The Bridge over the Drina, and Ivo Andric.
EXTRACT FROM: Ivo Andric 2008 [1945] The Bridge on the Drina (Lovett F. Edwards transl), Belgrade: Dereta, pp 25-7.
They knew that the bridge had been built by the Grand Vezir, Mehmet Pasa, who had been born in the nearby village of Sokolovici, just on the far side of one of those mountains which encircled the bridge and he town. Only a Vezir could have given all that was needed to build this lasting wonder of stone (a Vezir - to the children's minds that was something fabulous, immense, terrible and far from clear). It was built by Rade the Mason, who must have lived for hundreds of years to have been able to bulid all that was lovely and lasting in the Serbian lands, that legendary and in fact nameless master whom all people desire and dream of, since they do not want to have to remember or be indebted to too many, even in memory. They knew that the vila [fairy] of the boatmen had hindered its building, as always and everywhere there is someone to hinder building, destroying by night what had been built by day, until 'something' had whispered from the waters and counselled Rade the mason to find two infant children, twins, brother and sister, named Stoja and Ostoja, and wall them into the central pier of the bridge. A reward was promised to whoever found them and brought them hither.
At last the guards found such twins, still at the breast, in a distant village and the Vezir's men took them away by force; but when they were taking them away, their mother would not be parted from them and, weeping and wailing, insensible to blows and to curses, stumbled after them as far as Visegrad itself, where she succeeded in forcing her way to Rade the Mason.
The children were walled into the pier, for it could not be otherwise, but Rade, they say, had pity on them and left openings in the pier thorugh which the unhappy mother could feed her sacrificed children. Those are the finely carved blind windows, narrow as loopholes, in which the wild doves now nest. In memory of that, the mother's milk has flowed from those walls for hundreds of years, That is the thin white stream which at certain times of the year, flows from that faultless masonry and leaves an indelible mark on the stone. (The idea of woman's milk stirs in the childish mind a feeling at once too intimate and too close, yet at the same time vague and mysterious like Vezirs and masons, which disturbs and repulses them). Men scrape those milky traces off the piers and sell them as medicinal powder to women who have no milk after giving birth.
In the central pier of the bridge, below the kapia [terrace] there is a larger opening, a long narrow gateway without gates, like a gigantic loophole. In that pier, they say, is a great room, a gloomy hall, in which a black Arab lives. All the children know this. In their dreams and in their fancies he plays a great role. If he should appear to anyone, that man must die. Not a single child has seen him yet, for children do not die. But Hamid, the asthmatic porter, with bloodshot eyes, continually drunk or suffering from a hangover, saw him one night and that very same night he died, over there by the wall. It is true that he was blind drunk at the time and passed the night on the bridge under the open sky in a temperature of -15 degrees Celsius. The children used to gaze from the bank into that dark opening as into a gulf which is both terrible and fascinating. They would agree to look at it without blinking, and whoever first saw anything should cry out. Openmouthed they would peer into that deep dark hole, quivering with curiosity and fear, until it seemed to some anaemic child that the opening began to sway and to move like a black curtain, or until one of them, mocking and inconsiderate ... shouted 'The Arab' and pretended to run away. That spoilt the game and aroused disillusion and indignation amongst those who loved the play of the imagination, hated irony and believed that by looking intently they could actually see and feel something. At night, in their sleep, many of them would toss and fight with the Arab from the bridge as with fate until their mother woke them and so freed them from this nightmare.
This epic novel is built around the story of the magnificent bridge at Visegrad, Bosnia, completed by the Ottomans in 1577 and still standing today. Linking the predominantly Bosniak and Serb sections of the town, this vast construction (nearly 200 m long) has survived unscathed the periodical flooding of the Drina, as well as much fighting.
Ivo Andric won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1961 for this wonderful novel, built as a vast historical tapestry, well paced and reminescent, in its scale and tone, of Marquez' A hundred years of solitude. He was an ethnically Croatian author from Bosnia/Herzegovina (born in Travnik, the subject of another great book of his, A Bosnian Chronicle). He built a diplomatic career in pre-socialist Yugoslavia, being attached to the Holy See and later the League of Nations. After the war he settled in Belgrade, working as a Member of Parliament for Bosnia and academic. He donated the Nobel prize money to Bosnian libraries.
Respected across ethnic boundaries, Andric was and remains a key figure of the Yugoslav cosmopolitanism promoted by Tito (and still regarded nostalgically by many in ex-Yugoslavia) and his portrait of Bosnia is sometimes used to argue that ex-Yugoslavia is not just characterised by tribalism and conflict, but has equally strong historical traditions of ethnic conviviality and cooperation upon which it can draw today (but his historical analysis is far from symplistic).
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