Ismail Kadare - The File on H.

"Good God!" Daisy screamed inwardly. She had indeed stayed at that hotel. The very thought made part of her brain go numb. What if he had seen her entirely naked? What would that mean? She heard a small voice cry out inside her. If he really had seen her naked, then it would be the same as…

He put his head on hers and tasted the perfume of her hair, and Daisy's mind clouded over. She needed something to support her, and yet all her thoughts converged on a single point: if what he said had already happened, then all the rest was just a technicality.

She felt his hands take hold of her by the waist, and instead of pushing him off, as she had intended to right up to that moment, she let herself go.

He's gone, then, Daisy thought as she heard the garden gate screech on its hinges. She slipped a dressing gown over her bare shoulders and went to the window, pulling back the curtain. It was still raining outside, as if nothing had happened. He could at least have told her what the Irishmen had said about her, she mused, as she stood there still dazed. She hadn't managed to ask the question. Besides, she wasn't that interested anymore. Something had entered her whole being, and she didn't want to thing about anything else. She stepped slowly toward her bathroom, turned on the hot water tap, and got into the bath.

She was still soaking in the water when her husband came home for lunch.

Shortly after, as she laid the table for the midday meal, the governor reported rumors that were making the rounds about the king getting engages to a Hungarian countess.

"Is something the matter?" he asked, realizing with surprise that she was not taking any interest in gossip about the royals. "Have you got a headache?"

"Yes," she answered. "I've had a headache all morning."

He bowed his head over his plate, feeling guilty as he always did when Daisy's headaches were mentioned. He was well aware that the main cause of his wife's migraines was the fact that she had never had a child.

Lunch proceeded in that vein, with sparse remarks from the one to the other, then Daisy declared that she was going to lie down for a while. After a short rest, her husband went back to the office.

It was the same routine in the evening, the only difference being that the governor, instead of going back to the office after dinner, shut himself in his study; Daisy, for her part, went back to her bedroom.

She tried to sleep but could not manage it. She was now sure that she would have to face a sleepless night marked by the resonating, lonely chimes of the bronze clock. She could not understand why she had insomnia. It was the first time that she had deceived her husband, but she felt no remorse. No, there was something else, an unbearable emptiness, along with the feeling of having cheapened herself completely. Where did that feeling come from? She could have laughed at herself sourly: of course she knew where it came from! She had been dreaming of something altogether different — of an affair with a foreign Homeric scholar, of his speaking English, etc., etc. — and she had ended up in the arms of a mere informer. And not just any informer! She had slept with the spy who was eavesdropping on the man of her dream. Such irony…

As if that were not enough, she could already imagine the scene with the bleary-eyed gynecologist, animated by sheer inquisitiveness: "With whom?…" No, no, no, she screamed inside herself, she would never tell him the truth. She would make up stories, fabricate a novelette, or an accident (she was a bit tipsy, at a dance, and what's more, it was a complete coincidence that…), but she would never let out what had really happened. That thought calmed her somewhat. The throbbing in her forehead eased off. Perhaps I am not pregnant, she thought; and she became quite serene. She hadn't needed to get so worried. In the end, she was neither the first nor the last woman to whom such things happened. Half of the films that were made contained episodes of this kind, and when you think of books — Anna Karenina, Madame Bovary, and so many others whose titles she couldn't remember… Oh, if only she could go to sleep! Her migraine had subsided in fact, and everything was getting better, apart from her forehead…. Where was that cruel noise coming from — a hammer beating time, a thudding bell, quite outside her head?… She buried her head under the pillow in the hope that she would manage to muffle the reverberations, and at that moment she felt her husband turning over in bed, as if he had guessed what was going on in his wife's mind. Could he possibly have seen through it all, or was the noise really coming from outside, just to increase her distress? Her skull was still hurting when she heard her husband say:

"Someone's knocking at the door!"

"What!" She sat up with a start; she did not understand what was going on at all.

She saw his arm move and stretch out to switch on the bedside lamp. His voice made an entirely different sound in the illuminated bedroom:

"Someone is knocking at the front door!"

The knocks could now be made out distinctly, and over the rattle, you could hear someone pleading:

"Mr. Governor, sir! Mr. Governor, sir!"

It was his voice, she realized with horror. She shook her head from side to side as if to get rid of such an absurd idea. Her husband leaped out of bed and went to the window.

"Mr. Governor, Mr. Governor!" came the cry from outside, but now it was firmer and clearer.

"The English-speaking informer!" the governor said aloud, quite taken aback. "Something must have happened…."

She stared wide-eyed at her husband as he blundered around the bedroom, looking for his shirt, then his trousers, then his jacket.

"No!" she croaked, in a sob that sounded so different than her usual voice that despite his agitation, the governor stopped momentarily and looked hard at her, as if he could not quite believe that the sound had come from her. "Don't go!"

Several possible explanations for their being disturbed like this at such an hour were thundering around in her brain. Good news could not have brought the spy to hammer and yell at the door. My God, she moaned to herself, what can this new misfortune be? Maybe he had gone half crazy and was coming to take her away, to tell her husband about their relationship and to persuade him to let her go, or else he was there to humiliate him, or to mock them both, or simply to kill her husband, or perhaps to apologize. At that point, all these surmises seemed equally plausible, and just as incredible. Perhaps he had repented of what he had done, or worse still, maybe he had had a stupid crisis of conscience and, as the committed servant of the state that she had supposed he must be, was on his way to confess to his boss that he had broken a cardinal rule of conduct by revealing state secrets in exchange for a moment of pleasure…. But I did not ask him anything, I didn't even get so far as to tell him why I had asked him to come here! she protested to herself, painfully trying to justify herself. All these ideas whirled, around in her head as she stared hard at her husband, getting dressed.

"Don't go!" she pleaded a second time.

Containing his own excitement, which was no less acute than his wife's, though of quite a different order, the governor at long last replied:

"Daisy, something has obviously happened, but there is no reason for panic."

She did not have time to ask him a third time not to go out as he was already tumbling down the staircase. It's all over, she though. There was no way of stopping things now.

She jumped out of bed and went to the window. She heard the knocker at the door once again, then the voice, now growing hoarse with the shouting: "Mr. Governor, sir! Sir!" She opened the window, and the cold, rain-soaked air chilled her through the nightdress. She could hear her husband's footsteps, and then the metallic screech of the bolts being drawn, which made her spine tingle. She held on to the sill so as not to fall, and listened to the men's voices overlapping each other. She could not make out what they were saying: their words were punctuated by groans and exclamations of anger and indignation.