Ismail Kadare - Three Arched Bridge

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 with if not older than Greek, and that this, the monks say, was proved by the words that Greek had borrowed from our tongue,

“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.

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.

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!”,