The Bridge on the Drina

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Authors: Ivo Andrić
Tags: TPB, Yugoslav, Nobel Prize in Literature, nepalifiction
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piers and with some difficulty moored their raft to one of them. They let them climb up and come among them and then they attacked them with axes, overcame them and bound them. One, who had been struck unconscious by a blow from an axe, they had bound easily, but the other one, after pretending to be half-dead, had slipped from their grasp like a fish through the planks into the water. The frightened guard halted in his story and the man from Plevlje screamed:
    'Who let him go? Tell me who let him go, or I shall chop you all into small pieces, all of you.'
    The men stood silently and blinked at the red flickering light while their leader kept turning around as if searching the darkness, and shouting insults at them such as they had never heard him use by day. Then, suddenly, he started, leant over the bound peasant as if over a precious hoard, and began to mutter through his teeth in a thin lachrymose voice:
    'Guard him, guard him well! You bastards, if you let him go, not a single one of you will keep his head on his shoulders.'
    The guards crowded round the peasant. Two more hurried to join them, crossing the ferry from the farther bank. The man from Plevlje ordered them to bind the prisoner more securely. So they carried him like a corpse slowly and carefully to the bank. The man from Plevlje went with them, not looking where he was treading and never taking his eyes from the bound man. It seemed to him that he was growing in stature with every step, that only from that moment was he beginning to live.
    On the bank new torches were lighted and began to flare up. The captive peasant was taken into one of the workmen's barracks where there was a fire, and was bound tightly to a post with ropes and chains taken from the hearth.
    It was Radisav of Unište himself.
    The man from Plevlje calmed down a little; he no longer screamed or swore, but he was unable to keep still. He sent guards along the banks to look for the other peasant who had leapt into the water, though it was clear that on so dark a night, if he had not drowned, it would be impossible to find or catch him. He gave order after order, went out, came in again and then once again went back, drunk with excitement. He began to interrogate the bound peasant, but soon left off doing that also. All that he did was only to master and conceal his nervousness, for in fact he had only one thought in his head; he was waiting for Abidaga. He had not long to wait.
    As soon as he had slept out his first sleep Abidaga, as was his habit, waked shortly after midnight and, no longer able to sleep, stood by his window and looked out into the darkness. By day he could see from his balcony at Bikavac the whole river valley and all the construction works, with the barracks, mills, stables and all that devastated and littered space around them. Now in the darkness he sensed their presence and thought with bitterness how slowly the work was proceeding and how, sooner or later, this must reach the Vezir's ears. Someone would be sure to see to that. If no one. else, then that smooth, cold and crafty Tosun Effendi. Then it might chance that he might fall into disgrace with the Vezir. That was what prevented him from sleeping, and even when he did fall asleep he trembled in his dreams. His food seemed poison to him, men seemed odious and his life dark when he even thought of it. Disgrace —that meant that he would be exiled from the Vezir's presence, that his enemies would laugh at him (Ah! Anything but that!), that he would be nothing and nobody, no more than a rag, a good for nothing, not only in the eyes of others but also in his own. It would mean giving up his hard won fortune or, if he managed to keep it, to eke it out stealthily, far from Stambul, somewhere in the obscure provinces, forgotten, superfluous, ridiculous, wretched. No, anything but that! Better not to see the sun, not to breathe the air. It would be a hundred times better to be nobody and to have nothing. That was the

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