The Bridge on the Drina (47 page)

This way of thinking without limits, this speech without consideration, and this life without calculation and hostile to every calculation, drove Pavle, who had worked all his life by and with calculation, to frenzy and desperation. He was filled with fear whenever he heard or saw them; it seemed to him that they imprudently and irresponsibly hacked away at the very foundations of life, at all that was dearest and most sacred to him. When he asked them for an explanation which would convince and reassure him they replied disdainfully and haughtily with vague and high sounding words; freedom, future, history, science, glory, greatness. His skin crawled at all these abstract words. Therefore he liked to sit and drink coffee with Lotte, with whom he could talk about business and events, always based on a sure and admitted calculation, very different from the 'politics' and the big, dangerous words that questioned everything, explained nothing and affirmed nothing. During the conversation he often took out his pencil stub, not that of twenty-five years back but one just as shiny and almost equally invisible, and put all that was said to the infallible and irrefutable proof of figures. They often recalled in their talk some long ago happening, or some jest in which nearly all the participants were now dead, and then Pavle, bowed with cares, would go to his shop in the market-place and Lotte remained alone with her Worries and her accounts.

Lotte's personal speculations were in no better shape than the hotel's business. In the first years after the occupation it had been enough to buy any share in any enterprise and one could be sure that the money was well invested and the only question that could arise was the amount of the profit. But at that time the hotel had only just started work and Lotte had neither the ready money at her disposal nor the credit which she later enjoyed. When she had achieved both money and credit the state of affairs on the exchanges had completely changed. One of the most serious of the cyclic crises had hit the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century. Lotte's stocks and shares began to play like dust in a high wind. She would weep with rage when she read the most recent quotations each week in the Vienna 
Merkur. 
All the profits of the hotel, which at that time was still doing good business, were not enough to cover the losses caused by the general decline in values. At that time too she had had a severe nervous breakdown which lasted a full two years. She was almost mad with pain. She chatted

to people without hearing what they said or thinking what she herself was saying. She looked them full in the face but did not see them but the small-print columns of the 
Merkur 
which were to bring her good or evil luck. Then she began to buy lottery tickets. Since everything was in any case only a game of chance, she might as well do it properly. She had lottery tickets from every country. She even succeeded in getting hold of a quarter share in a ticket of the great Spanish Christmas Lottery whose first prize amounted to fifteen million pesetas. She prayed God for a miracle and that her ticket should draw the first prize. But she never won anything.

Seven years before, Lotte's brother-in-law Zahler had gone into partnership with a couple of wealthy men on pension and founded the 'Modern Milk Co-operative' in the town. Lotte provided three-fifths of the capital. Business on a large scale was envisaged. It was reckoned that the initial successes, which could not fail to eventuate, would attract capital from outside the town and even outside Bosnia. But just at the moment when the enterprise was in its critical phase the annexation crisis took place. This destroyed every hope of attracting fresh capital. These frontier districts became so unsafe that capital already invested in them began to flee. The Co-operative went into liquidation after two years, with the total loss of all the invested capital. Lotte had to mortgage her best and safest shares, like those of the Sarajevo Brewery and the Solvaj Soda Factory at Tuzla, to cover the deficit.

Parallel with these financial misfortunes and allied to them were family troubles and disappointments. It was true that one of Zahler's daughters, Irene, had married unexpectedly well (Lotte had provided the dowry). But the elder daughter, Mina, remained. Embittered by the marriage of her younger sister and unfortunate in her suitors she had become before her time a vinegary and sharp-tongued old maid to whom life at home and work in the hotel seemed even heavier and more unbearable than in fact they were. Zahler who had never been lively or quick-witted grew even more ponderous and indecisive and lived at home like a dumb but good-natured guest from whom there was neither harm nor profit. Zahler's wife, Deborah, though sickly and in advanced years, had given birth to a son, but the boy was backward and rickety. He was now ten years old and still could not speak clearly or stand upright, but expressed himself in vague sounds and crawled about the house on his hands and knees. But this miserable creature was so pitiable and good and clung so desperately to his Aunt Lotte, whom he loved far more than his mother, that Lotte, despite
all her worries and duties, looked after him, fed him, dressed him and sang him to sleep. With this cretin ever before her eyes, her heart contracted at the idea that business was now so bad that there was not enough money to send him to the famous doctors in Vienna or into some institution, and at the thought that the days of miracles were past and that such creatures could not grow healthy by God's will or by man's good works and prayers.

Lotte's Galician dependents, whom she had educated or given in marriage during the good years, also caused her no little worry and disappointment. Some amongst them had founded families, extended their business and acquired property. Lotte got regular news from them, letters filled with respect and gratitude and regular reports of the progress of their families. But the Apfelmaiers to whom Lotte had given a start in life, had educated or provided homes for, did not help her or take any responsibility for new relatives born and growing up in poverty in Galicia but, once settled in distant cities, only bothered about themselves and their own children. For them the greater part of their success lay in forgetting Tarnow and the cramped and wretched circumstances in which they had grown up and from which they had had the luck to liberate themselves, as quickly and as completely as possible; and Lotte herself was no longer able to set aside money as she had once done to give that black poverty of Tarnow its chance in life. She never went to sleep or woke now without the thought that someone of hers in Tarnow was forever sunk in the slough of hopeless poverty, condemned forever to ignorance and filth, in that shameful poverty which she knew so well and which she had fought against all her life.

Even amongst those whose lot she had already improved there was reason enough for complaint and dissatisfaction. Even the best among them had turned from the right path and made mistakes after their first successes and most shining hopes. One niece, a gifted pianist, who by Lotte's help and encouragement had completed her studies at the Vienna Conservatoire, had poisoned herself a few years earlier at the time of her first and best successes; no one knew why.

One of her nephews, Albert, Lotte's pride and the hope of the family, had completed all his studies, both at secondary school and university, with outstanding success and only because he was a Jew had not received his diploma 
'sub auspiciis regis' 
or obtained the Imperial signet as Lotte had secretly hoped. None the less, Lotte had imagined him at least as a leading lawyer in Vienna or Lwow, since being a Jew he could not become a senior civil servant which

would best have accorded with her ambitions. In such dreams she reaped the reward for all her sacrifices for his education. But there too she had had to suffer a painful disillusionment. The young doctor of law went into journalism and became a member of the Socialist Party, and of that extremist wing which became notorious in the Vienna general strike of 1906. Lotte had to read with her own eyes in the Viennese newspapers that 'during the cleaning up in Vienna of subversive foreign elements, the well-known Jewish agitator Dr Albert Apfelmaier has been expelled, after first purging a sentence passed against him of twenty days' imprisonment'. That, in the language of the town, meant the same as if he had been a 
haiduk, 
a brigand. A few months later Lotte received a letter from her dear Albert in which he told her that he was emigrating to Buenos Aires.

In those days she could not find peace even in her own room. With the letter in her hand she went to her sister and brother-in-law and desperately, senselessly, flew into a passion with her sister Deborah who could only weep. She shouted with rage:

'What is to become of us? I ask you, what is to become of us, when no one knows how to make his way and stand up for himself? Unless they are propped up they all fall. What is going to happen to us? We are accursed, that is all there is to it.'

'Gott, Gott, Gott,' wailed poor Deborah with tears flowing down her cheeks, naturally quite unable to answer Lotte's questions. Nor did Lotte herself find an answer but clasped her hands and lifted her eyes to heaven, not weeping and frightened like Deborah, but furious and despairing.

'He has become a Socialist! A Soc - ial - ist! Isn't it enough that we are Jews, but he must be that as well! O Great and Only God, how have I sinned that You must punish us thus? A Socialist!'

She wept for Albert as though he were dead and then never spoke of him again.

Three years later one of her nieces, sister of that same Albert, married well in Pest. Lotte took charge of the trousseau and took a leading part in the moral crisis that this marriage provoked in the great Apfelmaier family of Tarnow, rich only in children and an unsullied religious tradition. The man whom this niece was to marry was a rich speculator on the Bourse, but a Christian and a Calvinist, and he made it a condition that the girl should be converted to his faith. The relatives all opposed this but Lotte, with the interest of the whole family in mind, said that it was hard to keep afloat with so many persons in the boat and that it was sometimes necessary to throw something overboard for the salvation of all the rest. She supported the girl and her word was decisive. The girl was baptized and married. Lotte hoped that with the help of her new relative she would be able to introduce at least one of those cousins or nephews now of suitable age into the business world of Pest. But bad luck had it that the rich Pest speculator died in the first year of marriage. The young wife went almost mad with grief. Months passed and her great grief did not lessen. The young widow had now been living in Pest for four years, given over to her unnatural grief which amounted to a mild form of madness. The great, richly furnished apartment was swathed in black cloth. She went every day to the cemetery, sat by her husband's grave and read softly and devotedly to him the list of market quotations for the day from beginning to end. To all suggestions made that she should awake from the lethargy into which she had fallen she answered softly that the dead man had loved that above all and that it had been the sweetest music he had ever known.

Thus many destinies of all kinds accumulated in that little room. There were many accounts, many doubtful bills, many others written off and expunged for ever in that great, many-sided bookkeeping of Lotte's; but the great principle of work remained the same. Lotte was tired but she was not discouraged. After every loss or failure, she would call on her resources, set her teeth and go on with the struggle. In recent years she had been fighting a rearguard action but she went on struggling with the same aim before her eyes and with the same resolution as she had shown when she made money and went forward in the world. She was the 'man' of that household and 'Aunt Lotte' to the whole township. There were still many both in the town and in the outside world who waited for her aid, her advice or at least her encouragement, and who did not ask and could not imagine that Lotte was tired. But she was really tired, more than anyone suspected and more than she herself knew.

The little wooden clock on the wall struck one. Lotte rose with difficulty, her hands on her hips. She carefully extinguished the great green lamp on the wooden side-table and with the short steps of an old woman, steps she used only when she was in her own room and even then only when going to bed, she went to lie down.

There was complete and universal darkness over the sleeping town.

XXI

It is now 1914, the last year in the chronicle of the bridge on the Drina. It came as all earlier years had come, with the quiet pace of winter but with the sullen roar of ever new and ever more unusual events which piled upon one another like waves. So many years had passed over the town and so many more would still pass over it. There had been, and there still would be, years of every sort, but the year 1914 will always remain unique. So at least it seemed to those who lived through it. To them it seemed that never would they be able to speak of all that they had seen then of the course of human destinies, however much, still concealed by time and events, might be said or written about it later. How could they explain and express those collective shudders which suddenly ran through all men and which from living beings were transmitted to inert objects, to districts and to buildings? How could they describe that swirling current among men which passed from dumb animal fear to suicidal enthusiasm, from the lowest impulses of bloodlust and pillage to the greatest and most noble of sacrifices, wherein man for a moment touches the sphere of greater worlds with other laws? Never can that be told, for those who saw and lived through it have lost the gift of words and those who are dead can tell no tales. Those were things which are not told, but forgotten. For were they not forgotten, how could they ever be repeated?