Review
"The Bridge on the Žepa", published in 1925, is one of the stories richest in ideas which recur elsewhere in Andrić’s work. It provides a preliminary sketch for "The Bridge on the Drina", in a concentrated form. A Bosnian-born Grand Vizier in Constantinopole whose experience is similar to that of the great Mehmed Pasha, builder of the bridge on the Drina – he was taken, like Mehmed, from his native village at the age of nine – wishes to endow his native village with a building that will be enduring use. He is told of the regular destruction of the wooden bridges built over Žepa and resolves to have a stone bridge built. The bulk of the story consists of the description of the dedication of the master-builder, planning and building the bridge. Having made his initial plans and dispatched them to Constantinople, he builds himself a cabin and settles there, buying simple foods from the neighboring peasants and preparing them himself, spending the whole day investigating the river and its currents, examining the stone he intends to use, carving and sketching. When work begins, it is at first interrupted by a sudden storm that fills the river and sweeps away the preliminary structure. As in the "The Bridge on the Drina", the villagers interpret this as the will of the river, rejecting all human innovation. But the building starts again, the work stopping with the onset of winter when the master-builder remains in his hut, scarcely emerging, poring in solitude over his plans and calculations. Eventually, halfway through the following summer, the building is completed and the bridge emerges at last from the scaffolding.
The portrait given here of the master-builder suggests a devotion to an ideal conventionally associated with religious fervour. This gives his work a mysterious, almost supenatural quality. He works with single-minded, self-denying dedication to create something which will transcend the vagaries of the natural world and the ravages of a human time-scale. The ideas and the creative genius of the master-builder will long outlive him in his work.
In addition to the main theme – that the bridge emboides a complete statement requiring no further comment – there is another important idea. The Vizierćs initial desire to build something enduring in his native village is promped by his experience of imprisoment following a political upheavel in Constantinopole. The winter months he spent in prison brought a new thoughtfulness, a new awareness of the marrow dividing line between life and death, and a new gratitude for being alive and liberty. In prison, he remembered his native land and thought of the villagersć houses where his glory was frequently spoken of, without any realization of the price of that glory or other side of success. His decision to build the bridge was an expression of this new perspective.
The end of the story can be seen as a metaliterary frame as the narrator-writer tells how and when he decided to write the story: "This happened one evening when he was returning from the mountains and, feeling weary, had sat of summer when the days were scorching but the nights had a nip to them. As he leaned against the stonework, he noticed cool breeze was blowing in off the Drina pleasant and somehow unexpected was the touch of that warm hewn stone. There was an instant rapport between them. He then decided to write its story."
Fragment
translated by Joseph Hitrec, George Allen and Unwin Ltd, London, 1969
In the fourth year of his term as Grand Vizier, Yusuf committed a political indiscretion and, falling victim to a dangerous intrigue, unexpectedly fell into disfavor. The struggle lasted a whole winter and spring. It was a wicked and cold spring, which refused to let the summer begin. But in May, Yusuf emerged from banishment as victor. And so life went on as before, glorious, peaceful, and undisturbed. But from those winter months, when the margin between life and death, glory and ruin, amounted to little more than the sharp edge of a knife, there remained in the victorious Vizier a sense of something fretful and subdued. It was something that could not be expressed, something that men of experience who have suffered harbor inside them like a hidden treasure, and which unconsciously, and only at times, is reflected in a look, a movement, or in speech.
While he had lived in confinement, in solitude and in disgrace, the Vizier's memories of his origins and of his old country had grown more vivid, for disappointment and pain always turn the mind back to the past. He recalled his mother and his father. (They had both died while he was still a modest assistant to the Sultan's Master of the Horse; he had since ordered their graves to be edged with stone coping and marked by white tombstones.) He recalled Bosnia and the village of epa, from which he had been taken when he was nine.
It was pleasant in his unhappiness to think of that distant country and the scattered village, where tales of his success and glory in Istambul were told in every house, and where nobody knew or even suspected the reverse side of the medal of glory, or the price at which success was to be attained.
That very summer he had had an opportunity to talk to people coming from Bosnia. He questioned them, and they told him what they knew. After many rebellions and wars, the country had been convulsed by riots, scarcity, starvation, and all kinds of epidemics. He ordered substantial help for all his relatives who were still at epa, and at the same time instructed the officials to find out what was most needed in the way of building work. He was told that the family Šetkić still had four houses and were the wealthiest in the village, but that both the village and surrounding countryside had become impoverished, that the mosque had fallen into disrepair and become damaged by fire, and that the wells had gone dry; but their worst predicament was that there was no bridge over the river epa. The village stands on a hill right above the confluence. No matter what kind of plank bridge they threw across, it was always swept away by the waters; for either the epa would rise quickly and unexpectedly, as mountain streams are wont to do, and weaken the bridge and sweep away the logs, or else it was the Drina that swelled suddenly and rushed into the channel of the epa and backed its flow, so that its level rose and bore the bridge away as it had never been. Then again, in the winter the planks became iced and slippery, so that both men and beasts of burden came to grief. Thus, were anybody to built them a bridge, he would do them the greatest service.
The Vizier gave six rugs for the mosque and as much money as was needed to built a fountain with three spouts in front of it. At the same time he decided to built the villagers a bridge.
In Istanbul at that time there lived an Italian master builder who had put up several bridges near the city, and so had made a name for himself. He was now engaged by the Vizier's treasurer and sent to Bosnia with two men from the Court.
They arrived at Višegrad before the last snows of winter had melted. For several days afterwards the astonished people of Višegrad watched the master builder as, stooping and grayhaired but with a pink and youthful face, he inspected the great stone bridge there, knocking on it, crumbling the joints' mortar between his fingers and tasting it on his tongue, measuring the arches with his steps. Then he went to spend a few days at Bania, at the quarry from which the stone for the Višegrad bridge had come. He hired day laborers to clear out the quarry, which had become partially filled with earth and overgrown with bushes and hemlock saplings. They went on digging until they found a wide, deep vein of stone that was harder and whiter than that which had been used for the Višegrad bridge. Then the master builder walked down the bank of the Drina as far as the epa and determined the spot where the stone would be ferried across the river. Whereupon one of the Vizier's men went back to Istanbul with an estimate and plans.
The Italian remained behind to await their return, but he did not want to stay either at Višegrad or in any of the Christian houses overlooking the epa. He built himself a log cabin on a rise in the triangle between the Drina and the epa-the remaining Vizier's man and a Višegrad clerk acting as his interpreters-and there he lodged. he cooked for himself, buying eggs, cream, onions, and dried fruit from the peasants. He never once bought meat, it was said. All day long he dressed sample blocks of stone, made drawings, experimented with various kinds of rock, and studied the course and the currents of the epa.
In the meantime, the other official returned from Istanbul with the Vizier's approval and one third of the necessary funds.
Work on the bridge started. The people's wonder at the unusual spectacle knew no bounds. What was happening before their eyes in no way resembled a bridge. The man sank massive pine trunks diagonally across the epa, and between them a double row of piling, plaited together with brushwood and reinforced with clay, so that the whole thing looked like a trench. In this way the river diverted and one half of the river bed was drained. But one day, just when this work was completed, there was a cloudburst somewhere in the mountains and in no time at all the epa changed color and rose. That same night it broke the middle of the newly finished dam. By dawn the following morning the water had receded, but the wattle was broken through, the piles torn up, and the beams knocked askew. Among the workers and the people it was whispered that the epa did not want a bridge thrown over itself. But three days later the master builder ordered new piles to be driven in, this time deeper, and the remaining beams to be repaired and secured. Once more the rocky bottom of the river bed echoed to the din of the mallets and workmen's cries and rhythmical blows.
Only when everything had been set and made ready, and the stone from Bania delivered, did the stone cutters and masons arrive-men from Herzegovina and Dalmatia. They built themselves wooden huts, in front of which they chipped away at the stone, coated with dust and as white as millers. The master builder went from one to another, bent down over them, constantly checking their work with a drafting triangle of yellow tin and a lead plumb bob on a green thread. When the steep and rocky banks had been cut through on a both sides, the money suddenly ran out. The workmen began to grumble and rumor arose among the local people that nothing would come of this bridge. Some men who had just arrived from Istanbul reported having heard that the Vizier had had a change of heart. No one knew what was the matter with him, whether he was ill or beset by other troubles, but he was becoming more and more inaccessible and was neglecting or abandoning public works which he had begun in Istanbul itself. Yet a few days later one of the Vizier's men arrived with the remainder of the money, and the work went on.
A fortnight before St. Demetrius' Day, the people crossing the epa by the plank bridge a little distance above the new works noticed for the first time a white, smooth wall of hewn stone, decked with scaffolding like a spider's web, and jutting out of the dark-gray slate on both banks of the river. From then on it grew every day. Before long, however, the first frosts began, and work was suspended. The masons went home for the winter, while the master builder ensconced himself in his log cabin, from which he hardly ever emerged. All day long he pored over his plans and expense ledgers, and went out from time to time to inspect the bridge works. When, just before the spring, the river ice began to crack, he was often seen puttering around scaffolding and the dams, a worried look on his face. Sometimes he would even do this at night, with a torch in his hand.
Just before St. George's Day, the masons returned and work was resumed. And exactly at midsummer the bridge was finished. Gaily the workers took down the scaffolding, and from behind the maze of beams and boards there appeared a white and slender bridge, spanning the two rocky banks in a single soaring arch.
Few things would have been harder to imagine than such a wonderful structure in so ravaged and bleak a place. It seemed as if the two banks had each spurted a foaming jet of water toward one another, and these had collided, formed an arch, and remained thus for a moment, hovering above the chasm. Through the arch, at the farthest point of vision, one could see a small blue stretch of the Drina, and deep down beneath it was gurgling epa, now tamed and froth-speckled. For a long time one's eyes could not get used to the slender and beautifully conceived line of that arch, which looked as if in its flight it had momentarily got caught on that prickly and harsh landscape full of bramble and hemlock, and that at the first opportunity it would take off again and disappear.
(...)