Ismail Kadare - Three Arched Bridge

All these things came to my mind fragmentarily as the agreement was being concluded. They paid for every piece, yard by yard, in Venetian ducats, and in the end departed very pleased, as if they had acquired the road for nothing. And so, with muddied hair and filthy clothes, they went on their way.

The Dutch monk had told me that the beast of the land, having gorged himself on the crocodile’s heart, left the beast dead under its useless scales and, with bloodied muzzle, wandered off through the grassland as if drunk.

IMMEDIATELY AFTER THIS, one cloudy morning, two somewhat bewildered-looking travelers dismounted from their heavily laden mules by the Ujana e Keqe. They asked some children playing nearby whether this river was really the Ujana e Keqe, unloaded their mules, and there and then began to dig pits in the ground, fixing some sort of stakes in them, Toward noon, it was apparent that they were building a hut, They labored all day, and nightfall found them still at work; but in the morning they were no longer there, There was only the ugly hut, rather rickety, its door shut with a padlock.

This aroused general curiosity. Everybody, not just old people and children, clustered around it, peering through cracks and crevices in the planks to see inside. They turned away disappointed, shrugging their shoulders as if to say, “Strange, not a thing inside,” Some people examined the padlock, fingered it, while others chided them: “Don’t touch it. What’s it got to do with you?” Then they shook their heads and left.

Four days passed in this way. Interest was waning fast, but on the fifth day it revived again even more strongly. In the morning people discovered, or simply had a feeling, that the hut was no longer empty. There was no smoke or noise, but nonetheless it was felt that someone was inside. Somebody must have come during the night.

Nobody saw him all that day or the next. A damp mist swathed everything, and people who went to the hut and peered through chinks said that the stranger was huddled up inside, wrapped in fleeces.

He emerged only on the third day. He had a tousled, tightly curled mop of red hair, and pockmarked cheeks. He had the kind of eyes that somehow seem not to allow you to look straight into them. A sick gleam that appeared as soon as you caught his eye would totally confuse you. He walked along the riverbank for a long while, crossed to the other side on the raft, and walked there too, returning to shut himself in the hut again.

For days on end, people saw him wade into the river up to his knees, drive in small stakes of some kind, and lower some things like copper sheets into the water. He would study these carefully and then fill his hands again and again with river mud, letting it trickle through his fingers. Everyone realized that this could be none but the designer, or as they said now, the projector of the future bridge.

He stayed two consecutive weeks in the rough little hut, gloomy and not keeping company with anybody.

People came from all parts to see him, and not only the curious or the idle, who are never in short supply at such times, but folk of all kinds. Men who had set out for market came, women with their cradles in their arms, cheese-makers who smelled of brine, and hurrying soldiers.

They stood on the banks near the black stones and the old jetty and watched the man moving to and fro, wading into the water and climbing out again, then returning to the water with his strange tools, then back to the sandbank where he would bend down and vigorously, almost furiously, scratch figures and sketches in the sand itself.

Even though it was clear from a distance that he was excitable (it sometimes seemed that he could hardly keep one of his own hands from pestering the other), he paid not the slightest heed to the people who watched him for hours on end. He did not even occasionally turn his head toward them. He treated old Ajkuna, the only person who had the courage to go up to him and threaten him, with total unconcern. She struck the ground in front of him two or three times with her stick to make him listen, and when he lifted his head from the scrawls, she cried, “What are you doing here? Are you not afraid of Him above?” And she lifted her staff to the sky. Perhaps he did not understand a word she said, or perhaps he did not care. Nobody knows. What we do know is that he bent his head over his figures once more and did not raise it again.

When people realized that nothing ever distracted him, they talked loudly and expressed their opinions about him and his work under his very nose. “Ah, now he’s passing the mud through his hands, and hell find out what sort of land this is,” explained someone. “Because land is like a human being, and can be strong or weak, healthy or sick. It can look fine from the outside but still have an invisible disease. And the land itself can’t tell whether what it will carry will be for good or ill, and so he’s running it through his fingers, to learn all its secrets.”

On they talked, approaching now quite close to him, while he went on as indifferent as before, Nobody exchanged a word with him. The only person who kept company with the new arrival was mad Gjelosh. Without telling anybody, and without anybody understanding how, he silently put himself in the stranger’s service, He would wait for him to leave his hut at dawn, and carry his stakes and other implements, taking them to the river-bank and back again. Gjelosh was under his feet all day, and this taciturn redhead, who seemed ready to gnaw off his own fingers whenever work did not go well, accepted the mad boy’s company in silence. Gjelosh gazed at him in adoration and cleared away anything that stood in the way of his scribbles in the sand, uttering not a sound in the man’s presence. His tongue was unleashed only when the designer returned to the hut. “Eh, Gjelosh,’ people said, “Show us how your master works.” And a delighted Gjelosh would seize a stick and scribble in the ground so furiously that mud and pebbles flew twenty paces off. “That’s how he works, vu, vu, vu,” he went, wildly scratching the ground.

THE DESIGNER LEFT just as he had arrived^ unseen by anyone* One mornings mad Gjelosh scurried around the hut, again sealed with its padlock. He brought his head close to the cracks, peered inside for a long time, and then ran around the hut again, He apparently could not believe that the man was not there’ and so was looking for some other hole or chink in order to find him,

This went on almost all day, The idiot’s eyes had never looked so disconsolate,

THE RAFT CONTINUED to punt men and livestock across the Ujana e Keqe. I do not know why, but after the decision to build the bridge, I began to notice what sort of traffic went to and fro across the river by raft. On the last Saturday in March, I stood watching near the old jetty almost all day. The weather was cold, with a thin rain that erased from the sandbank the final traces of the departed designer’s scrawls. People sat miserably on the raft, huddled against the cold, trying to turn their backs to the bitter wind. The expressions on their pinched faces gave little clue as to why they were crossing the river. Maybe they were traveling because of illness, or for visits, or they might just be on their way to the bank, or in mourning. Almost half the faces among them were familiar, while the others were utter strangers, and it was quite useless to attempt to discover who they might be. A monk’s habit or the cloak of a simple icon seller might conceal the Venetian consul on a secret mission to who knew where. Such things had happened.