The File on H.

10

ON SOME DAYS THEY IMAGINED that they had succeeded in mastering the vast continent of Albanian heroic poetry that they had encompassed it in its entirety. But such illusions were quickly dissipated. by the next day, the firm outlines of the epic would grow blurred would shift and once again vanish into thin air; and then the same thing would happen not just at the outer edges but in every other part of the poetic mass’ including its core. At such moments it seemed unthinkable that they could ever really command the subjects any more than they could control a chaotic nightmare in which characters, events and catastrophes were forever changing their shape.

The great epic tradition itself seemed to have suffered catastrophic damage. Splits and cracks ran right across it; whole sections had been swept away by the impact. From the rubble, bleeding heroes reemerged their faces expressing unspeakable horror.

When did the disaster occur? Had the epic tradition lost its integrity as a result, or had it always been thus, a poetic haze awaiting the right conditions for condensation? They struggled with these questions in dozens of discussions, for they were just as relevant to the origins of Homeric poetry. If the Greek tradition had similarly been just a quantity of unelaborated poetic material at the starts then Homer’s greatness would be all the more apparent, for it would have been he who had succeeded in giving it order and discipline. People were wrong to think that Homer was the lesser poet for not having been the only begetter of his works. In all probability, his standing as a redactor would deserve to be higher than if he had been only a rhapsode.

As they tossed these ideas around, the two scholars tried to put themselves in Homer’s position, to imagine themselves working in the same conditions, that is to say without books or file cards or a tape recorder, and to cap it all, without eyesight! Good God, they thought, with none of these tools, how did he manage to collect all the lines of the Iliad, or rather of the proto-Iliad’ which he then transformed into the epic that we now have? How did he do it? No sooner did they feel that they were on their way to the right answer than the solution disappeared over the horizon once again. Their vision of the problem grew now clearer and now hazier, swinging back and forth like a pendulum between the contemporary world and the remotest past, as if they were divers returning to the surface for air before going back down into the deep.

It was all closely bound up with the question of who H. was. A poet of genius or a skillful editor? A conformist, a troublemaker, or an establishment figure? Had he been a kind of publisher of his day, the gossip columnist of Mount Olympus, or had he been a spokesman for officialdom? (Some passages in the Iliad sound quite like press releases, after all.) Or was he a leader, and, like any other leader, did he have a whole team of underlings? Or was he not any of these things, was he perhaps not even an individual but an institution? So his name may not have been "Homer” at all but a set of initials, an acronym that should be written HOMER …

Some of their ideas made them smile, but that didn’t stop them from pressing forward with their hypotheses. However bizarre, ideas like these were the urns in which the ashes of the truth would be found in the end. Homer probably suffered some major physical defect, but rather than blindness, his disability was more likely to have been deafness. Deafness brought on by listening to tens of thousands of hexameters? Actually, deafness suited Homer rather well. Blindness was more suitable for later times, when books had been invented. All the same, statues did usually portray Homer as eyeless. But maybe deafness was simply impossible to represent in marble? Maybe the sculptors had solved the problem by substituting one disability for another? In the last analysis, haven’t eyes and ears always been associated with each other as the two most characteristic, visible organs of humankind?

“If we go on like that,” Bill joked, “we’ll end up poking our own eyes out!”

Max looked at him out of the corner of his eye. It wasn’t Bill’s words about going down the wrong track that struck him, but his friend’s allusion to losing his eyes. Bill’s eyesight had been getting steadily worse, and Max had thought of asking the governor, at the first opportunity, to help him find an optician. There weren’t any at N--, and they would have to go all the way to Tirana. Recently, Max had done his best to steer their discussions away from any questions relating to Homer’s blindness.

They kept coming back to the idea that the epic must have had a different structure before the Catastrophe (they used the term now as if it were a proper name). If there had indeed been some catastrophe, then it must have happened at the time of Albania’s battle with the Turks. The clash between Christian Europe and the world of Islam had been more brutal and harsh in Albania than anywhere else. The whole country had been shattered, ruined, destabilized; its epic poetry must have suffered the same fate. Whole sections of it were buried beneath the rubble, and the tradition of recitation was banned. The rhapsodes who bore the knowledge of the verse had to flee to the mountains, and they lost all contact with the rest of the world. In those circumstances, preserving the tradition became difficult, because, like everything that has to go underground, it began to change. So that may have been the explanation for the fragmentation of the epic, for the multiplicity of variants, which made it seem unstable and unmasterable.

They thought that if Homer’s version of the Iliad had not been written down and subsequently published, then it too could easily have fragmented and then been reassembled later on into a quite different shape. The cycles of condensation and dissolution of this kind of epic poetry must have some resemblance to the cycles of creation, fragmentation, and re-creation of possible worlds from cosmic dust.

More and more, epic poetry seemed to them like a kind of poetic galaxy under the sway of mysterious forces. Maybe there were hidden directives coming from the magnetic center, to which the rhapsodes responded by limiting their own freedom, resisting their desire to change, and holding back their rebelliousness. If you looked at it that way, maybe you could understand why rhapsodes always seemed slightly deranged, with a distant look in their eyes, and sang in an unearthly voice whose timbre could have been perfected only in interstellar space.

On other occasions they told themselves that oral epic could only ever exist in the scattered form in which they found it, and they were betraying and altering their material by trying to put its pieces together. In that way of thinking, oral recitation was less like a poetic entity than a medieval order whose members, the rhapsodes, had converted singing into a ritual and spread it far and wide, as if they had been propagating a gospel or a liturgy. A national testament could only have been thus: for the epic corpus that foretold and lamented in advance the nation’s division into two parts obviously constituted the First Commandment of the Albanian people. That was how you could account for this thousand-year-long lamentation, this monotonous wail of foreboding made of the unending repetition of an archaic order.

Their minds were so intensely preoccupied with their studies that their dreams sometimes seemed to be no more than the continuation of their thinking, and what they saw while dreaming was hardly different from what they thought about during their waking hours of reading and listening to the tapes. The lack of distinction between waking and dreaming was very much in the spirit of the epics themselves. Space and time obeyed their own fantastical laws in epic poetry: action was spread out over hundreds of years, characters died or were plunged into deep sleep by a spell and then woke, half dead and half alive, to take up the fight; they married in the lull between two wars, went to rest for a while in their graves (Good grief!" Bill exclaimed one day. “It’s as if they were going on vacation!”), then rose again to pursue their gloomy destinies, and so on and so forth. It constituted a faithful representation of a millennial conflict that like a whirlwind had swept away everything in its path. For seven hundred years I shall slay thy progeny, Muj had threatened the mother-in-law of his Serbian foe. His own seven sons, all called Omer, had been slaughtered by Rado the Serb, and all seven had been buried in the Accursed Mountains, Bjeshkét e Nemuna.

In epic poetry, time sometimes flew by at the speed of lightning, and everything that had been foretold for the end of the world would happen in a few instants; in other passages, however, time would decelerate sharply, would slow to a snail’s pace: a wound would take ten years to heal; a wedding procession would be arrested and frozen in ice, and would thaw out only after time had gone by, before moving on again to the bridegroom’s house where, despite an interval of several years, people still waited for the procession to arrive, just as they had on the first day.

They had come across nothing like this special use of time in any other European epic poetry, not even in the Icelandic sagas.

It was March, but the days were still as short and dark as in February. Waiting impatiently for the weather to improve, the Irishmen feared from time to time that the first warmth of spring would take them away from the climate of the epic — for, as they had come to realize, epic weather was always wintry. It was initially rather astonishing that a Mediterranean country like Albania could have engendered a poetic climate that was all north wind and glistening snow and ice. The entire corpus of the epic seemed to crackle underfoot like an icebound field. But epic cold was generous, for the snow never melted sufficiently to reveal the mud underneath, and it struck the scholars that the climate had been specially invented to allow its characters to hibernate and to reawaken years later. At first they had taken it for granted that epic poetry originating at six thousand feet above sea level would necessarily be set in a snow-laden landscape, but as more detailed study of the ballads demonstrated, the characteristic climate of the Albanian epic corresponded to a much higher altitude than that, and it was safe to suppose without risk of error that the action was located in an area situated between twelve and fifteen thousand feet above sea level — halfway between the earth and the heavens.

They had been making more recordings, many of them providing perfect material, and were quite satisfied with their progress. The work was going well. They had succeeded in completing their inventory of instances where the Albanian epics coincided with those of the ancient Greeks, They had identified the equivalents of the House of Atreus and of Ulysses, and beyond that they had found doubles of Circe, Nausicaa, and Medea, as well as figures identical to the Furies and the Eumenides, whom the Albanians called Ora and Zana, They had undertaken further research on the question of forgetting by looking at details such as the rhapsodes diet, including their consumption of phosphorus. (Oddly enough, it turned out that the highlanders^? diet contained virtually no fish and even less of the minerals, such as phosphorus compounds, that are believed to improve the memory. Any rhapsode offered such nourishment would doubtless have treated it as a magic potion intended either to intensify memory or to annihilate it.) What’s more, they had succeeded in recording a ballad sung by a rhapsode who was thought to have committed a murder the previous week (a “blood debt” paid off), though they failed to establish whether or not this experience had exercised any influence on the poem or its delivery.

Despite all these elements, which complicated their task, Bill and Max felt that they had succeeded in weaving the Albanian epic onto the reels of their tape-recording machine. Each morning when they woke, their eyes turned automatically toward its quietly gleaming lid. They liked to remind themselves that the creation of that device was like a miracle. It seemed to have been decreed that the solution of the Homeric enigma had had to wait until tape recorders had been invented.

Thinking such thoughts bolstered their confidence and swept away their doubts. They imagined their predecessors in Homeric studies who, after struggling to pierce the mystery as they were doing, had eventually given up, and become ironical, not to say sarcastic, about their original enthusiasm, about their own gullibility, and about anyone who might try the same research again. But the tape recorder was the Irishmen’s rampart against failure and ridicule. Earlier scholars, they assumed, would have solved the puzzle of H. long since had they had a tape recorder to help them. The Irishmen were lucky to be alive at the right time: the key to success had fallen into their lap, and in the last analysis, they were simply carrying out the imperatives of their own time.

They had a dreadful fright one night when they thought that the machine had broken down. It was very late, and they were playing back a recorded tape. All at once the volume rose, then the voice slowed down and trailed off into a croak that sounded like a man dying of apoplexy. Bill and Max went as white as sheets. They could not have been more agitated had they been watching one of their nearest and dearest suffering a stroke. They panicked, paced up and down, tore their hair out, turned the instruction manual inside out, until Max suddenly thought of checking the batteries. Thank the Lord! they sighed with relief, when they realized that the only thing wrong was that the batteries were dead.

However, the croaking drawl of the failing tape stuck in their minds. That must be how the entire machinery of the oral epic had run down: its present voice only muffled the death rattle that could be heard nonetheless. The machine had produced just twelve lines for the year 1878 and had painfully squeezed out only four or five for 1913 like the last words of a delirious patient. The epic was now comatose. There was not much chance that it would come to in time to mumble a few more words before freezing forever in the silence of death.

One nighty they recorded the rumble of thunder over the high mountains and another night, the howling wind. They thought that these noises would help them to recreate the right atmosphere back in New York when they would be working on the tapes at home.

Martin told them one day that he had seen the Serbian monk wandering around the area again; but the scholars hardly remembered whom he was talking about.

Before reporting the significant results of the surveillance carried out this day of the cave known as the Screech Owl’s Cavern (or the Hermits Cave, to give it its other name), I should like to remind the governor that in my report oft February I referred to a conversation between the two Irishmen and the Serbian monk Dushan, who in the course of a journey to Shkoder stopped for the best part of half a day at the Buffalo Inn. If I am so bold as to remind you, sir, it is because the significance of the dialogue overheard today at the Screech Owl’s Cavern will perhaps be easier to grasp if put in the context of the conversation mentioned above. In addition, prior to giving an account of the later conversation, I should like to forewarn you, sir — and I do this not for the sake of justifying any failings on my part, sir, or to cover up any slackness in my conduct of the surveillance, but solely out of respect for the truth — I must therefore advise you forthwith, sir, that said conversation was closer to the gabbling of a pair of lunatics than to a normal discussion, and that given these circumstances, the governor will naturally understand the extent of the difficulty one has in reproducing its tone correctly. I must repeat that I do not wish thereby to justify in any way.…

“What a terrific fellow!” the governor said to himself as he raised his coffee cup from the circular mark that it had left, like a seal, on Dull Baxhaja’s latest report. “He’s the greatest!” Lower down, the spy gave the governor his formal assurance that he had always been careful to have his hearing tested, that he had taken the test required by regulations only a fortnight before, and that he had official certification that his hearing was A-1 and 20/20. Furthermore, keen as he was to maintain his memory in tiptop shape, he observed all appropriate dietary regulations, did not drink alcohol, and even though he would prefer to eat rather tastier morsels, he consumed the required weight of fish per week to provide his system with the right amount of phosphorus, and even went so far as to take the elderberry syrup that the doctor had prescribed for him three times a day. He begged the governor to forgive him his second digression, a liberty taken not at all for the purpose of obtaining a pay raise or promoting his career but solely in order to establish the credibility of this report and to fulfill the task allotted to him, insofar as the slightest doubt that might be raised as to its truthfulness could jeopardize the further conduct of the surveillance of the two suspects,

"Oh, hell!” muttered the governor as he raised the coffee cup again from its second ring mark on the report. He knew full well that even if he studied rhetoric or jurisprudence or any other subject of that ilk for twenty years, he would never be able to write so fluently or with such style.

Right, let’s get on with the story, he thought, as if weary with the preamble. In fact, Dull had guessed that the governor’s main satisfaction in reading his reports came from his flowery introductions. If the governor allowed himself to feel bored by the preliminaries and wanted to get to the meat of the report, it was only because he planned to go back to the beginning later on and reread the preamble for pleasure.

Dull went on to inform the governor that on 5 March he had observed the Serbian monk Dushan wandering around the inn once again, but to the spy’s surprise, the monk did not attempt to contact the foreigners and even seemed to be avoiding them. The monk had done none of the things that Dull had expected him to do. — he had neither stopped at the inn to rest for the night, nor had he continued his journey, nor had he gone back on his tracks — and had thus become doubly suspect, requiring even more vigilant surveillance. The monk Dushan, after illogical to-ings and fro-ings in the backyard of the inn, suddenly set off — and, even more amazingly, set off without his horse — in a direction that led one knew not where, in a directionless direction, so to speak, like a man wandering forlornly in a desert. At this point. Dull admitted, he had hesitated for a few minutes: Should he follow his target and thus abandon his area of surveillance? Or should he wait for the monk to return to the inn, which was where Dull had instructions to carry out his mission? At this point the report-writer felt obliged to inform the governor that his hesitation was quite unrelated to any personal concerns, nor was it the expression of any views that he would certainly not allow himself to hold about the regulations and laws of the state. Definitely not! He had hesitated only because some time before, he had attended a surveillance seminar where the main topic of discussion had been whether or not a good spy, when faced with a target moving away from home ground, should come out of his observation post and trail the target or stay put throughout the duration of his posting, in order to protect the security of said post. Unfortunately, no conclusion had been reached and the discussion had been held over to the next — seminar, so that, as the governor would now no doubt appreciate, his hesitation had been but the reflection of this controversy, or rather of the fact that it had produced no answer,

“Wow!” the governor cried out, and he made a nail mark in the margin alongside this whole passage.

Dull then told how he had followed the monk over the fields, observing all the correct tailing procedures, and in the end, to his great surprise, he observed the monk entering the Screech Owl’s Cavern, or the Hermit’s Retreat, as it had more recently been dubbed (the governor was presumably au fait with this development), since the hermit Frok had taken up residence there.

It was easy to understand the link, Dull went on, between a foreigner such as this monk from Yugoslavia and the hermit Frok, especially in view of the well-known interest of foreigners in taking up residence in precisely this part of the country. Taking advantage of his knowledge of the terrain, and fortunately aware of the fact that the cave in question possessed a ventilation shaft. Dull had circled around to the back of the hillock in which the cave had been dug and, given his experience in the chimney business, had found it quite easy to take up position inside the shaft, whence he could hear perfectly clearly anything the two suspects said to each other.

At this point the author of the report requested the governor to please pardon him for returning once again, en passant, to the issue of the credibility of his report, or in other words to the reliability of his hearing and his recall, etc., etc. Aware that he could well arouse the governor’s justifiable irritation by such repetitions, he would nonetheless like to emphasize, just to make doubly sure that the point had not been forgotten, that part of the conversation overhead at the Screech Owl’s Cavern, or, to be more exact, the first part of said conversation, was so similar to the incoherent ramblings of a pair of mental defectives that it could easily raise the most unfortunate doubts about the sanity of the overhearer.

The present writer, Dull went on in the third person, could have used a very simple device to avoid any possible misunderstanding and inconvenience, and that would have been to omit any mention of the first part of this conversation, on grounds of its being devoid of interest, especially as the present author reached the ventilation shaft with a certain delay and could therefore provide only a necessarily incomplete account. That is what he could have done to make things easier for him. self, but his professional conscience forbade him to take the easy option. For even though the beginning of the conversation may have been incoherent and insane, as it did indeed appear to be at first sight, or rather at first hearing, even though it resembled paranoid ramblings, etc, one could not avoid asking the question: what if? What if the ramblings were only apparently mad, what if the incoherence was in fact a secret code used by the two suspects for communicating with each other? This possibility had been enough to persuade the author of the present report to put down in black and white as accurately as he could the nonsense overheard.

At the point when he had got into position by the air shaft leading to the cavern, the two suspects (most of the talking was done, however, by Frok) were exchanging hypotheses about where the eye of the world might be found. As far as Dull could understand, they thought (but most especially Frok, who had asserted this explicitly) that the world, that is to say the terrestrial globe, possessed eyes, just like any other living being, eyes that, in his view, were to be found respectively in the Atlantic Ocean, somewhere between Greenland and the North Sea, and in the Central Asian plains, "One of the eyes is now very much dimmed," the hermit went on, "and the planet sees poorly through it, but it would be wrong to think as most people do that the bad eye is the one located in the steppes. In fact, it is the opposite: the weakened eye is the one that I have pinned down to the ocean floor and the healthy eye is the one I have placed in the dusty plains of Asia, That is how it is, brother….”

It has to be said. Dull added, that although the Serbian monk took little part in this conversation, he did nothing to contradict the hermit’s assertions. Dushan became a little more talkative when Frok began to explain how he had recently learned to distinguish normal lightning from lightning that the heavens aborted, just like a pregnant woman miscarrying. Overall there was one miscarriage for every seven flashes of lightning, the hermit said, but there were troubled times when the proportion of stillborn lightning was much higher.

That was the tenor of the first part of the conversation, Dull reported, saying that he had not managed to work out whether the monk Dushan already knew the hermit or this was his first visit to the cave. But the spy was now going to relate the second part of the conversation, which was in no way comparable to the foregoing, and begged the governor to forgive him for reproducing excerpts in direct speech, a form that in his view would give a more faithful rendering of what was actually said.

“So now he’s going to write dialogue!” the governor exclaimed. “Not what you’d call an uninventive fellow!”

According to Dull’s report, the hermit returned to the question of the eyes of the world, or more exactly to the weakening of sight in one of the eyes, which was certainly going to go completely blind, turning the planet into a one-eyed beings and then he went on about what that would mean for life on earth, and also alluded to the future when the remaining eye would go out in its turn, leaving the world completely blind, until the Serbian monk interrupted:

MONK: I guess you know about the two foreigners— they’re Irish, I believe — who’ve been staying at the Buffalo Inn for some time?

HERMIT: I don’t want to know about them.

MONK: You’re quite right. I feel the same way about them. They are snakes, and poisonous ones at that!

HERMIT: Snakes? Those two? Don’t make me laugh!

MONK: To begin with, the pair of them made the same impression on me. They seemed quite laughable. But when I discovered the purpose of their work, my hair stood on end. To call them snakes is short of the mark. They are the very devil, the devil incarnate!

HERMIT: And what is the work they are doing? I’ve heard say they have some kind of casket with which they wind human voices like string around a drum, so as to unwind it later on.

MONK: Yes, that’s the satanic device that they’re using to perpetrate their crime quite openly and brazenly, and people just look on and gawk without suspecting the calamity that will come of it. You called it a casket, I would rather call it a coffin, and that’s an understatement. It’s far, far worse than that. Compared to what that box means, brother Frok, death itself would be sweet.

HERMIT: They say it’s a kind of trunk

MONK: A trunk indeed! If they had brought the plague, or a gallows, or a guillotine, it would have been better than visiting that horror upon us! A trunk, you say? It’s a crate from hell, brother Frok! I'd better tell you all about it

At this point in the report, the spy requested that the governor forgive him for reverting to classical narrative form, for technical reasons upon which he preferred not to expatiate for fear of irritating his esteemed reader beyond reasonable endurance.

Thereupon the monk proceeded to explain to the hermit how and why the two foreigners were maleficent, and why the casket — the device, or tape recorder, as it was called — was truly infernal. “It is a sinister instrument,” he told him, “more evil than witches who dry up springs or wither grass. For if the witch may lay waste grass and water, this machine walls up the ancient songs, imprisons them within itself, and you know as well as I do what happens to a song when you wall up its voice. It’s like when you wall up a man’s shadow. He wilts and dies. That’s what happens to him. It doesn’t matter to me, I’m only a foreigner here myself, my land and my Serbian songs are far away, in a safe place, but I deplore for your sake what’s going on. With this machine these Irishmen will cut limbs from your body. They’ll mow down all those old songs that are the joy of life, and without them it will be like being deaf. You’ll wake up one fine morning and find yourselves in a desert, and you’ll hold your heads in your hands; but meanwhile those devils will have fled far away. They’ll have robbed you of everything, and you’ll be condemned to deafness for the rest of your lives. Generation upon generation of your descendants will curse you for having been so careless. It’s as I say.”

Dull went on to report that at first Frok just listened to the monk attentively, but then he began to snort, and you could tell he was getting excited.

“You’re making me angry!” he shouted at the monk. "So now tell me what should be done!”

The monk didn’t rush to provide an answer to that question. He advised the hermit to think long and hard about the appropriate steps before taking any action. Then he told him quite suddenly that it was getting late, that he was in a hurry, and that he would return some other day to talk again about the whole affair.

The spy concluded his report by noting that as he was returning to the inn, he noticed the monk striding off along the main road into the far distance.