Ismail Kadare - The File on H.

Just as the governor had ordered the policemen to set off on the bandits' trail and capture them before they reached the high mountains, Shtjefen recalled an important detail that he had theretofore failed to give: he had recognized one of the vandals as being Frok.

The manhunt began immediately. Fortunately for the pursuers, there was faint moonlight, so the policemen, driving slowly along the main north road with their van lights extinguished, could make out the bandits' silhouettes from a long way off. The first to be caught were the injured man and the two companions who were helping him along. The others were taken a little farther on, just at the foot of the mountains. As for Frok, he was found in his cave, ranting and raving.

The whole town of N— was buzzing with the story from dawn the next day. A small crowd gathered in the street in front of the prison, expecting to catch sight of this band of hooligans, whose motives remained a mystery. Despite the drizzle that began to fall, the crowd did not disperse. They hung around until at long last the prisoners appeared at the end of the street, chained together in pairs. Their waxen faces looked even paler under the locks of hair that the rain had glued to their foreheads. Their eyes bulged as if they were ready to pop out of their sockets.

"It's the hermit Frok! It's Frok!" two or three people whispered fearfully as the small procession of prisoners and policemen drew near. "Look at the rascal!"

"Good God, their hands are all bleeding!" an old woman muttered. "People should not be treated like that."

"No, granny, you've got it wrong," someone explained. "That's not blood you can see on their hands, but rainwater dripping off their rusty handcuffs."

The report that appeared two days later in one of the national newspapers began with a description of the men arrested, referring to them variously as bandits, fanatics, and members of a secret sect. The article went on to give a few details of the case and ended with a picture of the smashed machine and reels, alongside a short and completely impenetrable interview with one of the foreign scholars. "Now the epic is scattered again, just as it was before," one of them had declared with tears in his eyes, pointing to the pile of shredded magnetic tape. "We tried to put it all back together, but it has been torn to pieces, just like that… as if it had been hit by a natural disaster." The journalist emphasized that the foreign scholar had used the word catastrophe several times, qualifying it on one occasion as cosmic .

THEY BARRICADED THEMSELVES in a room at the Globe Hotel for forty-eight hours and refused to meet anyone. On the third day, they took a dray to the Buffalo Inn to collect their cases. The sky was overcast, and it was as cold as a winter’s day. In Martin’s absence, Shtjefen helped them carry their bags to the carriage, almost without a word. They left the wreckage of the tape recorder there, since it was no more than a piece of junk, like most of the reels of now unplayable tape. They were tempted to take some of the less damaged reels with them in the hope that something usable would remain, but in the end Bill said:

"No, let’s leave them behind. I don’t think they’ll ever be of any use.“

He kept rubbing his eyes, and though he did not complain about it, Max guessed that his friend’s sight had suddenly clouded over. As the vial of eye medication had been smashed along with everything else, the course of treatment had been interrupted and Bill’s condition had taken a turn for the worse

They got into the horse-drawn vehicle and turned to take one last look at the door of the inn, whose half-legible sign seemed to cast a shadow of oblivion and abandonment on the surrounding countryside. Every sound and every movement only heightened their feelings of deep bitterness and irreparable loss. They had come close to finding the key to the puzzle of Homer, and just as they were about to grasp it completely it had been torn from their hands, for no reason, for nothing at all! To cheer themselves up, they sometimes said they could always come back next year, or a few years later, and start their research all over again, but they themselves knew it was not true, that they would never come back. For even if they did travel once again to these parts, they would encounter no trace of the rhapsodes, or if they did, they would find only a hand-ful, and they would have gone deaf; and not only the rhapsodes but this whole last laboratory would thenceforth be buried under the ashes of oblivion. The age of the epic was truly over in this world, and it was only by the purest chance that they had had the opportunity of glimpsing its last flickering before it was extinguished for good. They had captured the final glow and then lost it. The veil of night had fallen forever over the epic land.

Yes, that was it: night had fallen forevermore. For although they could not quite admit it to themselves, they could imagine a second visit only as an excursion into an icy sphere whence life had departed, where it would hardly be possible to make out in the dust the marks of the white stick of the Great Bard whose riddle they had sought to solve.

Such were the musings of Bill and Max as their dray took them back to the town of N—, where they were to stay until the end of the week, when the bus would come to take them to the capital.

Unlike their last stay, they did not venture out of the hotel and met no one. The last locals with whom they had any dealings were the manager of the Globe Hotel and Blackie the porter, who lugged their suitcases to the bus station, then hobbled over to the bar, where, for reasons unknown, he drank himself silly and started talking about his first wife, whom no one had ever heard of before.

Some time passed. It was the middle of a perfectly ordinary week for the little town, a week devoid of any event whatsoever with an amount of drizzle exceeding the climatic norm for the season and the place. But the excess of light rain suited the town all the same; it was in harmony not just with its architecture but also in a sense with its whole way of life. The monotonous patter seemed to be an attempt to help people bear the burdens that weighed them down, to alleviate their fate of being at the margin of real life.

The last winter had in fact brought them a whole series of exceptional events, though it had all begun slowly and almost imperceptibly. The arrival of the foreign scholars, the link that had been established once and for all between this place and Homer, the gossip and fantasies of the women, the enigma of the Buffalo Inn, then the arrival of the English-speaking spy, the mysterious attack on the inn, the bloody chains, the horde of journalists from Tirana — these events were more than a backwater like N-- could bear, especially as they all took place in a single season.

Now it was all fading away. In the cafes, the skeptics who had at the start been against all that imaginative nonsense and had then given in to collective pressure were now holding forth with conviction: “It’s our own fault, you know We didn’t need to link the name of our town with a fellow who died four or five thousand years ago! For sheer stupidity, that takes the cake! If it had all been about opening a ketchup factory or the spa people have been going on about for ages, there might have been something to say for the fuss, but that Homeric business was just nonsense! Romantic nationalism, that’s what it is! Outdated fetishism! You might as well try to put a halter on a ghost! And what kind of a ghost, I ask you — a blind ghost!”

The café audiences nodded wisely, as if to say: Yes indeed, how could we have been so stupid as not to think of all that? Good grief, a blind ghost! Well, thank goodness the whole business is over now, without any more harm done, because it could all have turned out much worse.