Three Arched Bridge

by Ismail Kadare

  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.

  10

  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,

  11

  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.

  12

  THREE DAYS LATER I watched the raft again from the porch of the presbytery, Only two goatherds with their animals were crossing. The raft made the journey several times until it had carried the entire small herd to the opposite bank, The herdsmen were wrapped in cloaks like those of all common shepherds, but their tall pointed caps made them look somehow frightening from a distance.

  Another day at dawn,1 heard through my sleep some distant voices, apparently calling for help, and shouting “Ujk, ujk” — “Wolf, wolf.” I leaped out of bed and listened hard. They were really protracted shouts of Uk, oh U-u-uk.” I went out to the porch, and in the dim dawn light 1 made out four or five people on the opposite bank with a kind of black chest in their midst. They were calling the ferryman. Their shouts, stretching like a film over the swollen waters of the river, hardly reached me. It was a cold, bleak morning, and who knows what anxiety had made them set out on their road before dawn. “Uk, oh

  U-u-uk,” they called to the ferryman, holding their hands to their mouths like the bells of trumpets.

  Finally I saw Uk stagger down to the bank in his stooped fashion, no doubt muttering curses under his breath at these unknown travelers, the raft, the river, and himself.

  When the raft drew near the opposite bank and the travelers boarded, I saw that the black object was nothing less than a coffin, which they carefully lifted onto the planks of the raft,

  I went back to bed to rest a while longer, but sleep eluded me.

  13

  THE FIRST CONTINGENT of men and laden mules arrived at midday on the seventeenth of April. Mad Gjelosh strode out in front of the muleteers, gesticulating as if pounding a drum and puffing out his cheeks, drunk with joy.

  The men and mules halted on the riverbank, just next to the designer’s empty hut. There, in the wasteland among the wild burdocs, they started unloading. This took all day. By late afternoon the riverbank was unrecognizable. It was a complete jumble; people scurried about, speaking a language like a thicket of brambles, amid the piles of planks, ladders, creeperlike ropes, stakes, cleats, and implements of every kind. There was so much hubbub that even Gjelosh was taken aback, and I rather suspect that his initial joy was dampened.

  Late that evenings the new arrivals began building sheds by torchlight. That night some of them slept in the open, if such perpetual restlessness could be called sleep. They kept wandering, who knows why, from the bushes to the riverbank, calling to each other with loud voices and seeming to sing, weep, or groan in their sleep. They went boo, boo like owls, and threw up exactly over the spot where the toads were. Torches glimmering here and there gave everything the appearance of a nightmare. In fact, the anxiety and sleeplessness they brought with them were the first things they conveyed to those around them. The construction of storage sheds and dormitories went on for several days. It was surprising to see how even such rickety huts could emerge from this clutter. The disorder looked incapable of resolving itself into anything, and it seemed quite incredible that a bridge could come out of it. These road people were as rowdy and dirty as the “Boats and Rafts” people were meticulous and organized in everything they did.

  By the end of April two further caravans arrived, but work on building the bridge did not begin until the designer came. Now they called him the master-in-chief, because it seemed that he himself would direct the building of the bridge. Excavations began a long way off and to one side, by the bushes, as if the bridge were to run off in that direction, as far away from the water as possible. The workmen dug all kinds of pits and dead-end ditches. Everybody labored to level the ground, far away from the water, almost as if they wanted to deceive the river: “We have nothing to do with you. Can you see how far away we’re digging? Flow on in peace.”

  The network of pits and meaningless lines grew more elaborate as time passed. Everybody began to think that the master-in-chief was quite simply a li
ttle weak in the head and was frittering away the money allotted for the construction of the bridge. People even said it was no accident that Gjelosh made friends with him so quickly. It takes one to know one.

  Of course, Gjelosh scampered about all day amid the confusion, puffing out his cheeks, gnashing his teeth, and pretending to beat a drum. Nobody shooed him away. Even the master’s two assistants, who were supervising the work, said nothing to him. In contrast to their master, they were garrulous and ubiquitous. One of them was powerfully built, bald, and with abscesses on his throat, which some people said were signs of an incurable disease, while others insisted that they were scars from the torture he had been subjected to in an attempt to extract his bridge-building secrets from him. Those who made the latter guess were again divided into two camps. One group said that he had not withstood the agony and had divulged his secret, and others claimed that he had endured everything they could do, arching his back like a bridge under the pain, and had told his enemies nothing.

  The second assistant, on the other hand, was scrawny; everything about him, his head, chin, and wrists, was thin and angular. Later when they often waded into the river mud, people said that the master-in-chief always turned his back on the second assistant as they talked in order not to have to see his horrible shins.

  14

  WHEN THE HEAT tightened its hold and the Ujana e Keqe subsided considerably, work suddenly intensified around the collection of ditches flanking the river. The laborers extended the trenches one by one as far as the bank itself, and then joined them to the river, whose water now began to flow into them. Seen from above, the channels resembled great leeches, sucking the water from the already enfeebled river.

  It took less than two days for the appearance of the Ujana e Keqe to change completely. In place of the gentle play of the waters, thick mud spread everywhere, with a few dull glimmers squinting here and there.

  Farther downstream the channels led the water back to the river again, but on the site of the bridge everything was disfigured and bedraggled. Dead fish lay scattered in the mud. Turtles and diver-birds gave a final glimmer before perishing. Wandering bards, arriving from nobody knew where, looked glumly at the wretched spectacle of the river and muttered, “What if some naiad or river nymph has died? What will happen then?”

  The old raft was moved a short distance downstream, and the hunchbacked ferryman cursed the newcomers all day.

  These new arrivals crossed ceaselessly to and fro through the bog with buckets packed with mud, which so dirtied them that they resembled ghosts. Now not only the river but the whole surrounding area became smeared with mud. Its traces extended as far as the main road, or even farther still, as far as the Inn of the Two Roberts,

  The lugubrious, unsociable master-in-chief wandered to and fro amid the tumult of the building site. To protect himself from the sun, he had placed on his head not a straw hat, like the rest of the world, but a visor that only shielded his eyes. Sometimes, against the general muddiness, the rays of the evening sun seemed to strike devilish sparks from his reddish poll People no longer said he was mad; now he was the sole sane exception in the crowd of strangers, and the question was whether he would be able to keep this demented throng in harness.

  As time passed, the river became an eyesore. It looked like a squashed eel, and you could almost imagine that it would shortly begin to stink. Regardless of all the damage it had caused, people began to feel pity for it.

  Old Ajkuna wept to see it. “How could they kill the river?” she cried. “How could they cut it up, oy, oy!,’ She wept for it as if it had been a living person. “Killed in its sleep, poor creature! Caught defenseless and cut to pieces, oy oy!”

  She climbed down into the mud to seek out the master-in-chief. “The day will come when the river takes its revenge,” she muttered, “It will fill with water and be strong again. It will swell and roar. And where will you hide then? Where?”

  Whenever she thought she spied the builder in the distance, she would raise her stick threateningly: “Where will you hide then, Antichrist!”

  15

  WHILE THEY WERE STILL DIGGING THE PITS for the foundations of the bridge piers, our liege lord, the count of the Gjikas, received a request for his daughter’s hand in marriage, The request was very unusual It came from none of the Albanian or European dukes, barons, and princes, as often happened, but from an unexpected direction whence betrothals and wedding guests had never come, the Turkish state. The governor of one of the empire’s border provinces asked for the count’s daughter for his son Abdullah (what a terrible name!). The proposal, as the envoys said, was made with the knowledge of the sultan, so it was not difficult to realize that this was a political match. Our liege lord, Stres Gjikondi, had been aloof toward his new neighbors, and now they were trying to mollify him. -

  For longer than people could remember, betrothals had been like a calming oil poured on the sea of hostilities and divisions among the nobles of Arberia, Of course these things pacified matters for a time, but not for long. If there was a recent reason for a coolness, people’s minds worried at it until the day of the hated announcement: “We have important business,” After that, people knew what came: a fracas.

  A year ago the count of Kashnjet had asked for the hand of our liege lord’s only daughter, and immediately afterward so had the duke of the Gjin family, or Dukagjin as he is called for short, whose arms carry a single-headed white eagle, But our liege lord did not grant his daughter to her first suitor for reasons known only to himself, while the second withdrew his suit after an ambush at the Poplar Copse by unknown persons, doubtless suborned precisely for this task by those old enemies of our count, the Skuraj family, whose princely arms carry in the center a wolf with bared teeth.

  Quarrels among the Albanian princes and lords have been hopelessly frequent for the last hundred years. The Balsha family, princes of the north, whose arms carry a six-pointed white star and who in recent years have been in continual financial straits, could seldom agree with the proud Topia family, who have pretensions to the throne of all Arberia. Nor have the Balshas been on good terms with the counts of Myzeqe, the Muzakas, who have added to their old arms a forked stream that is rumored to suggest the springs of oil recently discovered on their lands. Yet the Muzakas likewise have been in almost continual animosity with Aranit Komneni, the powerful prince of Vlore, even though both families are allied by marriage to the emperors of Byzantium, in contrast to the Dukagjins, Balshas, and Topias, who have forged their marriage alliances abroad, exclusively with the French royal family. Nor have the Muzakas been on good terms with the Kastriotis, whose arms also bear an eagle, though not a white one like the Dukagjins, but a red one with two heads. People say that the dukes of Gjin descend from the marriage long ago of the chieftain Gjin to a mountain sprite, while the Kastrioti family, or Castriothi, as they sometimes write their name, are the only Albanian lords to use antique pearls as their seals. Two years ago there would have been a general slaughter among the men of Dukagjin and the Kastriotis at the wedding of the count of Kashnjet, had it not been for the intervention of Dejdamina, the old mistress of the house.

  The lords of Arberia imagined they could settle these quarrels by marriages. But as I mentioned, the alliances thrown across this stormy sea have been merely like rainbows straining to climb a few degrees above the abyss. The marriages of the great Count Topia with Katrina, the sister of Balsha II, of the latter with Komita, daughter of the prince of Vloré, and of the second brother, Gjergj Balsha, to Marija, the daughter of Andre Muzaka, did not in the least deter the three old princely houses from very soon setting aside the wedding music for the drums of war.

  Marriages with foreigners have not been any more successful. From the time when the Albanian prince Tanush Topia, father of the present count Karl Topia, snatched Helene d, Anjou, daughter of the king of France, from the French escorts who were accompanying her to her wedding in Byzantium, ill fortune has dogged many of the marriages in the l
and of Arberia. Tanush Topia kidnapped the French princess with inexcusable thoughtlessness, without in the least considering that he was entering into double enmity with France and Byzantium, both of whom were greater and mightier than himself, He lived with the Frenchwoman for five years, and she bore him two children, His father-in-law, the king of France, pretended to forget the offense, and invited the couple, son-in-law and daughter, to Paris, supposedly to be reconciled. He killed them both, and still today, after so many years, whenever I see the Topia coat of arms with its lion crowned with the white lilies of the Angevins of France, it reminds me of a tombstone.

  Aranit Komneni’s marriage into the imperial house of Byzantium was no less troubled, However, where Tanush Topia’s marriage became the cause of a quarrel, here on the contrary a quarrel was extinguished by a marriage, Aranit Komneni’s coolness with Byzantium arose over the old naval base of Orikum near Vlore. Taking advantage of Byzantium’s difficult position, the Albanian prince brought to light some old documents proving that the Orikum base, before it had been captured and rebuilt by Rome, had belonged to Illyria, that is, the Arberia of today. Without waiting for the conclusion of diplomatic talks with the empire, he attacked and captured one half of the base, which was defended by a garrison of Scandinavian mercenaries. Byzantium then hurried to offer him a princess as a wife, to preserve at least joint possession of the base and the small imperial private beaches nearby. They say that the Turks have recently been doing their utmost to persuade Komneni to hand over the base to them. They have promised the aged prince fabulous sums, and even a princess for his son, if he will cede to them at least his own portion of the base, in other words one half. Rumor has it that Aranit has insisted that he will not exchange the base for the most beautiful girl on land, because, he says, the base is the most beautiful girl on land and sea alike.