Three Arched Bridge (11 page)

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:
^C6
They 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 back? 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.

Both sides, “Boats and Rafts” and the road company, used ancient legend in their savage contest. The former used it to stir up the idea of destroying the bridge, and the latter to plot a murder.

My exhausted brain contained an idea as dismal as it was wearyingly plain. I thought that, like all the affairs of this world, this story was both simpler and more involved than it appeared, … They had come from far away. One side came from the water, and the other from the steppes, to accomplish before our eyes something that, as their collector of customs said, could still not be understood for what it was: a bridge or a crime, For it was still unknown which of the two would survive longer on this earth and which would be eroded by the seasons. Only then would we understand which was the real edifice and which the mere scaffolding that helped in its construction, the pretext that justified it.

At first sight, it seemed that the newcomers had calculated everything, but perhaps that too was only a superficial view. Perhaps they themselves imagined they were building a bridge, but in fact, as if in delirium, they had obeyed another order, themselves not understanding whence it came. And all of us, as fickle as they, watched it all and were unable to discern what was in front of us: stone arches, plaster, or blood.

Holy Blessed Mary, forgive me these sins, I prayed silently. I succeeded in calming my soul, but my brain would not rest. It raced to the legends. These people had revived legend like an old weapon, discovered accidentally, to wound each other badly. It was nevertheless early to say whether they had really enlisted it in their service. Perhaps it was legend itself that had caught them in a snare, had clouded their minds, and had thrust them into the bloody game.

D
URING ALL THOSE DAYS
nobody talked of anything but the immurement of Murrash Zenebisha. People told the most incredible stories about what he supposedly said at the moment when they walled him in, and his last wish for a space to be left for his eyes so that he could see his year-old child. Some substituted the bridge itself for the child, and some tied his last wish not only to his family but to their duty, to the gods, and to the entire principality,

There was a constant crowd of people by the arch of the bridge where the victim was immured. The guards placed by the count watched over the body from morning to night, and there came a moment when the investigators assigned to probe the incident, after making their inquiries, themselves stood petrified in front of the dead man. His face, that white plaster mask, had undergone no change in the last few days. Now that the plaster was dry and they were no longer coating him, the whiteness of that face was unchanging. They said that if you looked at it by moonlight, you could lose your speech.

His family —his elderly parents, his brothers and their wives, and his young widow with the baby whose mother's nipple always missed his mouth — came every day and stood stock-still for whole hours, never taking their eyes off the victim. His open eyes with their crust of plaster had the silence and unresponsiveness of that “never ever” that only death can bring. During the first week his parents aged by a century, and the features of his brothers and their wives and even their infants seemed furrowed for life. But he, leaning against the arch of the bridge as if against a stone pillow, entirely smoothed over, studied them all beyond the plaster barrier that made him more remote than a spirit.

Whenever the crowd thinned or dispersed, mad Gjelosh would arrive at the site of the sacrifice. He was quite stunned by the scene, and his inability to understand what had happened mortified him considerably, He would walk slowly up to the body, approaching it sidelong, and softly whisper, “Murrash, Murrash,” in the hope of making the man hear. He would repeat this many times and then disconsolately depart,

Old Ajkuna came on the seventh day, the day when it is believed that the dead make their first and most despairing attempt to break the shackles of the next world. She stayed for hours on end by the first arch, without uttering a word. That was something that could find no parallel in the experience of even the most elderly. A few more days passed, and then whole weeks, and the fortieth day was approaching, the day on which it was believed that a dead man's eyeballs burst, and then everybody realized what a great burden an unburied man was, not only on his family but on the entire district, It was something that violated everything we knew about the borders between life and death. The man remained poised between the two like a bridge, without moving in one direction or the other. This man had sunk into nonexistence, leaving his shape behind him, like a forgotten garment.

People came from all parts to see the unburied body: the curious from distant villages, and wayfarers who lodged at the inns on the great highway; even rich foreigners came, as they traveled idly to see the world together with their ladies. (Such a thing had come into fashion recently, after the dramatic improvements to the highway.)

They stood in awe by the first arch, noisy, waxen-faced, talking in their own languages and gesticulating. You could not tell from their gestures whether they blessed or cursed the hour that brought them to the bridge. Beyond all their hubbub, solitary, cold, vacant, aloof, and covered with lime, Murrash Zenebisha seemed to stand in silence like a bride.

It was the beginning of April The weather was fine, and work proceeded on the bridge more busily than ever before. The dead man seemed to spur the work forward. The second span was now completely finished, and the vault of the third was being raised. Last year's filthy mud, which had dirtied everything round about, had gone. Now only a fine dust of noble whiteness fell from the carved stones and spread in all directions. It coated the two banks of the Ujana, and sometimes on nights of the full moon it shone and glittered in the distance.

On one of these moonlit April evenings I ran into the master-in-chief on the riverbank, quite by accident. I had not seen him for a long time, He seemed not to want to look me in the eye. The words we exchanged were quite meaningless and empty, like feathers that float randomly, lacking weight and reason. As we talked in our desultory way,1 suddenly felt a crazy desire to seize him by the collar of his cape, pin him against the bridge pier, and shout in his face: “That new world you told me about the other day, that new order with its banks and percentages, which is going to carry the world a thousand years forward, it is founded on blood too.”

In my mind I said all this to him, and even expected his reply: “Like all sorts of order, monk.” Meanwhile, as if he had sensed my inner outburst, he raised his head and for the first time looked me in the eye. They were the same eyes that I now knew well, with rays and cracks, but inflamed, as if about to burst, almost as if it was the fortieth day not for the dead man at the bridge but for himself….