Meanwhile, the abandoned raft tied by its chain to the old jetty rotted and crumbled in an extraordinarily short time. Such a thing was indeed surprising, especially when you think that the ferryman had made virtually no repairs for decades. People had only to give up using it for a very short while before it disintegrated.
50
ON THE THIRD OF THE MONTH of St, Ndreu’ early in the mornings Dan Mteshi crossed the bridge, together with his sons and a goat. After him’ the men of the Gjorg clan crossed on their way to the law court. Then mad Gjelosh crossed (or rather advanced to the middle and turned back). Later, all noise and laughter, almost the entire Vulkathanaj clan crossed, mounted on mules, traveling to a wedding in Buzézesta. Immediately afterward Duda’s daughters crossed, as did mad Gjelosh’ making a zigzag path. At midday two groups of strangers crossed one after the other, and then a drunkard from the Inn of the Two Roberts; then mad Gjelosh braced himself to set off again but did not do so. Toward dusk’ on his bay mount, the knight Stanish Stresi crossed as fast as you could blink, though nobody could say why’ and after him a foreign herald. When night fell crossings became very rare, and anyway travelers were no longer recognizable in the darkness. As their silhouettes appeared on the bridge, you could gather a little from their gait, such as whether they were Albanians or foreigners, but there was no way that you could tell why they were travelings whether for pleasure, penance, or murder.
51
NOT A LIVING SOUL crossed the bridge for one hundred hours in a row. Rain fell. The horizon was dissolved in mist. They said that plague was ravaging central Europe.
What was this interruption? For a time it seemed that people, having committed such a sin (and there were those who came to confession immediately after crossing the bridged had made an agreement to abandon the bridge for good. However, on Sunday night the traffic resumed as unexpectedly as it had ceased.
When I was at leisure,I enjoyed choosing a sheltered spot and observing the bridge. The bridge was like an open book. As I watched what was happening on it, it seemed to me that I could grasp its essence. It sometimes seemed to me that human confidence, fear, suspicion, and madness were nowhere more clearly manifest than on its back. Some people stole over as if afraid of damaging it, while others thunderously stamped across it.
There were those who continued to cross at night. bandit style, as if scared of somebody, or perhaps of the bridge itself, since they had spoken so ill of it.
After the bishop of Ardenica, who was traveling to defrock a priest at the Monastery of the Three Crosses, another covered wagon crossed, which, it was later suspected, probably contained an abducted woman. Then came oil traders. Mad Gjelosh followed the traders, shouting, because it was well known that he could not endure the seepages from their skin bottles. With a rag in his hand, he would stagger almost on his knees, wiping away the traces of oil, and with the same rag wiping the stone sides of the bridge, as if to clean them of dust.
Late in the afternoon there came, from who knows where, Shtjefen Keqi and Mark Kasneci, or Mark Haberi as he had recently begun to call himself. They had set off a week earlier with a great deal of fuss “to look death in the eye,” but, it seemed, were coming back as always like drenched chickens.
Two months previously Mark Kasneci had caused us a great deal of confusion with his new surname. After a trip to the fiefdom of the Turkish pasha, he came back and announced that he was no longer called Mark Kasneci but Mark Haberi, which has the same meaning of “herald” in Turkish. He was the first person to change his surname, and people went in amazement to see him. He was the same as he always was, Mark Kasneci, the same flesh and bone, but now with a different name. I summoned him to the presbytery and said, “Mark, they say that along with your surname you have also changed your religion.” But he swore to me that that was not true. When I told him that a surname was not a cap you could change whenever you liked, he begged me with tears in his eyes to forgive him and to let him come to church, because, although he felt he was a sinner, he liked the surname so much and would not be parted from it….
That is what people are like. It sometimes occurred to me that if the bridge were conscious, it would be more disgusted than amused by us and would take to its heels like a frightened beast. A rainbow, the bridge’s model and perhaps its inspiration, is something that, thank God, nobody yet knows how to build, and still less to chain in fetters; but is it not also something frightening, fragile, and incomprehensible to people?
52
AT THE END OF THE WEEK the two representatives of the bridge owners, mounted on mules, turned up again after being absent for so long* People gaped at them openmouthed when they arrived, as if they were seeing shades. People’s eyes followed them, as if asking, Still on this earth?
They themselves did not show the slightest curiosity in glancing at the bridge, not even at the dead man in the first arch, but applied themselves immediately to the task for which they had come, They dug two holes, one at the entrance and the other at the end of the bridge, fixed iron stakes in them, and fixed metal signs on the stakes, like those that “Boats and Rafts” had once used. It was understood at once that these were tables of tolls for crossing the bridge, Everything was set out in detail; the toll for individuals, reduced rates for whole families and clans, the toll for the crossing of each head of livestock, reductions for herds, the toll for individual carts, reductions for caravans, and so forth.
People looked at the sign as if to say. We turned our noses up before at crossing for free, and now we have to pay!
The two employees of the road and bridge company did not leave after erecting the signs but took over the ferryman’s small abandoned lodge, which, it seems, the company had bought some time before. They began to do duty at the bridge in turns.
Surprisingly, people began to cross the bridge more and more often after the toll was imposed.
53
AVENETIAN MONK on his way to Byzantium brought more bad news from the Vloré base. A Turkish imperial decree had just been issued, removing the base’s old name of Orikum and renaming it Pasha-Lima, This was a terrifying and in any event an extraordinary name, since in Turkish it meant “port of ports,’ “chief port,’ or “pasha of ports.” It was not hard to imagine what a military base with such a name would be used for. This was a great harbor opened by the Ottomans on Europe’s very flank.
As the monk told me, Albanian and Turkish soldiers provoked each other daily at the boundary dividing the base. Dim-witted as he was, Balsha II could easily fall into a trap.
After the monk left, I went for a long walk on the banks of the Ujana e Keqe, and my thoughts were as murky as its waters. Time and again, that music of death I had heard weeks previously on the border came to my mind. Yes, they were trying to shackle our feet with that attenuated music. And after halting our dances they would bind our hands, and then our souls,
The hunger of the great Ottoman state could be felt in the wind. We were already used to the savage hunger of the Slavs, Naked and with bared teeth like a wolfs, this hunger always seemed more dangerous than anything else. But in contrast, the Ottoman pressure involved a kind of temptation. It struck me as no accident that they had chosen the moon as their symbol Under its light, the world could be caressed and lulled to sleep more easily.