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 Žepa, 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 Istanbul 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 Žepa, 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 Šetkié still had four houses and were the wealthiest in the village, but that both the village and the 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 Žepa. The village stands on a hill right above the confluence of the Žepa and the Drina, and the only way of getting to Višegrad was over the Žepa, about fifty yards above the confluence. No matter what kind of plank bridge they threw across, it was always swept away by the waters; for either the Žepa 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 Žepa and backed its flow, so that its level rose and bore the bridge away as if 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 build 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 build a fountain with three spouts in front of it. At the same time he decided to build 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 gray-haired 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 Žepa 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 Žepa. He built himself a log cabin on a rise in the triangle between the Drina and the Žepa—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 Žepa.

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 men sank massive pine trunks diagonally across the Žepa, 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 was 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 Žepa 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 Žepa 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 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 Žepa 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 the 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 the gurgling Žepa, 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.

Country folk from the nearby villages flocked to see the bridge. Townspeople from Višegrad and Rogatica also came to admire it, regretting that it had been built in such a stony wilderness instead of in their own market town.

“The thing to do is to give birth to a Vizier,” answered the people of Žepa as they passed their hands over the bridge parapet, which was straight and fine-edged as if carved from cheese, not hewn from stone.

Even as the first travelers, halting in wonder, were already crossing the bridge, the master builder paid off his men, packed and loaded his cases of tools and paper, and set off for Istanbul together with the Vizier’s two men.

Tales about him now spread through town and village. Selim the Gypsy, who had carried the Italian’s purchases on his horse from Višegrad, and was the only one ever to have entered the log cabin, now took his ease in the coffeehouses and recounted, Lord knew how many times, all he knew about the stranger.

“Truly, he is not a man like other men. This past winter, when there was no work, I went away for ten—fifteen days. But when I came back everything was in a mess, just as I’d left it. There he was, sitting in the freezing cabin, with a bearskin cap on his head and wrapped down to his waist—only the hands showed through, all blue from cold. He kept scraping those stones and writing. Scraping and writing, just like that. I’d unload the horse and he’d look at me with those green eyes of his, his eyebrows thick and dark, and you’d think he was about to snap my head off. But not a word, not a peep out of him. Never have I seen the likes of it. Ey, my lads, how that man worked his fingers to the bone during those eighteen months, and when it was all over, we took him across the ferry and off he went to Istanbul on that horse of his. You’d expect him to turn around just once and look at the bridge—but no, not him!”

The shopkeepers plied him with more questions about the master builder and the life he had led, and their wonder grew and they could not forgive themselves for not having paid more attention to him when he was still to be seen in the streets and alleys of Višegrad.

Meanwhile the master builder was riding home, and he was but two days’ journey from Istanbul when he fell ill of the plague. He arrived in the city in high fever, barely holding on to the saddle. He went straight to the hospital of the Italian Franciscans. The following day, at the same hour, he breathed his last in the arms of a monk.

The very next morning the Vizier was told about the death of the master builder, and given the remaining accounts and sketches of the bridge. The builder had received only a quarter of his pay. He had left neither debts nor ready money, neither a will nor any heirs. After a long deliberation, the Vizier ordered that one third of the pay still due to him should be given to the hospital and the other two thirds used as an endowment for the orphans’ bread and soup.

Just as he was issuing these instructions—it was a fine morning in late summer—they brought him a petition from a young and learned teacher of the Koran who was Bosnian by birth, and author of some polished verses, whom the Vizier had patronized and helped on past occasions. He had heard—the letter said—of the bridge which the Vizier had built in Bosnia, and hoped that it, like all other public works, would bear an inscription making known when and on whose orders it had been built. As always, be offered his services to the Vizier and would deem it an honor if the attached inscription, which he had composed with great care, were accepted. On a separate parchment was the chronogram, in an exquisite calligraphic hand, with a red and gold initial.

When Noble Skill joined hands
With Wise Administration,
This wonderous bridge was born,
A joy to men, and Yusuf’s glory
In both worlds.

Underneath was the Vizier’s oval seal, divided into two unequal sections; the larger bore the words Yusuf Ibrahim, true servant of Allah, and the smaller his personal motto: In Silence is Safety.

The Vizier sat a long time over this petition, his hands wide apart, one palm resting on the verse inscription, the other on the sketches and expense accounts of the master builder. Lately, he had been wont to spend more and more time deliberating over petitions and official documents.

This past summer it had been two years since his fall and banishment. At first, on his return to power, he had noticed no change in himself. He was at that age—the best of all—when a man knows and feels the full value of life; he had vanquished his opponents and was more powerful than ever before; the depth of his recent fall enabled him to measure the true height of his power. Yet, as the months went by, instead of forgetting his confinement he was nagged more and more by the memory of it. Even when at times he managed to shut his mind to such thoughts, he was powerless to prevent dreams. And his dreams were beginning to be haunted by the specter of prison, and from those nightmares the specter passed, like a nameless dread, into his waiting hours, poisoning his days.

He became more sensitive to the objects around him. Certain things that he had never before noticed now began to offend him. He ordered all brocade to be removed from the Palace and replaced it by a light-colored homespun cloth that was smooth and soft yet did not rustle under the touch. He developed something akin to hatred for mother-of-pearl, since in his thoughts it was connected with a certain chill wilderness and his own present isolation. At the mere touch, or even the mere sight of it, his teeth would chatter and his skin would break out in goose pimples. All furnishings and weapons that contained any mother-of-pearl were removed from his quarters.

He was beginning to view most things with a concealed but profound distrust. Somewhere in the back of his mind there was lodged the thought: Every human act and word can bring evil. And this possibility was now found to be lurking in almost everything he heard, saw, uttered, or thought. The victorious Vizier had become fearful of life. Thus, without even being aware of it, he was entering that state which is the first phase of dying, when a man begins to be more interested in the shadows thrown by things than in the things themselves.

This evil molded and seethed within him, and there was no person to whom he could even think of admitting or confiding it. And when, in the end, the evil had finally done its work and broken to the surface, no one would be likely to recognize it anyway; people would simply say: Death. For people have no inkling of how many of the great and powerful ones of this world die in such a fashion within themselves silently and imperceptibly, yet rapidly.

That morning, too, the Vizier was tired from lack of sleep, but was calm and collected. His eyelids were heavy and his checks all but frozen in the radiance of the morning. He thought of the foreign master builder who had died, and of the orphans who would feed on his earnings. He thought of the distant, mountainous, gloomy land of Bosnia (he could never think of Bosnia without experiencing a sense of gloom!) which even the light of Islam had only partially succeeded in illuminating, and where life, devoid of finer urbanities and grace, was poor, brutish, and hard. How many such regions were there in this world of Allah? How many torrential streams without a bridge or ford? How many places without drinking water? How many mosques without decoration and beauty?

In his mind the earth stretched on and on, full of all manner of needs, poverty, and fear in all shapes and forms.

The sun shone brightly on the tiny green tiles of the garden pavilion. The Vizier looked down on the teacher’s verse inscription, raised his hand slowly, and then crossed it out twice. He waited an instant, then struck out the upper half of the seal bearing his name. There remained only the motto: In Silence is Safety. He stood for some minutes gazing down on this, then raised his hand once more and crossed that out, too.

That was how the bridge came to have no name and no inscription.

But over in Bosnia, the bridge sparkled in the sun and glimmered in the light of the new moon, and men and cattle passed back and forth over it. Little by little, the crater of ravished soil and scattered objects that marks a new structure vanished without a trace. The people carried off, and the waters swept away, the broken piles, the remnants of the scaffolding and the rubble of the works, and the rains washed clean the last vestige of the work of stone cutters. But still the landscape could not fit itself to the bridge, nor the bridge to the landscape. Seen from the side, the white span of its bold arch always looked isolated and lonely and took the traveler by surprise like a strange thought gone astray and caught among crags in the wilderness.

The teller of this tale was the first to think of looking into the origins of the bridge. This happened one evening when he was returning from the mountains and, feeling weary, had sat down beside the stone parapet of the bridge. It was that time of summer when the days were scorching but the nights had a nip to them. As he leaned against the stonework, he noticed that it was still warm from the day’s heat. He perspired, yet a 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.