Three Arched Bridge

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.

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.