Three Arched Bridge (3 page)

Our liege lord studied his hands.

The words “forbid them” were uttered by the man with the black beard with such rage and savagery that he seemed to be saying. Kill them, slaughter them, hack them to pieces, so that it will not occur to the mind of man to build a bridge on this earth for the next forty generations.

Some years previously, a Dutch monk coming from Africa had told me about a deadly struggle between a crocodile and a tiger, which he had seen with his own eyes from the branches of a tree,

“We may even consider the possibility of deferring all your debts, over a very long period,” Pointed Beard said.

Our liege lord continued to stare down at the ring glittering on his hand,

“Or indefinitely,” the other went on.

The Dutchman told me how for a long time the two beasts, the tiger and the crocodile, had circled each other, without being able to bite or strike a blow at all.

“Besides, is the noble count aware of the nature of the business conducted by the man who wants to build this bridge?” asked Pointed Beard.

“That is of little interest to me,” the count said, shrugging.

“Then allow me to tell you,” Pointed Beard continued. “He is involved in the black arts.”

Three times the tiger threw himself on the crocodile's back, and three times his claws slipped on the monster's hard scales. Yet the crocodile could not bite the tiger or lash him with his tail. It seemed that the contest would never end.

“Of course,” our liege lord said, “the bitumen he extracts is black.”

“As black as death,” Pointed Beard said.

They must have noticed again that shadow of gloom in our liege lord's eyes, because they fell back again on evil premonitions. All three began to talk, interrupting each other to explain that one only had to see those barreis loaded with that horrible stuff to be sure that only wizards could take to such a trade, and alas for anyone who permitted carts to cross his land loaded with these barrels, that leak drops of tar in the heat, sprinkling the roads — no, what do I mean, sprinkling? — staining the roads with the devil's black blood. And these drops of pitch always sow disaster. Now it has become a main raw material for war, and this great wizard is selling it everywhere, to the Turks and Byzantium on one hand, and to all the counts and dukes of Arberia on the other, fomenting quarrels on both sides.

“That's what that tar does, and you are prepared to let it pass right through your lands. It brings death. Grief.”

But in one of the crocodile's furious thrashes, the tiger, it seems, discerned his soft, exposed belly. He attacked his enemy again with a terrifying roar. The crocodile lunged to bite him, exposing his belly again. The tiger needed only an instant to tear it open with his claws. Burying his head in his enemy's body and crazed by his blood, he tore through the bowels with amazing speed, until he reached the heart.

The three talked on, but I, who knew our liege lord, realized that he was not listening anymore. Perhaps because they had talked more than they should, they had lost. Although the count seemed to be in doubt for a moment, it was never easy to make him change his mind. The sum of money promised by the road company was greater than the entire profits of the water people. Besides, his daughter had shown signs of improvement since his decision to build the bridge.

“No,” he said at last, “We will talk no more about the bridge. It will be built,”

They were struck dumb. Two or three times they moved their hands and were about to speak, but they did nothing but close their bags.

The beast of the water was defeated.

A
WEEK LATER
the master of roads and bridges bought the stretch of highway that belonged to our lord, Two other emissaries had been journeying without rest for three months and more through the domains of princes, counts, and pashas, buying up the great western highway that had once been called the Via Egnatia and was now called the Road of the Balkans, after the name the Turks have recently given to the entire peninsula, which comes from the word
mountain
. More than by the desire of the Ottomans to cover under one name the countries and peoples of the peninsula, as if subsequently to devour them more easily, I was amazed by our readiness to accept the new name. 1 always thought that this was a bad sign, and now 1 am convinced that it is worse than that,

Now down this road came its purchasers, their clothes and hair whitened by its dust. They had so far purchased more than half of it, piece by piece, and perhaps they would travel all summer to buy it all They paid for it in fourteen kinds of coinage — Venetian ducats, dinars, drachmas, lire, groschen, and so forth —- making their calculations in eleven languages, not counting dialects, This was because the road passed through some forty principalities, great and small, and so far they had visited twenty-six of them, More than buying it, they seemed to be winding the old roadway, so gouged and pitted by winters, summers, and neglect, onto a reel

The highway was older than anyone could remember. In the past three hundred years or so, almost all the holy crusades had passed along it. They said that two of the leaders of the First Crusade, Robert Giscard, Count of Normandy, and Robert, Count of Flanders, had spent a night at the inn a thousand paces down the road from us, which since then had been called the Inn of the Two Roberts,

Tens of thousands of knights of the Second Crusade had also passed this way, and then the Third Crusade, headed by Frederick Barbarossa, or Barbullushi as our yokels called him. Then came the interminable hordes of the Children's Crusade, the Fifth Crusade, the Seventh and Eighth, the knights of the Order of the Templars, the Order of St. John the Hospitalier, and the Teutonic Order. Very old men remembered these last, not from the time when they were traveling to Jerusalem, but from about forty years ago, when they passed this way on their return to Europe.

A sorrier array of men had never been seen, as old Ajkuna said. Slowly, silently, they rode on their great horses, with breastplates patched with all kinds of scrap, which squeaked,
krr, krr
, as they rode, sometimes dripping rust in wet weather. They were returning northward to their own countries, with that creaking like a lament, leaving trickles of rust on the road like drops of discolored blood. Old Ajkuna said that when they saw the first of their ranks, people began to call, “Ah, the ‘Jermans' are coming, the ‘Jermans' are coming.” One hundred and fifty years had passed since they came this way on their journey to Jerusalem; but the stories about them that had passed from mouth to mouth were so accurate that people recognized the “Jermans” as soon as they appeared again. Very old people said that this was what they were called when they first came — “Jermans,” or people who talk as if in
jerm
, in delirium. Yet many people seem to have liked this name, since they say it is now used everywhere. According to our old men, these people have even begun to call their own country Jermani, which means the place where people gabble in delirium, or land of jerm. However, I do not believe that this name has such an origin.

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.

I
MMEDIATELY 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.

T
HE 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,

T
HE 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.