The city of Svelo has three rivers and sixty-eight bridges. Near the heart of the city the rivers blend into a single master river which continues westward and south. All bridges can be walked across, more than half driven across. Around the city’s outskirts the rivers begin to cut mazy paths towards one another, so the land is parceled and puzzled into islands, the islands left to be stitched together by bridges. Buried in the foundations of each of these are corpses of sacrificial offerings to spirits of the rivers, apologies for shadowing their waters with arched pathways of human construction. These had become figures of fascination for Tova, eighteen-year-old daughter of the new city planner elected to office after the last, Mr. Sackheim, had resigned due to the collapse of one of the older bridges the previous spring. Not enough funding and care had been directed to maintaining them, she had heard her father complain to someone official on the other end of a phone call, since the bridges were as perennial a feature to the city as its trees, they’d been neglected. His first order as the new city planner would be to renovate and reinforce the bridges, not at once, but piecemeal, so by the end of his term the city’s citizens could be ensured all sixty-eight bridges would have a long history ahead of them.
From overhearing her father’s phone calls, Tova knew which bridges were first slated for renovation. Work would begin in the northwest on Luyvere Bridge in a month’s time, then shortly after on Xutze Bridge to the south. Neither were within walking distance of where they lived. Tova would have been unable to identify the bridges on sight, since she’d never before had occasion to be curious about which was which. Bridges were merely a means of traveling from one end of a river to another.
Each had a body buried somewhere in their foundations, this much she knew. It was a legend about the city but she realized now that she was considering how she felt to think this, she’d never quite believed it. Many of the bridges were of original construction; all were versions of previous bridges, in turn themselves versions of previous bridges; most were five to seven hundred years old. When they'd been torn down and rebuilt, had the bodies been reburied, first in catches of stone, then in concrete? Unlikely. But it was true it hardly mattered whether the bridges were still built upon bodies, since it was believed over time their spirits leeched from their bones into the support works of the bridges themselves. The spirits took possession of the bridges from end to end, and were concentrated as much in each cobble stone as each girder or lamppost. How would these spirits feel having their bridges taken apart and reassembled? Would they be flattered for the attention or annoyed by the disturbance? Another detail of their legend might be worth considering here: that a bridge’s spirit gained sustenance from the footsteps of people walking across it. Closed for a year to make time for repairs, would a bridge-spirit starve? Would it be winnowed down to wraith-hood? She was curious to observe how a bridge might survive its renovation.
The last weekend before work crews closed Luyvere Bridge, her father drove across the city to park near it, have one last careful look at its shape and condition. To his surprise Tova asked to ride along. She was curious about his work, she explained, how a bridge might be taken apart and reassembled. On the drive along many streets and, yes, across many bridges, he described the history of the Luyvere and its troubles of late, cracks in its support pillars, crumbling of concrete down to rebar. Arriving, they parked on the eastern end of the bridge, stood with elbows on an ironworks fence along the river to admire the subtle lift and arch of the bridge, people crossing either side of the street at its center, on which cars passed going either way, eastwards or west.
It was one of the older bridges in the city and its design expressed as much. Beneath it were an excess of pillars, a row of three or four every few feet along the bridge’s length; seen from a distance these lent it the resemblance of an enormous caterpillar crawling across a leaf. At either end of the bridge were two tall columns and a guard post. The latter was empty, having long outlasted its purpose. Her father described to Tova the changes the Luyvere had undergone over the centuries, evolving as the city did. It was five hundred years old. Its construction had been ordered after the last great plague had passed, and after the last great fire had blown from island to island, started by accident during the mass burning of plague victims’ bodies. Tova’s father even knew the name of the architect who designed and oversaw its construction, Thresswell. A signature of Thresswell’s bridge design, a tell that he hadn’t been up-to-date in the science of bridge building, distribution of weight, optimal use of angles, was this very feature Tova had commented on, the crowding of pillars beneath it. He could have used half as many and saved time and money on materials; but then again, why should Tova’s father criticize, since the bridge still stood.
A warm spring afternoon, people crossing from one island to another along the Luyvere, Tova and her father joined their company heading toward the western bank. Tova’s view of the bridge changed subtly as she walked up its faint grade towards the center. Before this version had been built, her father said, before it’d become the Luyvere, there’d been a succession of smaller wooden bridges in this very spot, too modest to deserve a name. It was difficult to say when the first among them had been constructed, or by who. It might even have been before the city had become a city, when it was merely a disjointed series of towns separated by marshlands and networks of rivers and streams. At its center, Tova and her father stopped to watch the river thread into sight beneath them, slow-moving and decorated on its surface with eddies stirred by the force of water against its columns. I decided this was a fine bridge to begin with, her father explained, because stone had been crumbling off it for a long while, patched cheaply with mortar when needed. The patch-jobs were done without any regard for aesthetics, mortar-color not matching the hue of aged concrete, leaving it pocked and scarred like a recovered small pox patient. The bridge deserved better: he wanted to make it beautiful again.
