Ismail Kadare - Three Arched Bridge

And that was more or less my conversation with him.

IN THE FIRST WEEK OF MARCH the bridge was damaged again, This time the damage was mainly below the waterline and was extremely worrying. Large stone blocks had been dislodged from the piers of the main arch, and this, they said, would endanger the whole central portion of the bridge if repairs were not made at once.

Suspended by ropes above the icy water, the workmen attempted to fill the cavities. Besides being an exceptionally difficult task, this patchwork seemed in vain as long as the stones were put in place without mortar. However, if the repairs were postponed until summer, when the waters subsided and the use of mortar became possible, there was a danger that the waters would further erode the cavities.

As if bending over someone’s wounds, new faces that had come specially for this work swarmed all day over the damaged places. It was said that they were trying a new way of fixing stones with a mixture of wool, pitch and egg-white.

The new damage to the bridge caused, as expected, a fresh storm of evil premonitions. People came from all over to see with their own eyes the cursed bridge, which had brought down on itself the wrath of the naiads and water spirits. That the damage was invisible made it even more frightening.

Together with the curious travelers, a horde of bards came, some returning in disappointment from an unfinished war somewhere among the principalities of the north, and others appearing here for the first time. These latter took their places at the Inn of the Two Roberts, and every night sang old ballads in eerie voices.

They told me that one of these ballads was that of the three mason brothers and the young wife immured in the castle that was built by day and destroyed at night. I remembered the collector of tales and customs, but I do not know what it was that impelled me to set off for the Inn of the Two Roberts to listen to the ballad with my own ears.

It was chilly, but nevertheless I set off on foot. Perhaps because of the potholes and puddles on the highway, I could not banish from my mind the watery eyes of the vanished collector of tales.

As soon as I heard the ballad’s first verses, I recognized his hand in its composition. The ballad had been changed. It was not about three brothers building a castle wall, but about dozens of masons building a bridge. The bridge was built during the day and destroyed at night by the spirits of the water. It demanded a sacrifice. Let someone come who is willing to be sacrificed in the piers of the bridge, the bards sang. Let him be a sacrifice for the sake of the thousands and thousands of travelers who will cross that bridge winter and summer, in rain and storm, journeying toward their joy or to their misfortune, hordes of people down the centuries to come.

“Have you heard this new ballad that has appeared?” the innkeeper said to me, “The old one was better,”

I did not know what to say. The bard sang on in a spine-chilling voice:

O tremble, bridge of stone,

As I tremble in this tomb!

“Yesterday I heard them say that every bridge does in fact tremble a little, all the time,” the innkeeper went on.

I nodded. There flashed through my mind the thought that the collector of tales knew something about bridge building, perhaps as much as the master-in-chief.

I returned homeward in utter misery. From a distance the bridge stood blue in the falling dusk. Even if it were washed a thousand times in blood … the master-in-chief had said.

Clearly the ballad portended nothing but blood.

Along the entire road, I thought about the coming sacrifice. My head swam. Would he come to the bridge himself, like the youngest brother’s wife, or would he be caught in a trap? Who would it be? What reason would he have to die, or to be killed? The old ballad entangled itself in my head with the new one, like two trees unsuccessfully trying to graft themselves onto each other. What would happen the evening before in the house of the man to be sacrificed? And what would be his reason for setting out to die, on a moonless night, as the old song put it?

Nobody will come, I suddenly said almost aloud. That collector of tales was just mad. But deep in my heart I felt afraid that someone would come. He would come slowly^ with soft footsteps through the darkness^ and lay his head on the sacrificial block, Who are you who will come? I asked myself. And why will you come?

SOME TRAVELERS who slept at the inn of the Two Roberts brought disturbing news. It was said that the Turks had finally succeeded in forcing Byzantium to cede its part, in other words half, of the Vloré base in a few months, time, What they had sought from Aranit Komneni for so long in vain’ they had managed to snatch from the ailing empire. If this grim news was indeed true, Aranit Komneni would from now on share the base as a “partner” with the royal Turkish tiger. And it is well known what life is like with a tiger in its lair.

The news shocked everybody, especially our liege lord, People said that Aranit had sent letters to all the Albanian nobles and that a state of war had all but been declared in Vlore.

THE MARCH DAYS rolled by like chunks of ice. Nobody could remember such a bitterly cold spring in years. The news about the Orikum base at Vloré was true. The decision to hand over the Byzantine portion of the base to the Turkish Empire was proclaimed by special decree in the two imperial capitals, Constantinople and Brusa.

The news caused deep despair everywhere. It was said that the courts of Europe could not believe that ancient Byzantium could submit to such an indignity. Some made allowances, saying that this was at present the only way of staving off the Turkish monster. At present… But later?

News came from Vloré of preparations for the evacuation of the Byzantine warships. Apparently the base would be vacated very soon. The Scandinavian garrison too was preparing to make way for the Turks.

The elderly prince of Vloré kept his army mobilized. They said that he himself was seriously ill but was keeping his illness secret.

As if these dark clouds were not enough^ the bards at the Inn of the Two Roberts continued singing about the sacrifice that must be made at the bridge.

Work proceeded feverishly on the bridge. Ever since I had heard the most recent ballad’ in which the immured victim cursed the bridge to perpetual trembling, it seemed to me that the bridge had really begun to shake.

FOR SEVERAL CONSECUTIVE DAYS carts loaded with barrels of pitch passed along the western highway. The ferryman poled them across the river, cursing the wagoners, the pitch, and the entire world.

They said that the pitch was urgently needed at the Vloré base. That is how it has always happened. As soon as tar begins to move fast along the highways, you know that blood will flow after it.

Meanwhile dire foreboding continually thickened around us, or, 1 would say, around everything that centered upon this cursed bridge. Now it was not merely the bards who went on casting their grim spell night and day at the Inn of the Two Roberts. No, this matter was now a topic of general conversation from morning to night; strangest of all, it became a most simple and natural thing to talk about a sacrifice, as if it were the weather or the crops. The idea of sacrifice, up to now a truth within a song, had emerged from its cocoon and suddenly crept up on us. Now it moved among us, alive and on equal terms with all the other concerns of the day.

On the roads, at home, and in taverns along the great highway, people talked of the reward the bridge and road builders would give to the family of the man who would allow himself to be sacrificed in the bridge piers. I could not accustom myself to this transition at all Things that had been savage and frightening until yesterday had suddenly become tame. Everybody talked about the sum of money the immured man’s family would receive, and people even said that, apart from the cash payment, they would receive for a long time to come a percentage of the profits from the bridge, like everyone else who had met its expenses. Other people gave even more astonishing explanations, They said that the compensation due to every member of the family had been worked out in the minutest detail, with every kind of eventuality borne in mind. Everything had been provided for, from the possibility of the victim being without relatives, an odd man out, as they say (which was difficult to believe), to the opposite case of a poor man who might have a wife, parents, and a dozen children. They had anticipated everything, from the possibility of an orphan (in which case, in the absence of heirs, the remaining portion of the reward would be spent on a chapel for his soul that would be built just next to the bridge piers) to the case of a needy man, who would be given a first and final chance of property to leave to his nearest and dearest, in just the same way as a meadow or a mill is left as a bequest, except that this property would be his death. They said that the planning had been so thorough that they had even provided for the sacrifice of rich men, in other words death for a whim, out of boredom with life, or simply for fame. In this case, if the immured victim did not care for the reward, the cash would be used to erect, besides the chapel, a statue or memorial, also next to the bridge piers,