Ismail Kadare - The File on H.

The clack of Martin’s clogs could be heard, then the lad himself appeared at the back door, a bucket of water in each hand.

“Morning,” he said.

“Good mornings Martin. Did you have a good night?” asked Max.

“Hmm … So-so … I was worried about… about the recorder….”

“Why so?” Bill queried

“Well, how should I know?” he stammered, “Anything could happen, couldn’t it?”

Martin’s face looked vaguely worried, and Bill remembered his own bad night and the anxiety that had seemed to rise from below, as if it were coming from another age….

February 27,

at the Inn of the Bone of the Buffalo

Today we really began our work on the Homeric enigma .

We listened several times to the two poems sung by the rhapsode last night. Each song has about a thousand lines .

We compared both of them to the published versions, and as we expected, we found significant variations .

The first one tells of the treachery of Ajkuna, wife of the valiant Muj. German scholars saw her as a kind of Helen of Troy of Albanian epic. Except that her story is enough to make your blood curdle .

The other song must be a version of the epic of Zuk the Standard Bearer. It would be hard to think up a more tragic tale. A young woman is in the mountains. looking for her brother, who has been mortally wounded by his enemies. She finds him at last, drowning in his own blood. The wounded man asks for a drink, but there is no spring near at hand, and she is afraid that if she leaves him, she would not find her way back; so he tells her to soak a strip of cloth from her dress in his blood and let it drip as she walks, to mark her route; she follows his advice, but the rain comes and washes away the drops of blood. She loses her way and wanders around the mountains until she is confronted by a crow and a bear. The crow confesses that he has just picked out the eyes of a wounded man, and the bear admits he gobbled up the man’s head; so she flees, screaming, across the fog-enshrouded mountain .

“How horrible!” Max exclaimed when he turned off the recording .

We spent the rest of the day transcribing this ballad. No doubt we’ll spend more days on it.

Late February,

at the Inn of the Bone of the Buffalo

We’re waiting with impatience, not to say anxiety, for the rhapsode to come back .

Sometimes we are frightened of burying ourselves in the world of the epic and losing sight of the main aim of our visit We are Homeric scholars. That’s what we keep telling ourselves, every day, reminding ourselves that we came here not to study the Albanians' epic poetry but to try to solve the enigma of Homer .

Easier said than done. In spite of ourselves, epic absorbs us. And then we encounter issues that are more tangled than grass roots. For example, we have now identified two other versions of the adventures of Ajkuna, wife of Muj, and they give quite different explanations for what happened to hen It must have been the same with the rape of Helen in pre-Homeric poems — until Homer came along and chose one of the variants .

The Homeric account itself implies that there had been various different earlier views of Helen’s position. The whole story of the rape of the queen is deeply ambiguous. Did she follow Paris of her own free will, or was she taken by force before she fell in love with him? Maybe she never did love her violator but was just his slave! Alternatively, was she first fascinated by Paris, then, when tricked, did her feelings abate? Or was it rather he who first fell in love with her, then felt his passion waning, which is not exactly a rare event in such circumstances?

Homer manages to keep all these questions in the air. He never gives a final answer, neither during the Trojan War nor afterward, when the enigma of Helen’s absconding ought to be explained. All you find is a degree of remorse for all that happened, and that sentiment is, moreover, spread rather thin. As for her behavior toward Menelaus, her lawful husband, that too is hardly transparent: we do not know if she hated him, despised him, or loved him .

Though each of them recounts Ajkuna’s position variantly, the different versions of the Albanian ballad are, individually, clear and straightforward. In one version, Ajkuna is carried off into slavery by Muj’s Slav rival and, like any prisoner, spends her time waiting for her release from captivity. But there is another version, where the kidnapper is so fascinated by her that he turns her into a princess. Not only does he abandon his wife, but he forces her to hold a torch between her teeth to illuminate the first night of his love-making with Ajkuna. This variant does not mention Ajkuna’s own feelings; hut in two other versions, those feelings are clearly delineated. In one despite being made a princess, Ajkuna remains faithful to her first husband; in the other, she falls in love with her kidnapper as soon as she is carried off and furthermore, when Muj comes to rescue her, she cheats on him heartlessly. That was the version the rhapsode had sung — where Muj is betrayed, is chained to the lovers 3bed, and has a flaming pine branch forced between his teeth, illuminating the lovers pleasure .

It is obvious that each of the four Ajkunas overlaps with a part of Helen of Troy, or rather that Helen of Troy is an amalgam of these four different figures. As Homer depicts her, Helen is a rather muddled character, and the behavior of Menelaus is no less a confusion .

March 1,

at the Inn of the Bone of the Buffalo

This sun shines brightly but gives little warmth . …

It is cold, but we are contented. We have ended up discovering the foundations of a common Greco-Illyrian-Albanian proto-universe. Medieval Albanian poets went on asserting its existence for hundreds of years, but as is often the way with poets, they made themselves heard only when it was too late .

We’re trying to put ourselves inside Homer's skin to understand what kind of tyrannical power he must have had to contain such a bubbling cauldron of artistic activity .

The old worries still surface from time to time: are we going to get lost in the maelstrom? And another, more material worry; is the first rhapsode going to come back?

March 3, at the Inn

We were counting the hours until our lahuta player was due back, and then two other rhapsodes arrived, unannounced. We were really in luck, Shtjefen told us; it had been a long while since so many singers were seen in the space of a few days. One of the singers was placid and not at all talkative, like all the highlanders, but the other was a nervous, jumpy fellow. Always getting up and sitting down, going to the door, watching the road as if he was expecting something, good news or bad. Oddly enough, after Shtjefen had discussed matters with the rhapsodes, it was the jumpy one who agreed to sing for the two foreigners .

Contrary to expectations, he declared that he would sing without accompanying himself on the laheta. He did not explain why. Was the string of his instrument broken? Or his hand not in good shape? Everyone fell silent around him, like the last time, but before starting to chant, the rhapsode raised his right arm, opened his hand wide, and placed the flat palm on his cheekbone, beside his ear. His outstretched fingers appeared to be sticking out from the back of his head, like a crest or comb — and Bill and I both muttered in astonishment , Majekrah (wing tip)! We had just seen, right before our eyes, the ancient ritual gesture with its untranslatable name that we knew about from the scholarly literature .

There was a long silence before the bard began his chant. He started by declaiming these lines: