The Bridge on the Drina (37 page)

Every hole was plugged, the grasses plucked out and the birds' nests removed. When they had finished this task, work began on the waterlogged foundations of the bridge. The current was checked and its course altered so that the blackened and corroded stone could be seen, together with an occasional oak beam, worn away but petrified by the waters in which it had been placed 330 years
before. The indefatigable lifts lowered cement and gravel, load after load, and the three central piers which were the most exposed to the strong current and the most corroded were filled in at the bases as a rotten tooth is filled at its root.

That summer there were no sessions on the 
kapia 
and the customary life around the bridge was suspended. The bridge was crowded with horses and carts bringing sand and cement. The shouts of the workmen and the orders of the foremen echoed from all sides. On the 
kapia 
itself a wooden toolshed was erected.

The townsmen watched the work on the great bridge, astonished and perplexed. Some made a jest of it, others only waved their arms and went their way, and to all of them it seemed that the foreigners were doing this work, as they did all other work, only because they must work at something. Work for them was a necessity and they could not do otherwise. No one said this, but everybody thought it.

All those who had been accustomed to pass their time on the 
kapia 
now sat outside Lotte's hotel, Zarije's inn or in front of the wooden door-shutters of the shops near the bridge. There they drank coffee and told stories, waiting until the 
kapia
should be free again and that attack on the bridge should pass, as a man waits for the end of a shower or some other inconvenience.

In front of Alihodja's shop which was sandwiched between the Stone Han and Zarije's inn, where the bridge could be seen from an angle, two Turks sat from early morning, two hangers-on in the market-place, chatting about everything and more especially about the bridge.

Alihodja listened to them in ill-humoured silence, pensively watching the bridge which was swarming with workmen like ants.

In those twenty years the 
hodja 
had married three times. Now he had a wife much younger than himself and malicious tongues said that that was the reason he was always ill-humoured until noon. By these three wives he had fourteen children. His house was filled with a noisy crowd all day long and in the market-place they said in jest that the 
hodja 
did not know all his own children by name. They even told a story of how one of his numerous brood met the 
hodja 
in a sidestreet and took his hand to kiss it, but the 
hodja 
only stroked his head and asked: 'God give you good health, son! And whose may you be?'

To the eye the 
hodja 
had not changed greatly; only he was now plumper and redder in the face. He no longer moved so briskly and went home up that steep slope to Mejdan more slowly than before, for his heart had been troubling him for some time, even when
he was asleep. He had therefore gone to the district doctor, Dr Marovski, the only one of the newcomers whom he recognized and respected. The doctor gave him some drops which did not cure his ills, but helped him to bear them, and from him Alihodja learnt the Latin name for his complaint: 
angina pectoris.

Alihodja was one of the few local Turks who had accepted none of the novelties and changes which the newcomers had brought, either in dress, in customs, in speech or in methods of trade and business. With that same bitter obstinacy with which he had at one time stood out against useless resistance, he had for years stood out against everything that was Austrian and foreign and against everything that was gathering impetus around him. For that reason he sometimes came into conflict with others and had had to pay fines to the police. Now he was a little tired and disillusioned, but he was essentially just the same as he had been when he had argued with Karamanli on the 
kapia, 
obstinate in everything and at all times; save that his proverbial freedom of speech had turned to sharpness and his fighting spirit into a sullen bitterness which even the most daring words could not express and which was calmed and extinguished only in silence and in solitude.

With time the 
hodja 
had fallen more and more into a sort of calm meditation in which he had no need of anyone else and found all men hard to endure. Everyone, the idle merchants of the marketplace,
¹
 his customers, his young wife and all that horde of urchins which filled his house with noise, irritated him. Before the sun rose he fled from his house to his shop which he opened before any of the other merchants. There he carried out his morning devotions. There his lunch was brought to him. And when, during the day, conversation, visitors and business bored him, he put up the wooden shutters and withdrew into a tiny closet behind the shop which he called his coffin. That was a secret place, narrow, low and dark; the 
hodja
almost filled it when he crawled in. He had there a small stool covered with a rug on which he could sit with crossed legs, a few shelves with empty boxes, old scales and all sorts of rubbish for which there was no room in the shop. In that narrow dark hole the 
hodja 
could hear through the thin walls of his shop the hum of life in the market-place, the sound of horses' hooves and the cries of the sellers. All that came to him as from another world. He could hear too some of the passers-by who stopped before his closed shop and made malicious jokes and comments about him. But he listened to them calmly, for to him these men were dead and had not realized it; he knew
and forgot them in the same moment. Hidden behind those few planks, he felt himself completely protected from all that this life could bring him, this life which in his opinion had long become rotten and proceeded along evil ways. There the
hodja 
shut himself in with his thoughts on the destiny of the world and the course of human affairs, and forgot all else, the market-place, his worries about debts and bad tenants, his too young wife whose youth and beauty had suddenly turned into a stupid and malicious ill-humour, and that brood of children which would have been a heavy burden on an Emperor's treasury and about which he thought only with horror.

After he had recovered his spirits and rested there, the 
hodja 
would again take down his shutters as if he had just come back from somewhere.

So now he listened to the empty chatter of his two neighbours.

'You see now how the times are and the gifts of God; time eats away even stone like the sole of a shoe. But the Schwabes will not have it so and at once mend what is damaged,' philosophized one of them, a well-known lazybones from the market-place, as he sipped Alihodja's coffee.

'While the Drina is the Drina the bridge will be the bridge. Even if they had not touched it, it would last its appointed time. All this expense and all this trouble will serve them nothing,' said the other guest, of the same occupation as the first.

They would have dragged on their idle chatter indefinitely had not Alihodja interrupted.

'And I tell you that no good will come of their interfering with the bridge. You will see, nothing good will come of all this restoration. What they repair today they will tear down again tomorrow. The late lamented Mula Ibrahim used to tell me that he had learnt from ancient books that it is a great sin to meddle with living water, to turn its course aside or change it, were it even for a day or an hour. But the Schwabes do not feel themselves alive unless they are hammering or chiselling something or other. They would turn the whole world upside down if they could!'

The first of the idlers tried to show that, when all was said and done, it was not so bad that the Schwabes should repair the bridge. If it did not prolong its life it would at any rate do it no harm.

'And how do you know that they will do it no harm?' the 
hodja 
broke in angrily. 'Who told you? Don't you know that a single word can destroy whole cities; how much more then such a babel! All this earth of God's was built upon a word. If you were literate
and educated, as you are not, then you would know that this is not a building like any other, but one of those erected by God's will and for God's love; a certain time and certain men built it, and another time and other men will destroy it. You know what the old men say about the Stone Han; there was none other like it in the Empire. Yet who destroyed it? Had it been a question of its solidity and the skill of its construction it would have lasted a thousand years; yet it has melted away as if it had been made of wax and now on the place where it was the pigs grunt and the Schwabes' trumpet sounds.'

'But, as I think, I believe .. .' the idler replied.

'You believe wrongly,' interrupted the 
hodja. 
'According to your ideas nothing would ever have been built and nothing destroyed. That has never occurred to you. But I tell you that all this is not good, it foretells evil, for the bridge and for the town and for all of us who are looking at it with our own eyes.'

'He is right. The 
hodja 
knows best what the bridge is,' broke in the other idler, maliciously recalling Alihodja's one-time martydom on the 
kapia.

'You needn't think that I don't know,' said the 
hodja 
with conviction and at once began, quite calmly to tell one of his stories at which the townsfolk used to mock, but to which they loved to listen time and time again.

'At one time my late lamented father heard from Sheik Dedije and told me as a child how bridges first came to this world and how the first bridge was built. When Allah the Merciful and Compassionate first created this world, the earth was smooth and even as a finely engraved plate. That displeased the devil who envied man this gift of God. And while the earth was still just as it had come from God's hands, damp and soft as unbaked clay, he stole up and scratched the face of God's earth with his nails as much and as deeply as he could. Therefore, the story says, deep rivers and ravines were formed which divided one district from another and kept men apart, preventing them from travelling on that earth that God had given them as a garden for their food and their support. And Allah felt pity when he saw what the Accursed One had done, but was not able to return to the task which the devil had spoiled with his nails, so he sent his angels to help men and make things easier for them. When the angels saw how unfortunate men could not pass those abysses and ravines to finish the work they had to do, but tormented themselves and looked in vain and shouted from one side to the other, they spread their wings above those places and men were able to cross. So men learned from the angels of God how to build bridges, and therefore,
after fountains, the greatest blessing is to build a bridge and the greatest sin to interfere with it, for every bridge, from a tree trunk crossing a mountain stream to this great erection of Mehmed Pasha, has its guardian angel who cares for it and maintains it as long as God has ordained that it should stand.'

'So it is, so it is, by God's will!' the two idlers marvelled humbly.

So they passed their time in conversation, as the days passed and the work went on there on the bridge, whence they could hear the squeaking of carts and the pounding of machines mixing sand and cement.

As always, in this discussion too, the 
hodja 
had the last word. No one wanted to press an argument with him to the end, least of all those two idle and empty-headed fellows who drank their coffee there and knew well that the next day also they would have to pass a good part of their long day in front of his shop.

So Alihodja talked to everyone who stopped before the shutters of his shop, whether on business or just making a call. They all listened to him with mocking curiosity and apparent attention, but no one in the town shared his opinions or had any understanding of his pessimism or his forebodings of evil, which he himself was unable to explain or to support by proof. Furthermore they had for long been accustomed to look on the 
hodja 
as an eccentric and an obstinate man who now, under the influence of ripening years, difficult circumstances and a young wife, saw the black side of everything and gave everything a special and ill-omened significance.

The townspeople were, for the most part, indifferent to the work on the bridge, as they were towards everything which the newcomers had been doing for years in and about the town. Only the children were disappointed when they saw that the workmen with their wooden ladders went in through that black opening in the central pier, that 'room' in Which by universal childish belief the Arab lived. From this place the workmen brought out and tipped into the river countless baskets of birds' droppings. And that was all. The Arab never appeared. The children made themselves late for school, waiting vainly for hours for the black man to emerge from his darkness and strike the first workman in his path, strike him so strongly that he would fly from his moving scaffolding in a great curve into the river. They were furious that this had not happened, and some of the urchins tried to say that it had happened already, but they did not sound convincing and all their 'words of honour' were to no purpose.