The Bridge on the Drina Read Online Free PDF Page A

public matters and common troubles, but even more often young men who only knew how to sing and joke. There, on great occasions or times of change, were posted proclamations and public notices (on the raised wall below the marble plaque with the Turkish inscription and above the fountain), but there too, right up to 1878, hung or were exposed on stakes the heads of all those who for whatever reason had been executed, and executions in that frontier town, especially in years of unrest, were frequent and in some years, as we shall see, almost of daily occurrence.
    Weddings or funerals could not cross the bridge without stopping at the  kapia.  There the wedding guests would usually preen themselves and get into their ranks before entering the market-place. If the times were peaceful and carefree they would hand the plum-brandy around, sing, dance the  kolo  and often delay there far longer than they had intended. And for funerals, those who carried the bier would put it down to rest for a little there on the  kapia  where the dead man had in any case passed a good part of his life.
    The  kapia  was the most important part of the bridge, even as the bridge was the most important part of the town, or as a Turkish traveller, to whom the people of Višegrad had been very hospitable, wrote in his account of his travels: 'their  kapia  is the heart of the bridge, which is the heart of the town, which must remain in everyone's heart'. It showed that the old masons, who according to the old tales had struggled with  vilas  and every sort of wonder and had been compelled to wall up living children, had a feeling not only for
    the permanence and beauty of their work but also for the benefit and convenience which the most distant generations were to derive from it. When one knows well everyday life here in the town and thinks it over carefully, then one must say to oneself that there are really only a very small number of people in this Bosnia of ours who have so much pleasure and enjoyment as does each and every townsman on the  kapia.
    Naturally winter should not be taken into account, for then only whoever was forced tp do so would cross the bridge, and then he would lengthen his pace and bend his head before the chill wind that blew uninterruptedly over the river. Then, it was understood, there was no loitering on the open terraces of the  kapia.  But at every other time of year the  kapia  was a real boon for great and small. Then every citizen could, at any time of day or night, go out to the  kapia  and sit on the  sola,  or hang about it on business or in conversation. Suspended some fifteen metres above the green boisterous waters, this stone  sola  floated in space over the water, with dark green hills on three sides, the heavens, filled with clouds or stars, above and the open view down river like a narrow amphitheatre bounded by the dark blue mountains behind.
    How many Vezirs or rich men are there in the world who could indulge their joy or their cares, their moods or their delights in such a spot? Few, very few. But how many of our townsmen have, in the course of centuries and the passage of generations, sat here in the dawn or twilight or evening hours and unconsciously measured the whole starry vault above! Many and many of us have sat there, head in hands, leaning on the well-cut smooth stone, watching the eternal play of light on the mountains and the clouds in the sky, and have unravelled the threads of our small-town destinies, eternally the same yet eternally tangled in some new manner. Someone affirmed long ago (it is true that he was a foreigner and spoke in jest) that this  kapia  had had an influence on the fate of the town and even on the character of its citizens. In those endless sessions, the stranger said, one must search for the key to the inclination of many of our townsmen to reflection and dreaming and one of the main reasons for that melancholic serenity for which the inhabitants