Ismail Kadare - The File on H.

We’ll try to find out all that when we are there. With a bit of luck, we will manage to enter this universe, and then we shall understand how the yeast was made to rise in the ancient dough. As it always has done. As it did in H’s time .

Just as the governor was about to yawn, he lighted on a passage that had what seemed to him to be a rather literary touch:

For the second time this week, I’ve had a bit of trouble with my eyes. The first time, it was like a cloud in front of me. I thought it must be from too much reading and took no notice. Today it happened again, but it was slightly different. It was as if I was looking through a broken windowpane that would not stop wobbling. It felt as though the vibration was damaging my retina. After which my sight stayed misty for quite a while. I must go and see an optician .

As always in such circumstances the governor had the impression that he could smell his wife’s powder. He could see it sprinkled on her smooth belly, just where the pubic hair began but carnal desire instead of slowing down his breathings as it usually did’ filled his eyes with cruelty.

To ward off any evil imaginings, he struggled to focus his mind again on his utterly boring reading.

There are three hypotheses put forward by German scholars, who were the first to study the common motifs in the Greek and Albanian traditions, the migration of material from one mythology to another, its splicing, transferal, and cross-fertilization. The first view is that the process of the creation of epic poetry has come to an end in Albania. The second view is that the process is still alive. And the third view is a compromise; even if the age of the Albanian epic is effectively over, the embers are still hot and could throw out some last bright sparks. The same scholar, takes the view that even though the production of new epics is dying out, the foundry itself, however derelict it may have become, is still actually there .

So we must hurry. Make haste before the embers go cold! Before the foundry collapses!

“Before the embers go cold …,” the governor repeated to himself. In his mind, which had been shaped by detective mysteries “embers” summoned up images of sleepers , agents who had been put in place long ago., then of a nunnery, then of an old conspiracy, then, suddenly changing direction, it took his mind back to his wife’s sexual organ.

“Stop that now!" he exclaimed, and put his head down into the papers again. He would force himself to read them, even if they were in hieroglyphics!

How does living material, on more prosaically, inanimate raw material, bow does material in general enter the epic machinery that turns it into art?

That is another chapter, just as fascinating as the question of forgetting .

The Germans claim firmly that you can still find Albanian rhapsodes who convert contemporary events into epic poetry (who can Homerize modern life). It would be really extraordinarily good fortune to see such a miracle happening before our eyes .

Every time the question of this transformation arises, I think back to an old, long-abandoned tannery on the outskirts of Dublin, not far from where I lived. That’s how I imagine the ancient Homeric workshop .

When an event goes through those old rollers, belts, and vats of dark and sinister liquid, what happens to it? How do the rhapsodes' lungs, brains, fantasies, passions, and even their heredity contribute to the process?

It is all rather like an embalming process. Yet it’s not a corpse that is being treated, but a piece of life, an event, most often an unhappy one .

At bottom, epic poetry itself, seen as a whole, is no more than a kind of morgue. It’s no coincidence if the climate of the epic is always cold, indeed colder than cold. The temperature is always below zero. Moreover, there is a formulaic phrase that comes back time and again, like a refrain: This sun shines brightly but gives little warmth….

The governor reread the preceding passage and then underlined the words in the middle of the page’ dark and sinister liquid , trying all the while to keep his mind off Daisy’s body. But he couldn’t because the notes became once again’ just like a novel …

I can’t get to sleep. The lights of the city twinkle through the windowpanes. As they go out one by one, I feel as if I'm floating in the Milky Way .

There are billboards out there, one advertising ketchup and another vitamins that are good for the eyes. My optician prescribed that for me .

I imagine our two names, Bill Norton and Max Ross, alongside Homer’s (good God, like two assistants helping a blind man across the street!) in newspaper headlines and on the illuminated news display .

"Yes, go blind, then the two of you blinder than your hero!” the governor exclaimed and enjoyed the relief that he always felt when he uttered a curse.

"Well now …,” he said a few seconds later, as he came across the words happy day . “Let’s see what made our two dickey birds so happy."

Oh, happy day! Day of surprises. And of luck .

I could easily believe in divine intervention. Can’t be a coincidence that the magical elements magnés and phone, which make up the original word for the machine, seem to come from ancient times .

What has brought magic to this day, and to our forthcoming pilgrimage, and to our whole enterprise, is the word made up from magnetic and sound, the magnetophone, or, as the manufacturers call it for simplicity’s sake, the tape recorder.

It is a machine that records the human voice. That you can take with you, wherever you go. That not only records but plays back, as often as you want … Ifs exactly what we need! Like a gift from the heavens! Sent to us by providence! From Olympus!

Hmm … The governor stifled a cough. So that’s all their machine could do He had been imagining all sorts of things: a cinema camera, an oilfield detector a bomb intended to blow up Parliament…

Careful now! he warned himself as his eyes fell on the name of the king:

We are also learning more and more about Albania. A small country with an ancient population. Tragic history. To begin with, a European country. Then Asian overlords. Return to Europe in the twentieth century. Half of all Albanians live-outside the current borders .

Apart from the epic, which constitutes its principal treasure, in our view, Albania also has chrome and oil And a king, Zog, whose name means “bird.” King Bird the First .

I had another appointment with the optician. Got a fresh prescription .

Max is having problems with his wife .

We’re trying to get the money together so as to buy the tape recorder as soon as possible .

We are revising all our ideas in the light of the machine. Oddly enough, bringing a tape recorder into our work is no trouble at all The device fits our project so well that it seems as if we had designed it all from the start with the machine in mind. As if, subconsciously, it had preexisted its own invention …

The governor skipped through several more unutterably boring sheets. His eyelids were drooping but he sat up with a start when he came across the words minister and spy .

"You’re getting closer and closer, my friends," he mumbled as he reached for his cigarettes. "You’re walking right into the noose."

As he read on he said those words to himself over and over, but without really knowing whether the noose was the Albanian Legation in Washington or Albania itself.

We just got back from Washington, where we submitted our applications for Albanian visas. I can’t bide the fact that we were rather disappointed by the way the Albanian Legation treated us. Not at all warm. On the contrary, the atmosphere was all suspicion and mistrust .