The Bridge on the Drina (46 page)

'Thou art wise as thou art lovely. Lovely Fata Avdagina! . . .'

They recognized the voices of a number of young merchants' and landowners' sons. Some were walking slowly and sedately, others wavered and tottered. From their noisy jests it could be concluded that they had come from 'Under the Poplars'.

More than fifteen years earlier, even before the building of the railway had begun, a certain Hungarian and his wife had settled in the town. He was called Terdik and his wife Julka. She spoke Serbian for she had been born in Novi Sad. It soon became known that they had come with the intention of opening a business in the town for which the local people had no name. They opened it on the outskirts of the town, under the tall poplars which grew on the Stražište slopes, in an old Turkish house which they completely rebuilt.

This was the town's house of shame. All day long the windows remained shuttered. As dusk fell a white acetylene lamp was lit in the doorway which burned there all night. Songs and the tinkle of an automatic piano echoed from the ground floor. Young men and dissolute idlers bandied about among themselves the names of the girls whom Terdik had brought and kept there. At first there were four of them: Irma, Ilona, Frieda and Aranka.

Every Friday 'Julka's girls' could be seen going in two cabs up to the hospital for their weekly inspection. They were heavily rouged and powdered, with flowers in their hats and with long-handled sunshades with streamers of floating lace. When these cabs went by, the women of the town hustled their daughters out of sight and averted
their eyes with mixed feelings of shame, disgust and pity.

When work began on the railway and there was an influx of money and workers, the number of girls was increased. Besides the old Turkish house, Terdik built a new 'planned' one with a red-tiled roof which could be seen from afar. There were three rooms; the general room, the 
extra-zimmer 
and the officers' salon. In each of them were different prices and different guests. At 'Under the Poplars', as it was known in the town, the sons and grandsons of those who had once drunk at Zarije's inn, or later at Lotte's, could leave their inherited or hard-won money. The grossest practical jokes, the most notorious quarrels, wild drinking parties and sentimental dramas took place there. Many personal and family misfortunes had their origins in that house.

The centre of that group of drunkards who had spent the first part of the night 'Under the Poplars' and had now come to cool off on the 
kapia 
was a certain Nikola Pecikoza, a silly good-natured youth whom they made drunk and on whom they played their jokes.

Before the drunkards reached the 
kapia 
they halted by the parapet. A loud and drunken argument could be heard. Nikola Pecikoza bet two litres of wine that he would walk along the stone parapet to the end of the bridge. The bet was taken and the young man climbed on to the parapet and set out with arms outspread, placing one foot carefully before the other like a sleepwalker. When he reached the 
kapia 
he noticed the two late visitors; he said nothing to them but humming some song and wavering in his drunkenness continued on his dangerous way, while the merry party accompanied him. His great shadow in the weak moonlight danced on the bridge and broke into fragments on the opposite parapet.

The drunkards passed by in a frenzy of disconnected shouts and stupid comments. The two young men rose and, without saying goodnight, each went his own way to his own house.

Glasičanin disappeared into the darkness towards the left bank where was the path which led to his house up at Okolište. Stiković made his way with slow steps in the opposite direction towards the market-place. He walked slowly and irresolutely. He did not want to leave that place which was lighter and fresher than in the town. He halted by the parapet. He felt the need to catch hold of something, to lean on something.

The moon had set behind the Vidova Gora. Leaning on the stone parapet at the end of the bridge the young man looked long at the huge shadows and few lights of his native town as if he now saw it for the first time. Only two windows were still lighted in the officers' mess. The music could no longer be heard. Probably the unhappy lovers were there, the doctor and the colonel's lady, holding their discussions on music and on love or about their personal fates which would not permit them to be at peace with themselves or with one another.

From the spot where Stiković was now standing he could see that one window was still lighted in Lotte's hotel. The young man looked at those lighted windows on each side of the bridge as if he expected something from them. He was tired out and melancholy. The vertiginous walk of that idiot Pecikoza suddenly reminded him of his earliest childhood, when on his way to school he had seen in the mist of a winter's morning the squat figure of Čorkan dancing on that same parapet. Every memory of his childhood aroused sorrow and uneasiness in him. That sentiment of fateful and exalted greatness and universal flight above everyone and everything which Glasičanin's bitter and fiery words had excited in him was now lost. It seemed to him that he had suddenly fallen from the heights and that he was crawling on the darkened earth with everyone else. The memory of what had happened with the schoolmistress, and should not have happened, tormented him as if someone else had done it in his name; so too did the article which now seemed to him weak and full of faults, as if another had written it and had published it in his name and against his will. He thought of the long conversation with Glasičanin which now all of a sudden seemed to him full of malice and hate, of bitter insults and real perils.

He shivered inwardly and from the chill which arose from the river. As if suddenly awakened he noticed that the two windows in the officers' mess were no longer lighted. The last guests were leaving the building. He could hear the clink of their swords as they crossed the darkened square and the sound of loud, artificial chatter. The young man regretfully left the parapet and, looking at the solitary window still alight in the hotel, the last light in the sleeping town, made his way slowly towards his simple house up there at Mejdan.

XX

The only lighted window in the hotel, which remained as the last sign of life that night in the town, was that small window on the first floor where Lotte's room was. Even at night Lotte sat there at her overladen table. It was just as it had been earlier, more than twenty years before, when she had come to this little room to snatch a moment of respite from the bustle and noise of the hotel. Only now everything downstairs was dark and quiet.

At ten o'clock that night Lotte had withdrawn to her room to sleep. But before she lay down she went over to the window to breathe in the freshness from the river and to take a last glance at that arch of the bridge which was the only and eternally the same view from her window. Then she remembered some old account and sat down to look for it. Once she began looking through her accounts she became absorbed and remained for more than two hours at her table.

Midnight had long passed while Lotte, wakeful and absorbed, entered figure after figure and turned paper after paper.

Lotte was tired. In the daytime, in conversation and at work, she was still animated and talkative, but at night when she was alone she felt all the weight of her years and her fatigue. She had grown old. Of her onetime beauty only traces remained. She had grown thinner and yellow in the face; her hair was without lustre and was growing thin on her scalp, and her teeth, once shining and strong, were yellow and showed gaps. The glance of her black and still shining eyes was hard and at times sad.

Lotte was tired, but not with that blessed and sweet tiredness which follows heavy work and great gains, such as at one time had driven her to search for rest and respite in that room. Old age had come upon her and the times were no longer good.

She would not have been able to express in words, nor could she explain it to herself, but she felt at every step that the times were out of joint, at any rate for one who had always kept only
her own good and that of her family before her eyes. When, thirty years before, she had come to Bosnia and begun work there, life had seemed all of a piece. Everyone was moving in the same direction as she was; work and family. Everyone was in his right place and there was a place for everyone. And over everyone reigned one order and one law, an established order and a strict law. So had the world then appeared to Lotte. Now everything had changed and was topsy-turvy. Men were divided and separated without, it seemed to her, rhyme or reason. The law of profit and loss, that divine law which had always controlled human activities, seemed as if it were no longer valid, for so many men worked, spoke or wrote about things of which she could not see the aim or the sense and which could only end in misfortune and damage. Life was bursting asunder, was crumbling, was disintegrating. It seemed to her that the present generation attached more importance to its views on life than to life itself. It seemed to her mad and completely incomprehensible, yet it was so. Therefore life was losing its value and wasting away in mere words. Lotte saw this clearly and felt it at every step.

Her business affairs, which at one time had seemed to gambol before her eyes like a flock of spring lambs, now lay inert and dead like the great tombstones in the Jewish cemetery. For the past ten years the hotel had done little business. The forests around the town had been cut down and felling was moving farther and farther away, and with it the best of the hotel's customers and the greater part of its profits. That shameless and insolent boor, Terdik, had opened his house 'under the poplars' and enticed away many of Lotte's guests, offering them easily and immediately all that they had never been able to get in her hotel however much they paid. Lotte had long revolted against this unfair and shameless competition and said that the last days had come, those days in which law and order existed no longer or the chance of making an honest living. At first she had bitterly referred to Terdik as 'the whoremaster'; but he had brought her before the courts and Lotte had been sentenced to pay a fine for defamation of character. But even now she never referred to him by any other term, though she took care before whom she was speaking. The new officers' mess had its own restaurant, a cellar of good wines and its own guestrooms where distinguished visitors could be put up. Gustav, the sullen and bad-tempered but skilful and reliable Gustav, had left the hotel after many years of service and opened his own café in the most frequented part of the market-place, and so instead of a colleague he had become a competitor. The choral society
and the various reading-rooms which had been opened in the town in the past few years had their own cafés and attracted many guests.

There was no longer the former animation either in the main room or, still less, in the 
extra-zimmer. 
An occasional unmarried civil servant had his lunch there, read the newspapers and took coffee. Alibeg Pašić, the taciturn and impassioned friend of Lotte's youth, still went there every afternoon. Still as careful and discreet as ever, both in speech and actions, still correct and carefully dressed, he had grown grey and ponderous. His coffee was served with saccharine because of the severe diabetes from which he had been suffering for years. He smoked quietly and, silent as ever, listened to Lotte's chatter. When the time came he rose just as quietly and silently and went home to Crnče. There was also another daily visitor, Lotte's neighbour Pavle Ranković. He had long left off wearing national costume and now wore the 'tight' civilian dress, but he still stuck to his shallow red fez. He always wore a starched shirt with a stiff collar, and cuffs on which he noted down figures and accounts. He had long ago succeeded in taking over the leading place in the Višegrad trading community. His position was by now consolidated and assured, but not even he was without his cares and difficulties. Like all the older men who had a certain amount of property he was bewildered by the new times and the clamorous onrush of new ideas and new ways of life, thought and expression. All these things were embraced for him by the single word 'polities'. It was those 'politics' that confused and angered him and embittered those years which should have been years of respite and satisfaction after so much work and thrift and renunciation. He in no way wanted to stand aside or withdraw himself from the majority of his fellow countrymen, but at the same time he had no wish to come into conflict with the authorities with whom he wished to remain at peace and at least outwardly in agreement. But that was difficult, almost impossible, to achieve. He could not even understand his own sons as he should. Like all the rest of the younger generation they were simply baffling and incomprehensible to him; yet many older people either from necessity or weakness followed their example. Their bearing, behaviour and actions seemed to Pavle rebellious as if they thought that to live and die in present conditions was no better than to spend their lives like brigands in the mountains. Young people did not think what they said, paid no heed to what they did, did not count the cost and were careless in their work; they ate their bread without stopping to think whence it came and
talked, talked, talked, 'baying at the moon' as Pavle expressed it in his arguments with his sons.