Ismail Kadare - The File on H.

The governor’s thoughts returned to Daisy’s alabaster body, which doubtless made him an object of envy. Surely people dreamed of possessing his wife and making her pregnant. …

He was disturbed by a feeling, different from his usual desires that ran through him from head to toe. Getting up from his desk, he went noiselessly into the bedroom and gazed at Daisy. She appeared to be sleeping peacefully again, and despite her seeming more desirable than ever he did not dare wake her.

Daisy was not sleeping. When she heard the door creak on its hinges, she shut her eyes and slowed her breathing. She must have had an erotic dream in the first light of morning; she still felt limp.

A gloomy day had dawned outside. Even the chapel bells sounded as if they were in pain.

She wanted to cross herself, but she was quite numb in the bed’s warmth and had lost all wish to execute the slightest physical movement. Instead of making the sign of the cross, her hand glided lazily over her breast and then her belly. She was on the brink of tears.

Bill, three hundred yards away, did cross himself. He was only half awake, but even though he barely heard the church bells, his hand moved automatically to his forehead, his chest, each shoulder…

It had been a truly hellish night for him. Only in the small hours had the anxiety that had racked every part of his brain finally subsided and given him some peace. In the faint light of dawn, he could make out the dull gray mass of the metal case containing the recording machine. Hi there, buddy, he thought, with a feeling of calm and joy. He liked the peace that the day’s dawning brought him. Even the bugs seemed to be drowsing; they were certainly less ferocious now.

Bells are rung differently here, he managed to think just before he dropped off again. But the lonesome and lugubrious chimes, such as he had never heard anywhere else in the world, continued to reach his ears even while he slept.

ASMALL CROWD WAS WAITING on the pavement to watch the two Irishmen emerge from the Globe Hotel, or rather to get a glimpse of their luggage. Blackie the porter had sworn by all the gods that there was sure to be some nasty surprise when the cases were loaded. Maybe the hotel staff who had been given the job (Blackie had waited in vain for the manager to hire him) would stumble under the weighty maybe they would fall, maybe they would even break their backs. He hinted that the carriage could easily veer off and end up in the ditch. Apart from the terrible weight of those accursed trunks, there was that peculiar sensation the porter had felt in his head between the bus station and the hotel, which — he was sure of it now — came from the foreigners’ cases. Well, then, he surmised, if a human brain could be affected like that, just think what might happen to horses” heads. Without his actually saying so out loud, it was obvious that Blackie reckoned the nags might very well bolt and hurtle the carriage, the driver, and his passengers into a ravine.

Lym the coachman had heard the gossip, but he turned up nonetheless at the appointed hour at the steps of the Globe Hotels demonstrating that he was prepared to test the porter’s sinister prophecies. The word was that when he had been told of the porter’s assessment of the relative mental strengths of man and his main helpmeet, he had retorted that his horses were at least brighter than Blackie. All the same, when the foreigners appeared at the hotel doorway, the onlookers, who had been there for several hours waiting to see how the whole business would end, definitely noticed an expression of worry on the face of the coachman and in the trembling of his horsewhip.

Large raindrops were falling irregularly. However the two travelers would not get inside the coach until they had seen their luggage properly stowed. The hotel staff, including the porter and even the manager himself, who had tried to lend a hand, had wobbled now and again as they brought the luggage out, had even nearly stumbled, but none of them actually fell. (They’ll collapse on top of each other like dominoes, I swear by Allah they will, Blackie had promised; they’ll fall on each other like pieces of meat on a shishkebab, then they’ll scatter like chickpeas.) On the other hand, something happened that neither Blackie nor anyone else had foreseen. One of the travelers looked up at the sky anxiously, whispered something to the other foreigner, then both seemed to be about to make some point to the hotel boy who was carrying one of the trunks, then the first foreigner slipped off his raincoat and put it over the trunk, while the other nodded in approval.

"Ah, I see, they seem to want to protect that trunk from the rain. It must be full of… full of …”

“Full of what?” a voice asked.

No answer.

“What do you think could be in it?” the voice

insisted.

The first speaker stared at his questioner with wide eyes. “If you’re that eager to know, why don’t you ask them yourself?”

The second speaker just shrugged his shoulders.

Meanwhile the coach had set off, and the onlookers’ necks all turned in the same direction, as if connected by an invisible string.

Within fifteen minutes the coach had left the little town and was rolling along an empty country road. Max and Bill looked out of the tiny openings in the side doors, onto the desolate plain, which looked even wilder at its edges.

Bill rubbed his eyes with the palms of his hands.

“Is there fog on the plain, or am I just seeing things?” he asked.

“It really is foggy,” said Max.

Bill sighed with relief. I must stop worrying about that, he thought. Ever since they had left the town, it had seemed as if his sight was veiled once again by a wispy shroud. But the shroud was covering the plain, not his retina. It cheered him up, and he began to whistle.

“Beautiful, isn’t it?” he said after a while. “It feels as if today is the real beginning of our adventure.”

Max nodded gaily.

Above the half-dismantled and rain-sodden haystacks, black birds were wheeling, their wings seeming weighed down by the enormous raindrops.

“The farther away the inn is from here, the better for us," Bill said. “We’ll be able to get on with the work in peace. Otherwise we’ll have half our time taken up by small-town society calls."

“I bet they’ll come out all this way to get hold of us.”

“You think so? Then we’ll just have to be absolute bores.”

“Easy to say," Max replied. “But I think we have to do the opposite and be extremely accommodating. They could give us a load of trouble.”

“Maybe if we told them more about the work we’re planning to do, they’d leave us in peace," said Bill. “After all, it’s in their national interest.”

“Do you think they give a damn?”

“How should I know? Maybe you’re right. Looking at a country from afar, you imagine that every inhabitant is eager to slave away for it, but when you get nearer… Actually, I guess it’s the same with us. Hey, look, more haystacks.”

“I’ve never seen such haystacks — they look like ragged beggars,” said Max.

“Maybe because they’ve been in use. It is the end of winter…. What were we saying?”

“About local society…”

“Oh, right! If we get involved with those people, that’s the end of our work. I think I even heard them talking about a ball….”

“Really?”

Max burst out laughing. They joked about being invited to a provincial ball, then Max teased his friend about the governor’s wife.

“I thought I saw her making eyes at you.”

“You think so?” Bill rocked with laughter,

“Buffalo Inn … Buffalo Inn," Bill chanted, to the rhythm of the carriage’s creaking wheels. A proper medieval name for an inn. The longer the journey continued., the safer they felt from the dangers of bridge games and dances. The ruts and potholes on the road, which bounced the carriage about, offered supplementary protection against provincial cardplayers.