Three Arched Bridge by Ismaíl Kadaré Page A

someone asked his wife softly.
    She shook her head.
    â€œNo one,” she said.
    Only then did I notice the other members of the family, standing around his wife. His parents and two brothers with their wives were there. Their faces were petrified, as if they too had been splashed with that plaster of eternity.
    â€œNo one,” his wife repeated. But I could not look at her eyes any longer, they were so swollen with weeping.
    The count’s scribe asked something of her too, and she gave a short answer. Then she turned to me and said something, but my eyes were fixed on the immured man; I stared at the lower part of his neck, at his collarbone, just where the cavity above his chest…
    But at that moment the man standing by with the pail of plaster in his hands splashed him again, and once more the plaster ran down his forehead, igniting and at once quenching his vacant, blind, oblivious white eyes. Then the trickle meandered down his neck, quickly whitening the very spot from which I could not tear my eyes.
    The baby had again missed, his mother’s nipple, and was whimpering, I asked the woman whether they had been in financial straits,
    â€œNo,” she said, “He’d been earning plenty recently.”
    Recently, 1 thought. Like many inhabitants of the surrounding district, he had been working as a day laborer on the bridge and must have been receiving a normal wage, as normal as everything else in his life,
    Another of the count’s men arrived and whispered the same questions.
    â€œWhen?”
    â€œJust after midnight.”
    It seemed that we would all stand rooted to the spot, and people would arrive and mutter the same questions until the end of the world.
    Now and again one could hear the words “brother, brother” from his sister. But his mother’s sobbing was more muffled. Only once she said, “They killed you, son.” And a little later she very softly added, “As if your mother had no need of you.”
    I would never have dared to interrupt a mother’s lament, but the words “They killed you, son” gave me no peace,
    â€œIs it possible someone killed him?” 1 said to her in a low voice, “But why?”
    She wiped her tears.
    â€œWhy? How should a poor old woman like me know? No doubt for nothing. Because he cast a shadow on this earth,”
    â€œHe had always been worried recently,” said his wife by my shoulder, “He had something on his mind.”
    â€œAnd last night?”
    â€œLast night particularly.,’
    My eyes froze again on the dead man’s neck just above the collarbone, as if something were about to appear there, a shadow, a … I do not know what to say. But the plasterer with his usual gesture once more emptied his pail of plaster over the immured man. The grayish white liquid, the very stuff of legend, poured over him.
    â€œLast night particularly,” his wife went on. “I thought I saw him move at midnight and get up. At dawn he was gone,’
    The milk from her breast had again missed her baby and trickled to the ground, but she seemed not to care.
    â€œDid you need money?” someone asked.
    â€œWhat can I say?” his wife asked. “Like everyone else.”
    The members of the dead man’s family still stood grouped in silence. There was the splashing of the pail again as it was refilled with plaster from the barrel. 1 was completely numbed. 1 would not have been surprised if the man with the bucket had now coated us all with plaster.

39
    A LL THAT DAY AND THE NEXT 1 was not at all myself. His open eyes fixed under their film of plaster seemed to stare from every wall around me, Walls terrified me, and I tried at all costs not to look at them. But they were almost impossible to avoid, 1 only then understood what an important and powerful part walls play in our lives. There is no getting away from them, like conscience, I could leave the presbytery building, but even