Ismail Kadare - The File on H.

The inn stood by the roadside. Even before the carriage had come to a halt, they noticed the roof of flat stones, then a blackish balcony with a wooden balustrade, and finally the main door, which the wind blew back and forth on its hinges.

A tall boy with a jutting chin and wet, chilblained hands hobbled out on wooden clogs, whose clacking made it seem that he was moving faster than he really was.

Then a man came out to greet them. “I am the innkeeper,” he said. “My name is Shtjefen. And this is my lad, Martin," he added, pointing to the boy. “I am happy for my inn to house such unusual guests.”

His eyes looked sincerely glad, even if his mustache drooped at the tips as if mortified by some unknown offense.

“Inn of the Bone of the Buffalo,” Bill spelled out from the sheet-metal sign nailed onto one of the swinging doors. “That’s a very old name, isn’t it?”

“Indeed it is,” the innkeeper replied. “It’s been handed down from generation to generation. They say it’s been in existence for nearly a thousand years.”

Max whistled in admiration and cast his eyes over the soot-blackened beams above their heads.

They ascended the dangerously creaking wooden staircase in single file. The innkeeper pushed open the door to one of only two upstairs rooms.

“Here is your room, gentlemen. The bedsheets are clean. If you wish, you may make a fire in the fireplace. At night the wind blows a lot, but if you close the shutters you won’t hear or feel a thing. They’re thick, made of oak, and bulletproof. And here are some slow-burning candles for the night.”

The innkeeper’s eyes lit up, and then he furrowed his brow in thought.

“It’s very odd, but two weeks ago I dreamed that I had two guests who were very different from my usual clientele. They came on horseback, and their mounts had, in place of manes, unlit lanterns hanging around their necks, I thought in my dream: Let’s hope that is a good omen! And then, two days later, news of your visit reaches me….”

The foreigners exchanged glances.

“Does it happen that rhapsodes sometimes lodge at your inn?” Bill asked.

“Rhapsodes? Hmm…Of course they do. Even though …”

“Yes?”

The innkeeper made a wide gesture with his arms, as if to express deep regret.

“They used to come much more often. These days there are not all that many of them left.”

“How come? That’s not what some people reported to us. Apparently your inn is at the point where all their routes cross."

“That is right, sir. And I am glad that you know. It is perfectly accurate information. Perhaps I said more than I meant. What I meant to say was that in the old days there were more players of the lahuta the long-necked instrument with one string, with which you may be familiar."

“That goes without saying,’ both travelers said simultaneously.

“So….But if you want to see these singers." the innkeeper continued, “then there’s nowhere apart from here that you’ll find them, except perhaps at the Inn of the Two Roberts, where lahuta players still drop in, but that’s a long way away.”

“We’ll talk again about that," said Max. “We really do want to get in touch with them.“

“I’ll be glad to help, gentlemen," the innkeeper said, as he stood to one side to let in the lads who were bringing up the luggage.

Late that evening, the governor was busy at his desk, drafting a report for the Minister of the Interior, and he glanced from time to time at the account that his informer Dull had written on the two foreigners’ first day at the Buffalo Inn.

He does write well, the old devil, thought the governor. He may be a mere informer, but his prose is better than what you find in the Albanian Effort .

He had long secretly envied Dull’s style, especially turns of phrase like “leaving aside the fact that this task is not incumbent upon the present writer," or all those “notwithstanding" s that he sprinkled around his sentences with such elegance. The governor himself used to try inserting the latter word wherever he could in his letters, even when it did not really fit, and on rereading his texts, he always found himself obliged to cross it out.

“Barely had they arrived at the Buffalo Inn and after exchanging a few words with the innkeeper (leaving aside the fact that this task is not incumbent upon the present writer, I am obliged to point out that some of the innkeeper’s words, specifically when he told the newcomers that he had seen them in a dream, appeared to the present writer to be not only meaningless but quite inappropriate in the mouth of a citizen of our kingdom when speaking to foreigners) — after exchanging a few words, then, the foreigners remained in their room.”

The governor skimmed through the report and stopped at the point where Dull Baxhaja described the opening of the suitcases and especially of the trunks that contained the machinery, not to mention the thousands of file cards that the Irishmen took out of various card boxes with great care. Actually, the spy went on to say, the visitors did not seem particularly concerned about hiding the cards; quite the opposite, in fact, since they used thumbtacks to fix some of the cards and especially maps to the walls, to the extent that within fifteen minutes there was not a bare space on any of the partitions or even on the inside of the door.

The governor skipped the pages where the informer described in every detail the testing of the tape recorder, the sound of which he was hearing for the first time in his life. According to Dull, the Irishmen had recorded their own voices, though the playback had a different tone from that of a natural human voice. This difference notwithstanding. Dull continued, he was able, by dint of his vast experience, to satisfy himself that it was indeed the foreigners own voices, since the distortion made by the machine was identical to the alteration of a voice overheard from behind sheet metal, down a chimney, or through a decrepit wall.

What a sleuth! thought the governor.

He decided that the passage in Dull’s report about the maps pinned to the wall was the part most worth mentioning in his own report to the minister. “The present author,” Dull had written, “after having fulfilled the duties required of him in his posting under the eaves, managed to get a clearer view, from several angles, of the maps and of the markings made on them,"

The governor reread several times the passage describing the maps. According to Dull, they looked like weather maps, such as he had seen on the only occasion that he had been to Tirana airport, when he was entrusted, as the governor will perhaps recall, with the surveillance of Mme. Maria M--, traveling to Malta and suspected of taking with her two ancient icons from the great church of Shkodér as well as a secret missive from Monsígnor S--.

“There’s really nothing this lad doesn’t know,” the governor said to himself with something approaching admiration. “Nothing escapes him; he only has to see something once, or, even more, to hear something, and hes got it. If he lived a hundred years, two hundred years. Dull would still have it all stored up in his memory. He is more precious than a great library, than the National Archives or the British Museum, and all other such things. ”

According to Dull’s thorough description, the maps were marked with a host of arrows, some of them circled, some curved, some straight, similar to the signs that indicate rain and wind in meteorology. Above or below the arrows were letters, or numbers, or both: A, CRB, A4, etc. On some of the maps, roads were marked by unbroken lines, as were the built-up areas alongside them. Even the Yugoslav border was marked on two maps.