Books: Three Centuries

THE BRIDGE ON THE DRINA (314 pp.)—Ivo Andric—Macmi/lan ($3.50).

Above the rushing green waters of the Drina River, a beautiful white stone bridge with eleven vaulting arches provided a meeting place for the lackadaisical citizens of Visegrad. On summer evenings the townsfolk strolled its length, bought melons and cherries from the peasants, sipped thick Turkish coffee. The town elders sat smoking in the middle of the bridge, looked with contentment on the Bosnian mountains ringing their valley, gravely discussed public matters. The young men came to sing and joke, to flirt with passing girls or lean dreaming on the parapet. On such soft nights, a man on the bridge felt as if he were on a magic swing: “He swung over the earth and the waters and flew in the skies, yet was firmly and surely linked with the town and his own white house there on the bank with its plum orchard about it.”

This book is an evocative chronicle of the bridge, ranging the 350 years from its building by a 16th century grand vizier, as a link between the European and Asian halves of the Ottoman Empire, to its near destruction in World War I. At Visegrad, in what is now Yugoslavia, the right bridge had found the right people, an amiable mixture of Serbs, Jews and Turks with an immoderate love of women, an inclination to alcohol and laziness and a dislike of war, for they were men who “preferred to live foolishly rather than to die foolishly.”

Disputatious Moslem. Violence came infrequently to Visegrad but, when it did, men died resignedly. Early in the book, Author Andrić offers the most grisly description of an impaling since the Tartar Prince Azya was mounted on a stake and had his one eye gouged out in Henryk (Quo Vadis) Sienkiewicz’s Pan Michael. Later, when the Serbs revolt against the crumbling Ottoman Empire, severed heads are as common on the bridge as melons used to be, but the townsfolk—always approving of good workmanship—remark that the Turkish executioner has “a lighter hand than Mushan the town barber.” When the Austrians finally march into Visegrad on the heels of the routed Turks, in 1878, they find a disputatious Moslem named Alihodja on the bridge with his ear nailed to a beam. He had made the mistake of arguing with Turkish guerrillas who were urging the reluctant townspeople to defend Visegrad to the last man.

The bruised and put-upon Alihodja sounds the elegiac theme of Andrić’s book. He watches gloomily as the bustling Austrians destroy the “sweet tranquillity” of Visegrad. They busily replace the outmoded fountains with new ” ‘unclean’ water which passed through iron pipes so that it was not fit to drink”; they industriously built a railroad to the border that finally puts an end to the centuries-old traffic over the Drina Bridge. The book’s last chapters take place in the first months of World War I, with Visegrad being shelled impartially by Austrian and Serbian guns. Suspected Serb sympathizers are hanged in Visegrad Square, and the last gesture of the retreating Austrians is to wreck the bridge over the Drina.

Ironic Love. Near death himself, old Alihodja reflects that he has been right all along in his contempt for Western progress. For years, he mutters, the Austrians pretended concern for the bridge: “They had cleaned it, embellished it, repaired it down to its foundations, taken the water supply across it, lit it with electricity and then one day blown it all into the skies.”

Author Ivo Andrić, who was raised in the town of Visegrad he writes about so compassionately, is president of the Communist Federation of Writers of Yugoslavia. Before Tito, he was Yugoslavian minister in Berlin when the Nazis declared war on his homeland. This book, his acknowledged masterpiece, was written during World War II while Andrić lived in retirement in Nazi-occupied Belgrade. It is richly peopled and suffused with an ironic yet loving view of man. To Andrić there is always the hope that “if they destroy here, then somewhere is building. If God had abandoned this unlucky town on the Drina, he had surely not abandoned the whole world that was beneath the skies. They would not do this forever.”