Ismail Kadare - The File on H.

She ran back to the phone, but as she picked up the receiver she froze. Before passing on such radiant news to the postmaster’s wife, she felt the need to savor it all alone for a little while longer.

There are two of them, she thought, and most likely both of them are young men. Her husband had even told her their names: Max Ross and Bill Norton, He must also have been informed of their age. She would find a way of eliciting that information from him over lunch, without seeming to.

Moving automatically toward the bathroom, she stood for a moment in front of the cold and gleaming bathtub, then her hands reached out toward the hot-water tap. She began to undress with slow and sensual movements. She put two fingers into the water to test the temperature, then, when the tub was half full, decided to get in all at once. Quite often when her mind was occupied with thoughts of a particular kind she would soak in the bath and let her imagination wander.

As she lay stretched out with half-closed eyes, she watched the water rise and cover her body. That is how the dead are buried, she found herself thinking, but she cut off that thought, as she always did when a macabre or even just a painful idea came into her head. "No, no!" she said to herself. It was far too soon to indulge in such imaginings. She was still youthful; she was only thirty-two. Wasn’t she awaiting a miraculous event, the arrival of those two foreigners? She said their names aloud to herself: Max Ross, Bill Norton, They were proper European names. She had been quite right when, years before, she had changed her unattractively Oriental-sounding name, Mukadez, to Daisy. Most people had forgotten, and some were even unaware, that she had once had a different name; but when anyone who remembered used her old name, whether absentmindedly or maliciously, she considered that person immediately as belonging to the enemy camp, Daisy was a name that sounded good. Who knows what those two would be feeling if they knew that a young woman called Daisy was thinking of them right now, in her bathtub? She often tried to imagine what people looked like from the sound of their names. And that is what she began to do with the foreigners.

Max Ross, she imagined, would have red hair and lots of it (perhaps because of the letters x and r , or even more because of the s's), whereas the other one. Bill, she saw with hair smoothed down, a less virile figure, but no less dangerous. She had wanted for years to meet someone with just such a name, a fluid, slightly ambiguous name, all the more attractive for being hard to pin down.

The hot water covered her completely now, and she realized that she had forgotten to bring her bar of soap into the bath. No matter! She would just lie there and soak. Perhaps it would be even pleasanter without soap. She had noticed that in similar circumstances, lather disturbed both the clarity of the water and the flight of her fancies.

Through slanted eyes, she looked at her white body beneath the water, with the black triangle of her pubic hair refracted into a double image. In this shifting focus she found a kind of creeping dreaminess, which made everything vague and ambiguous. Though she tried not to admit it to herself, she knew that her boring provincial existence made her ripe for a sentimental adventure. It was no coincidence that a few minutes earlier, when the water was just reaching her waist, she had stopped herself from thinking the morbid thoughts that had tried to seize her. An emotion she had caught from watching romantic movies at the cinema stimulated her imagination and, so to speak, laid down a path for it. Images of that kind ran before her eyes and she found it increasingly difficult to suppress them. Chaotically, without attempting any logical sequence of thought, she saw herself first entangled with the hairy redhead, Max Ross, not because she was really attracted to him but by force of circumstance, or rather by the desire to encounter the whole range of initial sophisticated emotions (rivalry, exacerbated jealousy., etc.), before plunging fully into an affair with the other, Bill “Oh my God!" she exclaimed suddenly and to herself, without ceasing to look at her water-enveloped body, as if it was the sight of her own nudity that had brought this thought to her mind. Just because her lover bore such a wonderful name would not prevent his making her pregnant!

She shifted awkwardly in her bath, like a sleeper turning over in bed. The gurgling of the water and the sight of the refracted curves of her body set her imagination wandering again. She saw herself, ashen-faced and visibly terrified, climbing the front steps of an ivy-covered two-story house. On the door was a brass plate bearing the name of the only doctor in N— and,

beneath it, the word Gynecology .

Tests Daisy’s husband had agreed to have after years of dithering had proved that it was he who was responsible for their childlessness. Since then, Daisy could not imagine having an affair without an aftermath at the doctor’s clinic to remove the traces.

So she would have to appear before the man who, in the gloomy cast of the town’s characters, played, or seemed to play, the role of disillusioned doctor (for that is how provincial doctors are portrayed in films and in the stories of a Russian writer named Chekhov). “An accident? “ he would ask, as his eyes traveled lasciviously over those parts of her body where not long before the drama of love had been played out but which were now as cold as the marble tiles of the consulting room. And she would then think: You flabby provincial quack! How can you understand anything at all about this tragic miracle?

She shifted once more, the water rippled for a few minutes and then calmed, and once again she could see the shape of her body in all its whiteness, anguish gone. Why did she allow herself these thoughts? Real joy, with its combination of pleasure, curiosity, and mystery, was just around the corner; she didn’t need to make herself ill ahead of time with such mental contortions. A hand of bridge, a glass of wine, the warm glow of the hearth — these thoughts brought her back from her tragic tableau. All these things were almost palpably before her eyes and would be truly present within a few days. With a sudden burst of energy, she got out of the bath, put on a robe, and returned to her bedroom to dress.

Outside, as if nothing special had happened, it was still a soaking wet winter’s day beneath a lead-gray sky, with drizzling rain tapping out the slow rhythm of life all around. Through the dripping rain the telephone wires would soon carry the news, first to the postmaster’s wife, then to the other ladies of N—: something sensational was in the air.

Half an hour later, after making all her calls, Daisy went once again to the front window, which looked out over much of the little town. Though it looked quite unchanged, she knew that beneath that apathetic roofscape, her sharp-tipped news had hit targets all over the little town of N—.

DULL BAXHAJA, OTHERWISE KNOWN AS “THE EAVES,’ was the best informer on the books at N-- and had therefore been entrusted with the task of keeping an eye on the arrival and the subsequent words and deeds of the two foreigners. He wrote up his report for the governor on Saturday evening, that is to say on the day of their arrival After standing about waiting for four hours at the travel agency opposite the bus station, on the lookout for suspicious characters waiting to rendezvous with the foreigners, he wrote, he had noticed nobody who tallied even remotely with such a target. In fact, his meticulous observation of the site had revealed that apart from the usual porters, there were in all nine people waiting for the bus from the capital, which came this far only once a week, namely on Saturdays, and that all nine had indeed greeted relatives immediately on their arrival via the aforementioned bus service, their shows of appropriate emotions demonstrating that their wait at the station had been fully justified. Save for the Gypsy Haxhi Gaba, of whom the governor had perhaps heard speak but whom the author of the present report failed to mention previously since it was a well-known fact that the aforementioned waited regularly for the Saturday bus in the hope of finding among the travelers some person who might be inclined to slip him a few coins in return for his customary trick — “Your Honor will pardon me the expression “ — namely the performance of an impressively long sequence of farts. As the honorable governor presumably knew, the above individual had been investigated several times for bringing the town into intolerable disrepute, etc., etc., but as far as the author of the present report was aware, the case had not yet received a satisfactory solution. In sum, apart from the doings of the aforementioned Gypsy, nothing suspicious had been uncovered by the investigator.