Three Arched Bridge

59

THE MONTH OF ST. NDREU began and ended in fog. Sometimes the fog seemed to freeze stock-still.

Everything half dissolved in it: the riverbanks, the nearby hamlets, the bleak sandbank^ the bridge. On such days of mist the victim immured in the lap of the bridge seemed both more remote and closer, as if he would shortly resolve his ambiguous position and step out toward us, a living man toward the living, or retreat, a dead man toward the dead.

But he remained in between, neither in this world nor in the next, a constant burden to us all Nobody knew what had happened to his flesh inside, but his plaster mask was still the same. His open, vacant eyes, his cheeks, lips, and chin, were the same as before. Sometimes a drop of moisture would appear on his features, as if on the surface of a wall, and leave a mark when it dried.

There were people who stayed for a long time, trying to decipher these signs. There were noisy crowds who chattered under his very nose, shook their fingers in front of his eyes, and even criticized him. Anybody else suspended in his position would not dream of anything but gathering his own bones in some grave. It was believed that lightning frightened him, while ravens no longer flew low above him.

His family’s visits became rarer. They now no longer came in two hostile groups, but in four: his wife and baby, his parents, and his two brothers separately. Their quarrel over sharing the compensation had deepened during the autumn, and the lawsuit they had initiated over its division would be, it seemed, hopelessly protracted.

Each party came and stayed a while by the plaster mask as if before a court, with their own explanations and worries. The man’s open eyes stared at them all impartially, while the visitors no doubt imagined that next time they would reach a better understanding with the plaster.

Next time … There were indeed days on which it seemed that he would surmount the plaster barrier and would give to them and take from them. It would be his turn to judge perhaps not only his relatives but people of all kinds.

I have seen statues age, but my mind tells me that this bas-relief, perhaps the only one in the world with the dead man’s flesh, bones, and maybe soul inside it, will have a different life expectancy. Either it will burst prematurely, or it will outlive all others. The seasons will deposit their dust on it, the wind will slowly, very slowly erode it, as it erodes all the world, and he, Murrash Zenebisha, who has now donned his protective mask, and for whom the years have stopped, will eventually find old age. But old age will come not by years and seasons. In the normal way of human age, but by centuries. Sometimes I say to myself. Poor you, Murrash Zenebisha. What horrors you will see. For the future seems to me pregnant only with terrible disasters. But sometimes I think to myself. You are fortunate in what you will see, because, whatever will happen, I am sure that like every storm this too will pass, just as every night finds a dawn.