst them, in particular, Alihodja). At last, in the third year of the occupation, Shemsibeg died without ever having been ill. He passed away without ever pronouncing that bitter word which was for ever on the tip of his old lips and never again setting foot in the market-place, where all men had set out on the new ways.

Indeed the town changed rapidly in appearance, for the newcomers cut down trees, planted new ones in other places, repaired the streets, cut new ones, dug drainage canals, built public buildings. In the first few years they pulled down in the market-place those old and dilapidated shops which were out of line and which, to tell the truth, had up till then inconvenienced no one. In place of those old-fashioned shops with their wooden drop-counters, new ones were built, well sited, with tiled roofs and metal rollers on the doors. (Alihodja's shop too was destined to be a victim of these measures, but the 
hodja 
opposed it resolutely, took the affair to law, contested it and dragged it on in every possible way until at last he succeeded, and his shop remained just as it was and just where it was.) The market-place was levelled and widened. A new 
konak 
was erected, a great building intended to house the law courts and the local administration. The army, too, was working on its own account, even more rapidly and inconsiderately than the civil authorities. They put up barracks, cleared waste land, planted and changed the appearance of whole hills.

The older inhabitants could not understand, and wondered; just
when they thought that all this incomprehensible energy had come to an end, the newcomers started some fresh and even more incomprehensible task. The townsmen stopped and looked at all this work, but not like children who love to watch the work of adults but as adults who stop for a moment to watch children's games. This continual need of the newcomers to build and rebuild, to dig and to put back again, to put up and modify, this eternal desire of theirs to foresee the action of natural forces, to avoid or surmount them, no one either understood or appreciated. On the other hand all the townsmen, especially the older men, saw this unhealthy activity as a bad omen. Had it been left to them the town would have gone on looking as any other little oriental town. What burst would be patched up, what leant would be shored up, but beyond that no one would needlessly create work or make plans or interfere in the foundations of buildings or change the aspect which God had given to the town.

But the newcomers went on with their tasks, one after the other, quickly and logically, according to unknown and well prepared plans, to the even greater wonder and astonishment of the townsfolk. Thus unexpectedly and quickly came the turn of the dilapidated and abandoned caravanserai, which was always regarded as an integral part of the bridge, even as it had been 300 years before. In fact what had been known as the Stone Han had long ago become completely ruined. The doors had rotted, those lace-like grilles of soft stone on the windows broken, the roof had fallen into the interior of the building and from it grew a great acacia and a welter of nameless shrubs and weeds, but the outer walls were still whole, a true and harmonious rectangle of stone still standing upright. In the eyes of the townspeople, from birth to death, this was no ordinary ruin but the completion of the bridge, as much an integral part of the town as their own houses, and no one would ever have dreamt that the old 
han 
could be touched or that it was necessary to change anything about it that time and nature had not already changed.

But one day its turn came too. First engineers who spent a long time measuring the ruins, then workmen and labourers who began to take it down stone by stone, frightening and driving away all sorts of birds and small beasts which had their nests there. Rapidly the level space above the market-place by the bridge became bald and empty and all that was left of the 
han 
was a heap of good stone carefully piled.

A little more than a year later, instead of the former caravanserai of white stone, there rose a high, massive two-storied barracks,
washed in pale-blue, roofed with grey corrugated iron and with loopholes at the corners. Soldiers drilled all day on the open space and stretched their limbs or fell head first in the dust like suppliants to the loud shouts of the corporals. In the evening the sound of incomprehensible soldiers' songs accompanied by an accordion could be heard from the many windows of the ugly building. This went on until the penetrating sound of the bugle with its melancholy melody, which set all the dogs of the town howling, extinguished all these sounds together with the last lights in the windows. So disappeared the lovely bequest of the Vezir and so the barracks, which the people true to ancient custom went on calling the Stone Han, commenced its life on the level by the bridge in complete lack of harmony with all that surrounded it.

The bridge now remained completely isolated.

To tell the truth, things were happening on the bridge too, where the old unchanging customs of the people clashed with the innovations which the newcomers and their way of life brought with them, and in these clashes all that was old and local was always forced to give way and adapt itself.

As far as the local people were concerned, life on the 
kapia 
went its way as of old. Only it was noticed that now Serbs and Jews came more freely and in greater numbers to the 
kapia 
and at all times of day, paying no heed as they once had done to the habits and privileges of the Turks. Otherwise all went on as before. In the daytime merchants sat there waiting for the peasant woman and buying from them wool, poultry and eggs, and beside them the lazy and idle who moved from one part of the town to another in keeping with the movements of the sun. Towards evening other citizens began to arrive and the merchants and workers gathered there to talk a little or to remain silent for a time looking at the great green river bordered by dwarf willows and sandbanks. The night was for the young. They had never known, nor did they know now, any limits for the time that they stayed on the bridge nor for what they did there.

In that night-time life of the 
kapia 
there were, at least at first, changes and misunderstandings. The new authorities had introduced permanent lighting in the town. In the first years of the occupation they put lanterns on green standards, in which petrol lamps burned, in the main streets and at the crossroads. The lanterns were cleaned, filled and lit by big Ferhat, a poor devil with a house full of children, who until then had been a servant in the municipality. He discharged the petards announcing Ramazan and carried out similar jobs, without any fixed or certain wages. The bridge too
was lighted at several points, including the 
kapia. 
The standard for this lantern was fixed to that oak beam which was all that remained of the former blockhouse. This lantern on the 
kapia 
had to endure a long struggle with the local jokers, with those who loved to sing in the darkness or to smoke and chat on the 
kapia 
as also with the destructive impulses of the young men in whom love-yearning, solitude and plum brandy mingled and clashed. That flickering light irritated them and so countless times both the lantern and the lamp inside were smashed to pieces. There were many fines and sentences because of that lantern. At one time a special police agent was told to keep an eye on the light. So the nightly visitors now had a living witness, even more unpleasant than the lantern. But time exercised its influence and the new generation grew accustomed to it and so reconciled to its existence that they gave free vent to their night feelings under the weak light of the municipal lantern, and no longer threw at it whatever came to hand, sticks, stones or anything else. This reconciliation was made so much the easier because on moonlit nights, when the 
kapia 
was most visited, the lantern was generally not lit.

Only once a year the bridge had to experience a great illumination. On the eve of August 18th every year, the Emperor's birthday, the authorities decorated the bridge with garlands and lines of young pine trees and, as darkness fell, lit strings of lanterns and fairy-lights; hundreds of army ration tins, filled with lard and fat, flamed in long rows along the parapet of the bridge. They lit up the centre of the bridge, leaving the ends and the piers lost in the darkness, so that the illuminated part seemed as if floating in space. But every light quickly burns out and every feast comes to an end. By the next day the bridge was once again what it had always been. Only in the eyes of some of the children there remained a new and unusual picture of the bridge under the shortlived play of light, a bright and striking vision, but short and transient as a dream.

Besides permanent lighting, the new authorities also introduced cleanliness on the 
kapia, 
or more exactly that special sort of cleanliness that accorded with their ideas. The fruit peelings, melon seeds and nutshells no longer remained for days on the flagstones until the rain or the wind carried them away. Now a municipal sweeper brushed them up every morning. But that irritated no one, for men quickly become accustomed to cleanliness even when it forms no part of their needs or habits; naturally on condition that they personally do not have to observe it.

There was still one more novelty which the occupation and
the newcomers brought with them; women began to come to the 
kapia 
for the first time in its existence. The wives and daughters of the officials, their nursemaids and servants would stop there to chat or come to sit there on holidays with their military or civil escorts. This did not happen very often, but none the less it was enough to disturb the older men who came there to smoke their pipes in peace and quiet over the water, and disconcerted and confused the younger ones.

There had, naturally, always been a link between the 
kapia 
and the women in the town, but only in so far as the menfolk gathered there to pass compliments to the girls crossing the bridge or to express their joys, pains and quarrels over women and find relief from them on the 
kapia. 
Many a lonely man would sit for hours or even days singing softly to himself 'for my soul only', or wreathed in tobacco smoke, or simply watching the swift waters in silence, paying tribute to that exaltation to which we must all pay due and from which few escape. Many a contest between rivals was settled there, many love intrigues imagined. Much was said or thought about women and about love, many passions were born and many extinguished. All this there was, but women had never stopped or sat on the 
kapia, 
neither Christian nor, still less, Moslem. Now all that was changed.

Now on Sundays and holidays on the 
kapia 
could be seen cooks tightly laced and red in the face, with rolls of fat overflowing above and below their corsets in which they could scarcely breathe. With them were their sergeants in well brushed uniforms, with shining metal buttons and riflemen's pompoms on their chests. And on working days at dusk, officers and civil servants strolled there with their wives, halted on the 
kapia, 
chatted in their incomprehensible language, strolled about at their ease and laughed loudly.