Ismail Kadare - The File on H.

It was indeed a unique sunset, spread across an ink-black sky swept clean of every speck of Stardust, every source of light, all hint of softness. A fine night to be kidnapped! thought Bill The governor’s wife — or her husband — with a torch between her or his teeth (depending on which rhapsode’s version you listened to)… oh, those epics could set your nerves on edge!

Bill sighed with relief when he could make out the twinkling lights of the little town in the distance. Lanterns burned brightly at the door of the governor’s house. In the salon they found the same guests as on their first visit, and some new faces as well, presumably representing local high society.

“We are delighted to see you among us once again,” said the governor as he introduced them to the other guests. “The local gynecologist…The lawyer and his wife … Mr. Rrok — but you know him already, don’t you … And the postmaster too. It is really a great pleasure to have you back. The head of the regional recruitment office … And this is my wife."

The scholars felt just as foreign after an hour in the place as they had on first arriving. Like everyone else, they had glasses in their hands, they had even had a dance (just one), but they could not feel part of anything in that environment. It all seemed made of cardboard, as false as it was ridiculous. They realized how impossible it was to tear oneself away from the world of epic poetry and behave as one should at a ball Women whispering in corners kept looking at them sideways, presumably gossiping about them, but that didn’t matten The two foreigners felt miles away; they were still at the inn, where the people, and their clothes, and their gestures, and their code of conduct, were so different,…

Leaning against the marble mantelpiece, Bill cast his mind back to the travelers who had stayed at the inn, their costumes decorated with designs suggestive of snow or frost, decorations that seemed to have been put on by a machine able to embroider the pattern of lightning.

As for the folk sitting around the governor’s salon, the alleged elite of the town of N—, well, they were just straw men, ridiculous bureaucrats. They made you want to laugh, or be sick.

The hostess sidled up to Bill and said, “You don’t look as though you’re quite at your ease. Of course you’re bored. This is the end of the world, so what can you expect?”

“But of course not, madam,” Bill said, not really knowing how to respond.

To tell the truth, she was the only person in the whole pantomime who seemed to be different, and he did not want to offend her.

Her bright, submissive, and liquid eyes came close, appearing to bear the mark of the last weeks separation. Even the ring that sparkled on the hand that held the glass seemed to have acquired some of its mistress’s yearning.

Bill could smell her perfume, and he suddenly felt like blurting out the question: How could two Albanias coexist, in the same place, in the same period, when they were so completely different — eternal Albania, bearing its tragic destiny with dignity, as he had come to know it not only from its epic poetry but also at the inn up there, beside the main road; and the other Albania, the one he could see here and (he was sorry, but he had to be blunt) that struck him as nothing more than a dumb show.

“You’re dreaming …,” she said. “You say nothing and you dream. But I have a weakness for people like that.…”

“I am a little perplexed,” Bill replied. “In fact, I was about to ask you a question."

He thought he saw the ring on her finger quiver. Maybe she would not understand what he meant. It was quite possible that she knew absolutely nothing of the other Albania. Actually, anyone could well doubt its existence. Was old Albania really the way he saw it, or was his vision of it only a poet’s reverie?

He picked up the glass he had left on the mantelpiece, took a sip, and put it down again. A piece he had read by a young Albanian writer claimed that the high-landers who appeared to be so valiant and rebellious, were capable of giving in overnight and of crawling before the power of the state. Seen from a greater distance, however, things looked very different. There was nothing really surprising about it. Did people of the Homeric period behave in epic fashion? And what about Homer himself…? A horrible vision (as when you see yourself sleeping with your own mother) had seized upon his mind and would not go away: Homer, having just finished chanting the second or the seventh book of the Iliad , completely obsessed with counting out his pay … He had been delivered from this agonizing vision only when he learned that the Albanian rhapsodes would accept no form of reward. Please God, that had only been a suspicion!

“Did you want to say something to me?” Daisy whispered.

He looked her in the eye for a long moment. He would have to be quite mad to tell her what was in his mind, her especially, the first lady of N—.

He talked about his concerns to Max as soon as they were in the car on the way back to the inn. It was a safe bet that the governor’s other guests, as they walked home, were having a good gossip about the foreigners, calling them antisocial, uncivilized, pretentious, or just plain mad.

While he spoke. Bill could not take his eyes off a solitary light blinking in the distance, which only underscored the atmosphere of fright and doom that the black night aroused.

He waited for Max to answer. But Max was silent. He must have gone to sleep.

March 14, Buffalo Inn

WE >WERE EXPECTING the weather to get a bit milder, but suddenly winter has returned with a vengeance.

Fortunately, the cold has not prevented us from making more recordings. Some of them are rerecordings of the same rhapsode, and thafs our main triumph .

Our hypotheses about forgetting are being borne out all the time: none of the rerecordings is identical to the first versions. Sung afresh after a week or more (we have no material with a shorter time span), every ballad already bears the first sign of the process of forgetting .

Does this sign foretell the poem’s ultimate disappearance f Is it the germ of the disease that will eventually kill it? Or is it, on the contrary, the serum that will protect the ballad from time’s attrition? From what we know, it seems that the last conjecture is nearer to the truth .

So we are getting evidence of what we dimly suspected back in New York:

The loss of material from oral epic has nothing to do with the limits of men’s power to memorize .

Forgetting is a constituent part of the laboratory .

Just as in the metabolism of living beings, so in oral poetry, death is what guarantees that life goes on .

The question that we first asked — is the forgetting intentional or accidental? — now seems to us too naive. None of the rhapsodes has answered the question so far; but it was not just that no one answered, every one we asked appeared not to understand the question. It seems to me that both kinds of forgetting are part of the process, but are related to each other in ways that remain a mystery (a providential term in this sort of work!) .

I must add that omission is only one side of the coin. The other side, which is closely related, is constituted by additions . Lahuta players add lines as often as they leave lines out .

Then we must tackle an apparently vital issue: what is the rate of loss by any given measure of time — by ten weeks, by ten years, by two hundred fifty years, by a millennium … ?

At first glance you would think that the epic corpus is in a state of partial but progressive decay; but the sheer age of the corpus serves to contradict that view .