The Bridge on the Drina (36 page)

So, dancing in a sort of ecstasy, he passed the parapet around the 
sofa 
and then the second half of the bridge. When he came to the end he leapt down and looked confusedly about him, in wonder that he had once again landed on the hard and familiar Višegrad road. The crowd which till then had accompanied him with encouragement and jokes welcomed him. Those who had halted in fear rushed up. They began to embrace him, to clap him on the back and on his faded fez. All of them shouted together:

'Aferim, bravo, Ćorkan, our falcon!'

'Bravo, hero!'

'Rum for Ćorkan!' yelled Santo Papo in a raucous voice with a Spanish accent, thinking that he was in the inn.

In this general uproar and commotion someone proposed that they stay together and not go home, but go on drinking in honour of Ćorkan's exploit.

Those children who were then in their eighth and ninth years and were that morning hurrying across the frozen bridge to their distant school stopped and stared at the unusual sight. They opened their mouths in astonishment and little clouds of steam rose from them. Tiny, muffled up, with slates and schoolbooks under their arms, they could not understand this game of the grown-ups, but for the rest of their lives they would remember, together with the lines of their own bridge, the picture of Ćorkan the One-Eyed, that man so well known to them who now, transfigured and light, dancing daringly and joyously as if transported by magic, walked where it was forbidden to walk and where no one ever dared to go.

XVI

A score of years had passed since the first yellow Austrian military vehicles had crossed the bridge. Twenty years of occupation — that is a long sequence of days and months. Each such day and month, taken by itself, seemed uncertain and temporary, but all of them taken together constituted the longest period of peace and material progress that the town ever remembered, the main part of the life of that generation which at the moment of the occupation had just come to years of discretion.

These were years of apparent prosperity and safe gains, even though small, when mothers speaking of their sons said: 'May he live and be healthy and may God grant him easy bread!', and when even the wife of tall Ferhat, the eternal poor man, who lit the municipal street lamps and received for his work the wage of twelve florins a month, said with pride: 'Thanks be to God, even my Ferhat has become an official.'

The last years of the nineteenth century, years without upheavals or important events, flowed past like a broad calm river before reaching its unknown mouth. Judging from them, it seemed as if tragic moments had ceased to disturb the life of the European peoples or that of the town beside the bridge. In so far as they took place now and again in the world outside, they did not penetrate to Višegrad and were far-off and incomprehensible to its townspeople.

Thus, one summer day after so many years, there once more appeared on the 
kapia 
a white official notice. It was short and this time framed in a heavy black border, and announced that Her Majesty the Empress Elizabeth had died in Geneva, the victim of a dastardly assassination by an Italian anarchist, Lucchieni. The announcement went on to express the disgust and profound sorrow of all the peoples of the great Austro-Hungarian Monarchy and called on them to rally still more closely around the throne in loyal devotion and thereby afford the greatest consolation to the
ruler whom fate had so heavily bereaved.

The announcement was pasted up below the white plaque with the Turkish inscription, as had at one time been the proclamation of General Filipović about the occupation, and all the people read it with emotion since it concerned an Empress, a woman, but without any real understanding or deep sympathy.

For a few evenings there were no songs or noisy gatherings on the 
kapia 
by order of the authorities.

There was only one man in the town whom this news deeply affected. He was Pietro Sola, the only Italian in the town, a contractor and builder, stone-mason and artist, in short a man of all tasks and the specialist of the town. Maistor-Pero, as the whole town called him, had come at the time of the occupation and had remained in the town, marrying a certain Stana, a poor girl of not too savoury a reputation. She was reddish, powerful, twice as big as Maistor-Pero and was considered a woman of sharp tongue and heavy hand with whom it was better not to quarrel. Maistor-Pero himself was a small, bent, good-natured man with mild blue eyes and pendent moustaches. He worked well and earned much. In time he had become a real townsman only, like Lotte, he was never able to master the language and the pronunciation. Because of his skilful hands and gentle nature he was loved by the whole town and his athletically powerful wife led him through life strictly and maternally, like a child.

When, returning home from work grey with stone-dust and streaked with paint, Maistor-Pero read the announcement on the 
kapia, 
he pulled his hat down over his eyes and feverishly bit on the thin pipe which was always between his teeth. He explained to the more serious and respected citizens whom he met that he, although an Italian, had nothing in common with this Lucchieni and his dastardly crime. The people listened to him, consoled him and assured him that they believed him and that, furthermore, they had never even thought anything of the sort about him. None the less, he went on explaining to everyone that he was ashamed to be alive, that he had never even killed a chicken in his life how much less a human being, and that a woman and so great a personage. In the end his timidity became a real mania. The townspeople began to laugh at Maistor-Pero's worries, his zeal and his superfluous assurances that he had nothing in common with anarchists and murderers. The urchins of the town at once made up a cruel game. Hidden behind some fence they would shout at Maistor-Pero: 'Lucchieni!' The poor devil defended himself from these shouts as from a swarm of wasps, pulled his hat down over
his eyes and fled home to bewail his fate and weep on the broad lap of his Stana.

'I am ashamed, I am ashamed,' sobbed the little man, 'I can't look anyone in the face.'

'Get along, you old fool, what have you to be ashamed of? That an Italian has murdered the Empress? Let the Italian king be ashamed of that! But who are you and what have you done to be ashamed of?'

'I am ashamed to be alive,' wailed Maistor-Pero to the woman, who shook him and tried to instil a little strength and resolution into him and to teach him to walk through the market-place with head held high, not lowering his gaze before anyone.

Meanwhile the older men sat on the 
kapia 
with stony faces and downcast looks and listened to the most recent news, with details of the murder of the Austrian Empress. The news was no more than an excuse for a discussion on the fate of crowned heads and great men. Surrounded by a group of respectable, inquisitive and unlettered Turkish merchants, the Višegrad schoolmaster Hussein Effendi was holding forth on who and what were anarchists.

The schoolmaster was just as stiff and solemn, clean and neat, as he had been twenty years before when awaiting the arrival of the first Schwabes with Mula Ibrahim and Pop Nikola, both of whom had long been lying in their respective graveyards. His beard was already grey but just as carefully trimmed and rounded, his whole smooth face calm and peaceful, for men with a rigid under-standihg and hard heart age slowly. The high opinion which he had always had of himself had grown even greater in these last twenty years. It may be said in passing that the case of books on which his reputation as a learned man rested to a great extent was still largely unread, and his chronicle of the town had grown in these twenty years by four pages only, for the older the schoolmaster grew he esteemed himself and his chronicle more and more and the events around him less and less.

Now he spoke in a low voice, slowly as if reading from some obscure manuscript and in a dignified manner, solemnly and severely, using the fate of the infidel Empress only as a pretext which did not in any way enter into the real sense of his interpretation. According to this interpretation (and that too was not his own, for he had found it in the good old books inherited from his one-time teacher, the famous Arap-hodja) those now known as anarchists had always existed and would always exist while the world lasted. Human life was so ordered —and God, the One, the Merciful and Compassionate, had so ordained—that for every dram of good there were two drams of evil and there could be
no goodness on this earth without hatred and no greatness without envy, even as there was not even the smallest object without its shadow. That was particularly true of famous people. Beside each one of them, alongside their glory, was also their executioner waiting for his chance and who seized it, sometimes earlier, sometimes later.

'Take for example our countryman Mehmed Pasha who has long been in Paradise,' said the schoolmaster and pointed to the stone plaque above the proclamation, 'who served three Sultans and was wiser than Asaf and who by his power and piety erected even this stone on which we are sitting and who too died by the knife. Despite all his power and wisdom he was unable to escape his appointed hour. Those whom the Grand Vezir hindered in their plans, and they were a great and powerful party, found a way to arm and suborn a mad dervish to kill him, and that just at the moment when he was entering the mosque to pray. With his shabby dervish cloak on his back and a rosary in his hand the dervish barred the way of the Vezir's suite and humbly and hypocritically asked for alms, and when the Vezir was about to put his hand in his pocket to give them to him, the dervish stabbed him. And so Mehmed Pasha died as a martyr to the faith.'

The men listened and blowing the smoke of their cigarettes far from them looked now at the stone plaque with the inscription, now at the white placard bordered by a black line. They listened attentively, though not one of them fully understood every word of the schoolmaster's interpretation. But, looking through their cigarette smoke into the distance, beyond the inscription and the placard, they seemed to see somewhere in the world another and different life, a life of great ascents and sudden falls, in which greatness mingled with tragedy and which in some manner maintained a balance with this peaceful and monotonous existence of theirs on the 
kapia.

But those days passed too. The old order returned to the 
kapia 
with its usual loud conversations, jokes and songs. Discussions about anarchists ceased; the announcement of the death of that foreign and little-known Empress changed under the influence of sun, rain and dust until at last the wind tore it away and it floated in fragments down river into the void.

For a little longer the ragamuffins of the town shouted 'Lucchieni' after Maistor-Pero without knowing themselves what they meant nor why they did so, but solely from that childish need to tease and torment weak and sensitive creatures. They shouted, and then ceased to shout having found some other amusement. Stana of Mejdan contributed not a little to this result by mercilessly beating two of the most obstreperous of the urchins.

After a couple of months no one mentioned the Empress's death or anarchists any longer. That life at the end of the century, which seemed tamed and domesticated for ever, concealed everything beneath its wide and monotonous course and left among men the feeling that a century was opening of peaceful industry leading into some distant and unattainable future.

That unceasing and irresistible activity to which the foreign administrators seemed condemned and with which the townspeople were with difficulty reconciled, though they had just this to thank for their livelihood and their prosperity, changed many things in the course of those twenty years, in the outward appearance of the town and in the costume and habits of its citizens. It was natural that it would not stop short of the ancient bridge which looked eternally the same.

It was in 1900, the close of that happy century and the beginning of the new, which in the feelings and opinions of many was to be even happier, that engineers came to examine the bridge. The people were already accustomed to such things; even the children knew what it meant when these men in leather overcoats, with breast-pockets stuffed with varicoloured pencils, began to prowl about some hill or some building. It meant that something would be demolished, built, dug up or changed. Only no one was able to imagine what they could be doing with the bridge which to every living soul in the town meant a thing as eternal and unalterable as the earth on which they trod or the skies above them; But the engineers inspected it, measured it and took notes; then they Went away and the matter was forgotten. But about midsummer, when the river was at its lowest, contractors and workmen suddenly began to arrive and erect temporary lean-tos to store their tools near the bridge. Already the rumour spread that the bridge was to be repaired, and complicated scaffolding was erected near the piers and on the bridge itself windlass lifts were set up; 
by 
their help the workers moved up and down the piers as on some narrow wooden balcony and stopped at places where there was a hole or where tufts of grass had grown out of the stonework.