Ismail Kadare - Three Arched Bridge

Yet all this happened, as I said, in total silence, or seemed to, because the raging of the river smothered every sound. Only once (ah, my flesh creeps even now when I think of it), did a voice emerge from the dumb tumult. It was no voice, it was a broken kra , a horrible cry from some nonhuman throat. And then that play of shadows again, with somebody running from the middle of the bridge to the right bank, and returning to rescue someone who had fallen. There was a clash of spears, and at last the repulse of the horsemen, and their retreat into the fog out of which they had come, with one riderless horse following them, neighing.

That was all. The horizon swallowed the horsemen just as it had given them birth, and you could have thought they were only a mirage, but… there was evidence left at the bridge. Blood stained the bridge at its very midpoint.

The count himself soon came to the scene of the incident. He walked slowly across the bridge, while the guards, their breastplates scarred with spear scratches, told him what had happened. They paused by the pool of blood. It must have been the blood of the Turkish soldier, whose body the horsemen had succeeded in recovering. As the blood froze, the stones of the gravel made its final gleam more visible.

“Turkish blood,” our liege lord said in a hoarse, broken voice.

Nobody could tear his eyes away. We had seen their Asiatic costume. We had heard their music. Now we were seeing their blood … the only thing they had in common with us.

This day was bound to come. It had long been traveling in the caravan of time. We had expected it, but perhaps not so suddenly, with those seven horsemen emerging from the mist and being swallowed by the mist again, followed by a loose horse.

THE MORE THE HOURS PASSED, the more serious the incident appeared, Nightfall enlarged its significance in an extraordinary way, So did the days that followed. The silence that fell the following week, far from diminishing its importance^ heightened it yet further. Those movements on the bridge that seemed from a distance like the dance of madmen were repeated in everybody’s minds in slow motion, as if in delirium. It was like a first sketch for war. It was obvious now that this had not been a chance patrol From the base at Vloré to the mountains of the Dukagjins and the Kastriotis, the Turks had sparked off a series of provocations. You would have had to have less sense than mad Gjelosh not to realize that war had begun.

On Sunday, as I walked late at night on the deserted sandbank (the idiot had wandered cackling over the bridge a short time before), I felt a debility I had never experienced before. The moonlight fell evenly over the plain, freezing everything into a mask. Everything was wan; everything was dead, and I almost cried out: How can you become part of Asia, you, my lovely Arberia?

My eyes darkened, and just as I had seen that pale patch of blood under Murrash Zenebisha’s neck, so it seemed to me that now’ under that moonlight, I saw whole plains awash with blood, and mountain ranges burned to ash. I saw Ottoman hordes flattening the world and creating in its place the land of Islam. I saw the fires and the ash and the scorched remains of men and their chronicles. And our music, and dances, and costume, and our majestic language, harried by that terrible “-luk,” like a reptile’s tail, seeking refuge in the mountains among the lightning and the beasts, which will turn it savage. And below the mountains, I saw the plains left without speech. And above all I saw the long night coming in hours, for centuries …

Unconsciously I had reached the bridge’s first arch, where the immured man was, The moon illuminated him shockingly, and for a long time I stood there stunned, my gaze fixed on his plaster eyes, I was cold, as if he were conveying to me the iciness of the next world* “Murrash Zenebisha,” I said silently, (The thought that I was imitating mad Gjelosh, who once used to talk to the dead man like this, did not worry me in the least.) “Murrash Zenebisha,” 1 repeated, “You died before me, but will live after me, ….” I could not muster the strength to tear my gaze away from those quenched eyes, whose whiteness was becoming unendurable. Why had I come here? What did I want to tell him, and what did I expect of him? I should have run as fast as I could from the splashing of the moonlight and from that place of sacrifice, but my legs failed me. At any moment it seemed that the curtain of plaster would fall from the dead man’s eyes, allowing his message to pass, I could almost understand that message. We two are very close, monk, his eyes seemed to say, Do you not feel it?

I did indeed feel it precisely, and as I moved backward without taking my eyes from him (for this seemed the only way to break away from him), I felt I should return to the presbytery as soon as I could to complete my chronicle. I should return as soon as possible and finish it, because times are black; soon night may fall, it will be too late for everything, and we may pay with our lives for writing such testimonies. This was the immured man’s message. And this chronicle, like the bridge itself, may demand a sacrifice, and that sacrifice can be none other than myself, i, the monk Gjon, sonne of Gjorg Ukcama, who hath finyshed this knowynge that ther is no thynge wryttene in owre tonge about the Brigge of the Ufana e Keqe and the euil why che is upon us, and for the love of owre worlde .

Tirané, 1976-1978