Ismail Kadare - The File on H.

“Woodcutters,” Max whispered, when he noticed that the highlanders carried ax blades on their backs.

They definitely were woodcutters, and the Irishmen were all the more sure of it because they knew that Albanians never use sharp weapons to settle scores: their rules of conduct allow that only the bullet be used for dispatching enemies. Yes, definitely woodcutters, Bill repeated to himself. All the same, those blades looked as if they could easily have been stained with the dried blood of very ancient crimes.

The highlanders drew near. Some of their features called to mind the silhouettes that you find on classical vases. But the way the men walked was not quite like a normal marching stride, for their gait had been formed and modeled by the kanun .

“Hail!” said the first highlander.

The greeting took the scholars aback, and at first they gaped in silence. Bill then managed to utter a composite version of “good morning” and m iredita . As for Max, he just made a gesture of greeting.

After a while the Irishmen turned around and realized that they had gone so far from the inn as to have lost it from view. On their way back, they made firm resolutions to get down to work without delay — the next day at the latest, and even sooner, if a bard should come by that evening.

All was quiet at the Buffalo Inn. They went up to their room and opened their trunks to fish out more file cards and maps. The only wall spaces left for their notes and maps were 0ver the fireplace and between the two windows (though the latter space was not really big enough).

“Do we have mice?” Max suddenly asked aloud, raising his eyes to the ceiling.

Bill, who was unfolding a map of the Balkans, stopped and looked up as well

“I don’t think so.”

He looked at the map, on which the mountain ranges looked like horses’ ribs strewn in disarray on the flagstones of a slaughterhouse. The lettering over them read: “Northern Albania," "Rrafsh,” “Kosovo,” “Old Serbia.”

For more than a thousand years, Albanians and Slavs had been in ceaseless conflict in this area. They had quarreled over everything — over land, over boundaries, over pastures and watering holes — and it would have been entirely unsurprising had they also disputed the ownership of local rainbows. And as if that were not enough, they also squabbled over the ancient epics, which existed, just to make things completely intractable, in both languages, Albanian and Serbo-Croatian. Each of the two peoples asserted that it had created the epic, leaving the other nation the choice of being considered either a thief or a mere imitator.

“Did it ever occur to you that whether we like it or not, our work on Homer plunges us into this conflict?” Bill said without raising his eyes from the map.

“Do you think so?”

“It’s virtually inevitable. What we are trying to prove is that the material from which Albanian epic poetry is made is Homeric in origin; that would not be possible if the Albanians had not been here since classical times; and what arouses the jealousy and anger of the Serbs is precisely the question of historical precedence in the occupation of the Balkan peninsula,"

“I see Jealousy …,” Max muttered.

The rows he had had with his wife in New York just before leaving had been utterly depressing. “Buzz off, the two of you, go wherever you want with your mistress. Clear out, I said! Run off with that skirt-chaser Bill Norton! Only don’t try to pull the wool over my eyes with all that Homeric nonsense! Don’t you realize just how ridiculous you are?”

“Are you listening?” Bill asked,

“Sure, sure … You were saying something about jealousy….”

“Right. The Serbs just can’t accept that the Albanians were here before they were. Throughout the Balkans, local nationalisms like this give rise to absurd and morbid passions, but since this one relates to the Kosovo question, it also has a concrete political implication.”

Bill, still poring over the map, looked worried.

“A thousand-year war,” he said dreamily. “That’s an awfully long time, isn’t it?”

“Too long. But it’s war that gives birth to epic poetry,” said Max, turning toward the trunks. “It’s bloodthirsty stuff.”

For a moment they stared at the cold and gleaming metal cases. The task they had set themselves was to pack into those trunks the entirety of the epic poetry spread around the high plateau of the Rrafsh.

“The Germans called this a racial war.’ Max said. “They even made it plain they considered the Albanians the superior race.”

“I grant you we’re dealing with a nasty conflict/” Bill concurred. “But when I hear people talk of race, and especially of superior and inferior races, well, I just blow up. To me that stinks of Nazism.“

“All the same, it’s a very fashionable concept these days.”

They fell silent.

“The others also wanted to take their epic away from them,” said Bill finally, turning from his map.

“Of course,’ said Max. “When you take over a whole house, you aren’t squeamish about stealing all the treasures it contains.”

“Epic poetry is murderous stuff!” Bill exclaimed, and he stared again at the trunks as if the epic itself were inside, about to brim over at any minute.

“It’s chilly,”said Max, rubbing his hands.

He put down his notes and wrapped himself in the big blanket. Then Bill did the same. They were shivering, and gradually they yielded to a feeling of numbness.

Bill propped his head on the pillow and tried to imagine the Slavs’ first incursion into the Balkans, Albanian epics occasionally mentioned it, alluding to the countless waves of men from the north and northeast, and the slow retreat before them, mile by mile, of the longer-standing populations of the peninsula. It seemed the Slav tide would never stop; unlike the Roman invasions the conquest was achieved without armies, flags, or treaties. It must have been an unending straggle of women and children moving forward to the muddled sounds of yelling and squalling, a cohort obeying no orders, leaving no milestones or monuments, more like a natural disaster than a military invasion. That was the shock that disturbed the Balkans most, he figured, especially the Albanians of yore. All of a sudden they were in the midst of a Slavic sea: a gray, unending, anonymous Eurasian mass that could easily destroy all the treasures of a land where art had flourished more than anywhere else on earth. So what had to happen happened: the people who had lived here for centuries took up arms and bloodied the shores of the ocean. And the waves were held back at the very shores of Kosovo.

There was a knock at the door.

“Come in!” said Max.

It was Shtjefen, with an armful of firewood.

“Would you like me to light a fire?” he asked. “The cold is really coming on.”

“Oh, thank you! We were chatting about the enmity between Serbs and Albanians. Are things as bad as people say?”

“They are probably even worse than you think,” Shtjefen said as he laid the logs on the hearth. “Do you know what an Albanian poet wrote? 'We were born to mutual anger…'”

“A poet wrote that?”

“Yes, sir.”

“‘We were born to mutual anger,'“ Bill repeated. “There’s that word anger , or resentment , again, just like at the beginning of the Iliad . …

The memory of the Albanian diplomat in Washington flashed across their minds.

“Are there any mice here?” Max asked distractedly. “That’s not the first time it seemed to me that.

“We disinfested the inn especially for you, sir.”

The fire blazed up quickly. Shtjefen left and the two scholars continued talking, pacing up and down the room or standing with their backs to the fireplace, their hands spread out to catch the warmth.