The Bridge on the Drina (54 page)

So the night passed and with it life went on, filled with danger and suffering but still clear, unwavering and true to itself. Led on by ancient inherited instinct they broke it up into momentary impressions and immediate needs, losing themselves completely in
them. For only thus, living each moment separately and looking neither forward nor back, could such a life be borne and a man keep himself alive in hope of better days.

So the day broke. That meant only that the artillery fire became more intense and the senseless and incomprehensible game of war continued. For in themselves days no longer had either name or sense; time had lost all meaning and value. Men knew only how to wait and to tremble. Save for that, words, work and movements had all become automatic.

So, or similarly, did men live in the steep quarters below the Fortress and at Mejdan.

Below, in the market-place itself, few citizens had remained. From the first day of the war there had been an order that all shops must remain open so that the soldiers in passing could make minor purchases, and even more to prove to the citizens that the war was far away and presented no danger to the town. That order had remained in force, no one knew why, even now during the bombardment, but everyone found some good excuse to keep his shop closed for the greater part of the day. Those shops which were near the bridge and the Stone Han, like those of Pavle Ranković and Alihodja, were closed all day for they were too exposed to the bombardment. So too, Lotte's hotel was completely deserted and closed, its roof had been damaged by shell-fire and the walls pitted with shrapnel.

Alihodja only came down from his house on the hill once or twice a day to see if everything were in order, and then returned home.

Lotte and her whole family had left the hotel on the first day after the bombardment of the bridge began. They crossed to the left bank of the Drina and took refuge there in a large new Turkish house. The house was some way from the road, sheltered in a hollow and surrounded by dense orchards from which only its red roof emerged. Its owner with all his family had gone to the villages.

They had left the hotel at dusk, when as a rule there was a complete lull in the bombardment. Of the staff, the only one who remained was the loyal and unchanging Milan, an old bachelor but always immaculately turned out. For a long time past there had been no one for him to throw out of the hotel. All the others, as often happens in such circumstances, had fled as soon as the first shell whistled over the town. As always, in this transplantation also, Lotte had controlled and arranged everything, personally and without opposition. She decided what was most necessary and most
valuable to take with them, and what to leave behind, what each should wear, who was to carry Deborah's crippled and feeble-minded son, who was to look after Deborah herself, weeping and sickly, and who take care of the portly Mina, who was out of her mind from fear. So, taking advantage of the darkness of the hot summer night, all of them—Lotte, Deborah, Zahler and Mina—crossed the bridge with their few belongings and the sickly child on a pushcart, with their cases and bundles in their hands. After thirty years the hotel was now for the first time completely closed and remained without a living soul in it. Darkened, damaged by the shell-fire, it already looked like a ruin. They too, as soon as they made their first steps across the bridge, aged or weak, crippled or fat, bow-legged or unaccustomed to walking, suddenly seemed like Jewish refugees who had been walking all the roads of the world in search of refuge.

So they crossed to the farther bank and came to the big Turkish house to spend the night. There too Lotte arranged everything and put everything in order, their refugee luggage and themselves. But when it was time for her to lie down in that strange half-empty room, without her things and her papers with which she had spent her life, her heart failed her and for the first time since she had been conscious of her own existence, her forces all at once gave way. Her scream echoed through the empty Turkish house, something that no one had ever heard or suspected could exist. Lotte's weeping was terrible, heavy and stifled like that of a man, uncontrolled and uncontrollable. The whole family was overcome with astonishment. At first there was an almost religious silence and then a general weeping and wailing. For them the breakdown of Aunt Lotte's forces was a heavier blow than the war itself and the flight and the loss of home and property, for with her it was possible to surmount and overcome everything but without her they could think of nothing and do nothing.

When the next day dawned, a brilliant summer day, filled with the singing of birds, with rosy clouds and heavy dew, instead of the one-time Lotte, who up to the day before had controlled the destinies of all her family, there remained huddled on the floor a weak old Jewess who could not look after or care for herself, who shivered from reasonless fear and who wept like a child, not knowing how to say of what she was afraid or tell what it was that pained her. Then another miracle took place. That old, cumbersome, drowsy Zahler, who even in his youth had never had a will of his own but had been content to let Lotte guide him as she did all the rest of the family, who in fact had never been young, now
revealed himself as the real head of the family, with much wisdom and resolution, capable of making the necessary decisions and with enough force to put them into practice. He consoled and looked after his sister-in-law like a sick child and took care of everyone as she had done right up to the day before. He went down into the town during a lull in the bombardment and brought necessary food, goods and clothing from the deserted hotel. He found a doctor somewhere and brought him to the sick woman. The doctor diagnosed that the sick old woman had had a complete nervous breakdown, and said that she should be taken somewhere else as quickly as possible, outside the area of military operations, and prescribed some drops. Zahler arranged with the military authorities to get a cart and transport the whole family first to Rogatica and then to Sarajevo. It was only necessary to wait a day or two until Lotte was fit to travel. But Lotte lay as if paralytic, wept at the top of her voice and muttered in her picturesque and mangled language disconnected words of utter desperation, fear and repulsion. Deborah's unlucky child crawled around her on the bare floor, looked inquisitively into his aunt's face and called to her with those incomprehensible cries which Lotte had once understood so well and to which she did not now reply. She refused to eat anything or to see anyone. She suffered terribly from strange hallucinations of purely physical suffering. Sometimes it seemed to her that two planks beneath her suddenly opened like a trapdoor and that she fell between them into an unknown abyss and that, save for her own screams, there was nothing to save her and support her. At other times it seemed to her that she had in some way become huge, but light and very strong, as if she had giant's legs and powerful wings and ran like an ostrich, but with steps longer than from Višegrad to Sarajevo. The seas and rivers splashed under her tread like puddles, and towns and villages cracked under her steps like gravel and glass. That made her heart beat fiercely and her breath come in gasps. She did not know where that winged race would take her nor where it would stop, she only knew that she was escaping from those deceiving planks which opened beneath her with the speed of lightning. She knew that she trod down and left behind her a land in which it was not good to stay and that she stepped over villages and great towns in which men lied and cheated with words and figures. When then-words became involved and their figures entangled, they at once changed their game, as a conjuror changes his scene, and contrary to all that had been said or was expected, guns and rifles advanced with other, new men with bloodshot eyes with whom there
could be no conversation, no compromise and no agreement. Faced with this invasion she was suddenly no longer a powerful and giant bird that ran, but a weak, defenceless poor old woman on the hard floor. And these people came in hordes, in thousands, in millions; they shot, they cut throats, they drowned people, they destroyed without mercy or reason. One of them was bending over her; she could not see his face but felt the point of his bayonet pressed on that spot where the ribs separate and a person is softest.

'Ah .. a .. a .. a .. aah! No, don't! Don't!' Lotte woke with a shriek and tore pieces out of the thin grey shawl that covered her.

The little cretin squatted there, leaning against the wall, and watched her with his black eyes in which was more curiosity than fear or sympathy. Mina burst in from the next room, reassured Lotte, wiped the cold sweat from her face and gave her water to drink into which she carefully numbered the drops of valerian.

The long summer day over the green valley seemed endless, so that one could not remember when it had dawned or believe that it would ever be dusk. Here in the house, it was warm but not oppressive. Steps echoed in the house; other citizens kept arriving from the town or some soldier or officer wandered about. There was food and fruit in abundance. Milan brewed coffee continually. It might all have seemed like some extended festival visit to the villages, had it not been for Lotte's despairing scream which broke out from time to time and the sullen thunder of the guns which sounded in that sheltered hollow like howls of rage which showed that all was not well with the world, that universal and individual misfortune was nearer and greater than it seemed in the wide serenity of the day.

That was what war had done to Lotte's hotel and its occupants.

Pavle Ranković's shop was also shut. On the second day of the war Pavle, with other prominent Serbs, had been taken as a hostage. Some of them were at the station where they answered with their lives for the peace, order and regular communication of the line, while others were not far from the bridge, in a small wooden shed at the far end of the square where on market days the municipal scales were kept and where the local 
octroi 
was paid. There too the hostages had to answer with their lives, should anyone destroy or damage the bridge.

Pavle was sitting there on a café chair. With hands on knees and bowed head, he looked the perfect picture of a man who, exhausted after some great effort, had sat down for a moment's rest, but he had been sitting there motionless in the same position for several hours. At the door two soldiers, reservists, sat on a
pile of empty sacks. The doors were shut and the shed was dark and oppressively hot. When a shell from Panos or Goleš whistled overhead, Pavle swallowed and listened to hear where it fell. He knew that the bridge had been mined and thought of that continually, asking himself whether one such shell could ignite the explosives should it penetrate to the charge. At every change of guard he listened to the non-commissioned officer giving instructions to the soldiers: 'At the least attempt to damage the bridge, or at any suspicious sign that such a thing is being prepared, this man must be killed at once.' Pavle had got used to listening to these words calmly as if they did not refer to him. The shells and shrapnel, which occasionally exploded so near the shed that gravel and pieces of metal struck the planks, disturbed him more. But what tormented him most of all were his long, his endless and unbearable, thoughts.

He kept thinking what was to happen to him, to his house and his property. The more he thought, the more everything seemed like a bad dream. In what other way could all that had happened to him in the last few days be explained? The gendarmes had taken away his two sons, students, on the first day. His wife had remained at home, alone with her daughters. The great warehouse at Osojnica had been burnt down before his eyes. His serfs from the nearby villages had probably been killed or dispersed. All his credits over the whole district —lost! His shop, the most beautiful shop in the whole town, only a few paces from where he was now, had been shut and would probably be pillaged, or set on fire by the shells. He himself was sitting in the semi-darkness of this shed, responsible with his life for something that in no 
way 
depended on him; for the fate of that bridge.

His thoughts whirled in his head; tumultuous and disordered as never before, they crossed and mingled and were extinguished. What sort of connection had he with that bridge, he who all his life had paid no attention to anything save his work and his family? It was not he who had mined it, nor had he bombarded it. Not even when he had been an apprentice and unmarried, had he ever sat on the 
kapia 
and wasted his time in singing and idle jokes, like so many Višegrad youths. All his life passed before his eyes, with many details which he had long ago forgotten.

He remembered how he had come from the Sanjak as a fourteen-year-old boy, hungry and in shabby peasant sandals. He had struck a bargain with old Peter to serve him for one suit of clothes, his food and two pairs of sandals annually. He had looked after the children, helped in the shop, drawn water and groomed the horses.
He had slept under the stairs in a dark, narrow cupboard without windows where he could not even lie down at full length. He had endured this hard life and, when he was eighteen, had gone into the shop 'on salary'. His place had been taken by another village boy from the Sanjak. In the shop he had got to know and understand the great idea of thrift, and had felt the fierce and wonderful passion in the great power that thrift gave. For five years he had slept in a little room behind the shop. In five years he had never once lit a fire or gone to sleep with a candle beside him. He had been twenty-three when Peter himself had arranged a marriage for him with a good and well-to-do girl from Čajniče. She had been a merchant's daughter and now both of them saved together. Then came the time of the occupation and with it livelier trade, easier gain and lower expenses. He made good use of the profits and avoided the expenses. Thus he was able to get a shop and began to make money. At that time it was not difficult. Many then made money easily and lost it even more easily. But what was made was hard to keep. He had kept his and every day made more. When these last years came and with them unrest and 'polities', he, though already advanced in years, had tried to understand the new times, to stand up to them and adapt himself to them, and to go through them without harm and without shame. He had been Vice-President of the Municipality, President of the Religious Community, President of the Serbian Choral Society 'Concord', main,shareholder of the Serbian Bank and member of the executive committee of the local Agricultural Bank. He had tried his best, according to the rules of the market-place, to make his way wisely and honestly between the contrary influences which increased daily, without allowing his own interests to suffer, without being regarded with suspicion by the authorities or brought to shame before his own people. In the eyes of the townsmen he passed for an inimitable example of industry, common sense and circumspection.