Ismail Kadare - Three Arched Bridge

“Tell me, please, whether you are a collector of tales or a builder.”

“Oh,” he said. “I’m in no way a builder, but Tve learned something about the subject from working alongside builders. In fact, all great building works resemble crimes, and vice versa, crimes resemble.” He laughed, “For me, there is no difference between them. Whenever 1 find myself in front of columns I can clearly see blood spattering the marble, and the victim might replace a cathedral”

Whenever he left 1 felt dumbfounded.

One day he knocked before dawn to tell me something new that he had thought of during the night, 1 was still sleepy and could barely take in what he said. Finally 1 understood, He was saying that in his opinion the youngest brother too must have told his wife everything on that unforgettable night before the sacrifice.

“How is that possible?” I said. “How could a young woman then go to the masons knowing the fate that awaited her?”

“I knew you would say that,’ he said. “But I have thought of everything.” He moved closer to me. “Listen to this. The youngest wife agreed to be sacrificed voluntarily, because her sisters-in-law and mother-in-law had made life hell for her,”

“Hmm,” 1 said. “Rather strange.”

“There is nothing strange about it,” he went on, “Between a daily hell and immurement, she chose the latter. Do you know what a quarrel among sisters-in-law means? Ah, Fm sorry, you’re a monk.”

“But what about him?” 1 asked. “What do you think about his attitude?”

“Whose?”

“Her husband’s.”

“I have thought long and hard about that too. No doubt he knew that she suffered but never imagined that matters could be so bad as to drive her to self-destruction, So the next day, when he saw his own wife arrive carrying the basket of food, his blood must have frozen. What do you think?”

“I don’t know what to say,” 1 replied. “Perhaps you are right, but perhaps it wasn’t like that at all”

I was in fact certain that it had not been like that. Whenever he came to see me, he had some new explanation. Once he told me that the youngest brother had perhaps not told his wife the secret, not out of a desire to keep the besa with his brothers but because he did not love his wife and had found a way to get rid of her. Another time he suggested that perhaps the three brothers had colluded among themselves to kill the youngest wife, and the whole fiction that the walls demanded a sacrifice was just a way of justifying the murder, All his interpretations of the legend were founded on baseness, betrayal, and disloyalty, and whenever he left 1 would be annoyed with myself for having listened to him. When he departed for the last time, he had sown the seed of doubt over not only the behavior of the three mason brothers and the two sisters-in-law but also that of the mother-in-law, who in his view certainly took part in the oath, and even that of the sacrificed bride herself. After he had left, after slinging mud at everything, not sparing even the dead, I decided I would tell him that he was free to think what he liked, but I had no desire to hear any more of his perverted speculations.

I waited for him the next day, to tell him that his efforts to throw mud at this old tragedy were useless, because the true kernel of the legend was the idea that all labor, and every major task, requires some kind of sacrifice, and that this magnificent idea is embodied in the mythologies of many peoples. What was new, and peculiar to the ballad of the Balkan peoples, was that the sacrifice was not connected with the outbreak of war or some march, nor even a religious rite, but concerned a wall, a work of construction. And this can perhaps be explained by the fact that the first inhabitants of these territones, the Pelasgians, were the first masons in the world, as the ancient Greek chronicles themselves admit.

I wanted to say that in truth the drops of blood in the legend were nothing but streams of sweat, but we know that sweat is a kind of humble nameless servant in comparison with blood, and therefore nobody has devoted songs and ballads to it. So it can be considered normal in a song to represent a river of sweat with a few drops of blood. It is of course obvious that alongside his sweat every man sacrifices something of himself, like the youngest brother, who sacrificed his own happiness.

I could hardly wait to tell him these and other ideas, but just when I had made up my mind to speak out, he disappeared. From that time on, I never saw him again.

IN SPITE OF THE SEVERE COLD, work on the bridge continued. It was said that they had now quite completed the second main arch and had begun the third. 1 say “it was said,” because in fact nothing could be discerned from the bridge’s external appearance behind its confusion of timbers!

Nothing worth recording occurred in the following weeks. The old blackened raft continued to pass from one bank to the other. The ferryman looked more hunchbacked than ever. The words “Boats and Rafts” on the rusty sign were barely legible. Two planks of the raft had broken loose, and no one bothered to repair them. Everything now quickly decayed, and the black water visible through the gaping planks of the raft seemed to make the expressions of its passengers even gloomier.

At dusk one Sunday (this is the only event that I can even partially remember), some people wearing black sheepskins crossed the river by raft, in somber haste. The fog seemed to swallow them as soon as they disembarked on the opposite bank, It was not long before some more people, also in black sheepskins, asked for the raft. They were just as gloomy and in as great a hurry as the first group. They asked about the men who had crossed be-fore, and these were the only words to escape their lips as they crossed the river. One of them vomited continuously.

ONE MORNING, as I walked along the frozen river-bank in the hope of catching sight of the collector of tales and legends (for I did not know then that he had vanished forever), I came face to face with the master-in-chief* The north wind was piercing. Especially it had frozen his eyes’ coating them with a kind of glittering film that prevented you from seeing what was inside them.

To my astonishment, this stera, gruff man greeted me. Only then did I realize how eager 1 was to get to know him. We exchanged a few words and set off walking side by side along the sandbank. The icy crust that coated his eyes seemed to crack in two or three places,making them even more inscrutable. I had imagined that talking with this man would be difficulty but not to this extent. Our conversation was a rambling^ muddled affair, a real maze from which you could not extricate yourself. It was evident that he himself found it painful It was apparently easier for him to construct bridges or towers than to conduct a human conversation. The worst of it was that 1 still sensed that something valuable, perhaps very valuable., lay at the bottom of this tangle, and it was precisely my efforts to understand this that upset me most, When I left him, my head felt cleft in two. I sat down by the fire and once more did my best to recollect the tangle, I began to unravel it carefully, thread by thread, and eventually I seemed to succeed* The essence of what he had said was this: According to signs that he had been studying for some time, the lineaments of a new order that would carry the world many centuries forward had faintly, ever so faintly, begun to appear in this part of Europe, These signs included the opening of new banks in Dürres, growing numbers of Jewish and Italian intermediaries dealing in twenty-seven different kinds of coin, and the almost universal acceptance of the Venetian ducat as a form of international currency. There was also the increasingly heavy traffic of merchant caravans, the organization of trade fairs, and especially (Oh Lord! How he emphasized that word ‘‘especially’,), especially the construction of roads and stone bridges. And all this movement, he said, was a sign simultaneously of life and death, of the birth of a new world and the death of the old* He said something about bridges and the difficulties of building them, and during this part of the conversation I felt as if I were crushed under the rubble of a bridge that he had brought down upon me. But then he explained to me that, of all the monstrosities that deface the earth’s surface, there never had been and never would be anything uglier than corpse-bridges, These bridges are born dead, he said, and they live in death (he used the phrase “they die all their lives”) until the time comes for their demolition (or “ultimate death,” as he put it). He told me that he had built such bridges himself and that now they appeared in his dreams like ghosts. If ever he decided to commit suicide (he told me), he would hang himself from such a bridge. I could scarcely understand what they were. They were not bridges built over rivers or streams or chasms, or indeed over any kind of gap that had to be crossed. They were bridges built in the middle of fields, and their only service was now and then to carry on their backs great ladies, who climbed on them to observe the sunset together with their invited guests. Building bridges was in fashion now, he said, and many princes and pashas considered them to be the same as the porches of their houses. I have built such phantoms, he said. He indicated with his hand the furrowed, foaming waters of the Ujana e Keqe, over which the stone bridge loomed, grim and unloved, and he added: “But this kind of bridge, even if washed in blood, is a thousand times nobler than those.”