Ismail Kadare - Three Arched Bridge

I jumped out of bed immediately. As often when I heard news or saw dreams, I automatically turned my head toward the mountains. This was a habit left over from childhood., when my grandmother used to say to me, “Any sign you may receive, for good or ill, you must first tell to the mountains.”

One could sense that it was snowing in the mountains, although they themselves were invisible. When we arrived at the riverbank, the sight was indeed incredible. As the novice had told me, the builders had stopped work, a thing that had never happened. Those whom neither sleet nor hail, nor even the Ujana e Keqe itself, had succeeded in driving from the bridge had left their work half done and were scattered in groups on the sandbank, some looking toward the bridge, and some toward the river, as if seeing these things for the first time.

As we drew closer, 1 noticed other people, who had clambered onto the scaffolding and beams and looked like vultures, Among them, close by the recently formed central arch, I recognized from a distance the master-in-chief and his two assistants. Together with the others they crouched by the stone bridge, saying something to one another, bending again, stretching their heads down to study the piers, and then huddling together once more.

“Gjelosh, what happened?” someone asked the idiot, who was hurrying away from the site. “Has the bridge developed a bulge?”

“The bridge, br, bad, very bad, bridge, pa, pa, fright,” he answered.

Only a few hours later we learned the truth: the bridge had been damaged in several places during the night. Several almost inexplicable crevices, like scratches made by claws, had appeared in the central piers, the approach arches, and especially on the newly completed span. As pale as wax, the master-in-chief s assistants tried to imagine what kind of tools could have done such damage. The master-in-chief, wrapped in his cloak, stared with a glacial expression at the horizon, as if the answer might come from there.

“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.

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.

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?”