Ismail Kadare - The File on H.

On other occasions they told themselves that oral epic could only ever exist in the scattered form in which they found it, and they were betraying and altering their material by trying to put its pieces together. In that way of thinking, oral recitation was less like a poetic entity than a medieval order whose members, the rhapsodes, had converted singing into a ritual and spread it far and wide, as if they had been propagating a gospel or a liturgy. A national testament could only have been thus: for the epic corpus that foretold and lamented in advance the nation’s division into two parts obviously constituted the First Commandment of the Albanian people. That was how you could account for this thousand-year-long lamentation, this monotonous wail of foreboding made of the unending repetition of an archaic order.

Their minds were so intensely preoccupied with their studies that their dreams sometimes seemed to be no more than the continuation of their thinking, and what they saw while dreaming was hardly different from what they thought about during their waking hours of reading and listening to the tapes. The lack of distinction between waking and dreaming was very much in the spirit of the epics themselves. Space and time obeyed their own fantastical laws in epic poetry: action was spread out over hundreds of years, characters died or were plunged into deep sleep by a spell and then woke, half dead and half alive, to take up the fight; they married in the lull between two wars, went to rest for a while in their graves (Good grief!" Bill exclaimed one day. “It’s as if they were going on vacation!”), then rose again to pursue their gloomy destinies, and so on and so forth. It constituted a faithful representation of a millennial conflict that like a whirlwind had swept away everything in its path. For seven hundred years I shall slay thy progeny, Muj had threatened the mother-in-law of his Serbian foe. His own seven sons, all called Omer, had been slaughtered by Rado the Serb, and all seven had been buried in the Accursed Mountains, Bjeshkét e Nemuna.

In epic poetry, time sometimes flew by at the speed of lightning, and everything that had been foretold for the end of the world would happen in a few instants; in other passages, however, time would decelerate sharply, would slow to a snail’s pace: a wound would take ten years to heal; a wedding procession would be arrested and frozen in ice, and would thaw out only after time had gone by, before moving on again to the bridegroom’s house where, despite an interval of several years, people still waited for the procession to arrive, just as they had on the first day.

They had come across nothing like this special use of time in any other European epic poetry, not even in the Icelandic sagas.

It was March, but the days were still as short and dark as in February. Waiting impatiently for the weather to improve, the Irishmen feared from time to time that the first warmth of spring would take them away from the climate of the epic — for, as they had come to realize, epic weather was always wintry. It was initially rather astonishing that a Mediterranean country like Albania could have engendered a poetic climate that was all north wind and glistening snow and ice. The entire corpus of the epic seemed to crackle underfoot like an icebound field. But epic cold was generous, for the snow never melted sufficiently to reveal the mud underneath, and it struck the scholars that the climate had been specially invented to allow its characters to hibernate and to reawaken years later. At first they had taken it for granted that epic poetry originating at six thousand feet above sea level would necessarily be set in a snow-laden landscape, but as more detailed study of the ballads demonstrated, the characteristic climate of the Albanian epic corresponded to a much higher altitude than that, and it was safe to suppose without risk of error that the action was located in an area situated between twelve and fifteen thousand feet above sea level — halfway between the earth and the heavens.

They had been making more recordings, many of them providing perfect material, and were quite satisfied with their progress. The work was going well. They had succeeded in completing their inventory of instances where the Albanian epics coincided with those of the ancient Greeks, They had identified the equivalents of the House of Atreus and of Ulysses, and beyond that they had found doubles of Circe, Nausicaa, and Medea, as well as figures identical to the Furies and the Eumenides, whom the Albanians called Ora and Zana, They had undertaken further research on the question of forgetting by looking at details such as the rhapsodes diet, including their consumption of phosphorus. (Oddly enough, it turned out that the highlanders ?diet contained virtually no fish and even less of the minerals, such as phosphorus compounds, that are believed to improve the memory. Any rhapsode offered such nourishment would doubtless have treated it as a magic potion intended either to intensify memory or to annihilate it.) What’s more, they had succeeded in recording a ballad sung by a rhapsode who was thought to have committed a murder the previous week (a “blood debt” paid off), though they failed to establish whether or not this experience had exercised any influence on the poem or its delivery.

Despite all these elements, which complicated their task, Bill and Max felt that they had succeeded in weaving the Albanian epic onto the reels of their tape-recording machine. Each morning when they woke, their eyes turned automatically toward its quietly gleaming lid. They liked to remind themselves that the creation of that device was like a miracle. It seemed to have been decreed that the solution of the Homeric enigma had had to wait until tape recorders had been invented.

Thinking such thoughts bolstered their confidence and swept away their doubts. They imagined their predecessors in Homeric studies who, after struggling to pierce the mystery as they were doing, had eventually given up, and become ironical, not to say sarcastic, about their original enthusiasm, about their own gullibility, and about anyone who might try the same research again. But the tape recorder was the Irishmen’s rampart against failure and ridicule. Earlier scholars, they assumed, would have solved the puzzle of H. long since had they had a tape recorder to help them. The Irishmen were lucky to be alive at the right time: the key to success had fallen into their lap, and in the last analysis, they were simply carrying out the imperatives of their own time.

They had a dreadful fright one night when they thought that the machine had broken down. It was very late, and they were playing back a recorded tape. All at once the volume rose, then the voice slowed down and trailed off into a croak that sounded like a man dying of apoplexy. Bill and Max went as white as sheets. They could not have been more agitated had they been watching one of their nearest and dearest suffering a stroke. They panicked, paced up and down, tore their hair out, turned the instruction manual inside out, until Max suddenly thought of checking the batteries. Thank the Lord! they sighed with relief, when they realized that the only thing wrong was that the batteries were dead.

However, the croaking drawl of the failing tape stuck in their minds. That must be how the entire machinery of the oral epic had run down: its present voice only muffled the death rattle that could be heard nonetheless. The machine had produced just twelve lines for the year 1878 and had painfully squeezed out only four or five for 1913 like the last words of a delirious patient. The epic was now comatose. There was not much chance that it would come to in time to mumble a few more words before freezing forever in the silence of death.

One nighty they recorded the rumble of thunder over the high mountains and another night, the howling wind. They thought that these noises would help them to recreate the right atmosphere back in New York when they would be working on the tapes at home.