Three Arched Bridge (9 page)

“Whose?”

“Her husband's.”

“I have thought long and hard about that too. No doubt he knew that she suffered but never imagined that matters could be so bad as to drive her to self-destruction, So the next day, when he saw his own wife arrive carrying the basket of food, his blood must have frozen. What do you think?”

“I don't know what to say,” 1 replied. “Perhaps you are right, but perhaps it wasn't like that at all”

I was in fact certain that it had not been like that. Whenever he came to see me, he had some new explanation. Once he told me that the youngest brother had perhaps not told his wife the secret, not out of a desire to keep the
besa
with his brothers but because he did not love his wife and had found a way to get rid of her. Another time he suggested that perhaps the three brothers had colluded among themselves to kill the youngest wife, and the whole fiction that the walls demanded a sacrifice was just a way of justifying the murder, All his interpretations of the legend were founded on baseness, betrayal, and disloyalty, and whenever he left 1 would be annoyed with myself for having listened to him. When he departed for the last time, he had sown the seed of doubt over not only the behavior of the three mason brothers and the two sisters-in-law but also that of the mother-in-law, who in his view certainly took part in the oath, and even that of the sacrificed bride herself. After he had left, after slinging mud at everything, not sparing even the dead, I decided I would tell him that he was free to think what he liked, but I had no desire to hear any more of his perverted speculations.

I waited for him the next day, to tell him that his efforts to throw mud at this old tragedy were useless, because the true kernel of the legend was the idea that all labor, and every major task, requires some kind of sacrifice, and that this magnificent idea is embodied in the mythologies of many peoples. What was new, and peculiar to the ballad of the Balkan peoples, was that the sacrifice was not connected with the outbreak of war or some march, nor even a religious rite, but concerned a wall, a work of construction. And this can perhaps be explained by the fact that the first inhabitants of these territones, the Pelasgians, were the first masons in the world, as the ancient Greek chronicles themselves admit.

I wanted to say that in truth the drops of blood in the legend were nothing but streams of sweat, but we know that sweat is a kind of humble nameless servant in comparison with blood, and therefore nobody has devoted songs and ballads to it. So it can be considered normal in a song to represent a river of sweat with a few drops of blood. It is of course obvious that alongside his sweat every man sacrifices something of himself, like the youngest brother, who sacrificed his own happiness.

I could hardly wait to tell him these and other ideas, but just when I had made up my mind to speak out, he disappeared. From that time on, I never saw him again.

I
N SPITE OF THE SEVERE COLD,
work on the bridge continued. It was said that they had now quite completed the second main arch and had begun the third. 1 say “it was said,” because in fact nothing could be discerned from the bridge's external appearance behind its confusion of timbers!

Nothing worth recording occurred in the following weeks. The old blackened raft continued to pass from one bank to the other. The ferryman looked more hunchbacked than ever. The words “Boats and Rafts” on the rusty sign were barely legible. Two planks of the raft had broken loose, and no one bothered to repair them. Everything now quickly decayed, and the black water visible through the gaping planks of the raft seemed to make the expressions of its passengers even gloomier.

At dusk one Sunday (this is the only event that I can even partially remember), some people wearing black sheepskins crossed the river by raft, in somber haste. The fog seemed to swallow them as soon as they disembarked on the opposite bank, It was not long before some more people, also in black sheepskins, asked for the raft. They were just as gloomy and in as great a hurry as the first group. They asked about the men who had crossed be-fore, and these were the only words to escape their lips as they crossed the river. One of them vomited continuously.

O
NE MORNING
, as I walked along the frozen river-bank in the hope of catching sight of the collector of tales and legends (for I did not know then that he had vanished forever), I came face to face with the master-in-chief* The north wind was piercing. Especially it had frozen his eyes' coating them with a kind of glittering film that prevented you from seeing what was inside them.

To my astonishment, this stera, gruff man greeted me. Only then did I realize how eager 1 was to get to know him. We exchanged a few words and set off walking side by side along the sandbank. The icy crust that coated his eyes seemed to crack in two or three places,making them even more inscrutable. I had imagined that talking with this man would be difficulty but not to this extent. Our conversation was a rambling^ muddled affair, a real maze from which you could not extricate yourself. It was evident that he himself found it painful It was apparently easier for him to construct bridges or towers than to conduct a human conversation. The worst of it was that 1 still sensed that something valuable, perhaps very valuable., lay at the bottom of this tangle, and it was precisely my efforts to understand this that upset me most, When I left him, my head felt cleft in two. I sat down by the fire and once more did my best to recollect the tangle, I began to unravel it carefully, thread by thread, and eventually I seemed to succeed* The essence of what he had said was this: According to signs that he had been studying for some time, the lineaments of a new order that would carry the world many centuries forward had faintly, ever so faintly, begun to appear in this part of Europe, These signs included the opening of new banks in Dürres, growing numbers of Jewish and Italian intermediaries dealing in twenty-seven different kinds of coin, and the almost universal acceptance of the Venetian ducat as a form of international currency. There was also the increasingly heavy traffic of merchant caravans, the organization of trade fairs, and especially (Oh Lord! How he emphasized that word ‘‘especially',), especially the construction of roads and stone bridges. And all this movement, he said, was a sign simultaneously of life and death, of the birth of a new world and the death of the old* He said something about bridges and the difficulties of building them, and during this part of the conversation I felt as if I were crushed under the rubble of a bridge that he had brought down upon me. But then he explained to me that, of all the monstrosities that deface the earth's surface, there never had been and never would be anything uglier than corpse-bridges, These bridges are born dead, he said, and they live in death (he used the phrase “they die all their lives”) until the time comes for their demolition (or “ultimate death,” as he put it). He told me that he had built such bridges himself and that now they appeared in his dreams like ghosts. If ever he decided to commit suicide (he told me), he would hang himself from such a bridge. I could scarcely understand what they were. They were not bridges built over rivers or streams or chasms, or indeed over any kind of gap that had to be crossed. They were bridges built in the middle of fields, and their only service was now and then to carry on their backs great ladies, who climbed on them to observe the sunset together with their invited guests. Building bridges was in fashion now, he said, and many princes and pashas considered them to be the same as the porches of their houses. I have built such phantoms, he said. He indicated with his hand the furrowed, foaming waters of the Ujana e Keqe, over which the stone bridge loomed, grim and unloved, and he added: “But this kind of bridge, even if washed in blood, is a thousand times nobler than those.”

And that was more or less my conversation with him.

I
N 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?

S
OME 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.

T
HE 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.