Three Arched Bridge

by Ismail Kadare

  The deserted sandbank resembled a ruin, an eyesore with half-destroyed sheds stripped of everything of value, fragments of plank thrown anywhere, traces of mortar, piles of shattered stones, carelessly discarded broken tools, ditches, and lime pits half filled with water. The right bank of the Ujana looked disfigured forever,

  Before he boarded his cart, the master-in-chief, who seemed to notice that I was watching their departure, left his people and came up to me, apparently to bid farewell He said nothing but merely drew a piece of card from his jacket, Scribbling some figures on it with a bit of lead, he began to explain to me, I do not know why, the balancing forces that held the bridge upright, My eyes opened wide, because I had not the slightest knowledge of such things,, while he went on in his broken language, thinking that he was explaining to me what the forces and opposing forces were.

  Late that afternoon the last cart left, and a frightening silence descended, 1 still had in my hand the draftsman’s card, covered with lines and figures, which perhaps did show the forces that kept the bridge upright and those trying to bring it down. The setting sun gleamed obliquely on the arches, which at last found a broken reflection in the waters, and at that moment the bridge resembled a meaningless dream, dreamed by the river and both riverbanks together. So alien, dropped by the river-banks into time, it looked totally solitary as it gripped in its stone limbs its only prey, Murrash Zenebisha, the man who died to allay the enmity of land and water.

  47

  WHAT WAS THIS? They had gone, and an unendurable silence reigned everywhere, A horrible calm, Almost as if plague had struck,

  No one crossed the bridge. Not even mad Gjelosh. Chill winds blew upon it, passing in and out of its arches. And then the winds dropped, and the bridge hung in air, a stranger, superfluous. Human travelers who should have headed for it avoided the place, turning aside, back, or away, looking for the ford, calling softly to the ferryman; they were ready to swim across the river or freeze in its rapids and drown rather than set foot on the bridge. Nobody wanted to walk over the dead.

  And so the first week passed and the second began. The great mass of stone waited expectantly. The empty arches seemed about to eat you. The bowed spine above waited for someone to step on it, no matter who — vagrants, women, a barbarian horde, wedding guests, or an imperial army marching two, four, twenty-four, one hundred hours without rest.

  But nobody set foot on it. Sometimes it made you want to cry out: Had so much sweat, so much effort, and even … blood been expended for this bridge, never to be used for anything?

  Rain fell the second week. For days on end the bridge stood drenched and miserable.

  Then the rain stopped, and again the weather was chill and gray. The third week began. A whining wind crawled over the wasteland. It was the end of Tuesday afternoon when they saw that a wolf had padded softly over the bridge, as in a fairy tale. People could not credit their own eyes (and there were those who were ready to believe that a herald had crossed, waving the standard of the Skuraj family, the only one that has a wolf in its center). The beast meanwhile vanished quickly into the distance, where the wind seemed to have stood still, and howled.

  The days that followed were silent and empty. It was ashen weather everywhere, as if before the end of the world. One afternoon, old Ajkuna came up to the bridge. People thought that finally she would curse it, and they gathered to watch. She halted at the entrance to the bridge, below the right-hand approach arch, and laid her hand and then her ear to the masonry. She stood there a long while, then lifted her head from the palm of her hand and said:

  “It is trembling.”

  I remembered the man who had fallen in an epileptic fit. He had indeed passed on his convulsions to the bridge.

  Many believed that the bridge would collapse of itself. Occasionally I brought out the card on which the designer had scribbled those mysterious figures, and I would study them abstractedly, as if trying to understand from them the bridge’s fear,

  I would have wished that the designer could have seen this desolation.

  But the bridge’s solitude, which seemed ready to last for centuries, came to an end suddenly one Sunday. The highway, the surrounding plain, and the sandbank echoed to a piercing creak. People ran in terror to see what was happening. On the ancient road, in a long black column like a crawling iron reptile, a convoy of carts was traveling. The carts approached the bridge. We all stood frozen on the bank, expecting to witness some catastrophe. The first cart quickened its speed and began to mount the incline. You could hear the iron wheels changing their tone as they struck the stone paving. Then the cart mounted the right-hand approach arch, and then on, on, over the first arch, over … the dead man. Then came the second and third carts, and then the others, all laden with blackened barrels. They squeaked frighteningly, especially when they rode over the immured victim, and it looked each time as if the arch would split, but nothing happened.

  The tail of the convoy was still on the bridge when people realized what kind of caravan it was, what it carried, and where it was going. Its sole cargo was pitch, for the Orikum military base near Vloré.

  We watched its progress for a long time, looking alternately at the tail of the convoy and at the bridge, which had suffered no harm at all.

  Immediately after the crossing of this inauspicious tar train, as a guest at the Inn of the Two Roberts called it, news came that the death of Komneni had at last been announced at Vlore, and that his son-in-law, Balsha II, had deployed his troops over the entire principality, including Komneni’s half of Orikum. Our count, accompanied by his entourage, departed to attend the old prince’s burial He must have been still on the road when, like thunder after a lightning flash, more news came, worse than the first, to tell us that the Byzantine garrison had finally evacuated its half of the naval base, ceding it to the Turkish garrison.

  We were on the brink of war,

  48

  THE COUNT RETURNED from Komneni’s funeral even more withdrawn than when he had left. Almost all the lords of Arberia had gone to the ceremony, but apparently not even the sight of the old prince’s coffin, around which they were all gathered perhaps for the last time, gave them the wisdom to finally reach an understanding among themselves.

  Silence again reigned through all the days that followed. Still nobody else had crossed the bridge. One day only some frightened sheep somehow found themselves on it and tried to turn back, but were unable to do so. The sheep wandered over the bridge while the terrified shepherd brandished his crook on the bank, calling for the ferryman to carry him across.

  This was the only event of these days. A few blades of grass sprouted among the piles of stone and sand left beside the bridge. They were the first sign that nature was slowly, very slowly, but insistently preparing to erase from the face of the earth every trace that bore witness to the presence of workmen on the bank of the Ujana e Keqe.

  The days were numb with cold, with a few motionless clouds in the distant sky, and silent, silent. No news came from anywhere. They said that in a very distant country they were building a great wall Plague had struck central Europe again.

  On the eleventh of the month of Michaelmas, I happened to make a tour of duty as far as the borders of our territories, to the very spot where the domain of the neighboring Turkish pasha begins. After completing my work, I would sit for hours on end, contemplating the point where the Turkish Empire began. I could not believe it was there in front of me. I repeated to myself over and over again, like someone wandering in his mind, that what they call the lands of Islam began a few paces in front of me. Asia began two paces in front of me. It was indeed enough to turn your wits. What had once been more distant than the lands of fairy tales was now in front of our very noses. And still I could not believe it. Nor could anybody believe that these people had really come so close. There they were, yet evidence,, times, dates, and the units of measurement of time and space dissolved as if in a mist. Sometimes I wanted to call out: Where are they? Below
, the land was the same, and the same winter sky covered the earth. And yet just here began, or rather ended, their enormous state, which began in the Chinese deserts.

  I had seen nobody on the other side during the days of my tour of duty, neither guards nor inhabitants. There was only land left waste, more like a stony desert, and scrub everywhere. Only on the last night (oh, if only I had not stayed that night), on that final night I heard their music, I still do not know where that singing and accompaniment came from, who was singing, or why. I wonder whether they were wandering dervishes caught on the border as night fell, or civil servants sent from the capital to set border stones, or a group of itinerant musicians. In the end, I did not worry much about it. But when I heard their singing accompanied by entirely unfamiliar instruments, I felt seized by a sensation I had never known before. It was a diffused anxiety, without the slightest hint of hope. What was this stupor, this hashish dissolved in the air in the form of song? Its tones slithered drowsily; everything seemed sticky and shapeless. So this was their music, I thought, their inmost voice. It crept toward us like a soporific mist. At its tones, feet skipping in a dance would falter as if seized by terror.

  I returned bitter and sour from my journey.

  Nothing noteworthy happened until the middle of the month, apart from the appearance of the body of a drowned man floating one day on the surface of the waters. It collided with the pier where the body was immured (the water level had now risen this far), twirled around, and struck the pier once again with its elbow, as if to say to the dead man. How are you, brother? Then it floated away.

  Those who had seen the drowned man and tried to tell other people were met with stares of incredulity. But that happened last year, people said. We saw it together. Don’t you remember? And both sides would sit in bewilderment. By the bridge piers, time, swirling like water, seemed to have stood still.

  49

  ONE MORNING they woke me before dawn to tell me that people were crossing the bridge,

  “Who?” I asked sleepily.

  “The Baltaj family, all the men of the house together, with their black ox.”

  I went up to the narrow window-slit that overlooked the bridge, I knew that one day human beings would set foot on it, but I did not think it would happen so soon. By next spring at the earliest, I thought. Besides, I was also sure that some lone individual would be the first to dare, and not the Baltajs with a flock of children,

  “Where are they going, I wonder? What has got into them?” I asked nobody in particular,

  “No doubt some worry,” called a voice from below.

  Worry, I thought. What else could those black sheepskins contain?

  The first sheepskin, the tallest of them, who was leading the ox, emerged at the opposite bank without suffering any harm. After him came the shorter ones, and finally the children,

  “They crossed,” somebody said.

  They expected me to say somethings perhaps a curse or, on the contrary, a blessing on the travelers. Perhaps they had felt a secret wish to cross the bridge for a long time, I had experienced something of this sort myself, and whenever 1 felt its pull 1 would walk to and fro for a long while, tiring my feet, as if this desire were simply in my feet alone, and 1 were punishing them for it.

  So the Baltajs had crossed … only their menfolk, I remembered that in the villages, crossing the rainbow was considered so impossible that people thought that if girls went over they could be turned into boys, … And suddenly it flashed into my mind that nothing other than a rainbow must have been the first sketch for a bridge, and the sky had for a long time been planting this primordial form in people’s minds….

  I felt afraid of all this hostility toward the bridge. However, I calmed myself at once, The divine model had been pure. But here, although the bridge pretended to embody this idea, it had death at its foundations.

  The Baltajs, who had sold their black ox because of some problem, returned bitter and disconsolate, crossing the bridge again, but without their animal Everybody talked about their crossing, but there was neither anger nor reproach in their words. There was only something like a sigh.

  In the meantime Uk the ferryman had fallen ill. He had caught cold, which was not in itself something unexpected. But when it became known, everyone seemed to be astonished. Night and day on that dilapidated raft, his feet in the water, forty and more years on end, How had he never caught cold before?

  He died soon and was buried on the same day. It was a cloudy afternoon. The Ujana e Keqe was full of waves,, and the blackened raft, moored to its jetty by chains, bucked on the waters like a furious horse that had sensed the death of its mästen

  “Boats and Rafts’, did not replace the ferryman. It did not even remember the abandoned raft. The post that supported the sign with its name and the tolls was now very unsteady, and one day someone took it away*

  As if the ferryman’s death were some long-awaited sign, people one after another began to use the bridge. After the Baltajs, the Kryekuqe family crossed the bridge, and after them the landlord of the Inn of the Two Roberts, together with his brother-in-law, both drunk. On the same day some foreign travelers crossed, and at midday on the eighteenth of the month large numbers of the Stres clan passed over, a pregnant woman among them.

  None of the Zenebishas crossed. There were also many old men and women, led by old Ajkuna, who had not only vowed never to commit the sin of setting foot on that devil’s backbone but left instructions in their wills that even after their deaths they would prefer their coffins to be hurled into the water rather than carried over the bridge to the graveyard on the opposite bank.

  Meanwhile, the abandoned raft tied by its chain to the old jetty rotted and crumbled in an extraordinarily short time. Such a thing was indeed surprising, especially when you think that the ferryman had made virtually no repairs for decades. People had only to give up using it for a very short while before it disintegrated.

  50

  ON THE THIRD OF THE MONTH of St, Ndreu’ early in the mornings Dan Mteshi crossed the bridge, together with his sons and a goat. After him’ the men of the Gjorg clan crossed on their way to the law court. Then mad Gjelosh crossed (or rather advanced to the middle and turned back). Later, all noise and laughter, almost the entire Vulkathanaj clan crossed, mounted on mules, traveling to a wedding in Buzézesta. Immediately afterward Duda’s daughters crossed, as did mad Gjelosh’ making a zigzag path. At midday two groups of strangers crossed one after the other, and then a drunkard from the Inn of the Two Roberts; then mad Gjelosh braced himself to set off again but did not do so. Toward dusk’ on his bay mount, the knight Stanish Stresi crossed as fast as you could blink, though nobody could say why’ and after him a foreign herald. When night fell crossings became very rare, and anyway travelers were no longer recognizable in the darkness. As their silhouettes appeared on the bridge, you could gather a little from their gait, such as whether they were Albanians or foreigners, but there was no way that you could tell why they were travelings whether for pleasure, penance, or murder.

  51

  NOT A LIVING SOUL crossed the bridge for one hundred hours in a row. Rain fell. The horizon was dissolved in mist. They said that plague was ravaging central Europe.

  What was this interruption? For a time it seemed that people, having committed such a sin (and there were those who came to confession immediately after crossing the bridged had made an agreement to abandon the bridge for good. However, on Sunday night the traffic resumed as unexpectedly as it had ceased.

  When I was at leisure,I enjoyed choosing a sheltered spot and observing the bridge. The bridge was like an open book. As I watched what was happening on it, it seemed to me that I could grasp its essence. It sometimes seemed to me that human confidence, fear, suspicion, and madness were nowhere more clearly manifest than on its back. Some people stole over as if afraid of damaging it, while others thunderously stamped across it.

  There were those who continued to cross at night. bandit style, a
s if scared of somebody, or perhaps of the bridge itself, since they had spoken so ill of it.

  After the bishop of Ardenica, who was traveling to defrock a priest at the Monastery of the Three Crosses, another covered wagon crossed, which, it was later suspected, probably contained an abducted woman. Then came oil traders. Mad Gjelosh followed the traders, shouting, because it was well known that he could not endure the seepages from their skin bottles. With a rag in his hand, he would stagger almost on his knees, wiping away the traces of oil, and with the same rag wiping the stone sides of the bridge, as if to clean them of dust.

  Late in the afternoon there came, from who knows where, Shtjefen Keqi and Mark Kasneci, or Mark Haberi as he had recently begun to call himself. They had set off a week earlier with a great deal of fuss “to look death in the eye,” but, it seemed, were coming back as always like drenched chickens.

  Two months previously Mark Kasneci had caused us a great deal of confusion with his new surname. After a trip to the fiefdom of the Turkish pasha, he came back and announced that he was no longer called Mark Kasneci but Mark Haberi, which has the same meaning of “herald” in Turkish. He was the first person to change his surname, and people went in amazement to see him. He was the same as he always was, Mark Kasneci, the same flesh and bone, but now with a different name. I summoned him to the presbytery and said, “Mark, they say that along with your surname you have also changed your religion.” But he swore to me that that was not true. When I told him that a surname was not a cap you could change whenever you liked, he begged me with tears in his eyes to forgive him and to let him come to church, because, although he felt he was a sinner, he liked the surname so much and would not be parted from it….