They all strove to make room for it in their midst. Here is its shape: Three arches firing and the cross t that marked the place of sacrifice.
People stood in awe on both sides of the Ujana and gaped at it openmouthed, as if it were a thing of wicked beauty. Nevertheless nobody cursed it. Not even old Ajkuna, who came at midday, could curse it. The stone has taken my mouth away, she seemed to say as she departed. In their total absorption in the spectacle, nobody paid the least attention to the throng of laborers preparing to leave. It was incredible that this mass of men and equipment, this pig run, this gang of vagrants that had tried the patience of wood and stone, this filth, this pack of stammerers, liars, boozers, hunchbacks, baldheads, and murderers, could have given birth to this miracle in stone.
On one side, as if feeling themselves that they had suddenly become alien to their own creation, they gathered their paraphernalia, tools, mortar buckets, hammers, ropes, and criminals, knives. They heaved them helter-skelter onto carts and mules, and as I watched them scurrying about for the last time, I felt impatient, wanting them to leave, I wanted to be rid of them as soon as possible, and never hear of them again*
46
THE LAST CONTINGENT of workmen left three days later. They loaded on carts the heavy tools, great mortar barrels, and all kinds of scrap iron and wheels that creaked endlessly. They lifted the architect’s sick assistant onto a covered cart, hiding him from people’s view, because they said that his appearance was not for human eyes.
The deserted sandbank resembled a ruin, an eyesore with half-destroyed sheds stripped of everything of value, fragments of plank thrown anywhere, traces of mortar, piles of shattered stones, carelessly discarded broken tools, ditches, and lime pits half filled with water. The right bank of the Ujana looked disfigured forever,
Before he boarded his cart, the master-in-chief, who seemed to notice that I was watching their departure, left his people and came up to me, apparently to bid farewell He said nothing but merely drew a piece of card from his jacket, Scribbling some figures on it with a bit of lead, he began to explain to me, I do not know why, the balancing forces that held the bridge upright, My eyes opened wide, because I had not the slightest knowledge of such things, while he went on in his broken language, thinking that he was explaining to me what the forces and opposing forces were.
Late that afternoon the last cart left, and a frightening silence descended, 1 still had in my hand the draftsman’s card, covered with lines and figures, which perhaps did show the forces that kept the bridge upright and those trying to bring it down. The setting sun gleamed obliquely on the arches, which at last found a broken reflection in the waters, and at that moment the bridge resembled a meaningless dream, dreamed by the river and both riverbanks together. So alien, dropped by the river-banks into time, it looked totally solitary as it gripped in its stone limbs its only prey, Murrash Zenebisha, the man who died to allay the enmity of land and water.
47
WHAT WAS THIS? They had gone, and an unendurable silence reigned everywhere, A horrible calm, Almost as if plague had struck,
No one crossed the bridge. Not even mad Gjelosh. Chill winds blew upon it, passing in and out of its arches. And then the winds dropped, and the bridge hung in air, a stranger, superfluous. Human travelers who should have headed for it avoided the place, turning aside, back, or away, looking for the ford, calling softly to the ferryman; they were ready to swim across the river or freeze in its rapids and drown rather than set foot on the bridge. Nobody wanted to walk over the dead.
And so the first week passed and the second began. The great mass of stone waited expectantly. The empty arches seemed about to eat you. The bowed spine above waited for someone to step on it, no matter who — vagrants, women, a barbarian horde, wedding guests, or an imperial army marching two, four, twenty-four, one hundred hours without rest.
But nobody set foot on it. Sometimes it made you want to cry out: Had so much sweat, so much effort, and even … blood been expended for this bridge, never to be used for anything?
Rain fell the second week. For days on end the bridge stood drenched and miserable.
Then the rain stopped, and again the weather was chill and gray. The third week began. A whining wind crawled over the wasteland. It was the end of Tuesday afternoon when they saw that a wolf had padded softly over the bridge, as in a fairy tale. People could not credit their own eyes (and there were those who were ready to believe that a herald had crossed, waving the standard of the Skuraj family, the only one that has a wolf in its center). The beast meanwhile vanished quickly into the distance, where the wind seemed to have stood still, and howled.
The days that followed were silent and empty. It was ashen weather everywhere, as if before the end of the world. One afternoon, old Ajkuna came up to the bridge. People thought that finally she would curse it, and they gathered to watch. She halted at the entrance to the bridge, below the right-hand approach arch, and laid her hand and then her ear to the masonry. She stood there a long while, then lifted her head from the palm of her hand and said:
“It is trembling.”
I remembered the man who had fallen in an epileptic fit. He had indeed passed on his convulsions to the bridge.
Many believed that the bridge would collapse of itself. Occasionally I brought out the card on which the designer had scribbled those mysterious figures, and I would study them abstractedly, as if trying to understand from them the bridge’s fear,
I would have wished that the designer could have seen this desolation.
But the bridge’s solitude, which seemed ready to last for centuries, came to an end suddenly one Sunday. The highway, the surrounding plain, and the sandbank echoed to a piercing creak. People ran in terror to see what was happening. On the ancient road, in a long black column like a crawling iron reptile, a convoy of carts was traveling. The carts approached the bridge. We all stood frozen on the bank, expecting to witness some catastrophe. The first cart quickened its speed and began to mount the incline. You could hear the iron wheels changing their tone as they struck the stone paving. Then the cart mounted the right-hand approach arch, and then on, on, over the first arch, over … the dead man. Then came the second and third carts, and then the others, all laden with blackened barrels. They squeaked frighteningly, especially when they rode over the immured victim, and it looked each time as if the arch would split, but nothing happened.
The tail of the convoy was still on the bridge when people realized what kind of caravan it was, what it carried, and where it was going. Its sole cargo was pitch, for the Orikum military base near Vloré.
We watched its progress for a long time, looking alternately at the tail of the convoy and at the bridge, which had suffered no harm at all.
Immediately after the crossing of this inauspicious tar train, as a guest at the Inn of the Two Roberts called it, news came that the death of Komneni had at last been announced at Vlore, and that his son-in-law, Balsha II, had deployed his troops over the entire principality, including Komneni’s half of Orikum. Our count, accompanied by his entourage, departed to attend the old prince’s burial He must have been still on the road when, like thunder after a lightning flash, more news came, worse than the first, to tell us that the Byzantine garrison had finally evacuated its half of the naval base, ceding it to the Turkish garrison.
We were on the brink of war,
48
THE COUNT RETURNED from Komneni’s funeral even more withdrawn than when he had left. Almost all the lords of Arberia had gone to the ceremony, but apparently not even the sight of the old prince’s coffin, around which they were all gathered perhaps for the last time, gave them the wisdom to finally reach an understanding among themselves.