Three Arched Bridge by Ismail Kadare
“But these aren’t marks made by tools, sir,” one of the masons said at last.
“What?” the master-in-chief said.
“These aren’t hammer marks, or chisel marks, or —”
“Well then, what are they?” the master-in-chief asked.
The mason shrugged his shoulders and looked around at the others. Their faces had turned the color of mud.
“The bards,” one of them muttered, “a few weeks ago at the Inn of the Two Roberts, said something about naiads and water nymphs —”
“That’s enough of that,” the master-in-chief howled, and abruptly crouched again by the damaged arch to study the cracks. He looked at them for a long time, and when he too saw that they really did not look like marks made by hammers, picks, or crowbars, he no doubt shivered in terror like the rest.
24
THE NEWS that the bridge had been damaged led folk to appear on both banks of the Ujana, just as in the days after the flood, when everybody hurried to collect tree stumps for firewood.
The surface of the waters was now a blank. People watched for hours on end, and there were those who swore that they had discerned beneath the waves, if not naiads themselves, at least their tresses or their reflections. They then recalled the wandering bards, remembered their clothes and faces, and especially strove to recall the verses of their ballads, distorting their rhymes, as when the wind bends the tops of reeds.
“Who would have thought their songs would come true?” they said thoughtfully. “They weren’t singers, they were wizards.”
The Ujana e Keqe meanwhile flowed on obliviously. Its banks had been damaged and torn since its unsuccessful onslaught, so that in places it resembled a gully, but it had not hung back. It had finally succeeded in crippling the bridge.
At night, the bridge lifted blackly over the river the solitary span that had been so cruelly wounded. From a distance the mortar and fresh lime of the repaired patches resembled rags tied around a broken limb. With its injured spine, the bridge looked frightening.
25
JUST AT THIS TIME, for two successive nights, a strange monk named Brockhardt stayed in our presbytery on his way back to Europe from Byzantium’ where he had been sent on his country’s service,
I was reading in the last light of the fading day when they came to me and said that a person resembling a monk had crossed the river on the last raft and was asking for something in an incomprehensible tongue, I told them to bring him to me.
He was very sharp-featured, long-limbed, and unbelievably dust-covered*
“I have never seen such a long highway,” he said, pointing to himself with his finger^ as if his journey weighed on his body like a yoke. “And almost the whole of it under repair,”
I studied his muddied appearance with some surprise and hastened to explain.
“It is the old Via Egnatia, which a road company is restoring,” I said. He nodded and removed his cloak, shaking dust everywhere, “The very same people as are building the stone bridge,”
“Yes,” he said, “I saw it as I arrived.”
He looked even taller without his cloak, His limbs were so scrawny that if he had crossed those arms of skin and bone, he would have resembled a warning of mortal danger.
“One fork of the road takes you to the military base at Vlore, doesn’t it?” he said.
He must be a spy, I thought.
“Yes,” I replied.
After all, what did it matter to me if he asked about the Vloré base? It belonged to somebody else now.
I invited him to sit down on the soft rug by the fire and laid the small table.
“Sit down, and we will eat. You must be hungry.”
1 uttered these words in an unsteady voice, as if worried that I would find it impossible to fill all that boniness with food. As if reading my mind, he grinned from ear to ear and said:
“I am a guest. The Slavs say gost’s and have derived this from the English word ghost.” He smiled. “But like every soul alive, I need meat, ha-ha-ha!”
He laughed in a way that could not fail to look frightening. I tried not to look at his Adam’s apple, whose movements seemed about to cut his throat.
“Eat as if in your own home,” I said.
He went on chuckling for a while, not lifting his eyes from the table. The thought that I had the opportunity of spending the evening with one who knew something about the study of languages gave me a thrill of pleasure.
“And what news is there?”1 asked, saving the subject of languages for later.
He spread his arms, as if to say, Nothing out of the ordinary.
“In Europe, you know, war has been going on for a hundred years,” he said. “And Byzantium seethes with schemes and plots.”
“As always,” I said.
“Yes. As always. They have just celebrated the anniversary of the defeat and the blinding of the Bulgarian army. Since then, they all seem to have lost their heads. As you may know, in that country everybody looks for excuses for excitement.”
“The blinding of the Bulgarian army? What was that?”
“Don’t you know?” he said. “It was a terrible thing, which they solemnly celebrate every year.”
Brockhardt told me briefly about the Byzantine emperor’s punishment of the defeated Bulgarian army. Fifteen thousand captured Bulgarian soldiers had had their eyes put out. (You know that is a recognized punishment in Byzantium, he said.) Only one hundred and fifty were left with their sight intact, to lead the blind army back to the Bulgarian capital. Day and night, their faces pitted with black holes, the blind hordes wandered homeward.
“Horrible,” Brockhardt said, swallowing chunks of meat. “Don’t you think?”
It seemed to me that the more he ate, instead of putting on flesh, as he had jokingly said, the thinner and paler he became.
“Great powers take great revenge,” he said. We talked for a while about politics. He shared my opinion that Byzantium was in decline and that the main danger of our time was the Turkish state,
“At every inn where I stopped,” he said, “people talked of nothing else.”
“And no doubt everybody indulged in vain guesswork over who had first brought them out of their wilderness, and nobody had the least idea how to stop the flood.”
“That is right,” said Brockhardt. “When people do not want to fight against an evil, they start wondering about its cause. But this is an imminent danger for you too, isn’t it?”
“They are on our doorstep,’ “Ah yes, you are where Europe begins.” He asked about our country, and it was apparent at once that his knowledge about it was inaccurate. I told him that we are the descendants of the Illyrians and that the Latins call our country Arbanum or Albanum or Reg-num Albaniae, and call the inhabitants Arbanenses or Al-banenses, which is the same thing. Then I told him that in recent years a new name for our country has grown up among the people themselves. This new name is Shqiperia, which comes from shqiponjé, meaning “eagle.” And so, our Arberia has recently become known as Shqiperia, which means a flight or community or union of eagles, and the inhabitants are known as shqiptare, from the same word.
He listened to me closely, and 1 went on to explain to him a Serbian list of names of peoples, with features of totemism, that a Slovene monk had told me about. In it, the Albanians were characterized as eagles (dohar), the Huns as rabbits, the Serbs as wolves, the Croats as owls, the Magyars as lynxes, and the Romanians as cats.
He nodded continually and, when I told him that we Albanians, together with the ancient Greeks., are the oldest people in the Balkans, he held his spoon thoughtfully in his hand. We have had our roots here, I continued, since time immemorial The Slavs, who have recently become so embittered, as often happens with newcomers, arrived from the steppes of the east no more than three or four centuries ago. I knew that 1 would have to demonstrate this to him somehow, and so I talked to him about the Albanian language, and told him that, according to some of our monks, it is contemporary wit
“And they are not just any words,” I said, “but the names of gods and heroes.”
His eyes sparkled. I told him that the names Zeus, Dhemetra, Tetis, Odhise, and Kaos, according to our monks, stem from the Albanian words ze, “voice,” dhe, “earth,” det,“sea,” udhe, “journey,” and haes, “eater.” He laid down his spoon.
“Eat, ghost,” I said, staring almost with fear at his spoon, which seemed to be the only tool binding him to the world of the living.
“These are amazing things you say,” he said.
“When someone borrows your words for gods, it is like borrowing a part of your soul,” I said after a pause. “But never mind, this is no time for useless boasting. Now the Ottoman language is casting its shadow over both our languages, Greek and Albanian, like a black cloud.”
He nodded.
“Wars between languages are no less fateful than wars between men,’ he said.
I was saddened myself by the topic I had embarked on,
“The language of the east is drawing nearer,” 1 repeated after a while. We looked deep into each other’s eyes, “With its ‘-Ink’ suffix,’ I went on slowly, “Like some dreadful hammer blow,”
“Alas for you,’ he said,
I shook my head in despair,
“And nobody understands the danger,’ I said,
“Ah,’ he said, and with a sudden movement,, as if freeing himself from a snare, he rose from the table.
He was now free to become a ghost again.
26
THREE DAYS AFTER BROCKHARDT LEFT, the bridge was damaged again. This time it was no longer a matter of cracks and scratches; some stones in its central piers had been removed. The strangest thing was that some of these stones were dislodged beneath the surface of the water, and this, apart from adding to people’s terror, caused great trouble to the builders. It was almost impossible to carry out repairs underwater until the river subsided again next summer.
This second intervention of the spirits of the water caused general horror. Despite the rage of the master-in-chief and his assistants (the designer’s head might appear like a bolt of lightning at any part of the bridge), the pace of work slackened at once. Instead of the mud from the building site, terrifying rumors spread out from the sand of the riverbank, which now resembled some blighted plain. But these rumors spread faster and farther than the mud.
Some of the workmen began to abandon their work. Clutching their bags, and with their wages unclaimed^ they stealthily left their work at night, considering it cursed.
Increasingly, people in their interminable conversations began to voice the opinion that the bridge must be destroyed before it was too late.
27
THE BRIDGE’S MASTER-IN-CHIEF left unexpectedly one morning before dawn, Nobody knew where he went or why; it was understood that he himself had given no explanation, On the previous day he had struck his two assistants with a whip of hogshair, accompanying the blows with various strange insults: dog, telltale, liar, mangy cur, arch-asshole, He then threw away his whip and was seen no more.
Work on the bridge proceeded more sluggishly than even Gjelosh wandered miserably around the master-in-chief s hut, repeatedly putting his eye or ear to the keyhole. The punished assistants turned up here and there with the whip marks on their faces. One of them, the lean one, was bitterly angry, as outraged as a man could be at the marks of the lashes, while the other man, the stocky one, seemed pleased and seized every opportunity to show off his black welts, almost as proud of them as if they had been a certificate of commendation.
Meanwhile, in the absence of the master-in-chief, work on the bridge slackened daily, Everybody was convinced that he would never return and that nothing now remained but the decision to pull down the bridge, or at least abandon it to the mercy of the waters.
But the master-in-chief returned as unexpectedly as he had left. A group of official persons accompanied him, They had barely arrived before they went to the site of the damage, where they remained for hours on end. They examined the scratches and the dislodged stones, shook their heads, and made incomprehensible gestures. One of them, to everybody’s amazement, stripped off and dived into the water, apparently to inspect the damage below the water line.
The same thing happened on the second and third days. The inspection team was headed by a tall, thin, extremely stooped man. He seemed to have some kind of cramp in his neck, because he could barely move his head. Judging by the respect shown to him by everybody else, including even the master-in-chief, who was no respecter of persons, people supposed that he must be one of the principal proprietors of the roads and bridges.
“Look how God has bent that cursed one double,” old Ajkuna said when she saw him. “That’s how he’ll twist everyone who wants to build bridges. He’ll bend them double like the bridges themselves, so that their heads touch their feet. Our forebear was right when he said, ‘May you be bent double and eat your toes, you who stray from the path!”,
28
IWAS SUMMONED in haste to our count. Everyone was gathered there: the emissaries of the road owners, the master-in-chief, and our liege lord’s scribes. Their expressions were despondent, We waited for the count to arrive.
I could not at all imagine why this meeting was being held. Would there really be a decision to abandon the works? It would be difficult for our liege lord to pay -back even a small percentage of the money he had received. They did not really know his ways.
The delegation sat as if fixed to their high seats. The stooped man who had been so powerfully cursed by old Ajkuna was among them.
These meetings were beginning to irritate me. So in particular was the road owners, garbled language, which made my head ache for two days after translating it. Both sides, the water people and the road people, were equally unknown to me, but at least the water people spoke clearly and precisely. But an hour’s talk with the road people seemed to coat the table with the dust of their slovenly language, just as they littered the land where they built,
I will do what I can today, I said to myself, but next time I will find an excuse not to come.
The visitors glanced repeatedly at the door through which the count would enter. In fact, his delay showed that he was not pleased at this meeting. The visitors seemed increasingly on tenterhooks. They stared into space, at their hands, or at some pieces of parchment scribbled with all kinds of sketches.
At last the count arrived. He nodded a frosty greeting and sat down at the table.
“I’m listening,” he said.
Evidently the tall, bent man would speak first. He cleared his throat two or three times as if in search of the right pitch and was about to say something, but then hesitated and seemed to abandon the idea.
“Pm listening,” I translated for the count a second time.
The head of the deputation also cleared his throat, then said in a dry voice:
“Someone is damaging our bridge.”
The count’s eyebrows rose. They expressed surprise, but more expectation, and a hint of mockery.
“It is not the spirits of the water who are damaging our bridge, as rumor has it, but men,” the visitor continued.
The count’s face remained petrified.
The foreigners, representative studied the notes in front of him.
“We may state from the start whom we suspect,” he went on.
Our count shrugged, as if to say that it was no concern of his whom they suspected. The visitor apparently misinterpreted the gesture, and hastened to add:
“Please do not misunderstand me. We don’t suspect your own people in the least.” He gulped. “Nor do we even suspect the Turks. Our suspicions lie elsewhere.”
“Fm listening,’ Stres Gjikondi said for the third time.
The scratching of the quills of the count’s two scribes made the silence even more painful.
The count confronted his gaze calmly. It was obvious at once that he was barely interested in this matter. He had been worried all the time about the breach of relations with his Turkish neighbors, and he did not even want to know about what was happening at the bridge.
“It is obvious that they have been and still remain opposed to the construction of bridges, because of reasons that may be imagined., in other words questions of profit,’ the foreigner continued. “They put forward the idea of destroying the bridge, and then they took action against it. With the help of paid bards, they spread the legend that the spirits of the water will not tolerate the bridge and that it must be destroyed.”
His head, bent low over the table, turned left and right to gauge the impression his revelation made on us all. I believed him at once. In fact, I had suspected something of the sort before. If the bridge builders, whose representatives were here before us, could at the very start pay an epileptic and a wandering fortune-teller to be the first to advance the idea of building a bridge, then was it not possible that “Boats and Rafts, ’ could pay two wandering bards to launch the idea of its destruction?
“You must realize, my lord count,” the foreigner went on, “that it is not the spirits of the water who cannot endure the bridge but the grasping spirits of the directors of this gang of thieves called ‘Boats and Rafts/”
“Ha, ha!” the count laughed, “They say the same about you,”
Small reddish spots appeared on the brow of the leader of the delegation,
“We have never sunk any of their boats,” he said. “Nor have we damaged any of their jetties.”