The Bridge on the Drina (42 page)

The 
kapia 
was the main scene of their meetings. They would meet there after supper. In the darkness, under the stars or in the moonlight, above the boisterous river, echoed their songs, jests, noisy conversation and endless arguments, new, bold, naïve, sincere and unself-conscious.

With the students were also their childhood friends who had studied with them in the local elementary school, but had remained in the town as apprentices, shop assistants or clerks in the municipal offices. There were two types. Some were satisfied with their destiny and the life of the town in which they would pass their days. They looked with curiosity and sympathy at their educated comrades, admired them and never thought of comparing themselves with them, and, without the slightest jealousy, followed their development and their career. There were others who were dissatisfied with life in the town to which they were condemned by force of circumstances and who longed for something that they considered higher and better and which had escaped them, becoming every day farther away and more inaccessible. Though they used to meet together with their student comrades, these youths usually kept apart from their educated fellows either by some crude form of irony or by their unfriendly silence. They could not take part as equals in their conversations.'Therefore, constantly tormented by their feeling of inferiority, they now exaggerated and stressed in conversation their crudeness and ignorance by comparison with their more fortunate comrades or, from the height of their ignorance, mocked at all that they could not understand. In either case, envy breathed out of them as an almost visible and tangible force. But youth easily bears with even the worst instincts, and lives and moves freely and easily amongst them.

There had been and there would be again starlight nights on the 
kapia 
and rich constellations and moonlight, but there had never been, and God alone knows whether there would be again, such young men who in such conversations and with such feelings and ideas would keep vigil on the 
kapia. 
That was a generation of rebel angels, in that short moment while they still had all the power and all the rights of angels and also the flaming pride of rebels. These sons of peasants, traders or artisans from a remote Bosnian township had obtained from fate, without any special effort of their own, a free entry into the world and the great illusion of freedom. With their inborn small-town characteristics, they went out into the
world, chose more or less for themselves and according to their own inclinations, momentary moods or the whims of chance, the subject of their studies, the nature of their entertainments and the circle of their friends and acquaintances. For the most part they were unable, or did not know how, to seize and make use of what they succeeded in seeing, but there was not one of them who did not have the feeling that he could take what he wished and that all that he took was his. Life (that word came up very often in their conversations, as it did in the literature and politics of the time, when it was always written with a capital letter), Life stood before them as an object, as a field of action for their liberated senses, for their intellectual curiosity and their sentimental exploits, which knew no limits. All roads were open to them, onward to infinity; on most of those roads they would never even set foot, but none the less the intoxicating lust for life lay in the fact that they could (in theory at least) be free to choose which they would and dare to cross from one to the other. All that other men, other races, in other times and lands, had achieved and attained in the course of generations, through centuries of effort, at the cost of lives, of renunciations and of sacrifices greater and dearer than life, now lay before them as a chance inheritance and a dangerous gift of fate. It seemed fantastic and improbable but was none the less true; they could do with their youth what they liked, and give their judgments freely and without restriction; they dared to say what they liked and for many of them those words were the same as deeds, satisfying their atavistic need for heroism and glory, violence and destruction, yet they did not entail any obligation to act nor any visible responsibility for what had been said. The most gifted amongst them despised all that they should have learnt and underestimated all that they were able to do, but they boasted of what they did not know and waxed enthusiastic at what was beyond their powers to achieve. It is hard to imagine a more dangerous manner of entering into life or a surer way towards exceptional deeds or total disaster. Only the best and strongest amongst them threw themselves into action with the fanaticism of fakirs and were there burnt up like flies, to be immediately hailed by their fellows as martyrs and saints (for there is no generation without its saints) and placed on pedestals as inaccessible examples.

Every human generation has its own illusions with regard to civilization; some believe that they are taking part in its upsurge, others that they are witnesses of its extinction. In fact, it always both flames up and smoulders and is extinguished, according to the place and the angle of view. This generation which was now discussing philosophy, social and political questions on the 
kapia 
under the stars,
above the waters, was richer only in illusions; in every other way it was similar to any other. It had the feeling both of lighting the first fires of one new civilization and extinguishing the last flickers of another which was burning out. What could especially be said of them was that there had not been for a long time past a generation which with greater boldness had dreamed and spoken about life, enjoyment and freedom and which had received less of life, suffered worse, laboured more hardly and died more often than had this one. But in those summer days of 1913 all was still undetermined, unsure. Everything appeared as an exciting new game on that ancient bridge, which shone in the moonlight of those July nights, clean, young and unalterable, strong and lovely in its perfection, stronger than all that time might bring and men imagine or do.

XIX

Just as one warm summer night in August is like another, so the discussions of these schoolboys and students on the 
kapia 
were always the same or similar. Immediately after a good supper hurriedly eaten (for the day had passed in bathing and basking in the sun) they arrived one by one on the 
kapia. 
There was Janko Stiković, son of a tailor from Mejdan, who had already been studying natural science at Graz for two years. He was a thin young man with sharp features and smooth black hair, vain, sensitive, dissatisfied with himself but even more with everyone about him. He read much and wrote articles under a pen-name which was already well known in revolutionary youth papers published in Prague and Zagreb. He also wrote poems and published them under another pen-name. He was preparing a book of them which was to be published by 
Zora, 
the Nationalist Edition. He was also a good speaker and a fiery debater at students' meetings. Velimir Stevanović was a healthy, well-built youth, an adopted child of uncertain parentage; he was ironic, down to earth, thrifty and industrious; he had completed his medical studies at Prague. There was Jacov Herak, son of the good-natured and popular Višegrad postman, a small, dark law student, of piercing eyes and swift words, a socialist of polemical spirit, who was ashamed of his kind heart and concealed every trace of emotion. Ranko Mihailović was a taciturn and good-natured youth was was studying law at Zagreb and was already thinking of a career as a civil seryant. He took little part and that half-heartedly in his comrades' arguments and discussions on love, politics, views on life and social conditions. On his mother's side he was the great grandson of that Pop Mihailo whose head, with a cigar stuck between its lips, had been put on a stake and exposed on that very 
kapia.

There were also a few Sarajevo secondary school students who listened avidly to their older colleagues and their tales of life in the great cities, and with the imagination that whips up the vanity and hidden desires of children thought of everything as even greater and
more beautiful than it really was or ever could be. Among them was Nikola Glasičanin, a pale stiff youth who because of poverty, poor health and lack of success had had to leave the secondary school after the fourth class and return to the town and accept a post as clerk to a German timber exporting firm. He came from a decayed landowning family at Okolište. His grandfather, Milan Glasičanin, had died a short time after the occupation, in the Sarajevo lunatic asylum, after gambling away in his youth the greater part of his property. His father, Peter, a sickly creature without will, force or reputation had died some time ago. Now Nikola spent all day long on the river bank with the workmen who poled the heavy pine logs and made them into rafts. He measured the cubic meterage of the wood and afterwards, in the office, entered it in the books. This monotonous task among such people, without ideals and without wider views, he felt as a torture and a humiliation, and the absence of any likelihood of being able to change his social status or get on in the world had created of the sensitive youth a man old before his time, bilious and taciturn. He read much in his spare time, but that spiritual food did nothing to give him force or exalt him, for everything in him took a sour turn. His bad luck, his loneliness and his suffering opened his eyes and sharpened his senses to many things, but even the most beautiful thoughts and most precious knowledge could only discourage and embitter him the more, for they threw an even stronger light on his lack of success and his lack of prospects in the town.

There was also Vlado Marić, a locksmith by trade, a merry and good-humoured man whom his colleagues from the higher schools loved and invited, as much for his strong and lovely baritone as for his simple-heartedness and goodness. This vigorous young man with his locksmith's cap on his head was one of those humble men who are always sufficient to themselves and do not think of comparing themselves with others, but calmly and thankfully accept whatever life offers to them and give simply and naturally all they can.

There were also the two local schoolmistresses, Zorka and Zagorka, both born in the town. All the youths competed for their favours and around them played that naïve, complicated, brilliant and tormenting game of love. In their presence the discussions raged like a court of love in earlier centuries; because of them young men would later sit on the 
kapia 
smoking in the darkness and solitude or singing with others after an evening spent drinking somewhere else; because of them there were hidden enmities between comrades, badly concealed jealousies and open quarrels. About ten o'clock the girls would go home; but the young men remained for long, though
the mood on the 
kapici 
slackened and the rival eloquence diminished.

Stiković, who usually took the lead in these discussions, that evening sat silent, smoking. He was troubled and out of humour with himself, but he concealed it as he always concealed all his true feelings, though he never succeeded in concealing them completely. That afternoon he had had his first rendezvous with the schoolmistress Zorka, an attractive girl with a full figure, pale face and fiery eyes. On Stiković's insistence, they had been able to do the most difficult of all things in a small town; that is for a youth and a girl to meet in a hidden place where no one could see them or know anything about it. They had met in her school which was deserted at that time because of the holidays. He had gone in from one street, through the garden, and she from another by the main entrance. They had met in a dimly-lit, dusty room piled almost to the ceiling with benches. It is thus that the passion of love is often compelled to look for remote and ugly places. They could neither sit nor lie down. Both of them were embarrassed and awkward. Too full of desire, too impatient, they embraced and mingled on one of those benches which she knew so well, without looking at or noticing anything around them. He was the first to recover. Abruptly, without transition, as young men do, he stood up to arrange his clothing and go away. The girl burst into tears. Their disillusion was mutual. When he had more or less calmed down he went out, almost as if escaping, by a side door.

At home he met the postman who had brought the youth-paper with his article 'The Balkans, Serbia and Bosnia-Herzegovina'. Reading the article again turned his thoughts away from the incident of a few moments before. But even in that he found reason for dissatisfaction. There were printers' errors in the article and some of the sentences sounded silly to him; now, when it was no longer possible to make alterations, it seemed to him that many things could have been better expressed, more clearly and more concisely.

The same evening they sat on the 
kapia 
discussing his article in the presence of Zorka herself. His principal adversary was the talkative and aggressive Herak who looked at everything and criticized everything from an orthodox socialist viewpoint. The others only intervened in the discussion from time to time. The two schoolmistresses remained silent, preparing an unseen wreath for the victor. Stiković defended himself weakly, firstly because he himself now saw many weaknesses and illogicalities in his own article, though he would never admit this before his colleagues; and secondly because he was troubled by the memory of the afternoon in the dusty and stuffy classroom, a scene which now seemed to him both comic and ugly
but which had long been the aim of his most intense desires and his most ardent feelings towards the pretty schoolmistress. She herself was sitting there in the summer darkness looking at him with shining eyes. He felt like a debtor and a criminal and would have given much not to have been in the school that day and not to be here with her now. In such a mood, Herak seemed to him like an aggressive gadfly from whose attacks he could only defend himself with difficulty. It seemed to him that he must answer not only for his article but also for all that had happened that day in the school. Above all he wanted to be alone, somewhere far away, so that he could think calmly of something other than the article or the girl. But self-love drove him on to defend himself. Stiković quoted Cvijić and Štrosmajer, Herak Kautsky and Babel.