The File on H.

by Ismail Kadare

  "Don't ask me anything. I really didn't understand most of what went on myself. It's all such a mess.... Whew! What a mix-up! What a puzzle! I'm going to try to sleep for an hour or two, to get over it. My head feels like it's going to burst."

  She waited for him to wake, in the hope of getting something more precise out of him, but in vain. He had become even more sibylline. As if he had taken his nap solely in order to justify his mental confusion, he appeared quite unable to tell whether the events of his story had really taken place or some of them came from a dream. All he recounted seemed so far from credible that Daisy thought he was trying to pull the wool over her eyes, and she promptly began to speculate that maybe the spy had taken the opportunity during the journey to.... But she abandoned that suspicion right away when the telephone rang, and the affair, echoing and amplifying along the telephone lines, became ever more substantial and convoluted.

  That fact is that later on, when it was full daylight and the first reports reached her, followed by the statements and depositions, and much later, when everything had been written down and properly sorted out in the prosecutor's files, and even when some of the events had been mentioned in the press, things became hardly clearer than they had been in the story the governor told his wife before dawn on that unforgettable day. Daisy suspected that it was actually the same story, simply decorated with a few details.

  According to the various reports and eyewitness accounts (the main witness being the English-speaking informer), the affair could be summed up more or less as follows:

  Toward two in the morning, the informer, who had been obliged to take over Dull Baxhaja's job after the latter's unjustifiable dereliction of duty and was therefore in the attic, directly above the Irishmen's bedroom, heard first a noise, then a sharp scream. All the other witnesses corroborated the scream, but the explanations given varied widely. They spy declared in his report that he believed the scream to have recognizably the voice of Martin (which tallied with Martin's having been the first to be injured by the assailants), but others, including Martin himself, claimed the scream had come from someone else. Some said it was one of the other guests at the hotel; some said it must have been a bandit, yelling out because he had bumped into something, or had been hit in the dark by Martin, or, even more simply, just to create an atmosphere of terror before the attack. As for Shtjefen, he thought it was the Irishmen who had shrieked, which would have been the most plausible explanation had Martin not said he was certain that he heard the shout before the bandit broke down the foreigner's door. Some even went so far as to think that the shout had come from the informer himself...

  As he leafed through the file, the governor was amazed to see how much significance most of the people present at the inn that night attached to the shout, though in truth it could hardly be considered a major element in explaining the overall facts of the case. He confessed his puzzlement to the witnesses, who stared at him as if he had just committed to an unbelievable faux pas, and the governor became ever more inclined to believe that no one had actually shouted, and the shout that each of them thought had been uttered by another was only the inner shriek none of them had been able to restrain.

  So, hard upon this actual or supposed yell, the front door of the inn was broken down by a gang of persons unknown, whom everyone, in the first moments of mayhem, had taken to be bandits, or murders, or fugitives from a lunatic asylum. The first to stand up to them was Martin, who got hit on the head with a crowbar. Some of the hotel guests were armed, but none of them managed to use their weapons — because of the dark and the element of surprise, and also for fear of hitting a bystander. The innkeeper succeeded in getting an oil lamp lit, but someone, no doubt one of the bandits, smashed it out his hands. Nonetheless, in the few moments of light that it gave, the lamp had allowed him to identify the hermit Frok, and that identification was to prove fatal to the assailants. In chaos and confusion, stumbling in the dark over Martin's injured body, they made for the wooden staircase so as to reach the second floor and thus the Irishmen's room, proving that they had come with precisely that intention. As the bandits began to force their door open, the Irishmen started to shout: "What's going on? Who goes there? Help!" The spy was at this moment still up in the attic, and so he heard everything that happened subsequently: the door broken down, the screaming of the intruders and of their victims, groans, curses, and blows delivered to a metallic object. At that point he left his observation post, clambered down by the means of the window frame to the backyard inn, and rushed into town to make his report.

  When the governor and the policemen arrived, they found a nightmarish spectacle. By the light of the sole oil lamp that had remained unbroken, they could make out the traces of the vandals' attack. Apart from Martin, several travelers had been injured, as had one of the Irishmen. The other scholar was weeping, with his head between his hands. All their equipment had been broken beyond repair, especially the tape recorder, which had apparently been the main target of the brigands' fury. Not content just to smash up the machine, they had torn the reels to shreds and thrown cut-up bits of tape all around the room.

  It had all taken only a few seconds. But by the time the travelers downstairs had come to their senses, the bandits had already evaporated into the night. According to the innkeeper, at the time when the governor arrived with the police escort, the brigands could not yet be very far away. One of the fugitives had probably been injured when a hotel guest opened fire (everyone had heard the cry of pain), so that the governor, if he cared to take the trouble, could very probably lay hands on part of the gang.

  Just as the governor had ordered the policemen to set off on the bandits' trail and capture them before they reached the high mountains, Shtjefen recalled an important detail that he had theretofore failed to give: he had recognized one of the vandals as being Frok.

  The manhunt began immediately. Fortunately for the pursuers, there was faint moonlight, so the policemen, driving slowly along the main north road with their van lights extinguished, could make out the bandits' silhouettes from a long way off. The first to be caught were the injured man and the two companions who were helping him along. The others were taken a little farther on, just at the foot of the mountains. As for Frok, he was found in his cave, ranting and raving.

  The whole town of N— was buzzing with the story from dawn the next day. A small crowd gathered in the street in front of the prison, expecting to catch sight of this band of hooligans, whose motives remained a mystery. Despite the drizzle that began to fall, the crowd did not disperse. They hung around until at long last the prisoners appeared at the end of the street, chained together in pairs. Their waxen faces looked even paler under the locks of hair that the rain had glued to their foreheads. Their eyes bulged as if they were ready to pop out of their sockets.

  "It's the hermit Frok! It's Frok!" two or three people whispered fearfully as the small procession of prisoners and policemen drew near. "Look at the rascal!"

  "Good God, their hands are all bleeding!" an old woman muttered. "People should not be treated like that."

  "No, granny, you've got it wrong," someone explained. "That's not blood you can see on their hands, but rainwater dripping off their rusty handcuffs."

  The report that appeared two days later in one of the national newspapers began with a description of the men arrested, referring to them variously as bandits, fanatics, and members of a secret sect. The article went on to give a few details of the case and ended with a picture of the smashed machine and reels, alongside a short and completely impenetrable interview with one of the foreign scholars. "Now the epic is scattered again, just as it was before," one of them had declared with tears in his eyes, pointing to the pile of shredded magnetic tape. "We tried to put it all back together, but it has been torn to pieces, just like that... as if it had been hit by a natural disaster." The journalist emphasized that the foreign scholar had used the word catastrophe several times, qualifying it on one occasion as cosmic.
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  13

  THEY BARRICADED THEMSELVES in a room at the Globe Hotel for forty-eight hours and refused to meet anyone. On the third day, they took a dray to the Buffalo Inn to collect their cases. The sky was overcast, and it was as cold as a winter’s day. In Martin’s absence, Shtjefen helped them carry their bags to the carriage, almost without a word. They left the wreckage of the tape recorder there, since it was no more than a piece of junk, like most of the reels of now unplayable tape. They were tempted to take some of the less damaged reels with them in the hope that something usable would remain, but in the end Bill said:

  "No, let’s leave them behind. I don’t think they’ll ever be of any use.“

  He kept rubbing his eyes, and though he did not complain about it, Max guessed that his friend’s sight had suddenly clouded over. As the vial of eye medication had been smashed along with everything else, the course of treatment had been interrupted and Bill’s condition had taken a turn for the worse

  They got into the horse-drawn vehicle and turned to take one last look at the door of the inn, whose half-legible sign seemed to cast a shadow of oblivion and abandonment on the surrounding countryside. Every sound and every movement only heightened their feelings of deep bitterness and irreparable loss. They had come close to finding the key to the puzzle of Homer, and just as they were about to grasp it completely it had been torn from their hands, for no reason, for nothing at all! To cheer themselves up, they sometimes said they could always come back next year, or a few years later, and start their research all over again, but they themselves knew it was not true, that they would never come back. For even if they did travel once again to these parts, they would encounter no trace of the rhapsodes, or if they did, they would find only a hand-ful, and they would have gone deaf; and not only the rhapsodes but this whole last laboratory would thenceforth be buried under the ashes of oblivion. The age of the epic was truly over in this world, and it was only by the purest chance that they had had the opportunity of glimpsing its last flickering before it was extinguished for good. They had captured the final glow and then lost it. The veil of night had fallen forever over the epic land.

  Yes, that was it: night had fallen forevermore. For although they could not quite admit it to themselves, they could imagine a second visit only as an excursion into an icy sphere whence life had departed, where it would hardly be possible to make out in the dust the marks of the white stick of the Great Bard whose riddle they had sought to solve.

  Such were the musings of Bill and Max as their dray took them back to the town of N—, where they were to stay until the end of the week, when the bus would come to take them to the capital.

  Unlike their last stay, they did not venture out of the hotel and met no one. The last locals with whom they had any dealings were the manager of the Globe Hotel and Blackie the porter, who lugged their suitcases to the bus station, then hobbled over to the bar, where, for reasons unknown, he drank himself silly and started talking about his first wife, whom no one had ever heard of before.

  Some time passed. It was the middle of a perfectly ordinary week for the little town, a week devoid of any event whatsoever with an amount of drizzle exceeding the climatic norm for the season and the place. But the excess of light rain suited the town all the same; it was in harmony not just with its architecture but also in a sense with its whole way of life. The monotonous patter seemed to be an attempt to help people bear the burdens that weighed them down, to alleviate their fate of being at the margin of real life.

  The last winter had in fact brought them a whole series of exceptional events, though it had all begun slowly and almost imperceptibly. The arrival of the foreign scholars, the link that had been established once and for all between this place and Homer, the gossip and fantasies of the women, the enigma of the Buffalo Inn, then the arrival of the English-speaking spy, the mysterious attack on the inn, the bloody chains, the horde of journalists from Tirana — these events were more than a backwater like N---- could bear, especially as they all took place in a single season.

  Now it was all fading away. In the cafes, the skeptics who had at the start been against all that imaginative nonsense and had then given in to collective pressure were now holding forth with conviction: “It’s our own fault, you know We didn’t need to link the name of our town with a fellow who died four or five thousand years ago! For sheer stupidity, that takes the cake! If it had all been about opening a ketchup factory or the spa people have been going on about for ages, there might have been something to say for the fuss, but that Homeric business was just nonsense! Romantic nationalism, that’s what it is! Outdated fetishism! You might as well try to put a halter on a ghost! And what kind of a ghost, I ask you — a blind ghost!”

  The café audiences nodded wisely, as if to say: Yes indeed, how could we have been so stupid as not to think of all that? Good grief, a blind ghost! Well, thank goodness the whole business is over now, without any more harm done, because it could all have turned out much worse.

  That is what the barflies thought, but the opinion of the town’s gynecologist that Thursday afternoon was rather different. He was standing at the large bay window on the first floor of his house, part of which had been converted into a private clinic, and was watching the young woman whom he had just examined walking down the narrow alley in the rain, stepping carefully so as to avoid the puddles.

  On the doctor’s elongated face, somewhere between the chin and the lower lip (because of its curious shape, the doctor’s face differed from a normal physiognomy in all its proportions) there hovered something like a smile, expressing either a mildly ironical anxiety or the pleasure of having a morbid curiosity finally satisfied after years of waiting.

  No, it wasn’t all that easy to remove ail the consequences of the two foreigners’ visit to N—-.

  His eyes swept over the coldly glinting medical instruments lined up on the white-painted shelves. No, to make all the consequences disappear from that woman, for instance, he was going to have to use certain of those instruments on hen

  “Incredible!” he exclaimed, as he looked down once more at the alleyway, where she was no more to be seen. He had been waiting so long for the day when she would come for treatment at his clinic! Season followed upon season, and still she did not come. “It seems she’ll never deceive her governor!”

  But now she had come, just as he had stopped believing that she would ever need his services. As he had expected, she was pregnant.

  She had sat with flushed cheeks as he pronounced his verdict: “Madam, you are pregnant.” Without waiting for him to ask her to explain anything, as if they had enjoyed a tacit understanding for years, she had begun to talk. No, she wouldn’t hide it from him, there was no point in any case, she would hide nothing from him, she had had an adventure with one of the two learned scholars, more precisely with the one who had glaucoma. … That was what she had said, in an almost mechanical prattle, as if she had learned it by heart, while she hurriedly put her clothes back on, her eyes fixed firmly on the exit door, and she hadn’t answered his question about the date on which she could have the operation, nor did she respond to his final words of assurance that even though he was only a country doctor he was a gentleman nonetheless and that she could trust that her husband would never know anything at all…

  Well, well, well, the doctor mused, still standing at the window, made opaque by the rain. Who could guess what really goes on in the back of beyond? And he felt a pang of regret, like a bout of rheumatism brought on by the damp, that he had never made a record of all the bizarre episodes that had cropped up in the course of his long careen

  It must have been the same day that Bill Norton and Max Ross, wrapped in traveling capes, stood on the deck of the Durres-Bari steamer and watched the coast of Albania recede into the distance. Actually, only Max was watching, because Bill could not really see anything anymore. During the week they had spent waiting for the ferry, Max had tried to persuade his companion to resume the ey
e drop treatment, but Bill received these pleas with profound indifference. Once, he said he would start proper treatment when he got back to New York, but his tone made his fatalistic attitude pretty clear.

  Max looked at his friend from the side and recalled that he too had once felt resigned to a disastrous end. Homer’s revenge. He tried in vain to rid himself of that thought, but it had wormed its way into his mind. Perhaps that was how the Blind Bard would always take his revenge on those who sought to solve his riddle … ?

  The mere thought made Max shudder. Was the loss of sight perhaps a necessary precondition for entering the Homeric night?

  He shook himself as if to cast off these gloomy musings. Remembering that he had bought the day’s newspaper on the dockside and still had it in his pocket, he took it out and, struggling to prevent the wind from blowing the paper away, said to Bill:

  “Hey, look! We’re in the news….”

  “Really?”

  They found a wind-sheltered spot, and Max read the article to himself first of all.

  “The trial of the bandits will start very soon,” he said to Bill a few minutes later in the midst of his reading. “There’s an interesting hypothesis about the instigators “

  “Really?”

  “They’re saying something about Serbs,” said Max as he tried to flatten down the wind-blown newspaper.

  “Do you remember that monk with the jolly face?” Bill remarked.

  The paper in Max’s hands flapped about dement-edly.

  “Listen to what it says here, though: ‘This is not the first time that Slav chauvinists have brutally attacked scholars working on Albania’s classical roots. Any mention of the Illyrian origins of the Albanians, in particular, arouses in them barbaric and murderous jealousy, which is, alas, just as widespread here, in the Balkans.' Well... hang on, what’s this? ‘Anyone who deals directly or indirectly with this topic is in their eyes an enemy. And the hand that wielded the crowbar that struck down the Yugoslav scholar Milan Sufflay in a Zagreb back street some ten years ago did not tremble at the prospect of slaying two Homeric researchers from across the Atlantic.’"