Free Three Arched Bridge by Ismaíl Kadaré Page B

walls, but their work was not going well because what they built in the day was destroyed in the night,
    Suddenly the reason for his distress came as clear to me as sunlight. You had to have the brains of Gjelosh not to grasp the similarity between the castle in the legend and the damaged bridge.
    â€œWhat they built during the day was destroyed in the night,” he murmured in a soporific voice, as if lulling himself to sleep.
    I could not look him in the eye.
    â€œWhat could they do?,’ I went on, involuntarily lowering my voice. “A wise old man told them that the wall collapsed because it demanded a sacrifice. And so they decided to immure one of their brides in the foundations.”
    â€œA sacrifice,” he said, uselessly.
    â€œYes, a sacrifice,” I whispered. “Since to immure someone means killing them.”
    â€œKilling them…”
    â€œOf course. And they say that even if a person’s shadow is walled up inside a bridge, that person must die, and then …”
    â€œYes, yes,” he groaned.
    â€œBut which bride?” 1 continued. “They argued over the matter at great length and decided to sacrifice the bride who brought them their midday meal the next day,”
    â€œBut,” he interrupted, “But —”
    â€œThey gave their
besa
to each other that they would not tell their wives about the decision they had made. And so, as you see, we have the
besa
again. Or rather the
besa
and treachery woven together,”
    â€œYes.,
baesa”
    The word now seemed to stretch and tear at the corners of his mouth, and I would not have been surprised to see a trickle of blood,
    I wanted to say that here, just as in the first tale, the motif of the
besa
, according to our monks, proves the Albanian authorship of the ballad. But there was some kind of… how shall I put it… fatal urgency in his expression that forced me too to talk fast,
    â€œAnd that night two brothers, the oldest and the second, told their wives, and so broke the
besa
. The youngest brother kept it,”
    â€œAh,” he exclaimed,
    â€œThe two older brothers broke the
besa,"
 I repeated, hardly able to swallow my saliva.
    This was exactly the right place to explain to him that these words “to break the
besa
, are, in the Slavic version of the ballad,
vjeru pogazio
, which mean “to violate faith’, or “to outrage religion,” and are quite meaningless in the Slavic version. This is because of an erroneous translation from the Albanian, mistaking the word
besa
for
besim
, meaning belief, religion. However, he would not let me pause. He had grasped my hand, and softly. very softly, as if asking me about a secret, he said, “And then?”
    â€œThen morning came, and when their mother-in-law as usual tried to send one of the brides with food for the masons, the two older wives who knew the secret pretended to be sick. So the youngest set out, and they immured her, and that is all.”
    I raised my eyes to look at his face, and almost cried out. All the standing moisture of his old man’s eyes had drained away, and those empty eyes now resembled the cavities in a statue. Like death, I thought. That is how her eyes must have looked.

31
    T HROUGHOUT THE FOLLOWING DAYS he was always seeking me out, and as soon as he found me he would do what he could to bring the conversation around to the immurement of the bride* He spoke of it as if it were an event that had happened two weeks before, and as if he was charged with its investigation. Gradually he involved me too. For hours on end I could think of nothing but a semidesert place under a scorching sun, where three workmen kept building walls that could never be finished* As we talked about the legend, we carefully analyzed it strand by strand, trying to account for its darker sides and to establish a logical link between its contradictory parts.
    He asked me which of the three brides had