Three Arched Bridge

by Ismail Kadare

  They said that all these calculations had been put down on paper and fixed with a seal, so that anybody who was thinking of being immured could read them beforehand.

  To me all this resembled a bizarre dream. This was something we had never heard of before, a kind of death with accounts, seals, and percentages, We were quite unused to it. Sometimes I could not take it in at all I called to mind the delegation and its talks with the count, and what the collector of legends and the bridge’s master-in-chief had said, and I tried to establish some connection between these things, but the more 1 brooded the more perplexed 1 became. This business of calculated sacrifice confused me completely.

  Sometimes I told myself that perhaps these were the signs of the new order that the master-in-chief had told me about in that unforgettable conversation. That jumble of words had been full of contracts, accounts, currency exchange, and percentages, percentages, percentages on everything. Even on death.

  38

  IT WEIGHED ON ME like a fatal burden. Its stone piers crushed me. One of its arches planted itself directly on my stomach, another on my throat. I wanted to break free and save myself from it, but it was impossible. The only movement I could make was a slight, a very slight tremor…. Ah yes, 1 thought, this was the perpetual trembling of which the ballad spoke. A cry rose in my throat. The cry struggled to come out, pressing against the stone arch. This went on a long time. Then, I do not know how, something was released inside me, and I budged. In that same moment, with eyes closed in terror, I felt the bridge collapse and fall on my body.

  I woke drenched in sweat. The room was stuffy. I rose to open the window. Outside a warm, damp wind blew. One could sense that the sky, though invisible, was overcast. Some silent flashes of lightning burst against the mute flatness.

  “Oh Lord,” I cried aloud, and I lay down again on my bed. But further sleep eluded me. A few awkward ideas, with a deceptive glitter as if frozen by winter, floated somewhere inside me. I do not know how long I remained in this state. When I finally opened my eyes, it was light. Somebody was knocking at the outside door. There was an anxious rattle at the iron doorlatch. The sky was cloudy, but not as overcast as I had imagined. Spring has unexpectedly come, full of fury, I said to myself.

  Two village neighbors were at the door, with distraught faces. Their eyes were troubled and bloodshot.

  “What is it?” i asked. “What’s the matter?”

  They raised their hands to their throats, as if trying to force out the words.

  “At the bridge, Gjon … Under the first arch … They’ve walled up Murrash Zenebisha,”

  “No.”

  1 was unable to say anything else, or even to think. But these people, who seemed to have lost the power of thought before me, expected something from me. Soon ! found myself walking toward the bridge. We hardly walked but were blown where the wind bore us, like three waving scraps of rag, myself in the middle and the others on either side*

  I knew Murrash Zenebisha. Among ordinary people, it would have been difficult to find anyone more commonplace than he. His appearance, his average height, and his whole life were ordinary to the point of weariness, I could not take in the fact that this extraordinary thing, immurement, had happened to none other than him. The more I thought about it, the more it seemed an aberration. It was more than turning into a leader or a statue* … Everything had gone too far … now he was divided from us by the mortar of legend.

  From a distance, you could see a small gathering of people around the bridge pier. By the first arch. He must be there.

  As I drew closer, I tried, I do not know why, to recall Murrash Zenebisha’s commonplace face. Oh Lord, from this moment 1 could not picture it in my mind at all It swam as if under a film of water, with a broken, uncanny smile.

  The small group of people moved silently to make room for me, Nobody greeted me, They stood like candles, looking strangely small against the background of the bridge. A part of the arch bent heavy and chill above them,

  “There he is,” a quiet voice said to me.

  He was there, white like a mask, spattered with plaster, only his head and neck, and part of his chest. The remainder of his trunk, and his arms and legs, were merged with the wall

  I could not tear my eyes from him. There were traces of fresh mortar everywhere. The wall had been strengthened to contain the sacrifice. (A body walled up in the piers of a bridge weakens the structure, the collector of tales had said.) The bulging wall looked as if it were pregnant. Worse, it looked as if it were in birth pangs.

  The body seemed planted in the stone. His stomach and legs and the main portion of his trunk were rooted deep, and only a small portion of him emerged.

  A wall that demands a human being in its cavity, the collector of customs had said. Foul, sinful visions taunted me. The wall indeed looked pregnant, … But this was a perverse pregnancy…. No baby emerged from it, on the contrary, a human being was swallowed up…. It was worse than perverse. It would have been perverse if, in contrast to a baby who emerges into the light, the man who entered the darkness were to shrink and be reduced to the size of an infant and then to nothing…. But that was not to happen. This was a perversion of everything. It was perversity itself.

  Around me, people’s voices came as if from the next world.

  “When?” asked the hushed voice of a new arrival.

  “Just after midnight.”

  “Did he feel much pain?”

  “None at all”

  I heard sobbing close beside me. Then I saw his wife. Her face was swollen with tears, and in her arms she carried a year-old baby, who was trying to nuzzle her breast. Paying no attention to the men standing around, she had uncovered one breast. The breast was swollen with milk, and the nipple occasionally escaped from the baby’s mouth. Her tears fell on her large white breast, and when the nipple missed the child’s mouth, her tears mixed with drops of milk.

  “He was very calm,’ explained one of the count’s scribes, who had apparently come in search of explanations. “He asked about the terms of the agreement one more time, and then …”

  A workman who stood holding a pail near the place of sacrifice splashed the dead man with wet plaster. The plaster trickled down the hair sticking to his brow, gave a sudden gleam to his open eyes, which was quickly quenched, and then patchily smeared his features before coursing down his neck and disappearing into the walk

  “Why are you throwing on plaster?, ’ a nervous voice asked. But no one replied.

  It seemed that they were sprinkling him at intervals, because after emptying its contents over the sacrifice,, the worker went to refill his bucket from a nearby barrel

  His wife’s interrupted sobbing became louder after the sprinkling.

  “He didn’t tell anyone about what he was going to do?” someone asked his wife softly.

  She shook her head.

  “No one,” she said.

  Only then did I notice the other members of the family, standing around his wife. His parents and two brothers with their wives were there. Their faces were petrified, as if they too had been splashed with that plaster of eternity.

  “No one,” his wife repeated. But I could not look at her eyes any longer, they were so swollen with weeping.

  The count’s scribe asked something of her too, and she gave a short answer. Then she turned to me and said something, but my eyes were fixed on the immured man; I stared at the lower part of his neck, at his collarbone, just where the cavity above his chest…

  But at that moment the man standing by with the pail of plaster in his hands splashed him again, and once more the plaster ran down his forehead, igniting and at once quenching his vacant, blind, oblivious white eyes. Then the trickle meandered down his neck, quickly whitening the very spot from which I could not tear my eyes.

  The baby had again missed, his mother’s nipple, and was whimpering, I asked the woman whether they had been in financial straits,

  “No,” she said, “He’d been earni
ng plenty recently.”

  Recently, 1 thought. Like many inhabitants of the surrounding district, he had been working as a day laborer on the bridge and must have been receiving a normal wage, as normal as everything else in his life,

  Another of the count’s men arrived and whispered the same questions.

  “When?”

  “Just after midnight.”

  It seemed that we would all stand rooted to the spot, and people would arrive and mutter the same questions until the end of the world.

  Now and again one could hear the words “brother, brother” from his sister. But his mother’s sobbing was more muffled. Only once she said, “They killed you, son.” And a little later she very softly added, “As if your mother had no need of you.”

  I would never have dared to interrupt a mother’s lament, but the words “They killed you, son” gave me no peace,

  “Is it possible someone killed him?” 1 said to her in a low voice, “But why?”

  She wiped her tears.

  “Why? How should a poor old woman like me know? No doubt for nothing. Because he cast a shadow on this earth,”

  “He had always been worried recently,” said his wife by my shoulder, “He had something on his mind.”

  “And last night?”

  “Last night particularly.,’

  My eyes froze again on the dead man’s neck just above the collarbone, as if something were about to appear there, a shadow, a … I do not know what to say. But the plasterer with his usual gesture once more emptied his pail of plaster over the immured man. The grayish white liquid, the very stuff of legend, poured over him.

  “Last night particularly,” his wife went on. “I thought I saw him move at midnight and get up. At dawn he was gone,’

  The milk from her breast had again missed her baby and trickled to the ground, but she seemed not to care.

  “Did you need money?” someone asked.

  “What can I say?” his wife asked. “Like everyone else.”

  The members of the dead man’s family still stood grouped in silence. There was the splashing of the pail again as it was refilled with plaster from the barrel. 1 was completely numbed. 1 would not have been surprised if the man with the bucket had now coated us all with plaster.

  39

  ALL THAT DAY AND THE NEXT 1 was not at all myself. His open eyes fixed under their film of plaster seemed to stare from every wall around me, Walls terrified me, and I tried at all costs not to look at them. But they were almost impossible to avoid, 1 only then understood what an important and powerful part walls play in our lives. There is no getting away from them, like conscience, I could leave the presbytery building, but even outside there were walls, close by or in the distance,

  My head was splitting in two with speculation. If he had really set out to sacrifice himself of his own free will, as everybody now claimed, what must his motive have been? The desire to ensure a better life for his wife and family, with the help of the great sum of money that the road firm would pay for the sacrifice? I could have believed this suspicion of many people, but not the modest Murrash Zenebisha. Sometimes I wondered whether he had gone to die in order to put an end to a family quarrel (you don’t know what a quarrel among sisters-in-law is like), but this too was unbelievable. There had never been the least rumor of such a thing in the Zenebisha family, I sometimes asked myself whether, whatever his reasons for sacrificing himself, he had told his wife what was in his mind. And had she accepted his plan? It was impossible to believe such a thing. And then I wondered whether he perhaps did not love his wife. She had said that he sometimes went away at night, she did not know where. She had even begun to grow suspicious.

  I knew myself that this was the kind of conjecture that, although I despised, I had nevertheless acquired from that collector of customs. I strove to free myself from it, as from the walls, but I could not.

  Sometimes he would go away at night…. Was his wife really telling the truth? Were the others telling the truth? I too could have believed what was said, but that place in the victim’s neck, there between his neck and collarbone, controverted everything. I had stared at it three times, because each time it had struck me that a spot under the layer of plaster had begun to blush faintly, very faintly, like a stain. But all three times the man with the pail had splashed plaster on the corpse before I could really detect a redness.

  Enough, I thought. We have had nothing but babble and lies. We were dealing with a pure and simple crime. They had murdered Murrash Zenebisha. His mother had been the first to say the word: C6They killed him for nothing…. Because he cast a shadow on this earth… *” They had murdered him in cold blood shortly after midnight and then walled him up. The wound, or one of his wounds, was between the neck and the collarbone, and the man with the pail had splashed plaster over him again and again to hide the possible bloodstain. It was a murder done by the road builders.

  But how had Murrash Zenebisha come to be by the bridge at night? I asked this question out loud, because 1 had the satisfaction of being able to supply a clear answer. Sometimes he would go away at night,… And so shall we do the murder ourselves? … The road builders had let slip these words at the meeting with the count. Murrash Zenebisha’s fate had been sealed on that day. And the count, withdrawing to one side, had done nothing but wash his hands like Pontius Pilate, The road builders had understood that the water people had instructed someone to damage the bridge at night, This person was the ordinary Murrash Zenebisha, He had done his job three times in a row…The fourth time they had caught and killed him. He had been very worried recently, He had something on his mind,… And last night? Last night particularly, Everywhere bards were singing about his death, There was only one possibility left to him, to give up this job, However, “Boats and Rafts” would apparently not allow the agreement to be broken. After catching him in their trap, they would not let him back out, So there was nothing for him to do but become an outlaw, or continue on his fatal path, Apparently he had chosen the second,,,. He had something on his mind, And last night? Last night particularly, Possibly this was to have been his last task for the water people, He set out as on the other occasions shortly after midnight, He dived into the water a long way from the bridge and swam up to it, trying not to make any noise, The night was dark and moonless, What happened next at the bridge, no one would ever know, Perhaps they caught him on the spot, dislodging the stones, or in the water, trying to escape; no one knew. No one knew how they had killed him. They may have killed him at once, or perhaps they interrogated him for a time, and threatened him. Or they may have talked to him sweetly and reassuringly, reminding him of the lavish compensation his wife would receive, Or perhaps there had been neither threats nor sweet words, and they killed him in silence, everything done without words, in dumb show, under the arch of the bridge. Because this was only the final act of a murder that had been in the wind for a long time, Its spurts of blood had already spattered us all, and its screams had died away long ago.

  The long duel between the men of the water and the men of the land had concluded with the victory of the latter. Do not try to harm us again, or you will be killed, That was the cry that came from the first arch of the bridge.

  I was convinced of the truth of all this. But my mind was not entirely settled, and 1 continued silently to mull over innumerable theories.

  If this was really what had happened, then the question followed of whether Murrash Zenebisha’s wife was aware that he had agreed with “Boats and Rafts” to damage the bridge. And if she did know, what had her attitude been? But the initial question cropped up again before this, What had led Murrash Zenebisha into this danger? Desire for money? He was earning plenty. Besides, his brothers were masons like himself.

  All this made my head swim. 1 felt that 1 had wandered into a maze of arguments from which I would never emerge. I returned to where 1 had started and circled around the same point: had his wife encouraged him in this affair or, on the contrary, held him bac
k? Either was possible. Perhaps she had dreamed of a better life, of dressing better than her sisters-in-law., of finery* But it was also possible that she had said to her husband, Why do we need this damned money? Thank God, we don’t live badly. Sometimes he would go away at night.… And she had even several times become suspicious. But what if he really wanted more money for another woman? He would go away at night…. There could be two reasons for his disappearing at night. First, to damage the bridge, and second, another woman. Or perhaps both together. Another woman, rather than his daily existence, was more likely to lead him to risk his life. His wife had become suspicious. Perhaps she had spied on him. He could have explained his absences by telling her about damaging the bridge (if he had indeed told her his secret). But even so, perhaps his wife had begun not to trust him. So she might have followed him on one of those nights, and when she discovered that he had a secret besides the bridge, she may in her subsequent fury (or, who knows? quite calmly) have informed the builders.

  But in whatever way the incident had happened, its essence remained unchanged: the bridge builders had murdered Murrash Zenebisha in cold blood and immured him. The crime had only one purpose — to inspire terror.

  They had calculated everything in advance. No doubt they had carried out detailed studies of all possible ways of justifying the crime. At the very beginning, before the bridge existed or was even sketched, they had started by sending a man who pretended to be seized by an epileptic fit on the very bank of the Ujana e Keqe. Not a bridge, not a sketch, but a sickness lay at the root of it all. That was the first blow. It was natural that death should follow.