Three Arched Bridge

45

AT DAWN ON THE MORNING of the first Sunday of the month of St. Dimiter, the bridge over the Ujana e

Keqe’ which had in these two years brought us more troubles than the river itself had brought stones and tree stumps, stood complete.

Everyone knew that it was almost finished, but its appearance on that morning was quite amazing. This was because the day before much of it had still been half hidden behind the confusion of planks, and they had only begun removing the scaffoldings as if peeling the husk from a corn cob, just before dusk. They had perhaps planned it this way, so that at the dawn of day it would stand clear, as if emerging from the womb of the gorge.

The hammers had echoed all night’ dislodging the wooden wedges that fell crashing down. In their sleep, people thought they heard thunderclaps^ turned heavily in their beds, and cursed or were afraid. There were many who thought that the laborers, repenting or following an order from who knows where, were demolishing what they had built.

In the morning they were right not to believe their eyes. Under the clumsy light of day’ between the turbid waters and the gloomy sky, it soared powerfully from one bank, sudden, dazzling, like a voicelike scream, and hung in suspense directly over the watery gulf as if about to launch itself in flight. But as soon as it reached midway over the river, its trajectory fell, like a dream of flying, and it gently bent its back until its span touched the opposite bank and froze there. It was lovely as a vision. The veins of the stone seemed both to absorb and emit light, like the pores of a living body. Thrust between the enmity of water and earth, it now seemed to be striving to strike some accord between the separate elements of its surroundings. The frothing wave crests seemed to soften toward it, as did the wild pomegranate bushes on the opposite hill, and two small clouds on the horizon.

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*