The Unhappiness of Being a Single Man: Essential Stories

THE BRIDGE

I WAS S TIFF AND COLD, I was a bridge, I lay across a ravine. My feet were dug into one cliff, my hands into the other, I gripped the crumbling clay. The tails of my coat fluttered at my sides. Deep below me roared an icy trout river. No tourist ever strayed up to these trackless heights, the bridge wasn’t even marked on the maps. — So I lay there and waited; there was nothing else I could do. Unless it collapses, a bridge once built can never stop being a bridge.

One day, it was towards evening—was it the first evening, was it the thousandth? I can’t say, my thoughts were confused, going round in circles. Towards evening, in the summer, when the rushing water was getting darker, I heard the footsteps of a man. Coming to me, to me. — Stretch out your span, I said to myself; get your planks ready; carry the one who’s been entrusted to you. If his steps are uncertain, steady them without his noticing; but if he stumbles, reveal yourself and, like a mountain god, hurl him to the ground.

He came, he tapped me with his walking stick’s iron tip, he lifted up my coat-tails with it and arranged them on me. He stuck the tip into my unruly hair and left it there for a long time, no doubt while he gazed wildly around him. But then—as I lay above the mountains and the ravine, dreaming of him—he jumped with both feet onto the middle of my body. I shuddered in bewildered pain, not understanding. Who was he? A child? A dream? A robber? A suicide? A tempter? A destroyer? And I turned around to look at him. — A bridge turning around! I hadn’t even finished turning when I started to fall, I fell, and already I was being torn and impaled by the sharp rocks that had always stared up at me so peacefully from the raging waters.