Ismail Kadare - The File on H.

The plenipotentiary, who saw us in person, took our breath away. The representative of this partly archaic and partly grotesque little monarchy turned out to be intelligent, crafty, and witty, to have an extraordinary knowledge of world literature, to speak all the main European languages (including Swedish). He was even the friend and patron of the French poet Apollinaire, and he pokes fun at everything, most especially at his own country and its people. Although we were trying to be as vague as possible about the reasons for our visit, we couldn’t help mentioning the name of Homer — and the diplomat interjected:

“Did you know that some people claim that in the first line of the Iliad, “Menin aeide, thea, Péleíadéo Achiléos” (‘Sing, goddess, of the anger of Achilles, son of Peleus, the word ménin, as you can see for yourselves, is the Albanian word meni, meaning ‘resentment’? Which means that of the first three or four words of world literature, the first and unfortunately the bitterest is in Albanian…. Ha ha!”

Then he went on talking about Albania with such cutting irony that in the end Max said to him:

“Your Excellency, I find it hard to know when you are speaking seriously and when you are joking. For instance, what you said about the word mení, which you find in Homer — is that a learned jest or is it … ?”

The diplomat’s eyes flashed with a fearsome mixture of intelligence, cynicism, bitterness, and malice .

“As far as the word is concerned, I believe that what I told you is in effect correct, and yet…"

He fell silent and his face darkened, with only a twinkle of humor left in the corner of his eye, while his pupils shone with a fierce glow. After the words “and yet,” there was a long pause, which became ever more menacing, so that for the second time, unable to bear this lapse in conversation, Max interrupted:

“And yet, Your Excellency?”

“And yet” — the diplomat came to the point at last — “the Albanians of today maybe have nothing at all in common with the way you imagine them.”

“We don’t imagine anything at all, I answered. “So far, you are the first Albanian we have ever met, and I can’t hide the fact that we are, well, overwhelmed ."

The diplomat began to laugh again, while the consul, who had been present throughout without saying a word, stared at us with an obviously suspicious eye. When he glanced sideways at the maps that Max had taken out of his briefcase to show the plenipotentiary, I suddenly thought: Good God, of course — the consul takes us for spies!

“The consul assumed we were secret agents,” I said to Max as we walked away from the legation. “I realized that too,” he replied. “But what do you think of the plenipotentiary?”

"Amazing!"

"Amazing?" said Max. "That’s an understatement…”

The notes ended there. The governor rubbed his eyes. Funny business, he thought. His mind felt a complete blank.

Something attracted his attention to the window. It was the rain that the wind knocked against the pane from time to time. Dawn had risen on one of those really filthy days that give you somber thoughts, like a debt to settle next week or the fear of having a cancer you’ve not yet mentioned to anyone.

“'The consul assumed we were secret agents,’ I said to Max…” The governor read these words over and over, shaking his head. “What crooks!” he mumbled. “They think they can cover their tracks by planting words like agent and spy I Like pyromaniacs who give the first alert! What they’re trying to say is, As we are as white as the driven snow, we are not afraid to say the word. But they can’t pull the wool over my eyes! They must really be spies, and maybe far worse. All this nonsense about Homer and the rhapsodes is only camouflage, hiding their true, murky mission. They wrote those notes up on purpose and left them on purpose in their suitcases, so that even a dolt like Pjeter Prenushi would have no difficulty getting hold of them.

“You cretin!” the governor said aloud to himself, bursting with anger. “You utter idiot! You gave me the envelope, proud as Punch, as if to say, See what Í can do! Ah, you poor misguided fool! They ran rings around you, they took you for a ride, you blockhead! But it won’t work with me. Oh no. I can see that all these scribbles are just eyewash. Let’s wait and see what Dull has to tell us… .”

As usual, the thought of Dull calmed the governor’s nerves. It was not for nothing that he liked to say Dull was his balm, the secret of his restful nights. Every time he felt a sudden anxiety, the kind of anxiety that is all the more troublesome for being without obvious cause, he would think of Dull squeezed into some chimney or squatting on some blackened beam, and his nerves would be calmed down. He is listening, the governor would think; he is tracking down evil….

"Whereas you, Pjeter, birdbrain that you are, you’ve swallowed it hook, line, and sinker!" The governor roared out loud. “They shoved a load of paperwork under your nose, and you said. Thank you, that’ll do nicely! Filthy spies! Bastards! …”

The governor was overcome with waves of anger, rising from his gut. He thought he could hear the shutters banging again, but it was the door, which had just opened. Startled, he saw that Daisy had come in.

Still warm from bed, wearing only her transparent nightdress, Daisy had crept up to him on tiptoe. Good God, what softness she exudes! He was right to tell her that she was much prettier half asleep than in any of her fancy outfits….

“What are you doing?” she whispered.

He covered up the documents with an almost automatic movement of his hand, even though her sight was still too clouded with sleep for her to make out any words.

“As you can see, I'm working …”

“You gave me a fright. Has anything happened? ”

He stroked her hak “Go back to bed. It’s still very early in the morning."

The wind rustled and hissed outside. The governor watched his wife’s hips swing provocatively as she left the room, but his eyes glowed with an icy stare.

Somewhere in those papers there was an allusion to fecundity, or fecundation, something about getting on with it before it was too late. … There was even something about Homeric seed!

He riffled through the papers in a frenzy, Ah, there it was. He had remembered correctly, except that the word used wasn’t seed , it was marrow . But didn’t that come to the same thing, really?

Then he understood the real cause of his muffled fury. Every time he heard mention of sterility or fertility, he felt as if allusions were being made to his wife. Or even worse: he imagined that whoever used such words desired Daisy and was yearning to pour his own sperm into her. To make her with child … before it was too late … before menopause set in … before dusk.

Hadn’t one of those foreigners made eyes at her during the soiree? It was plain as a pikestaff, he realized, plain as a pikestaff. He was quite prepared to believe that they had come from the other end of the earth for the sole purpose of sleeping with his wife.

Curiously, the governor’s jealousy was tinged with a strange kind of desire, which welled up so strongly that he nearly fainted from it.

The distant bell of the Franciscans” chapel spread its gloomy resonance over the rain-sodden town’ as if to insist on its own repentance for some past failure. He imagined Brother Zef celebrating the morning service with eyes all red and swollen from a sleepless night; perhaps the image of one of the nuns had crossed his mind briefly. That would account for his having translating the Irishmen’s passionate language with such ardor.