Ismail Kadare - The File on H.

Martin sometimes told Max and Bill what had been going on. One evening there came a group of men looking as dark as the grave, apparently on someone’s trail A few minutes after the group left, the Royal Police Force turned up — and almost immediately after, the fugitive himself. Who knew what was really going on?

Another day, highlanders from the Black Ravine who were taking a sick man to the hospital turned up and asked to stay the night. When the Irishmen went down for their coffee at dawn the unfortunate man was still there on his stretcher. His face looked like a death mask. They asked what his sickness was, and Martin assured them that it was not a contagious disease.

"They suspect that his shadow has been walled up,” he explained. “If that is the case, there will be no point in taking him to Tirana. He won’t pull through.”

"What do you mean by ‘his shadow has been walled up'?" Max asked.

Martin tried to explain. It was a fatal malady. The victim was a stonemason, and during the construction of a k ulla , or round tower, such as you find in the Albanian uplands, one of his workmates had apparently walled up his shadow, accidentally or on purpose; that is, he had cemented a stone onto a wall exactly where the victim’s shadow was falling at that moment. Highland builders usually avoid walling up a shadow, as if it were the devil himself, for they all knew full well that if your shadow is trapped in a wall, then you are also imprisoned by it and must surely die. The man lying on the stretcher was, they said, a novice mason, without much experience.

"So there you are,” Martin said. “Whether they meant to or not, they have robbed him of his life. It’s a terrible shame. To think he is barely twenty years old!”

The Irishmen looked at each other.

"But maybe that is not what is really wrong with him?” Bill queried, "You said it was only a supposition.”

“Of course it is only a supposition. Otherwise why would they bother to carry him to town?”

"A strange business!” Bill exclaimed when the two scholars got back to their room. “Very ancient maladies, or rather, an antique explanation given for a malady … It makes your hair stand on end!”

The low rays of the afternoon sun caught the metal case of the tape recorder, which answered with a sinister glint. Bill and Max tried not to look at it, but though they did not admit it to themselves, they knew that the machine was at the root of their anxiety, of the obscure and unfocused worry that was eating at them and that neither death nor logic could explain.

One Saturday, they came back to the inn from their morning stroll to find Martin unsaddling a horse in the yard. He told them that a visitor was waiting inside and wanted to talk to them.

A tall man dressed partly in monk’s robes, the visitor had the round and ruddy face of a peasant. With a broad smile that spread across his face, he would have seemed a good-natured fellow had there not been a suspicious sparkle in his eyes. According to Martin, he spoke English, Albanian, and Serbo-Croatian.

“I was just passing by when I heard about you and the work you have thrown yourselves into.” he said, smiling first to one and then to the other of the Irishmen. “I must say it is a magnificent project, and I wanted to meet you, I am Serbian myself, from the archdiocese of Peja, a long way away from here. I'm on my way to Shkodér, on business — monastic business!”

“I see,” said Max, blankly.

“Yes, and I wanted to tell you," the monk went on, "I've had occasion to collect a few epic poems here and there. To the best of my limited abilities, of course, and only in my spare time. We monks do sometimes take an interest in such things. But obviously we’re only amateurs, and there’s no question of our wanting to set about it in scholarly fashion. What can you expect of a mere monk on his own? Cut off from the world, totally isolated, that’s our lot,… To be honest, Fve always dreamed of meeting people like you. To be able to discuss the ancient epics. But you must be very busy, your time must be very precious…”

“No, not at all." said Bill “We would also enjoy chatting with you. We came thousands of miles precisely in order to make contact with people such as yourself.”

“And it could turn out to be very helpful," Max added, as he asked the monk to be seated. He now felt he had been wrong to be suspicious, “What can I get for you?”

“Thanks, but this round is mine. Even if I'm not from these parts exactly, I am a neighbor I don’t live a thousand miles away."

“Peja is in Kosovo, isn’t it, over the Yugoslav border?” Bill asked.

“That’s correct."

They ordered three glasses of raki. When he brought the drinks Shtjefen looked askance at the visitor.

In no time at all, they were having a lively, even a heated conversation, as if they were old friends. As he listened to Bill and Max, the monk nodded with surprise and admiration, exclaiming, “We have all this material on our plates and haven’t begun to look at it properly, … What miserable ignoramuses we monks are! It’s heartbreaking!”

After his second glass of raki, the monk’s eyes narrowed and his glance grew more piercing.

“But tell me, are you working exclusively on the Albanian ballads? You must know as well as I do that the epic corpus also exists in another language, Serbo-Croatian.”

“Yes indeed,” said Max. “Obviously we are aware that the epics exist in both languages. But for the moment we’re looking only at the versions one gets here.”

“If I may be so bold as to ask, why?”

The Irishmen exchanged rapid glances.

The monk’s smile began to twist into a different kind of expression but still would not quite leave his face. They had never seen a smile change into its opposite like that while retaining the hallmark, so to speak, of its origin. Such a paradoxical expression made the monk seem all the more poisonous.

“We’re scholars," said Bill, “and we have not the slightest wish to get involved in local… shall we say Balkan squabbles."

“Never take sides in arguments,” the American consul in Tirana had advised them at the one meeting they had had with him. “In this country, disagreements rapidly escalate into armed conflicts. Especially if what’s at stake is the ancestry or the paternity of epic poetry. Both sides treat the question as a fundamental part of the national issue and connect it to ethnic origins, to historic rights over Kosovo, and even to current political alliances.“

The consul had shown them a pile of Albanian and Yugoslav newspapers and, with a smile, translated extracts, so as to give them an idea of the style of polemical writing in the Balkans. Once both sides had exhausted their available stock of all imaginable insults, the Serbian press declared that for the greater good of Europe, Albania should be wiped off the map of the continent — and the Albanian papers, which presumably thought the same of Serbia, brought the argument to a conclusion by stating that no dialogue was possible between two peoples whose names derived, on the one hand, from the word for “snake” and, on the other, from the word meaning “eagle.”

In the ensuing silence at the inn, Max, though tempted to give his opinion, just stretched his arms out wide and said.

“I hope you understand our position, especially as you are a man of the cloth.“

“Of course, of course …, said the monk. In a flashy he reassembled the fragments of his smile and beamed as he had at the start. He went on in a good-humored way:

“It’s of no matter, gentlemen. You have done me a great honor by deigning to exchange a few ideas with a poor ignorant monk. Please, again, pardon me my excitement, if I may use such an expression. But I think you understand me — I am Serbian, and I support my nation’s cause. It’s unavoidable, especially here in the Balkans. Please don’t take my reactions amiss."