Ismail Kadare - The File on H.

Hmm. That’s serious, the governor thought. These customers could not even be bothered to camouflage their game. Either they still think we are fools, or else … or else there’s something even more important underneath.

Dull went on to give even more interesting clues. According to the spy, some of the maps were marked with large circles labeled “epic zone A” or simply “epic zone" or “authentic epic zone”; there were even areas labeled “epic subzone” and “semi-epic zone".

It was all extraordinarily precise. The governor would have liked to copy this part of the report word for word, but he was reluctant to do so. It was not just a matter of pride — after all, nobody would ever know that he, the all-powerful governor of the town of N—, had plagiarized the report of a mere informer — but something of much greater weight: he was afraid of making a blunder. All these facts were laid out in the open, as if they were being displayed precisely in order to be seen. What if that was merely a trick designed to divert suspicion?

“Hmm …,” he said aloud. For a moment he was quite still, hesitant, his pen in his hand. He would do well to cast his report to the minister in such a way as to protect himself, however things turned out, against accusations of gullibility, on the one hand, and, on the other, of having been overeager to suspect the foreigners at any cost.

He started scribbling again, and as he added fine-sounding words to his unpolished sentences, he felt once again a pang in his heart. He was jealous of Dull. The more he thought about it, the angrier he became with himself. He tried three times to get “notwithstanding" into his report, but however hard he tried, he could not manage to insert it in the right place; it stuck out from the other words like a foreign body, like an unacceptable and even comical intrusion, and he crossed it out three times with a stroke of the pen that was more like the lash of a whip. “Oh, oh,” he groaned aloud, “a vulgar little spy who can write better than I can! Well, anyway," he added by way of self-consolation, “flowers grow better on dunghills.”

After much effort, he finally managed to deliver himself of a paragraph in which he informed the minister that in view of the maps and the arrows marked on them, and notwithstanding the foreigners professed interest in the movements of rhapsodes across northern Albania, there was every reason to suspect them of being involved in intelligence activities. It was still unclear how they intended to use the rhapsodes to transmit or receive information or coded messages. For the time being, and as per His Excellency’s instructions, the foreigners had been placed under twenty-four-hour surveillance, but (and His Excellency would please forgive his raising this problem a second time) he was obliged to confess that the surveillance was, in effect, from the aural point of view, quite deaf.

He checked his last sentence against the informer’s report, and his contentment at having found such a happy formulation evaporated instantly. Apart from the expression “Your Excellency,” which had replaced “the governor” in Dull’s version, his sentence was in all respects identical to his agent’s words. He realized he had become enslaved by Dull’s style, “To hell with the whole business!” he sighed, suddenly exhausted. He had begun to ponder something else. Should he ask the minister to send an English-speaking informer, or would it be better not to annoy him with a request of that kind? When he had raised the question in one of his letters a fortnight ago, the minister’s office had refused point-blank: there were only two English-speaking operatives in Tirana, one of whom barely managed to cover the British Legation, and the other had an ear infection and was thus, in effect, unavailable. Under the circumstances, the ministry wrote, the governor would have to accept that however important it might be to keep a close watch on the foreigners, he could not have the services of the only currently active English-speaking agent in the capital The office would try to find one for him from some other part of the kingdom, but the governor should take note here and now that it would be no easy task, because quite apart from the shortage of intelligence operatives with foreign languages., the whole issue of informers had recently been complicated by the results of a medical survey, which showed that for years a number of agents had been hiding the fact that their hearing was very poor.

The governor cursed himself for not having taken the initiative in encouraging Dull Baxhaja to learn some English. Added to his other skills, he would certainly have made a better job of it. Had he not managed to learn a bit of Latin in double-quick time when he’d had to spy on the Bishop of Shkodér’s conversations with local priests? And on top of that, hadn’t he learned to speak Romany almost fluently in order to help track down a horse that had been stolen from the king’s stables?

Well, he sighed, to comfort himself, how can you know where the next foreigner is going to come from? You may get geared up for an Englishman, but how do you know it won’t be a Turkish tourist or a Japanese visitor or God knows what else who turns up next on your doorstep? It really was a devilishly tricky business.

His eyes wandered back to Dull’s report. The conclusion was a real masterpiece, and the governor was sorry not to be able to quote it verbatim in his letter to the minister. “Look, he’s bringing up the English issue again, damn him,” the governor exclaimed. What if he concluded his report without explicitly raising the language question again but referring nonetheless to the awkwardness of “deaf” surveillance, in other words of relying solely on the visual observation of suspects? That would provide the opportunity for transcribing every word of Dull’s philosophical reflections on the relationship between the eye and the ear in the trade or craft of surveillance.

The governor reread his informer’s paragraphs before putting pen to paper. Masterful! he thought, in utter amazement at the skill of the phrasing. It’s Shakespeare and Dante rolled into one! For as the governor will know.” Dull had written, spying is above all an art of the ear. The support of the eye is only a secondary, not to say superfluous, issue. Besides, all the great spies had poor eyesight, not to mention those who were quite simply blind.

"What a capital fellow!” the governor mumbled. "No two ways about it, he’s the devil himself." And so he began to copy out what Dull had written.

WHERE AM I? HE WONDERED. How did I get here? Clumps of hair brushed against his chin, then on his nose, and as he opened his eyes with a start, he nearly screamed in terror, thinking he saw the long russet fur of his childhood teddy bear or toy fox nearly burying his face. But he quickly got a grip on himself and pushed back the blanket that had worked its way over his head in the night.

Day was breaking. The dawn’s gray light trickled in through the half-open shutter of one of the room’s narrow windows. The misted pane gave an even more ashen hue to the light. Bill turned toward Max’s bed and saw that his friend was still asleep.

The Buffalo …, he mused. So here they were on a gray winter’s morning in this legendary inn, where you went to bed under those thick, long-haired blankets that are indigenous to the Balkans. Their adventure had truly begun. There was no turning back now, even if they had wanted to give up. Brrr! It was freezing! But the low temperature was bracing and filled him with joy. Getting out of bed slowly and carefully so as to make as little noise as possible, he stepped daintily across the creaking and groaning boards to the window. His eyes rested on a low sky that seemed to have had its heart torn out by some unknown cataclysm.