The Bridge on the Drina (55 page)

Thus, for more than a half of a normal human existence he had worked, saved, worried and made money. He had taken care not to hurt a fly, been civil to all and looked only straight ahead of him, keeping silent and making money in his own way. And here was where it had led him; to sit between two soldiers like the lowest of brigands and wait until some shell or infernal machine should damage the bridge and, for that reason, to have his throat cut or be shot. He began to think (and that pained him most of all) that he had worked and worried and ill-used himself all in vain, that he had chosen the wrong path and that his sons and all the other 'youngsters' had been right, and that times had come without
measures or calculations or which had some sort of new measures and different calculations; in any case his own calculations had been shown to be inaccurate and his measures short.

'That's the way of it,' said Pavle to himself, 'that's the way; everyone teaches you and urges you to work and to save, the Church, the authorities and your own common sense. You listen and live prudently, in fact you do not live at all, but work and save and are burdened with cares; and so your whole life passes. Then, all of a sudden, the whole thing turns upside down; times come when the world mocks at reason, when the Church shuts its doors and is silent, when authority becomes mere brute force, when they who have made their money honestly and with the sweat of their brows lose both their time and their money, and the violent win the game. No one recognizes your efforts and there is no one to help or advise you how to keep what you have earned and saved. Can this be? Surely this cannot be?' Pavle asked himself continually, and without finding any answer went back to the point whence his thought had started—the loss of all that he possessed.

Try as he might to think of something else, he could not succeed. His thoughts returned continually to the point where they had started. Time crept by with mortal slowness. It seemed to him that the bridge over which he had crossed thousands of times but had never really looked at, now lay with all its weight on his shoulders like some inexplicable and fateful burden, like a nightmare but in a sleep from which there was no awakening.

Therefore Pavle went on sitting there, huddled on his chair with bowed head and shoulders. He felt the sweat oozing from every pore under his thick starched shirt, collar and cuffs. It fell in streams from under his fez. He did not wipe it away but let it stream down his face and fall in heavy drops to the floor and it seemed to him that it was his life that was draining away and was leaving him.

The two soldiers, middle-aged Hungarian peasants, remained silent and ate bread and ham sprinkled with paprika; they ate slowly, cutting off with a small penknife first a piece of bread and then a slice of ham as if they were in their own fields. Then they took a mouthful of wine from an army canteen and lit their short pipes. Puffing away, one of them said softly:

'Eh, I have never seen a man sweat so much.'

Then they went on smoking in complete silence.

But it was not only Pavle who sweated such bloody sweat and lost himself in that sleep from which there is no awakening. In those
summer days, on that little piece of earth between the Drina and the dry frontier, in the town, in the villages, on the roads and in the forests, everywhere men sought death, their own or others', and at the same time fled from it and defended themselves from it by all the means in their power. That strange human game which is called war became more and more intense and submitted to its authority living creatures and material things.

Not far from that municipal shed a detachment of an unusual army was resting. The men were in white uniforms with white tropical helmets on their heads. They were Germans, the so-called Skadar detachment. Before the war they had been sent to Skadar (Scutari in Albania) where they were to maintain law and order together with detachments from other nations, as part of an international army. When war broke out, they had received orders to leave Skadar and place themselves at the disposal of the nearest Austrian Army command on the Serbian frontier. They had come the evening before and were now resting in the hollow which separated the square from the market-place. There, in a sheltered corner, they awaited the order to attack. There were about 120 of them. Their captain, a plump reddish man who suffered from the heat, had just been cursing at the gendarmerie sergeant Danilo Repac, cursing him as only a senior officer of the German army can curse, noisily, pedantically and without any sort of consideration. The captain was complaining that his soldiers were dying of thirst, that they had not even the most necessary supplies, since all the shops nearby, which were probably full of everything, were shut despite the order that all shops were to remain open.

'What are you here for? Are you gendarmes or dolls? Must I die here with all my men? Or must I break open the shops like a robber? Find the owners at once and make them sell us provisions and something worth drinking! At once! Do you understand what that means? At once!'

At every word the captain grew more and more flushed. In his white uniform, his close-shaven head red as a poppy, he seemed to burn with anger like a torch.

Sergeant Repac, astounded, only blinked and went on repeating:

'I understand, sir. At once. I understand. At once!'

Then, passing suddenly from his cataleptic stiffness to frenzied action, he turned and hurried from the market-place. It seemed as if the sergeant, approaching too close to that captain flaming with anger, had himself been touched by that flame, which made him run, curse, threaten and beat all round him.

The first living being whom he met in the course of his mad rush
was Alihodja, who had just come down from his house to cast an eye on his shop. Looking closely at the once familiar 
' wachtmeister' 
Repac, now completely changed, rushing towards him, the astonished 
hodja 
asked himself whether this savage and maddened man was really the same 
'wachtmeister' 
whom he had watched for years, calm, dignified and humane, passing in front of his shop. Now this sombre and infuriated Repac looked at him with new eyes which no longer recognized anyone and saw only their own fear. The sergeant at once began to shout, repeating what only a short time ago he had heard from the German captain.

'God in heaven, I ought to hang all of you! Weren't you ordered to keep your shops open? For your sake, I have had to . . .'

And before the astonished 
hodja 
was able to utter a word, he slapped him hard on the right cheek so that his turban slid from his right ear to his left.

Then the sergeant rushed frenziedly on to open other shops. The 
hodja 
set his turban straight, let down his door-shutter and sat on it, almost out of his mind from astonishment. Around the shop crowded a swarm of strange-looking soldiers in white uniforms such as he had never seen before. It seemed to the 
hodja 
as if he were dreaming. But in these times when slaps fell from heaven he no longer felt really astonished at anything.

So the whole month passed, in preliminary bombardment of the bridge and in the firing from the surrounding hills, in suffering and violence of every kind, and in the expectation of worse misfortunes. In the first days the greater number of the citizens had already left the town which now lay between two fires. By the end of September the complete evacuation of the town began. Even the last officials were withdrawn, by night along the road which led over the bridge, for the railway line had already been cut. Then the army was withdrawn little by little from the right bank of the Drina. There remained only a small number of defence squads, a few engineers' units and some gendarme patrols, until the orders came for them too to retire.

The bridge remained as if under sentence of death, but none the less still whole and untouched, between the two warring sides.

XXIV

During the night the sky clouded over as if it were autumn; the clouds clung to the tops of the mountains and lingered in the valleys between them. The Austrians had taken advantage of the darkness of the night to effect the withdrawal of even the last detachments. Already before dawn they were all not only on the right bank of the Drina but on the heights behind the Liješte chain, out of sight and out of range of the Serbian guns.

At daybreak there was a fine, almost autumnal, rain. In that rain the last patrols visited houses and shops in the vicinity of the bridge to see if there were anyone still in them. Everything was as if dead; the officers' mess, Lotte's hotel, the ruined barracks and those three or four shops at the entrance to the market-place. But in front of Alihodja's shop they came upon the 
hodja 
who had just come down from his house and let down his door-shutter. The gendarmes, who knew the 
hodja 
as an eccentric, warned him most seriously to shut his shop at once and leave the market-place, for any longer stay in the vicinity of the bridge was most 'dangerous to life' and strictly forbidden. The 
hodja 
looked at them as if they were drunk and did not know what they were saying. He wanted to reply that life had been dangerous for a long time past and that everyone was more or less dead already and only waiting his turn to be buried, but he thought better of it, taught by the bad experience of the last few days, and merely told them calmly and naturally that he had only come to take something from the shop and would return home at once. The gendarmes, who were evidently in a hurry, warned him once more that he should move away as soon as possible, and went on across the square to the bridge. Alihodja watched them marching away, their footfalls inaudible in the dust which the morning rain had turned to a thick, damp carpet. He was still watching them as they crossed the bridge, half concealed by the stone parapet, so that they could see only their heads and shoulders and the long bayonets on their rifles. The first rays of sunlight struck on the heights of the Butkovo Rocks.

All their orders were like this, severe, important and yet basically senseless, thought Alihodja, and smiled to himself like a child who has outwitted his teacher. He lifted the door-shutter enough to let him get inside and then let it fall, so that from the outside the shop appeared to be shut. Alone in the darkness, he wriggled his way into that little room behind the shop where he had so often taken refuge from the obtrusive world, from conversations that poisoned and bored him, from his family and from his own worries. He sat down on the small hard chair and crossed his legs under him and sighed. His inner self was still troubled by outward impressions, but he soon became calm and balanced again. The narrow room quickly filled with the warmth of his body and the 
hodja 
felt that sweetness of solitude, peace and forgetfulness which made of the close, dark, dusty little room a place of endless paradisiacal gardens with green banks between which murmured invisible waters.

In the darkness and closeness of this narrow space he could still feel the freshness of the morning rain and the sunrise outside. Outside there was an unusual silence which, for a wonder, was not broken by a single shot, a single voice or footfall. Alihodja was flooded with a feeling of happiness and gratitude. These few planks, he thought to himself, were enough, with God's help, to shelter and save a true believer, like some wonder ship, from every misery and care to which there seemed no solution and from the guns with which the two enemies, both infidel and each worse than the other, were fighting their duel over his head. There had not been such a calm since the opening of hostilities, the 
hodja 
thought joyously, and silence is sweet and good; with it returned, at least for a moment, a little of that real human life which had recently grown weaker and weaker and which, under the thunder of the infidel guns, had completely disappeared. Silence is for prayer; it is itself like a prayer.

At that moment the 
hodja 
felt the stool under him rise upward and lift him like a toy; his 'sweet' silence was shattered and suddenly transformed into a dull roar and a great smashing that filled the air, tore at the eardrums and became universal and unbearable. The shelves on the wall opposite cracked and the things on them leapt at him as he at them. Ah, shrieked the 
hodja: 
or rather he only thought that he shrieked for he himself no longer had voice or hearing, even as he no longer had any place on the earth. Everything was deafened by sound, shattered, torn up by the roots and whirled about him. Improbable as it seemed, he felt as if the little tongue of land between the two rivers on which the town was built had been plucked out of the earth with a terrific noise and thrown into space in which it was still flying; that the two rivers had been torn out of their beds
and drawn upward to the skies, only to fall once more with all their mass of waters into the void, like two waterfalls which had not yet been halted or broken. Was not this 
kiyamet, 
that last Day of Judgment of which books and learned men spoke, in which this lying world would be burnt up in the twinkling of an eye, like one stubs out a spark? But what need had God, whose glance was enough to create and to extinguish worlds, with such a chaos? This was not divine. But if not, how had human hands such power? How could he, so astonished, so deceived, so overwhelmed by this terrible blow which seemed to destroy, break up and suffocate everything down to man's very thought, give an answer to this? He did not know what power it was that bore him up, he did not know where he was flying nor where he would stop, but he knew that he, Alihodja, had always and in everything been right. Ah, shrieked the 
hodja 
once again, but this time with pain for that same force that had lifted him up now threw him roughly and violently back again, but not to the place where he had been but to the floor between the wooden wall and the overturned stool. He felt a dull blow on his head and a pain under his knees and in his back. Now he could tell only by ear, like a sound separate and distinct from the universal thundering, that something heavy had struck the roof of the shop and that, there behind the partition, had begun a clashing and breaking of wooden and metal objects as if all the things in the shop had come alive, were flying about and colliding in mid-air. But Alihodja had already lost consciousness and lay motionless in his little room, as if it were indeed his coffin.