A Bosniak engineer is conscripted to rebuild the bridge his own resistance destroyed — and realizes the only way to keep his soul is to bring it down a second time, with himself on it.

SYNOPSIS:

SYNOPSIS

EASTERN BOSNIA, JANUARY 1994. Pulled from a death march of two hundred Bosniak prisoners, MARKO KOVA?, 49, a celebrated Sarajevo bridge engineer whose wife was killed in the siege, is delivered to COLONEL DRAGAN OBRADOVI?, a Serb officer who has admired his published work for seven years. The offer: rebuild the strategic crossing the Bosniak resistance just destroyed — strong enough to carry a T-72 — in ninety days. Forty Bosniak prisoners live as long as the work continues. Marko negotiates rations, picks his foremen — among them HASAN, an ironworker who calls him turncoat, and VEDAD, 19, a literature student — and starts the clock. The bridge rises. So does something he has no language for: he sleeps. He stops shaking. At his drafting table, sleeves rolled up, he finds to his horror that he is happy. The work is taking him back. Hasan sees it first, and stops looking at him. LIEUTENANT PAVKOVI?, 26, films everything for a propaganda documentary, and at day forty-nine screens his cut to the prisoners: Marko on screen, gesturing at blueprints, alive. The men walk out in silence. None of them looks at him.

That night, through a courier, Marko makes contact with the demolition team that brought the first bridge down. He will give them the second one. He asks for no extraction — if I walk off this bridge, in two years I am working for them in Banja Luka; in five years I am explaining to a young man how it was complicated. When Obradovi? moves the opening forward to save the prisoners with a transfer to a labor camp — also confessing that his own son is in the town the bridge will be used to attack — Marko sets the charges himself, better than the demolition team would have, and kneels at the detonator. Obradovi? finds him there with a pistol. He asks one question: Why did you build it well? Marko answers: Because I did not know how to build it any other way. Obradovi? closes his eyes. Neither did I. He lowers the pistol, climbs the parapet, and goes into the river. Marko presses the plunger. At dawn, on the road to Banja Luka, Hasan and Vedad stand watching a distant column of smoke, holding hands. In the empty office above the valley, Pavkovi? films the wreckage, ejects the tape, and buttons it into the breast pocket of his uniform.

THE ENGINEER