Three Arched Bridge

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?