There was a knock at the door.
“Come in!” said Max.
It was Shtjefen, with an armful of firewood.
“Would you like me to light a fire?” he asked. “The cold is really coming on.”
“Oh, thank you! We were chatting about the enmity between Serbs and Albanians. Are things as bad as people say?”
“They are probably even worse than you think,” Shtjefen said as he laid the logs on the hearth. “Do you know what an Albanian poet wrote? 'We were born to mutual anger...'”
“A poet wrote that?”
“Yes, sir.”
“‘We were born to mutual anger,'“ Bill repeated. “There’s that word anger, or resentment, again, just like at the beginning of the Iliad. …
The memory of the Albanian diplomat in Washington flashed across their minds.
“Are there any mice here?” Max asked distractedly. “That’s not the first time it seemed to me that.
“We disinfested the inn especially for you, sir.”
The fire blazed up quickly. Shtjefen left and the two scholars continued talking, pacing up and down the room or standing with their backs to the fireplace, their hands spread out to catch the warmth.
They spent the whole afternoon sorting out their notes and file cards. Outside,, the light was failing by the minute, and there came a time when their conversation flagged. On this late winter’s afternoon, they felt completely cut off, swaddled in silence, in a faraway inn. Would every day be the same?
Max was the first to think how to shake off the encroaching glooms he lit the oil lamp, whose beam kept at bay the somber dusk that had now covered the face of the world outside like a death mask.
6
THE FIRST RHAPSODE put in at the Buffalo Inn four days laten Windswept rain rattling the shutters had been getting on the Irishmen’s nerves.,When Shtjefen appeared in the doorway, they realized from the expression on his face that their keenest wish had been granted.
"He’s downstairs,” the innkeeper whispered, as if imparting a secret.
The rhapsode was on his way to a different part of the country on personal business; he would come back by the same route in a fortnight; if Shtjefen had understood the scholars correctly, this was exactly the kind of circumstance they were seeking in order to record twice over the singing of the same bard.
“Lahuta players are not easygoing people,” Shtjefen continued," and it wasn’t simple to persuade this one to stay. ‘It’s dreadful weather,' I told him, 'and it’s getting late. Believe me, I have no stake in this, and of course you’ll get free lodging. five got only one request to make …,’ and that’s when I told him about you two.“
In the common quarters on the ground floor, there sat a handful of highlanders, all soaked to the skin. Before making out which of them was the rhapsode, the scholars noticed the labuta propped against the wall Then Shtjefen put his hand on the shoulder of one of the men (just at the spot where the cut-off ribbons were sewn to his cloak), and the man turned around. They reached agreement on the spot. The rhapsode looked hard at one of the foreigners for a long moment, seemingly to remove a doubt from his mind. The Irishmen had rarely seen eyes so fair or so piercing, with what seemed like a crack running through them, as if they were staring through a broken mirror. The innkeeper kept talking to the rhapsode, who did not appear to be listening, but then he lowered his head sharply, a gesture signifying yes. In accordance with ancient custom, he would not accept any reward. It was understood only that he would not pay for his night at the inn.
Getting the tape recorder downstairs was a troublesome business, just as getting it up to the room in the first place had been. The highlanders watching from the ground floor were intrigued.
Night had fallen, and Shtjefen lit the tall oil lamp, the one used for important occasions. There was a special, party atmosphere at the inn this evening. Only the rhapsode, who was aware of being the hero of the night, stood aside, looking calmly at the tape recorder. Bill kept glancing at him, trying to imagine what feelings this ultramodern device aroused in the rhapsode: bewilderment? apprehension? guilt about betraying his predecessors, the singers of yore? In the end, he concluded that the rhapsode’s calm masked inner turmoil. It would be the first time that the sound of his voice and of his labuta would not be lost to the air. as sounds had always been, but instead would be collected inside this metal box, like rainwater in a cistern or like … He suddenly feared that the rhapsode might change his mind.
Bill was reassured by the sight of the company, sit. ting in a semicircle, mostly on the floor. The ritual had already begun, and nothing and nobody would halt it now.
At last the rhapsode took up his labuta. It made a monotonous sound that seemed to draw the listener on into some all-embracing dream. Bill and Max glanced at each other. The rhapsode began to sing, in a voice quite unlike his speaking voice. It was unnatural, cold, unwavering, full of an anguish that seemed to come from another world. It made Bill’s spine tingle. He tried to follow the meaning of the words, but the monotonous delivery of the singer made that impossible. It felt as if he were being emptied from inside, as if his guts were being drawn out of him, as if his inner being were slowly being wound along a woolen thread turning on a distaff. The rhapsode’s voice had the ability to hollow you out. If he went on much longer, everyone here was going to dissolve on the spot. But the labuta stopped in time.
In the sudden silence, the tape machine’s soft purring could be heard, and it was Max who reached out a hand to switch it off. Then the crowd came back to life, as if emerging from a trance. Congratulations came from every side. Bill and Max chimed in with their thank-yous in Albanian, but they sounded weak indeed alongside the ritual formulations the highlanders lavished on the rhapsode.
Before the rhapsode began his second song, Max checked the quality of the recording. When the machine reproduced the rhapsode’s voice a little more resonant that it had seemed on first hearings everyone was struck dumb. The man was there, with his mouth shut and his lahuta at rest’ yet you could hear the sound of his voice and of his instrument. There was something quite horrifying about this disconnection this removal of a man from the attributes that gave him his distinct and independent existence.
They all huddled around the machine and gaped at the two reels turning like a pair of grinding wheels. Their eyes were full of questions they did not dare to put into words. So the voice was now stored inside the box, but in what form?
After a short interval the rhapsode sang a second ballad.
“Won’t the two songs get muddled inside there?" one of the traveling highlanders asked in the end pointing to the machine.
Bill tried not to laugh aloud.
It was late at night before they switched off the tape recorder and thanked the rhapsode.
“In a fortnight"’ Shtjefen told him, “when you pass by here again, you’ll sing the same songs. As I told you that’s what interests these gentlemen. They want to make comparisons and I’m not sure what else. Besides you gave me your word as a man, and you’ll keep it.”
“Fear not," said the singer in a somber tone.
“So the voice can be kept in there for a fortnight?” asked one young Highlander. “It doesn’t rust?”
“Not a bit,” Bill replied, “It can stay in there for months, even years.”
The labuta player was staring hard at the case of the recorder. From the glow in the man’s eyes, Bill reckoned that there was something troubling him. What if he changes his mind? Bill wondered anxiously. What if he has found it a bad omen to leave his voice locked and trapped in a box?
The two foreigners bade good night to all and went back up to their room. Shtjefen, for his part, put out the oil lamp and left the large room in darkness.
Bill felt as if the troubled and fitful sleep of the ground-floor guests had followed the two of them upstairs. Tomorrow, he thought — as if he needed to fasten his mind on something clearer and more logical in order to dispel a profound se
nse of fear caused by he knew not what — tomorrow we’ll have our work cut out! He wrapped himself in his blanket and gave a deep sigh.
Bill woke several times in the night, thinking it was dawn, but each time sunrise seemed to be ever further off. When finally he woke up properly, it was quite late.
Going downstairs, the Irishmen discovered with surprise that the main quarters of the inn were entirely deserted.
“They’ve gone,” Shtjefen said when he noticed their amazement. “Highland folk get up very early.” Through the open door you could see the dark, rain-heavy sky.
"And just think." the innkeeper continued, “they’re traveling in that weather!”
The clack of Martin’s clogs could be heard, then the lad himself appeared at the back door, a bucket of water in each hand.
“Morning,” he said.
“Good mornings Martin. Did you have a good night?” asked Max.
“Hmm … So-so … I was worried about… about the recorder….”
“Why so?” Bill queried
“Well, how should I know?” he stammered, “Anything could happen, couldn’t it?”
Martin’s face looked vaguely worried, and Bill remembered his own bad night and the anxiety that had seemed to rise from below, as if it were coming from another age….
February 27,
at the Inn of the Bone of the Buffalo
Today we really began our work on the Homeric enigma.
We listened several times to the two poems sung by the rhapsode last night. Each song has about a thousand lines.
We compared both of them to the published versions, and as we expected, we found significant variations.
The first one tells of the treachery of Ajkuna, wife of the valiant Muj. German scholars saw her as a kind of Helen of Troy of Albanian epic. Except that her story is enough to make your blood curdle.
The other song must be a version of the epic of Zuk the Standard Bearer. It would be hard to think up a more tragic tale. A young woman is in the mountains. looking for her brother, who has been mortally wounded by his enemies. She finds him at last, drowning in his own blood. The wounded man asks for a drink, but there is no spring near at hand, and she is afraid that if she leaves him, she would not find her way back; so he tells her to soak a strip of cloth from her dress in his blood and let it drip as she walks, to mark her route; she follows his advice, but the rain comes and washes away the drops of blood. She loses her way and wanders around the mountains until she is confronted by a crow and a bear. The crow confesses that he has just picked out the eyes of a wounded man, and the bear admits he gobbled up the man’s head; so she flees, screaming, across the fog-enshrouded mountain.
“How horrible!” Max exclaimed when he turned off the recording.
We spent the rest of the day transcribing this ballad. No doubt we’ll spend more days on it.
Late February,
at the Inn of the Bone of the Buffalo
We’re waiting with impatience, not to say anxiety, for the rhapsode to come back.
Sometimes we are frightened of burying ourselves in the world of the epic and losing sight of the main aim of our visit We are Homeric scholars. That’s what we keep telling ourselves, every day, reminding ourselves that we came here not to study the Albanians' epic poetry but to try to solve the enigma of Homer.
Easier said than done. In spite of ourselves, epic absorbs us. And then we encounter issues that are more tangled than grass roots. For example, we have now identified two other versions of the adventures of Ajkuna, wife of Muj, and they give quite different explanations for what happened to hen It must have been the same with the rape of Helen in pre-Homeric poems — until Homer came along and chose one of the variants.
The Homeric account itself implies that there had been various different earlier views of Helen’s position. The whole story of the rape of the queen is deeply ambiguous. Did she follow Paris of her own free will, or was she taken by force before she fell in love with him? Maybe she never did love her violator but was just his slave! Alternatively, was she first fascinated by Paris, then, when tricked, did her feelings abate? Or was it rather he who first fell in love with her, then felt his passion waning, which is not exactly a rare event in such circumstances?
Homer manages to keep all these questions in the air. He never gives a final answer, neither during the Trojan War nor afterward, when the enigma of Helen’s absconding ought to be explained. All you find is a degree of remorse for all that happened, and that sentiment is, moreover, spread rather thin. As for her behavior toward Menelaus, her lawful husband, that too is hardly transparent: we do not know if she hated him, despised him, or loved him.
Though each of them recounts Ajkuna’s position variantly, the different versions of the Albanian ballad are, individually, clear and straightforward. In one version, Ajkuna is carried off into slavery by Muj’s Slav rival and, like any prisoner, spends her time waiting for her release from captivity. But there is another version, where the kidnapper is so fascinated by her that he turns her into a princess. Not only does he abandon his wife, but he forces her to hold a torch between her teeth to illuminate the first night of his love-making with Ajkuna. This variant does not mention Ajkuna’s own feelings; hut in two other versions, those feelings are clearly delineated. In one despite being made a princess, Ajkuna remains faithful to her first husband; in the other, she falls in love with her kidnapper as soon as she is carried off and furthermore, when Muj comes to rescue her, she cheats on him heartlessly. That was the version the rhapsode had sung — where Muj is betrayed, is chained to the lovers3 bed, and has a flaming pine branch forced between his teeth, illuminating the lovers pleasure.
It is obvious that each of the four Ajkunas overlaps with a part of Helen of Troy, or rather that Helen of Troy is an amalgam of these four different figures. As Homer depicts her, Helen is a rather muddled character, and the behavior of Menelaus is no less a confusion.
March 1,
at the Inn of the Bone of the Buffalo
This sun shines brightly but gives little warmth. …
It is cold, but we are contented. We have ended up discovering the foundations of a common Greco-Illyrian-Albanian proto-universe. Medieval Albanian poets went on asserting its existence for hundreds of years, but as is often the way with poets, they made themselves heard only when it was too late.
We’re trying to put ourselves inside Homer's skin to understand what kind of tyrannical power he must have had to contain such a bubbling cauldron of artistic activity.
The old worries still surface from time to time: are we going to get lost in the maelstrom? And another, more material worry; is the first rhapsode going to come back?
March 3, at the Inn
We were counting the hours until our lahuta player was due back, and then two other rhapsodes arrived, unannounced. We were really in luck, Shtjefen told us; it had been a long while since so many singers were seen in the space of a few days. One of the singers was placid and not at all talkative, like all the highlanders, but the other was a nervous, jumpy fellow. Always getting up and sitting down, going to the door, watching the road as if he was expecting something, good news or bad. Oddly enough, after Shtjefen had discussed matters with the rhapsodes, it was the jumpy one who agreed to sing for the two foreigners.
Contrary to expectations, he declared that he would sing without accompanying himself on the laheta. He did not explain why. Was the string of his instrument broken? Or his hand not in good shape? Everyone fell silent around him, like the last time, but before starting to chant, the rhapsode raised his right arm, opened his hand wide, and placed the flat palm on his cheekbone, beside his ear. His outstretched fingers appeared to be sticking out from the back of his head, like a crest or comb — and Bill and I both muttered in astonishment, Majekrah (wing tip)! We had just seen, right before our eyes, the ancient ritual gesture with its untranslatable name that we knew about from the scholarly literature.
There was a long sil
ence before the bard began his chant. He started by declaiming these lines:
Today I shall reclaim an ancient debt of blood — No one else on earth has ever reclaimed so much …
Max and I shouted out in unison, “This the ballad of Zuk the Standard Bearer!"
And indeed it was that entrancing ballad he sang, and what’s more, in its full version. We had dreamed of hearing this poem ever since we first got interested in Albanian epic. Not for nothing have German scholars called it the Albanian Or esteia. It has all the elements of ancient drama. a mother’s betrayal, a sister inciting her brother to matricide, and Furies, and retribution...
When he had finished, we asked the rhapsode when he would be back, but to our great surprise (and to Shtjefen’s surprise, above all), he replied that he would never return to the Rrafsh.
Shtjefen was struck dumb by the answer. A highlander leaving the plateau forever was unthinkable, and worse still, it was a bad omen, a sign of terrible misfortunes to come.
“We live in bad times,” said Shtjefen. “The worst things can happen.”
March
The inn is empty. We keep working, but now and again our spirits sink. The first rhapsode has not reappeared.
The File on H. Page 8