The Bridge on the Drina (28 page)

The Višegrad schoolmaster, Husseinaga, a learned and loquacious man, interpreted, as the most competent amongst them to do so, what this noting down of houses by number and this counting of men and children might mean.

'This has, it seems, always been an infidel custom; thirty years ago, if not more, there was a Vezir in Travnik, a certain Tahirpasha Stambolija. He was one of the converted, but false and insincere. He remained a Christian in his soul, as he had once been. He kept, it is said, a bell beside him and when he wanted to call one of his servants he would ring this bell like a Christian priest until someone answered. It was this Tahirpasha who began to number the houses in Travnik and on each house he nailed a tablet with the number (it was for this reason that he was known as "the nailer"). But the people rebelled and collected all those tablets from the houses, made a pile of them and set fire to it. Blood was about to flow for this, but luckily a report of this reached Stambul and he was recalled from Bosnia. May all trace of him be abolished! Now this is something of the same sort. The Schwabes want to have registers of everything, even our heads.'

They all stared straight in front of them and listened to the schoolmaster who was well known to prefer recounting long and detailed stories of the past to giving his own opinion shortly and clearly on what was taking place in the present.

As always, Alihodja was the first to lose patience.

'This does not concern the Schwabes' faith, Muderis Effendi; it concerns their interests. They are not playing and do not waste their time even when they are sleeping but look well to their own affairs. We cannot see today what all this means, but we shall see it in a month or two, or perhaps a year. For, as the late lamented Shemsibeg Branković used to say: "The Schwabes' mines have long fuses!" This numbering of houses and men, or so I see it, is necessary for them because of some new tax, or else they are thinking of getting men for forced labour or for their army, or perhaps both. If you ask me what we should do, this is my opinion. We have not got the army to rise at once in revolt. That God sees and all men know. But we do not have to obey all that we are commanded. No one need remember his number nor tell his age. Let them guess when each one of us was born. If they go too far and interfere with our children and our honour, then we shall not
give way but will defend ourselves, and then let it be as God wills!'

They went on discussing the unpalatable measures of the authorities for a long time, but in the main they were in agreement with what Alihodja had recommended: passive resistance. Men concealed their ages or gave false information, making the excuse that they were illiterate. And as for women no one even dared to ask about them, for that would have been considered a deadly insult. Despite all the instructions and threats of the authorities the tablets with the house numbers were nailed upside down or hidden away in places where they were invisible. Or else they immediately whitewashed their houses and, as if by chance, the house number was whitewashed too.

Seeing that the resistance was deep-seated and sincere, though concealed, the authorities turned a blind eye, avoiding any strict application of the laws with all the consequences and disputes which would inevitably have ensued.

Two years passed. The agitation about the census had been forgotten when the recruitment of young men, irrespective of faith and class, was actually put into force. Open rebellion broke out in Eastern Herzegovina, in which not only Turks but also Serbs took part. The leaders of the rebels tried to establish ties with foreign countries, especially with Turkey, and claimed that the occupation authorities had gone beyond the powers granted them at the Berlin Congress and that they had no right to recruit in the occupied districts which still remained under nominal Turkish suzerainty. In Bosnia there was no organized resistance, but the revolt spread by way of Foča and Goražda to the borders of the Višegrad district. Individual insurgents or the remnants of routed bands tried to seek refuge in the Sanjak or in Serbia, crossing the bridge at Višegrad. As always in such circumstances, in addition to the rebellion, banditry began to flourish.

So once more, after so many years, a guard was mounted on the 
kapia. 
Though it was winter and heavy snow had fallen, two gendarmes kept watch on the 
kapia 
day and night. They stopped all unknown or suspected persons crossing the bridge, interrogated them and inspected their belongings.

A fortnight later a detachment of 
streifkorps 
appeared in the town and relieved the gendarmes on the 
kapia. 
The 
streifkorps 
had been organized when the rebellion in Herzegovina had begun to assume serious proportions. They were mobile storm troops, picked men equipped for action in difficult terrain, and made up of well paid volunteers. Amongst them were men who had
responded to the first call-up with the occupation troops and did not want to return to their homes, but remained to serve in the 
streiikorps. 
Others had been seconded from the gendarmerie to the new mobile units. Finally, there were also a certain number of local inhabitants who served as informers and guides.

Throughout that winter, which was neither short nor mild, a guard of two 
streiikorps 
men kept watch on the bridge. Usually the guard consisted of one stranger and one local man. They did not build a blockhouse, as the Turks had done during the Karageorge insurrection in Serbia. There was no killing or cutting off of heads. But none the less this time, as always when the 
kapia 
was closed, there were unusual events which left their trace on the town. For hard times cannot pass without misfortune for someone.

Among the 
streiikorps 
men who mounted guard on the 
kapia 
was a young man, Gregor Fedun, a Ruthenian from Eastern Galicia. This young man was then in his twenty-third year, of gigantic stature but childlike mind, strong as a bear but modest as a girl. He had almost completed his military service when his regiment was sent to Bosnia. He had taken part in fighting at Maglaj and on the Glasinac Mountains and had then spent eighteen months on garrison duty in Eastern Bosnia. When his time was up, he had not wanted to go back to his Galician town of Kolomea and to his father's house which was rich in children but in little else. He was in Pest with his group when the call for volunteers to enrol in the 
streiikorps 
was made. As a soldier who knew Bosnia through several months of fighting, Fedun was accepted at once. He was sincerely glad at the thought that he was again to see the Bosnian townships and hamlets where he had spent both hard and pleasant days, of which his memory recalled the days of hardship as more beautiful and lively even than the pleasant ones. He melted with joy and was filled with pride, imagining the faces of his parents, brothers and sisters when they received the first silver florins which he would send them from his ample 
streiikorps 
pay. Above all he had the good fortune not to be sent into Eastern Herzegovina where the fighting with the insurgents was tiring and often very dangerous, but to the town on the Drina where his duties consisted of patrolling and guard-keeping.

There he spent the winter, stamping his feet and blowing on his fingers on the 
kapia 
in the clear frosty nights, when the stones cracked in the frost and the sky paled above the town so that the large autumn stars became tiny, wicked little candles. There he awaited the spring and watched its first signs on the 
kapia: 
that dull, heavy booming of the ice on the Drina which a man feels deep down
in his entrails, and that sullen soughing of some new wind which has howled all night through the naked forests on the mountains close pressed above the bridge.

The young man mounted guard in his turn and felt how the spring, with all its signs on the earth and on the waters, was slowly entering into him also, flooding his whole being and troubling his senses and his thoughts. He kept watch and hummed all the Ruthenian songs which were sung in his own country. As he sang it seemed to him, more and more every spring day, as if he were waiting for someone on that exposed and windy spot.

At the beginning of March, headquarters sent an order to the detachment guarding the bridge to double their precautions since, according to reliable information, the notorious brigand Jakov Čekrlija had crossed from Herzegovina into Bosnia and was now hiding somewhere near Višegrad whence, in all likelihood, he would try to reach either the Serbian or the Turkish frontier. The 
streifkorps 
men on guard were given a personal description of him, with the comment that the brigand, though physically small and insignificant, was very strong, daring and exceptionally cunning, and had already several times succeeded in escaping and outwitting the patrols that had surrounded him.

Fedun had listened to this warning when making his report, and had taken it seriously as he did all official communications. But he had considered it to be unnecessarily exaggerated, since he could not imagine how anyone could cross unperceived that ten paces which constituted the width of the bridge. Calm and unworried he passed several hours, by day and by night, on the 
kapia. 
His attention was indeed doubled, but it was not taken up with the appearance of Jakov, of whom there was neither sight nor sound, but with those countless signs and portents by which spring announced its arrival on the 
kapia.

It is not easy to concentrate all one's attention on a single object when one is twenty-three years old, when one's body is quivering with strength and life and when around one, on all sides, spring is burgeoning, shining and filling the air with perfume. The snow was melting in the ravines, the river ran swift and grey as smoked glass, the wind which blew from the north-east brought the breath of snow from the mountains and the first buds to the valleys. All this intoxicated and distracted Fedun as he paced out the space from one terrace to the other or, when on night duty, leant against the parapet and hummed his Ruthenian songs to the accompaniment of the wind. By day or by night the feeling that he was waiting for someone never left him, a feeling tormenting and yet sweet, and which seemed to
find confirmation in all that was taking place around him, in the waters, the earth and the sky.

One day about lunchtime a Turkish girl passed the guard. She was of the age when Turkish girls, not yet veiled in the heavy 
feridjah, 
no longer go with uncovered faces but wrap themselves in a large thin shawl which conceals the whole body, the hair and the hands, chin and forehead, but still leaves uncovered a part of the face: eyes, nose, mouth and cheeks. She was in that short phase between childhood and womanhood when the Moslem girls show innocently and gaily their still childish and yet womanly features which, perhaps even the next day, will be covered forever by the 
feridjah.

There was not a living soul on the 
kapia. 
Fedun's fellow guard was a certain Stevan of Prača, one of the peasants attached to the 
streif-korps. 
He was a man of a certain age, by no means averse to plum brandy, who sat drowsing, contrary to regulations, on the stone 
sofa.

Fedun looked at the girl timidly and cautiously. Around her floated her gaily-coloured shawl, waving and shimmering in the sunlight as if alive, moving with the gusts of wind and in rhythm with the girl's pace. Her calm lovely face was closely and tightly framed by the stretched weave of the shawl. Her eyes were downcast but flickering. So she passed before him and disappeared across the bridge into the market.

The young man paced more briskly from one terrace to the other and kept an eye fixed on the market-place. Now it seemed to him that he really had someone for whom to wait. After half an hour — the noonday lull was still unbroken on the bridge —the Turkish girl returned from the market and again crossed before the troubled youth. This time he looked at her a little longer and more boldly, and what was even more wonderful she too looked at him, a short but candid glance, with a sort of half-smile, almost cunningly but with that innocent cunning with which children get the better of one another at their games. Then she swayed away again, moving Slowly but none the less vanishing quickly from his sight, with a thousand bends and movements of the wide shawl wrapped about her young but sturdy figure. The oriental design and lively colours of that shawl could long be seen between the houses on the farther bank.

Only then did the young man wake from his reverie. He stood in the same place and in the same position as he had been at the moment when she had passed before him. With a start he fingered his rifle and looked around him with the sensation of a man who has let slip his opportunity. Stevan was still dozing in the deceptive March sun. It seemed to the young man that both of them had in some way failed in their duty and that a whole army platoon could have passed by
them without him being able to say how many of them there were, or what significance they might have had for himself or for others. Ashamed of himself, he woke Stevan in exaggerated zeal and they both remained on guard until their relief arrived.