Ismail Kadare - The File on H.

The governor went over the case at great length in discussions with his subordinates and came to the conclusion that the leaking of the secret was not in this case, as it would have been in ordinary circumstances, the result of someone’s unavowed wish to forewarn the suspects so as to help them keep out of danger. In his judgment, what confronted him was a phenomenon of a diametrically opposite kind, which is to say that the leak, far from being prompted by compassion for the two foreigners, was in all probability the result of a surge of patriotism among the inhabitants of N who had received the spy from Tirana with great enthusiasm. (So you think you can step right in with your fat cigars and your funny machines and do whatever you want in these parts? Well, Mr. Foreigner, you’d better think again! You can’t even begin to imagine what we’re going to do to you, Mr. Foreigner, sir! We’re going to get to the bottom of all your little plans and even of your English!) That’s what seemed to be the real reason for the leak.

This analysis of the rumor’s origin (a resurgence of the patriotic ardor that had admittedly been somewhat muted in recent years in N) put the governor’s mind at rest, so he promptly turned a deaf ear to the further circulation of the news.

Meanwhile the rumor kept on spreading. Even the new spy’s real name was now on the lips of the local gossips. There was mention of his special services to the king in Tirana, of his sentimental involvements with society ladies in the capital, including the wives of ambassadors, and much else besides. He was a spy of the very first rank, you couldn’t deny it, the local underlings admitted with envy; he was accustomed to working in the vaults of palaces and cathedrals, not in bug-ridden, dung-filled barns, as they were. Dull Baxhaja, who had occasion to crouch alongside the man from the capital in the roof space of the Buffalo Inn, must be feeling quite diminished. But it would actually be a great honor for him to be allowed to work alongside such a star. Unless Dull had been considered unnecessary now and had been moved off the Irish job? Yes, sure, he must have been taken off the job. What use would he be now that the maestro was there?

According to another rumor, however, Dull was carrying on with his surveillance of the foreigners. It was only common senses even the man from Tirana couldn’t stay up in the rafters twenty-four hours a day, and in any case that wasn’t even essential He listened only at quite specific times, and at night he would go back to his comfortable hotel bedroom, leaving Dull in the attic.

One day, Daisy said to her husband:

“ I heard about the arrival of a spy who speaks English, but you said nothing about it to me!"

"So what? It’s not as if it were important news!”

She carefully watched her husband’s eyes shifting desperately around the sitting room, seeking something to look at.

“Thank you at least for not trying to deny it this time.”

“Eh?” he said, as he left the room, still pretending to be hunting for something he had lost.

Daisy sank into an armchair and stared at the carpet. From time to time she was overcome by a particular kind of sadness, a slow-moving sadness like a slab of melting snow, more bearable than the pangs of real, acute melancholy. She had not made up her mind to go all the way to the inn. She had dithered and backed off, not seeing how to overcome some of the obstacles, such as whom to choose to accompany her and what explanation to invent for her visit. Sometimes she calmed herself down by saying that what had to happen had happened, that the eavesdropping had been put in place and she could be of no further use to the foreigners, but the opposite thought immediately followed; maybe they had not yet said anything compromising, maybe the disaster could still be stayed. And so the temptation to dash out to the inn would come to the fore again, and she would work out the words she would say to her only real friend, the postmaster’s wife, to explain why she had gone to the inn, and then she would once more fall prey to doubts and hesitations: How much of the truth should she tell? And just what would she say exactly?…

This is utter torture, she would groan inwardly from time to time. She had never thought she would be so in. capable of making a decision. Yet she had to act at once! If she could only manage to tell the Irishmen not to talk about her, so that the filthy ears of the eavesdroppers would at least not hear her name! Maybe they would take the hint and understand all the rest?

The skies were still overcast, but March had nonetheless changed the quality of the light and widened the expanse of the heavens. Bill stood at the window and looked outside, while Max was busy with the tape recorder behind him. The rhapsode’s monotonous chant made him sleepy.

Bill was startled out of his daydream by the noise of a carriage in the courtyard of the inn. He leaned closer to the windowpane, wiped off the condensation, but still could not make out who it was walking back to the carriage. For a second he thought he recognized the silhouette, but the form blurred into vagueness once again.

Who is that woman? he wondered. I think I’ve seen her somewhere before. He rubbed the glass pane with his hand and then shuddered from head to toe as he realized that the haze belonged not to the image itself but to his own vision of it. Were his eyes now so weak as to prevent his making out a person only a few yards away?

He had been increasingly concerned about his eyesight for some time. “Galloping glaucoma,” he mumbled, diagnosing the malady that had recently become his living nightmare. He closed his eyes, then immediately opened them, hoping that he had suffered only a momentary loss of vision and he would now be able to see the woman getting into the horse-drawn carriage. But it was as before, and everything, even the carriage, seemed to have been swallowed up by fog.

“Max,” he said, turning around to speak to his friend. “We must go to Tirana right away. I can hardly see anything anymore.”

The governor could hardly believe his eyes when he slit open the envelope. Instead of Dull’s daily report, it contained a letter of resignation.

“Have I gone mad or has Dull?" he cried out. “Resigning just when the affair of the two foreigners is about to bear fruit?”

To the governor’s amazement, the informer began his letter by begging to be excused for causing such trouble, but once he had read the submission, the governor would probably think that either he himsel had lost his marbles or it was the present writer. Dull who had gone off his rocker.

But no, the spy went on, it was not so: the governor was not hallucinating, and he. Dull, had not gone mad. He was in full possession of his mental and physical faculties, and he was asking to be relieved of his responsibilities.

Malicious persons, he continued, would no doubt attempt to explain this request as a petty maneuver related to dissatisfaction over his rank, for instance, or his salary, etc., but he trusted that the governor knew Dull well enough to believe that he had never allowed ambition or personal interests to influence his work. People of ill will would perhaps attribute his resignation to the humiliation, or even the jealousy he had allegedly experienced on the arrival of the English-speaking spy. Coming from them, such an explanation was entirely natural, since just as a cucumber is nine-tenths water, so their lives consisted in equal proportion of offenses suffered and resentments harbored.

Nine-tenths water! the governor repeated to himself. Dull knew so many things! More than a mere spy, that man had the makings of a university professor, he thought.

That’s what such sorts might think, the spy wrote, whereas the governor himself certainly remembered that it was he. Dull, who had clamored, perhaps to the point of irritating the governor, for the detachment to N— of his colleague from the capital.