Ismail Kadare - Three Arched Bridge

But nobody set foot on it. Sometimes it made you want to cry out: Had so much sweat, so much effort, and even … blood been expended for this bridge, never to be used for anything?

Rain fell the second week. For days on end the bridge stood drenched and miserable.

Then the rain stopped, and again the weather was chill and gray. The third week began. A whining wind crawled over the wasteland. It was the end of Tuesday afternoon when they saw that a wolf had padded softly over the bridge, as in a fairy tale. People could not credit their own eyes (and there were those who were ready to believe that a herald had crossed, waving the standard of the Skuraj family, the only one that has a wolf in its center). The beast meanwhile vanished quickly into the distance, where the wind seemed to have stood still, and howled.

The days that followed were silent and empty. It was ashen weather everywhere, as if before the end of the world. One afternoon, old Ajkuna came up to the bridge. People thought that finally she would curse it, and they gathered to watch. She halted at the entrance to the bridge, below the right-hand approach arch, and laid her hand and then her ear to the masonry. She stood there a long while, then lifted her head from the palm of her hand and said:

“It is trembling.”

I remembered the man who had fallen in an epileptic fit. He had indeed passed on his convulsions to the bridge.

Many believed that the bridge would collapse of itself. Occasionally I brought out the card on which the designer had scribbled those mysterious figures, and I would study them abstractedly, as if trying to understand from them the bridge’s fear,

I would have wished that the designer could have seen this desolation.

But the bridge’s solitude, which seemed ready to last for centuries, came to an end suddenly one Sunday. The highway, the surrounding plain, and the sandbank echoed to a piercing creak. People ran in terror to see what was happening. On the ancient road, in a long black column like a crawling iron reptile, a convoy of carts was traveling. The carts approached the bridge. We all stood frozen on the bank, expecting to witness some catastrophe. The first cart quickened its speed and began to mount the incline. You could hear the iron wheels changing their tone as they struck the stone paving. Then the cart mounted the right-hand approach arch, and then on, on, over the first arch, over … the dead man. Then came the second and third carts, and then the others, all laden with blackened barrels. They squeaked frighteningly, especially when they rode over the immured victim, and it looked each time as if the arch would split, but nothing happened.

The tail of the convoy was still on the bridge when people realized what kind of caravan it was, what it carried, and where it was going. Its sole cargo was pitch, for the Orikum military base near Vloré.

We watched its progress for a long time, looking alternately at the tail of the convoy and at the bridge, which had suffered no harm at all.

Immediately after the crossing of this inauspicious tar train, as a guest at the Inn of the Two Roberts called it, news came that the death of Komneni had at last been announced at Vlore, and that his son-in-law, Balsha II, had deployed his troops over the entire principality, including Komneni’s half of Orikum. Our count, accompanied by his entourage, departed to attend the old prince’s burial He must have been still on the road when, like thunder after a lightning flash, more news came, worse than the first, to tell us that the Byzantine garrison had finally evacuated its half of the naval base, ceding it to the Turkish garrison.

We were on the brink of war,

THE COUNT RETURNED from Komneni’s funeral even more withdrawn than when he had left. Almost all the lords of Arberia had gone to the ceremony, but apparently not even the sight of the old prince’s coffin, around which they were all gathered perhaps for the last time, gave them the wisdom to finally reach an understanding among themselves.

Silence again reigned through all the days that followed. Still nobody else had crossed the bridge. One day only some frightened sheep somehow found themselves on it and tried to turn back, but were unable to do so. The sheep wandered over the bridge while the terrified shepherd brandished his crook on the bank, calling for the ferryman to carry him across.

This was the only event of these days. A few blades of grass sprouted among the piles of stone and sand left beside the bridge. They were the first sign that nature was slowly, very slowly, but insistently preparing to erase from the face of the earth every trace that bore witness to the presence of workmen on the bank of the Ujana e Keqe.

The days were numb with cold, with a few motionless clouds in the distant sky, and silent, silent. No news came from anywhere. They said that in a very distant country they were building a great wall Plague had struck central Europe again.

On the eleventh of the month of Michaelmas, I happened to make a tour of duty as far as the borders of our territories, to the very spot where the domain of the neighboring Turkish pasha begins. After completing my work, I would sit for hours on end, contemplating the point where the Turkish Empire began. I could not believe it was there in front of me. I repeated to myself over and over again, like someone wandering in his mind, that what they call the lands of Islam began a few paces in front of me. Asia began two paces in front of me. It was indeed enough to turn your wits. What had once been more distant than the lands of fairy tales was now in front of our very noses. And still I could not believe it. Nor could anybody believe that these people had really come so close. There they were, yet evidence, times, dates, and the units of measurement of time and space dissolved as if in a mist. Sometimes I wanted to call out: Where are they? Below, the land was the same, and the same winter sky covered the earth. And yet just here began, or rather ended, their enormous state, which began in the Chinese deserts.

I had seen nobody on the other side during the days of my tour of duty, neither guards nor inhabitants. There was only land left waste, more like a stony desert, and scrub everywhere. Only on the last night (oh, if only I had not stayed that night), on that final night I heard their music, I still do not know where that singing and accompaniment came from, who was singing, or why. I wonder whether they were wandering dervishes caught on the border as night fell, or civil servants sent from the capital to set border stones, or a group of itinerant musicians. In the end, I did not worry much about it. But when I heard their singing accompanied by entirely unfamiliar instruments, I felt seized by a sensation I had never known before. It was a diffused anxiety, without the slightest hint of hope. What was this stupor, this hashish dissolved in the air in the form of song? Its tones slithered drowsily; everything seemed sticky and shapeless. So this was their music, I thought, their inmost voice. It crept toward us like a soporific mist. At its tones, feet skipping in a dance would falter as if seized by terror.

I returned bitter and sour from my journey.

Nothing noteworthy happened until the middle of the month, apart from the appearance of the body of a drowned man floating one day on the surface of the waters. It collided with the pier where the body was immured (the water level had now risen this far), twirled around, and struck the pier once again with its elbow, as if to say to the dead man. How are you, brother? Then it floated away.

Those who had seen the drowned man and tried to tell other people were met with stares of incredulity. But that happened last year, people said. We saw it together. Don’t you remember? And both sides would sit in bewilderment. By the bridge piers, time, swirling like water, seemed to have stood still.