Ismail Kadare - Three Arched Bridge

He listened to me, all eyes and ears.

“Because we fight over everything here on this peninsula, and not only over pastures and sheep, you can imagine that there have been quarrels even over the authorship of legends.”

“Just think of that,” he said.

“Even though everybody insists on claiming this legend for his own land, our monks think that it was born here. This is not because the event really happened in this country but because only among the Albanians has the besa become so charged with meaning,”

“No doubt,’ he said, His eyes remained half closed, and it seemed that his mind was elsewhere. “Magnificent,” he murmured. “The living and the dead trying to climb on the same cart… because, as we know, there is something dead in every living person, and vice versa,”

He talked as if to himself, and meanwhile covered half his face with the collar of his cloak.

“I am keeping my left eye from the wind,” he said to me, although I had not shown any sign of suspicion.

For part of the way, we spoke about other legends. They always concerned the prohibition against crossing from one world to the other and the temptation to transgress it. A man who tried to climb out of the pit of hell. Another who, having been transformed into a snake, attempted again to assume human form. A wall that demanded a sacrifice in order not to fall…

“A sacrifice?” he almost shrieked.

His brow darkened, and it was not just gloom but the opening of a chasm. He continued to hide half his face with his collar, but even what was visible was enough to make your flesh creep.

“A wall demanding a sacrifice … This is the legend of immurement, if I am not mistaken.”

“It is, sir,” I replied, quite coldly, I do not know why. “But you seem to know it.”

“I know it. But I would like to hear it again. Tell it to me,” he said in a lost voice, as if in a plea for help.

He now seemed far away, despite his attempts to smile. I could almost, sense the reason for his anxiety. It was somewhere close to me. I could almost touch it. Ah, just a moment, I thought, just a moment. It will appear of its own accord.

“A wall that demanded a human being in a cavity … as it were, to acquire a soul, tell it to me,” he said again, “And take no notice of me, I am like a child, and when I like something, I like to hear it a dozen, a hundred times in a row.”

I began to tell him the legend of the castle of Shkodér, just as I had heard it years ago from my mother. There were three brothers, all masons, who were building the walls, but their work was not going well because what they built in the day was destroyed in the night,

Suddenly the reason for his distress came as clear to me as sunlight. You had to have the brains of Gjelosh not to grasp the similarity between the castle in the legend and the damaged bridge.

“What they built during the day was destroyed in the night,” he murmured in a soporific voice, as if lulling himself to sleep.

I could not look him in the eye.

“What could they do?’ I went on, involuntarily lowering my voice. “A wise old man told them that the wall collapsed because it demanded a sacrifice. And so they decided to immure one of their brides in the foundations.”

“A sacrifice,” he said, uselessly.

“Yes, a sacrifice,” I whispered. “Since to immure someone means killing them.”

“Killing them…”

“Of course. And they say that even if a person’s shadow is walled up inside a bridge, that person must die, and then …”

“Yes, yes,” he groaned.

“But which bride?” 1 continued. “They argued over the matter at great length and decided to sacrifice the bride who brought them their midday meal the next day,”

“But,” he interrupted, “But —”

“They gave their besa to each other that they would not tell their wives about the decision they had made. And so, as you see, we have the besa again. Or rather the besa and treachery woven together,”

“Yes., baesa”

The word now seemed to stretch and tear at the corners of his mouth, and I would not have been surprised to see a trickle of blood,

I wanted to say that here, just as in the first tale, the motif of the besa , according to our monks, proves the Albanian authorship of the ballad. But there was some kind of… how shall I put it… fatal urgency in his expression that forced me too to talk fast,

“And that night two brothers, the oldest and the second, told their wives, and so broke the besa . The youngest brother kept it,”

“Ah,” he exclaimed,

“The two older brothers broke the besa," I repeated, hardly able to swallow my saliva.

This was exactly the right place to explain to him that these words “to break the besa , are, in the Slavic version of the ballad, vjeru pogazio , which mean “to violate faith’, or “to outrage religion,” and are quite meaningless in the Slavic version. This is because of an erroneous translation from the Albanian, mistaking the word besa for besim , meaning belief, religion. However, he would not let me pause. He had grasped my hand, and softly. very softly, as if asking me about a secret, he said, “And then?”

“Then morning came, and when their mother-in-law as usual tried to send one of the brides with food for the masons, the two older wives who knew the secret pretended to be sick. So the youngest set out, and they immured her, and that is all.”

I raised my eyes to look at his face, and almost cried out. All the standing moisture of his old man’s eyes had drained away, and those empty eyes now resembled the cavities in a statue. Like death, I thought. That is how her eyes must have looked.

THROUGHOUT THE FOLLOWING DAYS he was always seeking me out, and as soon as he found me he would do what he could to bring the conversation around to the immurement of the bride* He spoke of it as if it were an event that had happened two weeks before, and as if he was charged with its investigation. Gradually he involved me too. For hours on end I could think of nothing but a semidesert place under a scorching sun, where three workmen kept building walls that could never be finished* As we talked about the legend, we carefully analyzed it strand by strand, trying to account for its darker sides and to establish a logical link between its contradictory parts.

He asked me which of the three brides had children, and whether perhaps the youngest had none, as was easy to believe, and whether this was the reason why she was the one who was sacrificed. But I explained to him that all three had children, and I even apologized for not telling him the end of the story, in which the young wife who was immured begged her murderers (1 used the actual word) to leave one breast outside the wall, so that even after her death she could suckle her child. He nearly lost his temper at my omission, shaking his finger almost threateningly at me, and told me not to do such a thing ever again, Because we were both of us at the time steeped in a strange world, his threat made no impression on me, although this is not something that I could normally forgive anyone. At this point 1 also told him about the curse that the sacrificed wife lays on the stonework in the two famous lines:

O tremble, wall of stone,

As I tremble in this tomb!

“This can be taken in a technical way,” he butted in, “Because … at least bridges … every bridge in a way sways all the time.”

This interjection on his part made no particular impression on me, but when a little later he said that immuring a person in fact weakens a structure, I interrupted: