History as Illness : THE THREE-ARCHED BRIDGE.<i> By Ismail Kadare</i> .<i> Translated from the Albanian by John Hodgson</i> . <i> Arcade: 184 pp., $24.95</i>

If we knew what the future held, we might be less eager than President Clinton to build a bridge to it. Perhaps we would widen the river.

Tragedy to our American mind--to the extent that our mind regards it--is still what you advance out of. Through much of the history of much of the world, it has been what you advance into, helplessly.

The bridge in Ismail Kadare’s “The Three-Arched Bridge” is a foreboding, an omen, a threat. Toward the end of the 1300s, it goes up across a river in Albania, where the last remnants of Byzantine power are giving way to the first sorties of the Ottoman Turks. It is a bridge over which Asia will invade Europe and the future will invade the past.

Kadare, an Albanian, has used the materials at hand to become one of Europe’s great writers. His country’s chaotic national isolation, not broken but intensified, paradoxically, over 2,000 years of incursions by Greeks, Serbs, Bulgarians, Turks, Normans, Italians and Austrians, provides a dark counter-model to the triumphalism of history and human endeavor.

Kafka erected his “Castle” of alienation and estrangement in the heartland of European prosperity. The fortress ruins left on Albania’s impoverished hillsides during two millenniums were, each in its time, Kafka castles not as symbol but as blood and stone.

In Kadare’s parables of history as nightmare, it is the stones--the building enterprise itself--that are the horror. “All great building works resemble crimes, and, vice versa, crimes resemble . . . “ mutters one of the strangers who arrive with the builders in “The Three-Arched Bridge.” The endless stone galleries and catacombs in Kadare’s masterpiece, “The Dream Palace,” represented the sultan’s mad attempt to control his subjects’ dreams. The monstrous construction in “The Pyramid,” draining a kingdom of its substance and its lives, was a ruler’s bid for immortality.

Despairing, seeing nothing clearly, the medieval monk Gjon sets down his account of the building of the bridge over the river Ujana e Keqe. Only a little more educated than his neighbors, he senses trouble. For Kadare, history is not knowledge but illness, and Gjon falls sick with the premonition of an ominous planetary shift.

The Ottoman tide that will eventually engulf the Balkans and much of Central Europe is lapping at the divided territories of the Albanian chieftains. The Turks already half control the naval port at Vores, in the south; soon they will control it all. Some of the Albanian lords have declared themselves vassals of the sultan; the Turkish governor across the river has asked Gjon’s lord for his daughter’s hand and been refused.

Passage across the river has always been by raft, the monopoly of a cloudy enterprise known as “Boats and Rafts.” One day a stranger falls into a trance on the bank. A traveling fortuneteller interprets his ravings as a prophecy that a bridge is to be built. And before long, representatives of another cloudy enterprise, “Bridges and Roads,” arrive to persuade the local lord to allow the construction of a toll bridge.

Gjon is summoned to do the interpreting; he finds the strangers’ speech painfully discordant, a hodgepodge of European languages. “It is easier to interpret for woodpeckers,” he complains. It is not just the sounds that grate, though, but the future. Medieval Europe has emerged into the Renaissance, the trade routes are booming, bridges are needed for access to the markets and suppliers of Asia. Bridges go two ways, though, and what is about to arrive going the other way is a stultifying 600-year empire.

Builders set up a camp, level the river banks, dig diversionary channels to allow three piers to be sunk in the riverbed. The villagers are divided. Some “were glad that the Ujana e Keqe would be pinned down by a clasp of stone”; others warn that “it was not easy to saddle a kicking mule, let alone the Ujana e Keqe.” Agents from the old raft company spread the rumor that the spirits of the water will be angered; before long, in fact, there is sabotage.

Gjon notes everything, troubled. He observes the sudden appearance of dervishes on the neighboring Turkish lands. He reports the arrival of the Turkish delegation bearing the marriage proposal and rich gifts: “They were all charm. Their breeches whispered with the steady swish of silk.” When they departed empty-handed, “the henna glowed threateningly from their short beards” and they looked about, glowering. “Every invasion starts with the eye,” Gjon recalls his father telling him.

It is an enterprise, expansion, progress that unleashes destruction in Kadare’s dismal view of history. A horror descends upon the project; an old legend comes back to do the work of the innovators. The legend concerns three builders of a castle who found that the work they did by day was undone by night. The walls, it seems, required a soul in order to stand; a builder’s wife was entombed inside the masonry, one breast protruding to allow her children to nurse.

Word spreads that the bridge company will pay a rich reward to the family of anyone who volunteers to be immured. One morning Murrash, a bridge worker, is found dead, his head projecting from the pier inside which his body has been embedded. Rumors abound: He volunteered for the reward; he was a saboteur working for the raft company and was caught and killed; his own family denounced him to get the money.

The bridge is finished. Murrash’s dead face, plastered over, protrudes whitely. “It was something that violated everything we knew about the borders between life and death,” Gjon relates. “The man remained poised between the two like a bridge, without moving in one direction or the other. This man had sunk into nonexistence, leaving his shape behind him like a forgotten garment.”

At first nobody crosses. “The bridge resembled a meaningless dream, dreamed by the river and both banks together. So alien, dropped by the riverbanks into time, it looked totally solitary as it gripped in its stone limbs its only prey. . . .” Then people begin to use it. Trade moves east across the bridge and it will not be long before the Ottoman armies will move west.

The course of power and enterprise has resumed. Murrash’s effigy briefly stood out against it; Gjon’s testimony protests it. Kadare’s writings turn the proverb inside out: Homeless (he has lived outside his country for many years), he hurls his words--not glass but resounding crystal--against the stone houses of history.