Silence again reigned through all the days that followed. Still nobody else had crossed the bridge. One day only some frightened sheep somehow found themselves on it and tried to turn back, but were unable to do so. The sheep wandered over the bridge while the terrified shepherd brandished his crook on the bank, calling for the ferryman to carry him across.
This was the only event of these days. A few blades of grass sprouted among the piles of stone and sand left beside the bridge. They were the first sign that nature was slowly, very slowly, but insistently preparing to erase from the face of the earth every trace that bore witness to the presence of workmen on the bank of the Ujana e Keqe.
The days were numb with cold, with a few motionless clouds in the distant sky, and silent, silent. No news came from anywhere. They said that in a very distant country they were building a great wall Plague had struck central Europe again.
On the eleventh of the month of Michaelmas, I happened to make a tour of duty as far as the borders of our territories, to the very spot where the domain of the neighboring Turkish pasha begins. After completing my work, I would sit for hours on end, contemplating the point where the Turkish Empire began. I could not believe it was there in front of me. I repeated to myself over and over again, like someone wandering in his mind, that what they call the lands of Islam began a few paces in front of me. Asia began two paces in front of me. It was indeed enough to turn your wits. What had once been more distant than the lands of fairy tales was now in front of our very noses. And still I could not believe it. Nor could anybody believe that these people had really come so close. There they were, yet evidence, times, dates, and the units of measurement of time and space dissolved as if in a mist. Sometimes I wanted to call out: Where are they? Below, the land was the same, and the same winter sky covered the earth. And yet just here began, or rather ended, their enormous state, which began in the Chinese deserts.
I had seen nobody on the other side during the days of my tour of duty, neither guards nor inhabitants. There was only land left waste, more like a stony desert, and scrub everywhere. Only on the last night (oh, if only I had not stayed that night), on that final night I heard their music, I still do not know where that singing and accompaniment came from, who was singing, or why. I wonder whether they were wandering dervishes caught on the border as night fell, or civil servants sent from the capital to set border stones, or a group of itinerant musicians. In the end, I did not worry much about it. But when I heard their singing accompanied by entirely unfamiliar instruments, I felt seized by a sensation I had never known before. It was a diffused anxiety, without the slightest hint of hope. What was this stupor, this hashish dissolved in the air in the form of song? Its tones slithered drowsily; everything seemed sticky and shapeless. So this was their music, I thought, their inmost voice. It crept toward us like a soporific mist. At its tones, feet skipping in a dance would falter as if seized by terror.
I returned bitter and sour from my journey.
Nothing noteworthy happened until the middle of the month, apart from the appearance of the body of a drowned man floating one day on the surface of the waters. It collided with the pier where the body was immured (the water level had now risen this far), twirled around, and struck the pier once again with its elbow, as if to say to the dead man. How are you, brother? Then it floated away.
Those who had seen the drowned man and tried to tell other people were met with stares of incredulity. But that happened last year, people said. We saw it together. Don’t you remember? And both sides would sit in bewilderment. By the bridge piers, time, swirling like water, seemed to have stood still.
49
ONE MORNING they woke me before dawn to tell me that people were crossing the bridge,
“Who?” I asked sleepily.
“The Baltaj family, all the men of the house together, with their black ox.”
I went up to the narrow window-slit that overlooked the bridge, I knew that one day human beings would set foot on it, but I did not think it would happen so soon. By next spring at the earliest, I thought. Besides, I was also sure that some lone individual would be the first to dare, and not the Baltajs with a flock of children,
“Where are they going, I wonder? What has got into them?” I asked nobody in particular,
“No doubt some worry,” called a voice from below.
Worry, I thought. What else could those black sheepskins contain?
The first sheepskin, the tallest of them, who was leading the ox, emerged at the opposite bank without suffering any harm. After him came the shorter ones, and finally the children,
“They crossed,” somebody said.
They expected me to say somethings perhaps a curse or, on the contrary, a blessing on the travelers. Perhaps they had felt a secret wish to cross the bridge for a long time, I had experienced something of this sort myself, and whenever 1 felt its pull 1 would walk to and fro for a long while, tiring my feet, as if this desire were simply in my feet alone, and 1 were punishing them for it.
So the Baltajs had crossed … only their menfolk, I remembered that in the villages, crossing the rainbow was considered so impossible that people thought that if girls went over they could be turned into boys, … And suddenly it flashed into my mind that nothing other than a rainbow must have been the first sketch for a bridge, and the sky had for a long time been planting this primordial form in people’s minds….
I felt afraid of all this hostility toward the bridge. However, I calmed myself at once, The divine model had been pure. But here, although the bridge pretended to embody this idea, it had death at its foundations.
The Baltajs, who had sold their black ox because of some problem, returned bitter and disconsolate, crossing the bridge again, but without their animal Everybody talked about their crossing, but there was neither anger nor reproach in their words. There was only something like a sigh.
In the meantime Uk the ferryman had fallen ill. He had caught cold, which was not in itself something unexpected. But when it became known, everyone seemed to be astonished. Night and day on that dilapidated raft, his feet in the water, forty and more years on end, How had he never caught cold before?
He died soon and was buried on the same day. It was a cloudy afternoon. The Ujana e Keqe was full of waves, and the blackened raft, moored to its jetty by chains, bucked on the waters like a furious horse that had sensed the death of its mästen
“Boats and Rafts’, did not replace the ferryman. It did not even remember the abandoned raft. The post that supported the sign with its name and the tolls was now very unsteady, and one day someone took it away*
As if the ferryman’s death were some long-awaited sign, people one after another began to use the bridge. After the Baltajs, the Kryekuqe family crossed the bridge, and after them the landlord of the Inn of the Two Roberts, together with his brother-in-law, both drunk. On the same day some foreign travelers crossed, and at midday on the eighteenth of the month large numbers of the Stres clan passed over, a pregnant woman among them.
None of the Zenebishas crossed. There were also many old men and women, led by old Ajkuna, who had not only vowed never to commit the sin of setting foot on that devil’s backbone but left instructions in their wills that even after their deaths they would prefer their coffins to be hurled into the water rather than carried over the bridge to the graveyard on the opposite bank.