Ismail Kadare - Three Arched Bridge

ONE MORNING they woke me before dawn to tell me that people were crossing the bridge,

“Who?” I asked sleepily.

“The Baltaj family, all the men of the house together, with their black ox.”

I went up to the narrow window-slit that overlooked the bridge, I knew that one day human beings would set foot on it, but I did not think it would happen so soon. By next spring at the earliest, I thought. Besides, I was also sure that some lone individual would be the first to dare, and not the Baltajs with a flock of children,

“Where are they going, I wonder? What has got into them?” I asked nobody in particular,

“No doubt some worry,” called a voice from below.

Worry, I thought. What else could those black sheepskins contain?

The first sheepskin, the tallest of them, who was leading the ox, emerged at the opposite bank without suffering any harm. After him came the shorter ones, and finally the children,

“They crossed,” somebody said.

They expected me to say somethings perhaps a curse or, on the contrary, a blessing on the travelers. Perhaps they had felt a secret wish to cross the bridge for a long time, I had experienced something of this sort myself, and whenever 1 felt its pull 1 would walk to and fro for a long while, tiring my feet, as if this desire were simply in my feet alone, and 1 were punishing them for it.

So the Baltajs had crossed … only their menfolk, I remembered that in the villages, crossing the rainbow was considered so impossible that people thought that if girls went over they could be turned into boys, … And suddenly it flashed into my mind that nothing other than a rainbow must have been the first sketch for a bridge, and the sky had for a long time been planting this primordial form in people’s minds….

I felt afraid of all this hostility toward the bridge. However, I calmed myself at once, The divine model had been pure. But here, although the bridge pretended to embody this idea, it had death at its foundations.

The Baltajs, who had sold their black ox because of some problem, returned bitter and disconsolate, crossing the bridge again, but without their animal Everybody talked about their crossing, but there was neither anger nor reproach in their words. There was only something like a sigh.

In the meantime Uk the ferryman had fallen ill. He had caught cold, which was not in itself something unexpected. But when it became known, everyone seemed to be astonished. Night and day on that dilapidated raft, his feet in the water, forty and more years on end, How had he never caught cold before?

He died soon and was buried on the same day. It was a cloudy afternoon. The Ujana e Keqe was full of waves, and the blackened raft, moored to its jetty by chains, bucked on the waters like a furious horse that had sensed the death of its mästen

“Boats and Rafts’, did not replace the ferryman. It did not even remember the abandoned raft. The post that supported the sign with its name and the tolls was now very unsteady, and one day someone took it away*

As if the ferryman’s death were some long-awaited sign, people one after another began to use the bridge. After the Baltajs, the Kryekuqe family crossed the bridge, and after them the landlord of the Inn of the Two Roberts, together with his brother-in-law, both drunk. On the same day some foreign travelers crossed, and at midday on the eighteenth of the month large numbers of the Stres clan passed over, a pregnant woman among them.

None of the Zenebishas crossed. There were also many old men and women, led by old Ajkuna, who had not only vowed never to commit the sin of setting foot on that devil’s backbone but left instructions in their wills that even after their deaths they would prefer their coffins to be hurled into the water rather than carried over the bridge to the graveyard on the opposite bank.

Meanwhile, the abandoned raft tied by its chain to the old jetty rotted and crumbled in an extraordinarily short time. Such a thing was indeed surprising, especially when you think that the ferryman had made virtually no repairs for decades. People had only to give up using it for a very short while before it disintegrated.

ON THE THIRD OF THE MONTH of St, Ndreu’ early in the mornings Dan Mteshi crossed the bridge, together with his sons and a goat. After him’ the men of the Gjorg clan crossed on their way to the law court. Then mad Gjelosh crossed (or rather advanced to the middle and turned back). Later, all noise and laughter, almost the entire Vulkathanaj clan crossed, mounted on mules, traveling to a wedding in Buzézesta. Immediately afterward Duda’s daughters crossed, as did mad Gjelosh’ making a zigzag path. At midday two groups of strangers crossed one after the other, and then a drunkard from the Inn of the Two Roberts; then mad Gjelosh braced himself to set off again but did not do so. Toward dusk’ on his bay mount, the knight Stanish Stresi crossed as fast as you could blink, though nobody could say why’ and after him a foreign herald. When night fell crossings became very rare, and anyway travelers were no longer recognizable in the darkness. As their silhouettes appeared on the bridge, you could gather a little from their gait, such as whether they were Albanians or foreigners, but there was no way that you could tell why they were travelings whether for pleasure, penance, or murder.

NOT A LIVING SOUL crossed the bridge for one hundred hours in a row. Rain fell. The horizon was dissolved in mist. They said that plague was ravaging central Europe.

What was this interruption? For a time it seemed that people, having committed such a sin (and there were those who came to confession immediately after crossing the bridged had made an agreement to abandon the bridge for good. However, on Sunday night the traffic resumed as unexpectedly as it had ceased.

When I was at leisure,I enjoyed choosing a sheltered spot and observing the bridge. The bridge was like an open book. As I watched what was happening on it, it seemed to me that I could grasp its essence. It sometimes seemed to me that human confidence, fear, suspicion, and madness were nowhere more clearly manifest than on its back. Some people stole over as if afraid of damaging it, while others thunderously stamped across it.

There were those who continued to cross at night. bandit style, as if scared of somebody, or perhaps of the bridge itself, since they had spoken so ill of it.

After the bishop of Ardenica, who was traveling to defrock a priest at the Monastery of the Three Crosses, another covered wagon crossed, which, it was later suspected, probably contained an abducted woman. Then came oil traders. Mad Gjelosh followed the traders, shouting, because it was well known that he could not endure the seepages from their skin bottles. With a rag in his hand, he would stagger almost on his knees, wiping away the traces of oil, and with the same rag wiping the stone sides of the bridge, as if to clean them of dust.

Late in the afternoon there came, from who knows where, Shtjefen Keqi and Mark Kasneci, or Mark Haberi as he had recently begun to call himself. They had set off a week earlier with a great deal of fuss “to look death in the eye,” but, it seemed, were coming back as always like drenched chickens.

Two months previously Mark Kasneci had caused us a great deal of confusion with his new surname. After a trip to the fiefdom of the Turkish pasha, he came back and announced that he was no longer called Mark Kasneci but Mark Haberi, which has the same meaning of “herald” in Turkish. He was the first person to change his surname, and people went in amazement to see him. He was the same as he always was, Mark Kasneci, the same flesh and bone, but now with a different name. I summoned him to the presbytery and said, “Mark, they say that along with your surname you have also changed your religion.” But he swore to me that that was not true. When I told him that a surname was not a cap you could change whenever you liked, he begged me with tears in his eyes to forgive him and to let him come to church, because, although he felt he was a sinner, he liked the surname so much and would not be parted from it….