Three Arched Bridge

40

DURING ALL THOSE DAYS nobody talked of anything but the immurement of Murrash Zenebisha. People told the most incredible stories about what he supposedly said at the moment when they walled him in, and his last wish for a space to be left for his eyes so that he could see his year-old child. Some substituted the bridge itself for the child, and some tied his last wish not only to his family but to their duty, to the gods, and to the entire principality,

There was a constant crowd of people by the arch of the bridge where the victim was immured. The guards placed by the count watched over the body from morning to night, and there came a moment when the investigators assigned to probe the incident, after making their inquiries, themselves stood petrified in front of the dead man. His face, that white plaster mask, had undergone no change in the last few days. Now that the plaster was dry and they were no longer coating him, the whiteness of that face was unchanging. They said that if you looked at it by moonlight, you could lose your speech.

His family — his elderly parents, his brothers and their wives, and his young widow with the baby whose mother’s nipple always missed his mouth — came every day and stood stock-still for whole hours, never taking their eyes off the victim. His open eyes with their crust of plaster had the silence and unresponsiveness of that “never ever” that only death can bring. During the first week his parents aged by a century, and the features of his brothers and their wives and even their infants seemed furrowed for life. But he, leaning against the arch of the bridge as if against a stone pillow, entirely smoothed over, studied them all beyond the plaster barrier that made him more remote than a spirit.

Whenever the crowd thinned or dispersed, mad Gjelosh would arrive at the site of the sacrifice. He was quite stunned by the scene, and his inability to understand what had happened mortified him considerably, He would walk slowly up to the body, approaching it sidelong, and softly whisper, “Murrash, Murrash,” in the hope of making the man hear. He would repeat this many times and then disconsolately depart,

Old Ajkuna came on the seventh day, the day when it is believed that the dead make their first and most despairing attempt to break the shackles of the next world. She stayed for hours on end by the first arch, without uttering a word. That was something that could find no parallel in the experience of even the most elderly. A few more days passed, and then whole weeks, and the fortieth day was approaching, the day on which it was believed that a dead man’s eyeballs burst, and then everybody realized what a great burden an unburied man was, not only on his family but on the entire district, It was something that violated everything we knew about the borders between life and death. The man remained poised between the two like a bridge, without moving in one direction or the other. This man had sunk into nonexistence, leaving his shape behind him, like a forgotten garment.

People came from all parts to see the unburied body: the curious from distant villages, and wayfarers who lodged at the inns on the great highway; even rich foreigners came, as they traveled idly to see the world together with their ladies. (Such a thing had come into fashion recently, after the dramatic improvements to the highway.)

They stood in awe by the first arch, noisy, waxen-faced, talking in their own languages and gesticulating. You could not tell from their gestures whether they blessed or cursed the hour that brought them to the bridge. Beyond all their hubbub, solitary, cold, vacant, aloof, and covered with lime, Murrash Zenebisha seemed to stand in silence like a bride.

It was the beginning of April The weather was fine, and work proceeded on the bridge more busily than ever before. The dead man seemed to spur the work forward. The second span was now completely finished, and the vault of the third was being raised. Last year’s filthy mud, which had dirtied everything round about, had gone. Now only a fine dust of noble whiteness fell from the carved stones and spread in all directions. It coated the two banks of the Ujana, and sometimes on nights of the full moon it shone and glittered in the distance.

On one of these moonlit April evenings I ran into the master-in-chief on the riverbank, quite by accident. I had not seen him for a long time, He seemed not to want to look me in the eye. The words we exchanged were quite meaningless and empty, like feathers that float randomly, lacking weight and reason. As we talked in our desultory way,1 suddenly felt a crazy desire to seize him by the collar of his cape, pin him against the bridge pier, and shout in his face: “That new world you told me about the other day, that new order with its banks and percentages, which is going to carry the world a thousand years forward, it is founded on blood too.”

In my mind I said all this to him, and even expected his reply: “Like all sorts of order, monk.” Meanwhile, as if he had sensed my inner outburst, he raised his head and for the first time looked me in the eye. They were the same eyes that I now knew well, with rays and cracks, but inflamed, as if about to burst, almost as if it was the fortieth day not for the dead man at the bridge but for himself….