Ismail Kadare - The File on H.

No, he concluded, absolutely no part of what was going to be said about him would be true. And to make a long story short, he would now lay out with as much clarity and honesty as he could the real reason for his resignation: on 11 March, at 11:00 A.M. precisely, after seven years of true and loyal service to the kingdom as an informer, he had for the first time nodded off while on duty.

Oh, so that’s it. The governor sighed with relief. It was an open secret that most officials in N— took a nap during working hours, especially during the summer. But Dull wanted to be different. And to make his confession look all the more tragic, the spy had framed it in thick black lines, as if it were a bereavement card.

Nobody had seen him, Dull went on, so he could have confessed nothing, seeing that he was at that time alone in the attic of the Buffalo Inn. He could have kept quiet about it, but he didn’t have it in him to cheat. He had never hidden anything from the state. With only his own conscience to keep watch over him, over the years he had undertaken all the exercises that a good spy should practice on his own, such as training his ear in difficult, not to say extremely hard acoustic conditions — against the howling wind, the pelting rain, the rumble of thunder, the sound of the sea, dogs barking, crows crowing, owls hooting, and so on. He had never allowed himself to be overcome by sleep, neither in sultry summer heat nor in winter’s icy blast; he had kept awake forty-eight hours at a stretch and even resisted, as he crouched in attics, the snoring of his dozing suspects below. In addition, he had always reported in writing everything he had heard and seen, without adding or omitting anything at all, without having recourse to any tricks or wheezes. He had accomplished his task in secret and in silence, as is the lot of every spy; he had made every effort not to breathe a word of it to anyone and to remain unseen, and on the other hand to be as open and frank to the state as was imaginable. For which reason he could not hide what had happened to him on that morning of March 11. The governor sighed deeply before reading on. On March 11, at 11:00 A.M., the informer related, while lying as per usual above the ceiling of the room at the Buffalo Inn where the two Irishmen had been listening for some time to a recording of a rhapsode, he had suddenly become aware of the rumble of a carriage in the backyard of the inn. What carriage is this? he asked himself straightaway. Where has it come from? Why had he not heard it coming sooner? He rubbed his eyes, thinking he must have been drowsing for a second. Drowsing, indeed! To his great shame, he had actually fallen asleep! To such an extent that when he had been wakened by the noise of the carriage, he had not had all his wits about him and so he only half saw a woman as through a thick fog getting into the carriage and speeding off.

There was no point going on at any length about the shock he had suffered. It was not simply that he had failed to recognize the woman, not merely that he had missed the conversation she might have had with the suspects. In fact, it was impossible to tell whether she had actually met them. As for her identity, that would presumably come to light later on. But those were not the real reasons for his upset; far from it. The catastrophe had happened inside himself: it made him feel like a cracked vase, shattered from top to bottom. Suffering intolerable pain, consumed with howling remorse, he had fallen into a state of irremediable despair. He would ask for neither pardon nor comfort. Words of consolation would simply exacerbate his torment. He asked one thing only: the right to retire to a life of oblivion. Which was why he was submitting to the governor in accordance with all necessary regulations, his official request to be relieved of his functions as informer to the kingdom.

The governor gazed for a long while at the signature that he had got to know so well He felt a wave of sorrow and, simultaneously, acute irritation. What sense did this abrupt resignation make? Was it really conscience-stricken remorse, or was it a cover for something else?

Dark and turgid thoughts, heaped one upon the other like rain clouds, floated through his mind. Who could the woman be? Alongside the sadness he experienced at the prospect of life without Dull’s reports — a sharp pang of regret, with a vague touch of nostalgia for his lost youth, as if this episode were the end of an era — he also felt suspicions: had Dull really not recognized the woman, or was he behaving this way so as not to have to give her away?

The governor’s head was throbbing, an aftermath, it seemed, of an odd spell. "Retire to a life of oblivion,” he said aloud, repeating Dull’s words. He would bet that Dull wasn’t going to vanish from circulation, except in order to reappear later as a mysterious visitor, or a prophet, or even as a claimant to the throne! God knows, with a man like that, you could not rule anything out! It sometimes occurred to him that his favorite spy had the potential to rise to inaccessible heights, to the very stratosphere, to the rank of chief spy to the terrestrial globe! That last thought brought a shiver to his spine. He could feel his mind going over the brink, but he was unable to stop himself. The hermit’s ramblings about the eye of the world somewhere in the Central Asian plain had had their effect….

He suddenly realized that he had never actually seen Dull Baxhaja, “The Eaves.” Year after year, he had read his reports without having the slightest notion of the man’s appearance or his voice. Without ever having seen or heard him! And in the whirl of his mind he almost shouted, "Does he really exist?’’

He stood up from his chair sharply to put a stop to this latest wave of dementia.

EACH DROP OF THE LIQUID made the blank stare of the pupil seem even more pitiable. The first drop, then the second, then the third clouded the pupil beneath a glaucous film.

After four days’ treatment with a new and powerful medicine that had only just come onto the market and which they had been amazed to find available in a Tirana pharmacy (apparently the queen mother, who had problems with her eyes too, had ordered it from abroad), Bill had the feeling that his eyesight was improving slightly.

As a result, the scholars' morale, which had been badly dented by Bill’s state of health, took a turn for the better. The gradual lifting of the winter weather contributed to their spirits. That very morning, Bill had been full of good cheer and had shouted out:

"Hey, Max, do you see that bird? It’s flying toward the Accursed Mountains, isn’t it?”

Max turned his head toward the window.

“That’s where it’s heading, all right. It’s a miracle. Bill.”

Bill was perfectly aware of the double meaning of these words. It was a miracle that he had managed to make out a bird in flight and, what’s more, tell where it was flying. Also miraculous was that the flight of the bird confirmed the advent of spring. For most of the year, no birds overflew the Accursed Mountains; that was one of the reasons for the mountains' name.

“A holy miracle, Bill!” Max emphasized, clapping his hands.

Bill's sickness had ruled out their planned trek into the hills for some time, but now it seemed that it could come back onto the agenda. They even asked Shtjefen to hire a carriage for them and to permit Martin to accompany them, if they undertook the expedition.

The trip into the mountains would be the crowning event of their project. They now knew exactly where to find the usual dwellings of eleven rhapsodes, whom they would record, some of them for the second and others for the third time.

Furthermore, they had not abandoned a faint hope, against all reason that they would stumble upon the very last stammerings of the epic machine — that is, lines of verse dealing with some event later than 1913. Since the epic had produced twelve lines for the year 1878 and, thirty-five years later, another five lines for 1913, surely it was possible that twenty years further on it could have secreted another two or three? In fact, given the antiquity of the epic, these decades that seemed so long to contemporaries were just crumbs of time, a few minutes more or less in the time scale of tradition.