Three Arched Bridge (6 page)

Under our feet, the Ujana e Keqe roared on with its grayish crests, but neither the river nor the bridge could hold the countesses' attention any further. They went on gossiping about their acquaintances, their love affairs, and their precious jewelry; try as 1 might not to listen, something of their chatter penetrated my ears as if by force. For a while they maliciously mocked the Ottoman governor's proposal of marriage to the daughter of our count. They dissolved in laughter over what they called their ‘‘Turkish bridegroom,' imagining his baggy breeches; they held on to each other so as not to fall into the puddles in their mirth. Then, amid fresh gales of laughter, they tried to pronounce his name, “Abdullah,' saying it ever more oddly, especially when they tried to add an affectionate diminutive “th” to the end.

A
T THE END OF THE MONTH OF MICHAELMAS
and during the first week of winter, we still saw dervishes everywhere. It struck me that these horrible vagabonds could only be the scouts of the great Asiatic state that destiny had made our neighbor.

They were no doubt gathering information about the land, the roads, the alliances or quarrels among the Albanian princes, and the princes' old disputes. Sometimes, when I saw them, it struck me that it was easier to collect quarrels under the freezing December wind than at any other time.

I was involuntarily reminded of fragments of the conversation between the two dainty countesses, and it sometimes happened that, without myself knowing why, I muttered to myself like one wandering in his wits the name of the “Turkish bridegroom”: Abdullahth.

O
NE OF THE NOVICES
attached to the presbytery woke me to tell me that something had happened by the bridge, Even though he had gone as far as the riverbank himself, he had been unable to find out anything precisely.

I jumped out of bed immediately. As often when I heard news or saw dreams, I automatically turned my head toward the mountains. This was a habit left over from childhood., when my grandmother used to say to me, “Any sign you may receive, for good or ill, you must first tell to the mountains.”

One could sense that it was snowing in the mountains, although they themselves were invisible. When we arrived at the riverbank, the sight was indeed incredible. As the novice had told me, the builders had stopped work, a thing that had never happened. Those whom neither sleet nor hail, nor even the Ujana e Keqe itself, had succeeded in driving from the bridge had left their work half done and were scattered in groups on the sandbank, some looking toward the bridge, and some toward the river, as if seeing these things for the first time.

As we drew closer, 1 noticed other people, who had clambered onto the scaffolding and beams and looked like vultures, Among them, close by the recently formed central arch, I recognized from a distance the master-in-chief and his two assistants. Together with the others they crouched by the stone bridge, saying something to one another, bending again, stretching their heads down to study the piers, and then huddling together once more.

“Gjelosh, what happened?” someone asked the idiot, who was hurrying away from the site. “Has the bridge developed a bulge?”

“The bridge, br, bad, very bad, bridge, pa, pa, fright,” he answered.

Only a few hours later we learned the truth: the bridge had been damaged in several places during the night. Several almost inexplicable crevices, like scratches made by claws, had appeared in the central piers, the approach arches, and especially on the newly completed span. As pale as wax, the master-in-chief s assistants tried to imagine what kind of tools could have done such damage. The master-in-chief, wrapped in his cloak, stared with a glacial expression at the horizon, as if the answer might come from there.

“But these aren't marks made by tools, sir,” one of the masons said at last.

“What?” the master-in-chief said.

“These aren't hammer marks, or chisel marks, or —”

“Well then, what are they?” the master-in-chief asked.

The mason shrugged his shoulders and looked around at the others. Their faces had turned the color of mud.

“The bards,” one of them muttered, “a few weeks ago at the Inn of the Two Roberts, said something about naiads and water nymphs —”

“That's enough of that,” the master-in-chief howled, and abruptly crouched again by the damaged arch to study the cracks. He looked at them for a long time, and when he too saw that they really did not look like marks made by hammers, picks, or crowbars, he no doubt shivered in terror like the rest.

T
HE NEWS
that the bridge had been damaged led folk to appear on both banks of the Ujana, just as in the days after the flood, when everybody hurried to collect tree stumps for firewood.

The surface of the waters was now a blank. People watched for hours on end, and there were those who swore that they had discerned beneath the waves, if not naiads themselves, at least their tresses or their reflections. They then recalled the wandering bards, remembered their clothes and faces, and especially strove to recall the verses of their ballads, distorting their rhymes, as when the wind bends the tops of reeds.

“Who would have thought their songs would come true?” they said thoughtfully. “They weren't singers, they were wizards.”

The Ujana e Keqe meanwhile flowed on obliviously. Its banks had been damaged and torn since its unsuccessful onslaught, so that in places it resembled a gully, but it had not hung back. It had finally succeeded in crippling the bridge.

At night, the bridge lifted blackly over the river the solitary span that had been so cruelly wounded. From a distance the mortar and fresh lime of the repaired patches resembled rags tied around a broken limb. With its injured spine, the bridge looked frightening.

J
UST AT THIS TIME,
for two successive nights, a strange monk named Brockhardt stayed in our presbytery on his way back to Europe from Byzantium' where he had been sent on his country's service,

I was reading in the last light of the fading day when they came to me and said that a person resembling a monk had crossed the river on the last raft and was asking for something in an incomprehensible tongue, I told them to bring him to me.

He was very sharp-featured, long-limbed, and unbelievably dust-covered*

“I have never seen such a long highway,” he said, pointing to himself with his finger^ as if his journey weighed on his body like a yoke. “And almost the whole of it under repair,”

I studied his muddied appearance with some surprise and hastened to explain.

“It is the old Via Egnatia, which a road company is restoring,” I said. He nodded and removed his cloak, shaking dust everywhere, “The very same people as are building the stone bridge,”

“Yes,” he said, “I saw it as I arrived.”

He looked even taller without his cloak, His limbs were so scrawny that if he had crossed those arms of skin and bone, he would have resembled a warning of mortal danger.

“One fork of the road takes you to the military base at Vlore, doesn't it?” he said.

He must be a spy, I thought.

“Yes,” I replied.

After all, what did it matter to me if he asked about the Vloré base? It belonged to somebody else now.

I invited him to sit down on the soft rug by the fire and laid the small table.

“Sit down, and we will eat. You must be hungry.”

1 uttered these words in an unsteady voice, as if worried that I would find it impossible to fill all that boniness with food. As if reading my mind, he grinned from ear to ear and said:

“I am a guest. The Slavs say
gost's
and have derived this from the English word
ghost.”
He smiled. “But like every soul alive, I need meat, ha-ha-ha!”

He laughed in a way that could not fail to look frightening. I tried not to look at his Adam's apple, whose movements seemed about to cut his throat.

“Eat as if in your own home,” I said.

He went on chuckling for a while, not lifting his eyes from the table. The thought that I had the opportunity of spending the evening with one who knew something about the study of languages gave me a thrill of pleasure.

“And what news is there?”1 asked, saving the subject of languages for later.

He spread his arms, as if to say, Nothing out of the ordinary.

“In Europe, you know, war has been going on for a hundred years,” he said. “And Byzantium seethes with schemes and plots.”

“As always,” I said.

“Yes. As always. They have just celebrated the anniversary of the defeat and the blinding of the Bulgarian army. Since then, they all seem to have lost their heads. As you may know, in that country everybody looks for excuses for excitement.”

“The blinding of the Bulgarian army? What was that?”

“Don't you know?” he said. “It was a terrible thing, which they solemnly celebrate every year.”

Brockhardt told me briefly about the Byzantine emperor's punishment of the defeated Bulgarian army. Fifteen thousand captured Bulgarian soldiers had had their eyes put out. (You know that is a recognized punishment in Byzantium, he said.) Only one hundred and fifty were left with their sight intact, to lead the blind army back to the Bulgarian capital. Day and night, their faces pitted with black holes, the blind hordes wandered homeward.

“Horrible,” Brockhardt said, swallowing chunks of meat. “Don't you think?”

It seemed to me that the more he ate, instead of putting on flesh, as he had jokingly said, the thinner and paler he became.

“Great powers take great revenge,” he said. We talked for a while about politics. He shared my opinion that Byzantium was in decline and that the main danger of our time was the Turkish state,

“At every inn where I stopped,” he said, “people talked of nothing else.”

“And no doubt everybody indulged in vain guesswork over who had first brought them out of their wilderness, and nobody had the least idea how to stop the flood.”

“That is right,” said Brockhardt. “When people do not want to fight against an evil, they start wondering about its cause. But this is an imminent danger for you too, isn't it?”

“They are on our doorstep,' “Ah yes, you are where Europe begins.” He asked about our country, and it was apparent at once that his knowledge about it was inaccurate. I told him that we are the descendants of the Illyrians and that the Latins call our country Arbanum or Albanum or Reg-num Albaniae, and call the inhabitants Arbanenses or Al-banenses, which is the same thing. Then I told him that in recent years a new name for our country has grown up among the people themselves. This new name is Shqiperia, which comes from
shqiponjé
, meaning “eagle.” And so, our Arberia has recently become known as Shqiperia, which means a flight or community or union of eagles, and the inhabitants are known as
shqiptare
, from the same word.

He listened to me closely, and 1 went on to explain to him a Serbian list of names of peoples, with features of totemism, that a Slovene monk had told me about. In it, the Albanians were characterized as eagles
(dohar)
, the Huns as rabbits, the Serbs as wolves, the Croats as owls, the Magyars as lynxes, and the Romanians as cats.

He nodded continually and, when I told him that we Albanians, together with the ancient Greeks., are the oldest people in the Balkans, he held his spoon thoughtfully in his hand. We have had our roots here, I continued, since time immemorial The Slavs, who have recently become so embittered, as often happens with newcomers, arrived from the steppes of the east no more than three or four centuries ago. I knew that 1 would have to demonstrate this to him somehow, and so I talked to him about the Albanian language, and told him that, according to some of our monks, it is contemporary with if not older than Greek, and that this, the monks say, was proved by the words that Greek had borrowed from our tongue,

“And they are not just any words,” I said, “but the names of gods and heroes.”

His eyes sparkled. I told him that the names Zeus, Dhemetra, Tetis, Odhise, and Kaos, according to our monks, stem from the Albanian words
ze
, “voice,”
dhe
, “earth,”
det
,“sea,”
udhe
, “journey,” and
haes
, “eater.” He laid down his spoon.

“Eat, ghost,” I said, staring almost with fear at his spoon, which seemed to be the only tool binding him to the world of the living.

“These are amazing things you say,” he said.

“When someone borrows your words for gods, it is like borrowing a part of your soul,” I said after a pause. “But never mind, this is no time for useless boasting. Now the Ottoman language is casting its shadow over both our languages, Greek and Albanian, like a black cloud.”

He nodded.

“Wars between languages are no less fateful than wars between men,' he said.

I was saddened myself by the topic I had embarked on,

“The language of the east is drawing nearer,” 1 repeated after a while. We looked deep into each other's eyes, “With its
‘-Ink'
suffix,' I went on slowly, “Like some dreadful hammer blow,”

“Alas for you,' he said,

I shook my head in despair,

“And nobody understands the danger,' I said,

“Ah,' he said, and with a sudden movement,, as if freeing himself from a snare, he rose from the table.

He was now free to become a ghost again.

T
HREE DAYS AFTER BROCKHARDT LEFT
, the bridge was damaged again. This time it was no longer a matter of cracks and scratches; some stones in its central piers had been removed. The strangest thing was that some of these stones were dislodged beneath the surface of the water, and this, apart from adding to people's terror, caused great trouble to the builders. It was almost impossible to carry out repairs underwater until the river subsided again next summer.