THE THREE-ARCHED BRIDGE

Late last Sunday night, when I had gone out to walk on the sandbank, I saw the idiot Gjelosh Uk-Markaj crossing the bridge. He was laughing and sniggering to himself, and gesticulating like mad. The shadow of his limbs pranced over the roadway and flickered down the arches to the water. I struggled to imagine what sort of impression all these recent events might have left on his disordered mind, and I told myself that people had no call to laugh whenever they saw him muttering his way back and forth across the bridge, clenching his fists and flicking his wrists with the impression he was holding a horse’s reins. The fact is, what people know about this bridge is no less muddled than the inventions of a madman’s mind.

To stop people spreading truths and untruths about this bridge in the eleven languages of the peninsula, I will attempt to present the whole truth about it: in other words to record the lie we saw and the truth we did not see and to set down not only the daily events that are as ordinary as the stones from which it is built, but also the major disasters, which are about as many in number as the arches of the bridge.

Muleteers and caravans are now spreading all over the great land of the Balkans the legend of the sacrifice allegedly performed at the piers of the bridge. Few people know that this was not a sacrifice dedicated to the naiads of the waters, but just a straightforward crime, to which, along with other things, I will bear witness before our millennium. I say millennium, because this is one of those legends that survives for more than a thousand years. It begins in death, and ends in death, and we know that news of death or rumour leavened by the yeast of death is of all things the least likely to fear death itself.

I write this chronicle in haste, because times are troubled, and the future looks blacker than ever before. After the chilling events at the bridge, people have calmed down a little and so have the times, but another evil has appeared on the horizon – the Turkish state. The shadows of its minarets are slowly stealing towards us.

This is an ominous peace, worse than any war. For centuries we had bordered on the ancient land of the Greeks; then suddenly, before we realized it and as if in a bad dream, we awoke one morning to find ourselves neighbours of the Empire of the Ottomans.

Its minarets shoot up on all sides, a veritable dark forest of them. I have a premonition that the destiny of Arberia will soon change, especially after what happened this winter, when blood was shed for the second time on the newly-finished bridge – this time Asiatic blood. But everything will find its place in my chronicle.

Even though this was the spot on the bank where people and livestock were used to embarking or disembarking from the ferry, it was still a mere backwater, a place where nothing out of the ordinary ever happened. Of course such things did happen, as they do at all crossing points, and never more so than at a place like this, where the ancient highway, which was of such great length that nobody knew where it came from, was suddenly cut off by the river. At all events, here important events were the exception. As a rule, people who gathered to cross the river simply waited here, as people do at such times. In bad weather they would mutely watch the swirling, dun-coloured waters of the river as they waited wrapped in sodden black skins. Even the harness bells of the horses alongside them gave out a feeble tinkle, and the children’s voices were hushed as the raft approached. The appearance of the raft, with the ferryman squatting on board, served to frighten them.

A kind of wilderness stretched all around; the low riverbank, sandy and muddy by turns, receded into the distance dotted here and there with reed patches. There was not the smallest house round about; even the walls of our parish house were out of sight, while the nearest inn was a good mile off.

By the stakes where the raft was moored at night there was a metal plaque on which the words “Ferries and Rafts” were inscribed in crooked lettering. For many years since, such plaques had been put up everywhere, not only in the lands of our own liege lord, Count Stres of the Gjikas, or Stres Gjikondi, as they call him for short, but also far away, even beyond the state borders of Arberia, in other parts of the peninsula. This started in the winter of the year 1367, ten years before, when all the rafts used as ferries across rivers, estuaries, and lakes were bought up by a bizarre person who came from God knows where, and whose name nobody knows. They even say that he has no name apart from “Ferries and Rafts”, which has sprouted up everywhere like a plant that takes root wherever there is water and moisture. They say that he has the same plaque with the same words even at his great house from which he manages his business, and that he even signs the notices and receipts with the same words “Ferries and Rafts”, much as if they were his emblem, just as a white lion with a flaming torch between its teeth is the emblem of our own liege lord.

Once this new master bought up all the ferries and rafts the ferrymen and boatmen became his employees, apart from the odd exception, such as the wretched ferryman at the Stream of the Tree-Stumps, who would have starved sooner than accept a wage from this damned Jew. Just after the winter of 1367, this metal plaque appeared on our riverbank too, with the tolls for crossing inscribed on it: “Persons, one-half grosh. Horses, one grosh.”

In times of drought, when the Ujana e Keqe subsided and turned to a trickle, travellers would use the ford to cross the river on foot, even when laden with sacks, to avoid paying the toll. But they were not uncommonly drowned, deceived by the river, which was not for nothing called Ujana e Keqe, “Wicked Waters”. Weather-blackened memorial crosses were still to be seen on both sides of the river. They say that the owners of “Ferries and Rafts” were careful to plant such crosses on the bank for every person drowned, to remind other travellers of the price to pay if they tried to cross the river without their assistance.

Together with the raft, “Ferries and Rafts” had also bought the old jetty, a relic of Roman times. Blacksmiths had after a fashion repaired its iron cleats so that the ferryman could secure his craft the more easily, especially in winter.

The raft brought in large earnings, not only from the passage of travellers and their livestock, but also from the caravans that carried from Arberia to Macedonia the salt from the great coastal salt pans, and especially from the carts that supplied the Byzantine naval base at Orikum near Vlora. There had been detailed agreements dividing this income between our liege lord and “Ferries and Rafts”. In fact there had never been the least hint of a quarrel over this point, a rare thing on the face of this earth. It seems that “Ferries and Rafts” was was ever scrupulous in business matters.

“It is a sign from on high,” said one of the bystanders. This was a thin man who, when we later asked what his business was, said he was a wandering fortune-teller.

“And what sort of sign is it?” someone else asked.

The man threw a lacklustre look at the trembling epileptic, then at the river.

“Yes,” he muttered. “A sign from on high. Look how his trembling moves the waters, and the waters pass on their own movement to him. My God, they understand each other.”

The bystanders looked at each other. The man on the ground seemed to be becoming calmer. Someone had a hold on his head now.

“Well, what sort of sign is it, what do you think?” someone else asked.

The man who said he was a wandering fortune-teller half closed his lifeless eyes.

“It is a sign from the Almighty that a bridge has to be built here, over these waters.”

“A bridge?”

“Didn’t you see how he stretched his arms in the direction of the river? And that his body shook, just as a bridge shakes when heavy carts pass over it?”

“Brr . . . It’s cold,” someone complained.

The sick man was quiet now, his limbs only occasionally twitching in their last spasms, as if they had wound down. Someone bent over and wiped the foam from the edges of his lips. His eyes were sad and dull.

“This is a holy sickness,” the fortune-teller said. “In our parts, they call it the foaming. It always comes as a sign. The sign can portend evil and warn of an earthquake, for instance, but this time, praise God, the omen is a favourable one.”

“A bridge . . . this is strange,” people round about started saying. “Our liege lord must be told of this. Who is the lord of these parts? Count Stres of the Gjikas, long life to him. Are you a foreigner then, not knowing a thing like that? That’s right, brother, from abroad. I was waiting for the raft when the poor fellow . . . This must certainly reach the ear of our liege-lord. A bridge? My goodness, who would have thought of it!”

In the hall were the count, one of his scribes, our bishop, and two unknown house-guests dressed in tight-fitting jerkins, which were in fashion who knows where.

The count looked on edge. His eyes were bloodshot for lack of sleep, and I remembered that his only daughter had recently fallen ill. No doubt the two strangers were doctors from somewhere or other.

“I can’t get through to them at all,” he said as soon as I entered. “You know several languages. You can help us.”

The new arrivals did indeed speak the most horrible tongue. My ears had never heard such a babble. Little by little I began to untangle the strands. I noticed that their numbers were Latin and their verbs generally Greek or Slav, while they used Albanian for the nouns, and now and then a word of German. Adjectives they altogether did without.

With difficulty I began to grasp what they were trying to say. They had both been sent by their master to our liege lord, the Count of the Gjikas, with a particular mission. They had heard of the sign sent by the Almighty for the construction of a bridge over the Ujana e Keqe, and they undertook to build it, or in other words he, their master, was, if the count would give them permission. In short, they were prepared to build a stone bridge over the Ujana e Keqe within a period of two years, to buy the land on which it was to stand, and to pay the count a regular annual tax on the profits they would earn from it. If the count agreed, this would all be set out in a detailed agreement (item by item and point by point, as they put it) that would be signed and sealed by both parties.

They broke off their speech to produce their seal, which one of them drew from inside his strange jerkin.

“That which the Almighty proposes must be carried out,” they said, almost in one voice.

The count turned his weary, bloodshot eyes first on the bishop and then on his own scribe. But this riddle left them looking impassive.

“And who is this master of yours?” our liege lord asked.

Out came a fresh tangle of words, but the threads were this time so snagged that it took me twice as long to comb them out. They explained that their master was neither a duke, a baron, nor a prince, but was a rich man who had recently bought the old bitumen mines abandoned since Roman times and had also bought the larger part of the equally ancient great highway, which he intended to resurface. He has no title, they said, but he has money.

They kept interrupting each other, and finally noted down on a piece of paper what sums they would pay for the land and what annual tax they would pay to exploit the bridge.

“But what matters of course is to heed the message of the Most High,” one of them said.

The sums noted on the paper were fabulous, and everyone knew that our liege lord’s revenue had recently declined. Moreover, his daughter had been ill for two months and the doctors could not diagnose her malady.

Our liege lord and the bishop repeatedly caught each other’s eye. The count’s thoughts were clearly fluctuating between his empty exchequer and his sick daughter, and the bridge these strangers were offering to build was the remedy for both evils.

They started talking again about the heavenly message conveyed by the vagrant. In our parts, they call the poor fellow’s ailment moon-sickness, one of them explained, whereas here, as far as I can gather, it is called earth-sickness. Not that it makes much difference. These very names show clearly that everywhere they consider it a superior disorder, practically divine as one might say.

Our count did not think it over for long. He said that he accepted, and told his scribe to draw up the contract in Albanian and Latin. He then invited us all for luncheon, and I have never sat down to a grimmer one, as I kept having to rack my brains to grasp the ever more incomprehensible things these strangers were saying.

Fortunately, now and then they shut their mouths. They watched the flight of the storks. Then, seeing the granaries, they asked about the size of the harvest and the number of cattle taken to market and the route they took.

I noticed that the closer we came to the river, the less talkative they became and the less spirited. As they waited for the raft that was to carry them across, they did not conceal their terror of the waters. This was evident at all events from their faces.

Dusk was falling when they embarked on the ferry. I stared after them from the bank for a while. They were engaged in a frantic discussion, gesticulating like anything and pointing at each bank of the river in turn. It was cold. In the fast-falling darkness, they looked from a distance like a few black lines scrawled on the raft, as mysterious and incomprehensible as their inhuman gabble. And suddenly, as I watched them disappear, a suspicion crept into my mind, like a black beetle: the man who had fallen in a fit on the riverbank, the wandering fortune-teller who had been close by him, and these two clerks with their tight jerkins were in the service and pay of the same master . . .

People responded to the news with a feeling of fear mingled with elation. They were pleased that they would have no more dealings with those churlish ferrymen, who were always on the far bank when you wanted them, if they were to be found at all, and who, even worse, turned out to be drunk, with the exception of the present ferryman, the hunchback, who never pestered the women and never drank but always looked so forbidding he might have been ferrying you to your death. Besides, the rafts were filthy and damp and their rocking made you want to throw up, while the bridge would always be there, at all times of the day or night, ready to arch its stone back under your feet, without swaying or playing tricks. They would have no more trouble with the river either, which sometimes swelled and wreaked havoc, or else would dwindle to the merest thread, as if about to give up the ghost. People were glad that the Ujana e Keqe, which had been such a trial to them, would finally be pinned down in a stone collar. But this very thing, if it caused them joy, also scared them. It is not easy to saddle a kicking mule, let alone the Ujana e Keqe. Oh, we shall see, we shall see how it all turns out, they said.