Ismail Kadare - The File on H.

At the point when he had got into position by the air shaft leading to the cavern, the two suspects (most of the talking was done, however, by Frok) were exchanging hypotheses about where the eye of the world might be found. As far as Dull could understand, they thought (but most especially Frok, who had asserted this explicitly) that the world, that is to say the terrestrial globe, possessed eyes, just like any other living being, eyes that, in his view, were to be found respectively in the Atlantic Ocean, somewhere between Greenland and the North Sea, and in the Central Asian plains, "One of the eyes is now very much dimmed," the hermit went on, "and the planet sees poorly through it, but it would be wrong to think as most people do that the bad eye is the one located in the steppes. In fact, it is the opposite: the weakened eye is the one that I have pinned down to the ocean floor and the healthy eye is the one I have placed in the dusty plains of Asia, That is how it is, brother….”

It has to be said. Dull added, that although the Serbian monk took little part in this conversation, he did nothing to contradict the hermit’s assertions. Dushan became a little more talkative when Frok began to explain how he had recently learned to distinguish normal lightning from lightning that the heavens aborted, just like a pregnant woman miscarrying. Overall there was one miscarriage for every seven flashes of lightning, the hermit said, but there were troubled times when the proportion of stillborn lightning was much higher.

That was the tenor of the first part of the conversation, Dull reported, saying that he had not managed to work out whether the monk Dushan already knew the hermit or this was his first visit to the cave. But the spy was now going to relate the second part of the conversation, which was in no way comparable to the foregoing, and begged the governor to forgive him for reproducing excerpts in direct speech, a form that in his view would give a more faithful rendering of what was actually said.

“So now he’s going to write dialogue!” the governor exclaimed. “Not what you’d call an uninventive fellow!”

According to Dull’s report, the hermit returned to the question of the eyes of the world, or more exactly to the weakening of sight in one of the eyes, which was certainly going to go completely blind, turning the planet into a one-eyed beings and then he went on about what that would mean for life on earth, and also alluded to the future when the remaining eye would go out in its turn, leaving the world completely blind, until the Serbian monk interrupted:

MONK: I guess you know about the two foreigners— they’re Irish, I believe — who’ve been staying at the Buffalo Inn for some time?

HERMIT: I don’t want to know about them.

MONK: You’re quite right. I feel the same way about them. They are snakes, and poisonous ones at that!

HERMIT: Snakes? Those two? Don’t make me laugh!

MONK: To begin with, the pair of them made the same impression on me. They seemed quite laughable. But when I discovered the purpose of their work, my hair stood on end. To call them snakes is short of the mark. They are the very devil, the devil incarnate!

HERMIT: And what is the work they are doing? I’ve heard say they have some kind of casket with which they wind human voices like string around a drum, so as to unwind it later on.

MONK: Yes, that’s the satanic device that they’re using to perpetrate their crime quite openly and brazenly, and people just look on and gawk without suspecting the calamity that will come of it. You called it a casket, I would rather call it a coffin, and that’s an understatement. It’s far, far worse than that. Compared to what that box means, brother Frok, death itself would be sweet.

HERMIT: They say it’s a kind of trunk

MONK: A trunk indeed! If they had brought the plague, or a gallows, or a guillotine, it would have been better than visiting that horror upon us! A trunk, you say? It’s a crate from hell, brother Frok! I'd better tell you all about it

At this point in the report, the spy requested that the governor forgive him for reverting to classical narrative form, for technical reasons upon which he preferred not to expatiate for fear of irritating his esteemed reader beyond reasonable endurance.

Thereupon the monk proceeded to explain to the hermit how and why the two foreigners were maleficent, and why the casket — the device, or tape recorder, as it was called — was truly infernal. “It is a sinister instrument,” he told him, “more evil than witches who dry up springs or wither grass. For if the witch may lay waste grass and water, this machine walls up the ancient songs, imprisons them within itself, and you know as well as I do what happens to a song when you wall up its voice. It’s like when you wall up a man’s shadow. He wilts and dies. That’s what happens to him. It doesn’t matter to me, I’m only a foreigner here myself, my land and my Serbian songs are far away, in a safe place, but I deplore for your sake what’s going on. With this machine these Irishmen will cut limbs from your body. They’ll mow down all those old songs that are the joy of life, and without them it will be like being deaf. You’ll wake up one fine morning and find yourselves in a desert, and you’ll hold your heads in your hands; but meanwhile those devils will have fled far away. They’ll have robbed you of everything, and you’ll be condemned to deafness for the rest of your lives. Generation upon generation of your descendants will curse you for having been so careless. It’s as I say.”

Dull went on to report that at first Frok just listened to the monk attentively, but then he began to snort, and you could tell he was getting excited.

“You’re making me angry!” he shouted at the monk. "So now tell me what should be done!”

The monk didn’t rush to provide an answer to that question. He advised the hermit to think long and hard about the appropriate steps before taking any action. Then he told him quite suddenly that it was getting late, that he was in a hurry, and that he would return some other day to talk again about the whole affair.

The spy concluded his report by noting that as he was returning to the inn, he noticed the monk striding off along the main road into the far distance.

THROUGH HALF-CLOSED EYES, Daisy could just about make out a tuft of her husband’s grayish hair on the pillow a few inches away. Still only half awake, she thought. It must be Sunday. Every other day of the week she woke up alone, since her husband went to his office early, and it was only on Sundays that he lay in bed as she did every day.

She opened her eyes fully and looked at her husband for a few moments. His sleeping face asked for pity. The radiators must be off, she thought, and she pulled the blankets up over his shoulders. The last traces of the night’s warmth had all but vanished from the bedroom. The mist on the windowpanes had broken up into rivulets here and there, another sign that the heat had gone. The winter really did not want to go away this year. Daisy’s mind went over futile and sometimes quite meaningless trifles, as it did every morning, before wandering toward the subject of the two Irishmen, whom she had not seen for quite some time. It was thinking of the winter that kept dragging on that had led her by a curious jump to thoughts of the Irish scholars. They had said something about the end of the winter, hadn’t they? Ah yes, that warmer weather would perhaps allow them to set off on a trek into the mountains.

To get even farther away from me! she said inwardly, with a touch of bitterness that was no more consistent than the condensation on the windowpanes. She had never imagined (it’s hard to tell why, but even though it was Bill who was mainly in her mind, she always thought of them now as a pair and called them “they”), no, it had never even crossed her mind that they might prove so uninterested in her. But she wasn’t offended. She was convinced that it was not true indifference but a side effect of their absence, along with the practical difficulties they would have had if they had tried to come and visit more often. They’re so caught up in this Homer business, she thought sourly. She was not far short of feeling outright hostility for all that ancient rubbish.