In the Skin of a Lion: Part 1: Chapter 2: The Bridge Summary & Analysis

At dawn, a truck carrying tar moves through central Toronto to take workers to the half-built bridge. Once they are near the viaduct, the men jump off and walk quickly to fight off the cold. The innovative bridge, which will carry traffic, water, electricity and, later, trains, requires the constant work, day and night, of men who climb on wooden plank structures to perform their tasks. After the electricians place lights on the bridge, it is finally completed in 1918 and called the “Prince Edward” or Bloor Street Viaduct.

Later, during the bridge’s opening ceremonies, an unauthorized person avoids the guards and circles the bridge twice by bicycle, enjoying the bridge’s emptiness. Although this person might be the first member of the public to be seen on the bridge, the evening before the workers took part in an unofficial ceremony of their own, walking on the bridge while carrying candles to honor the workers who died during the bridge’s construction.

While workers pour tar onto the mud roads leading to the bridge, the foreman calls a man named Caravaggio, who feels exasperated at the prospect of having another fight with the foreman. While the men work with the tar, nearby children sometimes put bits of tar in their mouths to chew for fun, and the workers themselves heat their cans of beans over the hot surface.

During the bridge’s construction, Commissioner Harris always comes to look at the bridge in the evening. Harris has dreamed of this bridge for a long time. He took a passionate part in the planning and was the person who imagined that trains, in addition to cars, could pass on it. He is also fascinated with water and wants to bring water from the outskirts to the center of the city. Sometimes accompanied by Pomphrey, an English architect who later designed Harris’s greatest achievement, the water filtration plant, Harris walks on the bridge toward the workers even though most of them do not speak English.

Harris enjoys seeing the bridge at night because it allows him to concentrate on its general shape and to dream of his grandiose plans, which he sometimes shares with Pomphrey. In April 1918, on a night of heavy wind, after attaching themselves with harnesses, Harris and Pomphrey are shocked to see five nuns walking on the bridge.

Watching the nuns, Harris concludes that they must have lost their way at night and become attracted by the fire on the bridge around which workers gathered. On the bridge, the heavy wind makes them lose their balance. Although some men grab the nuns, one of them is soon lifted up and pushed off the bridge. Everyone looks at the scene in awe and horror, and Commissioner Harris concludes that his first creation has already become a murderer.

Although everyone is convinced the nun is gone forever, one of the men working in a lower arch, attached by a rope, sees a figure fall and catches it. The sudden weight forced onto him causes the man to scream and his shoulder to fall out of its socket, as he holds onto a metal pipe to steady himself. The man sees a girl’s face and notices her habit. Terrified, the girl cannot speak, but the man, Nicholas Temelcoff, unable to yell because of the pain, tells her that she should scream to call for help.

Nicholas evaluates the situation and decides that they will need to swing to a higher level. Therefore, he takes the nun in his arms and tries to swing toward the bridge’s structure, feeling responsible for this person’s life. When they finally reach the lower level, the woman is still in shock, her clothes and hair disheveled, and Nicholas is so exhausted that the girl herself saves him from falling back. She holds him as they walk on the bridge.

On a higher level, the workers and the nuns are still agitated, as they are convinced that the nun who flew off the bridge—a girl known for being clumsy and unlucky—is gone forever. In the meantime, Temelcoff and the girl walk off the bridge without attracting any attention. They walk through a cemetery and the girl holds him, showing him that he should keep his arm rigid. She then pushes underneath his arm forcefully, which makes Temelcoff groan in pain and feel as though he is about to faint, and she uses her veil to maintain his shoulder in place.

Finally, Nicholas shows the nun the direction to the Ohrida Lake Restaurant, where his friend Kosta opens the door and he tells him to go back to bed. He goes to look for a bottle of brandy and the nun waits for him in the dark, empty restaurant. As Nicholas gestures her to sit at a table, he realizes that she has not said a single word, since even the scream on the bridge was his own.

Nicholas is known on the bridge for being exceptionally talented and fearless. He is given the most dangerous tasks, which involve diving off the bridge while being attached with a rope. He is so agile that it is easy not to spot him on historical photographs of the bridge’s construction, where he appears as nothing but a distant dot.

Nicholas’s solitary, risky work allows him to be paid one dollar per hour, whereas other workers are paid only forty cents. However, everyone prefers to leave these dangerous tasks to him. He knows the bridge so intimately that he could perform his tasks while blindfolded.

In the restaurant, Nicholas walks past a parrot called Alicia to search for brandy. When he returns, he offers some to the nun, adding that she does not have to drink it if she doesn’t want to. He then thanks her for his arm, which prompts her to indicate that he still needs medical help. However, Nicholas says that he prefers to drink and rest for the moment, to alleviate the pain. He stands up to turn on the radio and sits back down next to her, telling her that he is in pain but that he feels alive. The nun then picks up her glass and drinks.

Noticing a scar on the nun’s nose, Temelcoff asks her about it and encourages her to speak, despite her apparent diffidence. Wanting her to stop feeling shocked, he tries to start a gentle conversation and tells her about his own scars, while showing them to her. While Temelcoff talks incessantly, the woman hears a song she enjoys on the radio and listens to it while observing Temelcoff’s intense stare into her face. This is the first time she has been alone in a bar with a man and, as she looks around, she realizes that this Macedonian restaurant is meant to imitate an old courtyard in the Balkans.

As Temelcoff keeps on talking, mixing words of English—which he learned by listening to songs on the radio—with his native language, the nun looks alive and interested, looking around the room and tapping her fingers to the music. He admires her brown eyes and her short brown hair, and realizes that he wants to touch it. He then tells her that he loves her hair and thanks her for her help, as well as for accepting the drink. The woman looks intently into his eyes and feels as though she wants to say something, although she realizes she does not even know his name. Temelcoff then closes his eyes and, exhausted, falls into a deep sleep from which nothing can wake him.

Left alone in the darkness, the nun feels as though she is the only person alive in the building. She walks to the sink to wash the bad taste from the alcohol in her mouth and looks at herself in a mirror. She passes her hand through her hair, as Temelcoff had wanted to do, and puts her face on the cold surface of the counter. She then returns to Temelcoff and, in a whisper, asks him what his name is before kissing him.

On the bridge, in mornings of fog, the men stay close to each other, feeling as though they are trapped in a new space from which everything outside seems foreign and invisible. However, Temelcoff walks off on his own, entering steel and wood cages hanging unstably on the bridge. He directs the movement of steel bars from a hanging platform, from which structures called “travelers” handle the steel. Since travelers have already collapsed twice, Temelcoff attaches his rope to the permanent structure of the bridge. His movements are so sharp and forceful that he soon feels as if all of his bones are broken.

From his hanging position, Temelcoff calls out to the driver handling steel. Once, he was doing this when a traveler collapsed and he was forced to swing in various directions to avoid heavy pieces of wood and metal. The person working before Temelcoff was killed by such flying objects, his body sliced in two by a sharp piece of steel. At eight in the morning, after working for two hours, Temelcoff looks down at the river, the railway tracks, and the valley, while speaking English to himself.

When the nun leaves Ohrida Lake Restaurant at dawn, she abandons her former identity. Although, a few years earlier or later, the woman would have smelled the flour in Temelcoff’s hair, what she now remembers is the roughness of the man’s callused hands.

Even though Commissioner Harris has never spoken to Nicholas Temelcoff directly, he sees how Temelcoff listens attentively to the engineer’s instructions, never looking the engineer directly in the eye but focusing instead on tools. Nicholas seems oblivious to the people around him and does not realize that many workers watch him in awe, as though Nicholas were an extraordinary being, as fearless as a child.

Tied to a rope, Nicholas steps off the bridge without marking a pause, feeling the pressure of the rope against his chest. Sometimes men can hear him hum songs to himself, as though Nicholas were not aware that other people could hear him. Nicholas enjoys learning English, even though it feels more difficult to him that performing physical tasks. He also proves particularly knowledgeable about people’s movements, recognizing Commissioner Harris by his walk and his expensive coat, which costs more than the sum of five bridge workers’ weekly salaries.

In Macedonia, Daniel Stoyanoff, a member of Nicholas’s village of Oschima, bragged about his experience in North America. After losing an arm in a factory, he received financial compensation from the company that has allowed him to come back home and live a wealthy life. Although no stitches can be seen on Stoyanoff’s good arm, he tells everyone that that one too was cut off but that one of his colleagues, a tailor, sowed it back for him. His stories make him a hero to the children in the region.

When war erupts in the Balkans, Nicholas is twenty-five. After his village is destroyed, he leaves with three friends to reach Switzerland through Greece. All of them dream of reaching America and, although they have to spend a week in a factory basement to recover from illness (since no ill person is allowed to cross Switzerland into France), they finally reach Le Havre, a port where they find a boat travelling to New Brunswick, a Canadian province.

When Nicholas finally arrives, after two of his friends died on the journey, he sees Canada as a wild, primitive land. After the passengers pick lice off each other, Nicholas is finally admitted into Canada, showing a few coins to prove that he will not be dependent. He initially works in a bakery in Toronto while going to school to learn English.

Most immigrants learned English by imitating songs or actors on stage, to the point that knowledgeable immigrants could play an entire actor’s part. When Nicholas began working on the bridge, he kept to himself, muttering sentences in English to himself to practice, according to his model, the jazz musician Fats Waller.

In the restaurant, Nicholas is woken up by a doctor taking care of his arm, while Kosta watches on. As the doctor comments that Nicholas somehow managed to put his shoulder back into its socket, he looks at the veil that the nun has left. As Nicholas chats with Kosta about the girl and discovers that she told Kosta to call a doctor for him, Nicholas is curious about the girl’s speech, wanting to know how her voice sounds. When Kosta asks what Nicholas knows about her, Nicholas mentions her black skirt. Later, he sees a piece of clothing and realizes that she cut off her habit to make a dress for herself.

The day after his accident, Nicholas feels that the city’s streets look new to him and he searches for the nun everywhere in the city. Nicholas’s “courtship” with the girl remains a silent one. When he remembers being asleep in the restaurant—since he always needs to drink himself to sleep, being terrified of the act of falling asleep—he recalls the woman asking him about his name.

A week later, once his shoulder is healed, Nicholas returns to the bridge. He ignores people’s stories about the nun who vanished and, instead, focuses on his work. He knows the landscape of the valley better than anyone else, even the engineer, the architect, and Commissioner Harris, as though Nicholas were a bird. He looks around him and longs for the absent nun. One year from then, he will open a bakery with his savings.