The Bridge on the Drina (31 page)

'Oy my mai-ai-ai-ai-den! O-o-o-y!' ' A far greater commotion than that made by the recruits themselves was made by the women, mothers, sisters and other relatives of the young men, who had come from distant villages to say farewell, to see them for the last time, to weep, to wail and to give them some last gift or final sign of love. The square near the bridge was packed with women. They sat there as if turned to stone, talked among themselves and from time to time wiped away their tears with the fringes of their kerchiefs. In vain it had been earlier explained to them in their villages that the young men were going neither to war nor to slavery, but that they would serve the Emperor in Vienna, and be well fed, well clothed and well shod; that after a term of two years they would return home, and that young men from all the other parts of the Empire served in the army, and that they served for a three-year term. All that passed over their heads like the wind, foreign and completely incomprehensible. They listened only to their instincts and would only be guided by them. These ancient and inherited instincts brought tears to their eyes and a wail to their throats, forced them persistently to follow as long as they could and try to get a last glance at him whom they loved more than life and whom an unknown Emperor was carrying off into an unknown land, to unknown trials and tasks. In vain even now the gendarmes and officials from the 
konak 
went among them and assured them that there was no reason for such exaggerated grief and advised them not to block the way nor rush after the recruits and create trouble and disorder, for they would all return hale and hearty. But it was all in vain. The women listened to them, agreed to all they said dully and humbly and then returned once more to their tears and wailing. It seemed as if they loved their tears and their wailing as much as they loved those for whom they wept.

When the time came to move and the young men were drawn up in four ranks in the correct manner and moved across the bridge, a crowding and rushing began in which even the most equable of gendarmes could hardly retain his composure. The women ran and tore themselves from the hands of the gendarmes in order to be beside someone of their own, pushing and overturning one another. Their wails were mingled with cries, entreaties and last moment recommendations. Some of them even ran in front of the line of recruits whom four gendarmes were keeping in file and fell under their feet, clutching at their bare breasts and shouting:

'Over my body! Over my body!'

The men lifted them up with difficulty, carefully disentangling boots and spurs from dishevelled hair and disordered skirts.

Some of the recruits, ashamed, tried by angry gestures to make the women return home. But most of the young men sang or shouted, increasing the general disorder. The few townsmen among them, pale with emotion, sang together in the town manner:

'In Sarajevo and Bosnia

Every mother mourns

Who has sent her son

As a recruit for the Emperor. ...'

This song created even greater weeping.

When, somehow or other, they crossed the bridge towards which the whole convoy was headed and took the Sarajevo road, all the townspeople were awaiting them, drawn up on each side of the road, in order to see the recruits and to weep for them as if they were being taken away to be shot. There were many women there too who wept for every one of them although none of their own relations was amongst those who were going. For every woman has some reason to weep and weeping is sweetest when it is for another's sorrow.

But little by little the ranks along the road became sparser. Even some of the peasant women gave up. The most persistent were the mothers who ran around the convoy as though they were fifteen years old, leapt the ditch at the side of the road from one side to the other and tried to outwit the gendarmes and stay as long as possible close to their sons. When they saw that, the young men themselves.

pale with emotion and a sort of embarrassment, turned and shouted:

'Get along home when I tell you!'

But the mothers went on for long, blind to all save the sons that were being taken from them and listening to nothing save their own weeping.

But even these troublous days passed. The people dispersed to their villages and the town again grew calm. When letters and the first photographs from the recruits in Vienna began to arrive, everything became easier and more tolerable. The women wept for long over those letters and photographs, but more gently and more calmly.

The 
streifkorps 
was disbanded and left the barracks. For a long time there had been no guard on the 
kapia 
and the townsfolk went on sitting there as they had done before.

Two years quickly pass. That autumn the first recruits returned from Vienna, clean, close-cropped and well-fed. The people clustered around them as they told tales of army life and of the greatness of the cities they had seen, their talk interlarded with strange names and unfamiliar expressions. At the next call-up there was less weeping and agitation.

Generally speaking, everything became easier and more normal. Young men grew up who no longer had any clear or lively memory of Turkish times and who had to a great extent accepted the new ways. But on the 
kapia 
they still lived according to the ancient custom of the town. Without regard for the new fashions of dress, new professions and new trades, the townspeople still went on meeting there as they had done for centuries past, in those conversations which had always been and still were a real need of their hearts and their imaginations. The recruits went to their service without uproar and without commotion. The 
haiduks 
were mentioned only in old men's tales. The 
streifkorps 
was forgotten as completely as that earlier Turkish guard when there had been a blockhouse on the 
kapia.

XIV

Life in the town beside the bridge became more and more animated, seemed more and more orderly and fuller, assuming an even pace and a hitherto unknown balance, that balance towards which all life tends, everywhere and at all times, and which is only rarely, partially and temporarily achieved.

In the far off cities unknown to the townsmen whence at that time the power and administration over these districts originated, there was —in the last quarter of the nineteenth century—one of those short and rare lulls in human relationships and social events. Something of that lull could be felt even in these remote districts, just as a great calm at sea may be felt even in the most distant creeks.

Such were those three decades of relative prosperity and apparent peace in the Franz-Josef manner, when many Europeans thought that there was some infallible formula for the realization of a centuries-old dream of full and happy development of individuality in freedom and in progress, when the nineteenth century spread out before the eyes of millions of men its many-sided and deceptive prosperity and created its 
lata morgana 
of comfort, security and happiness for all and everyone at reasonable prices and even on credit terms. But to this remote Bosnian township only broken echoes penetrated of all this life of the nineteenth century, and those only to the extent and in the form in which this backward oriental society could receive them and in its own manner understand and accept them.

After the first years of distrust, misunderstanding and hesitation, when the first feeling of transience had passed, the town began to find its place in the new order of things. The people found order, work and security. That was enough to ensure that here too life, outward life at least, set out 'on the road of perfection and progress'. Everything else was flushed away into that dark background of consciousness where live and ferment the basic feelings and indestructible beliefs of individual races, faiths and
castes, which, to all appearances dead and buried, are preparing for later far-off times unsuspected changes and catastrophes without which, it seems, peoples cannot exist and above all the peoples of this land.

The new authorities, after the first misunderstandings and clashes, left among the townspeople a definite impression of firmness and of permanence (they were themselves impregnated with this belief without which there can be no strong and permanent authority). They were impersonal and indirect and for that reason more easily bearable than the former Turkish rulers. All that was cruel and grasping was concealed by the dignity and glitter of traditional forms. The people still feared the authorities but in much the same way as they feared sickness and death and not as one fears malice, misery and oppression. The representatives of the new authority, military as well as civil, were for the most part newcomers to the land and unskilful in their dealings with the people and were themselves of little importance, but with every step they made they felt themselves to be part of a greater mechanism and that behind each one of them stood more powerful men and greater organizations in long rows and countless gradations. That gave them a standing which far surpassed their own personality and a magic influence to which it was easier to submit. By their titles which appeared to be great, by their calm and their European customs, they aroused among the people, from whom they so greatly differed, feelings of confidence and respect and did not excite envy or real criticism, even though they were neither pleasant nor loved.

On the other hand, after a certain time, even these newcomers were unable to avoid completely the influence of the unusual oriental milieu in which they had to live. Their children introduced the children of the townspeople to strange phrases and foreign names, brought with them new games and toys, but equally they easily picked up from the local children the old songs, ways of speech, oaths and the traditional games of knucklebones, leap-frog and the like. It was the same with the grown-ups; they too brought a new order, with unfamiliar words and habits, but at the same time they too accepted every day something of the speech and manner of life of the older inhabitants. It is true that the local people, especially the Christians and Jews, began to look more and more like the newcomers in dress and behaviour, but the newcomers themselves did not remain unchanged or untouched by the milieu in which they had to live. Many of these officials, the fiery Magyar or the haughty Pole, crossed the bridge with
reluctance and entered the town with disgust and, at first, were a world apart, like drops of oil in water. Yet a year or so later they could be found sitting for hours on the 
kapia, 
smoking through thick amber cigarette-holders and, as if they had been born in the town, watching the smoke expand and vanish under the clear sky in the motionless air of dusk; or they would sit and wait for supper with the local notables on some green hillock, with plum brandy and snacks and a little bouquet of basil before them, conversing leisurely about trivialities or drinking slowly and occasionally munching a snack as the townsmen knew how to do so well. There were some among these newcomers, officials or artisans, who married in the town and had decided never to leave it.

But for none of the townspeople did the new life mean the realization of what they felt deep down within themselves and had always desired; on the contrary all of them, Moslems and Christians alike, had taken their place in it with many and definite reservations, but these reservations were secret and concealed, whereas life was open and powerful with new and apparently great possibilities. After a longer or shorter period of wavering, most of them fell in with the new ideas, did their business, made fresh acquisitions, and lived according to the new ideas and customs which offered greater scope and, it seemed, gave greater chances to every individual.

Not that the new existence was in any way less subject to conditions or less restricted than in Turkish times, but it was easier and more humane, and those conditions and restrictions were now far away and skilfully enforced, so that the individual did not feel them directly. Therefore it seemed to everyone as if the life around him had suddenly grown wider and clearer, more varied and fuller.

The new state, with its good administrative apparatus, had succeeded in a painless manner, without brutality or commotion, to extract taxes and contributions from the local people which the Turkish authorities had extracted by crude and irrational methods or by simple plunder; and, moreover, it got as much or more, even more swiftly and surely.

Even as the gendarmes, in their own time, had replaced the soldiers and after the soldiers had come the officials, so now, after the officials, came the merchants. Felling began in the forests and brought with it foreign contractors, engineers and workers, and provided varied sources of gain for the ordinary people and traders, with changes in dress and speech. The first hotel was built, of which we shall have much to say later. Canteens and workshops
sprang up which had not been known hitherto. Besides the Spanish speaking Jews, the Sephardi, who had been living in the town for hundreds of years, for they had first settled there about the time when the bridge had been built, there now came the Galician Jews, the Ashkenazi.

Like fresh blood, money began to circulate in hitherto unknown quantities and, which was the main thing, publicly, boldly and openly. In that exciting circulation of gold, silver and negotiable paper, every man could warm his hands or at least 'gladden his eyes', for it created even for the poorest of men the illusion that his own bad luck was only temporary and therefore the more bearable.