Ismail Kadare - The File on H.

That is what the barflies thought, but the opinion of the town’s gynecologist that Thursday afternoon was rather different. He was standing at the large bay window on the first floor of his house, part of which had been converted into a private clinic, and was watching the young woman whom he had just examined walking down the narrow alley in the rain, stepping carefully so as to avoid the puddles.

On the doctor’s elongated face, somewhere between the chin and the lower lip (because of its curious shape, the doctor’s face differed from a normal physiognomy in all its proportions) there hovered something like a smile, expressing either a mildly ironical anxiety or the pleasure of having a morbid curiosity finally satisfied after years of waiting.

No, it wasn’t all that easy to remove ail the consequences of the two foreigners’ visit to N—.

His eyes swept over the coldly glinting medical instruments lined up on the white-painted shelves. No, to make all the consequences disappear from that woman, for instance, he was going to have to use certain of those instruments on hen

“Incredible!” he exclaimed, as he looked down once more at the alleyway, where she was no more to be seen. He had been waiting so long for the day when she would come for treatment at his clinic! Season followed upon season, and still she did not come. “It seems she’ll never deceive her governor!”

But now she had come, just as he had stopped believing that she would ever need his services. As he had expected, she was pregnant.

She had sat with flushed cheeks as he pronounced his verdict: “Madam, you are pregnant.” Without waiting for him to ask her to explain anything, as if they had enjoyed a tacit understanding for years, she had begun to talk. No, she wouldn’t hide it from him, there was no point in any case, she would hide nothing from him, she had had an adventure with one of the two learned scholars, more precisely with the one who had glaucoma. … That was what she had said, in an almost mechanical prattle, as if she had learned it by heart, while she hurriedly put her clothes back on, her eyes fixed firmly on the exit door, and she hadn’t answered his question about the date on which she could have the operation, nor did she respond to his final words of assurance that even though he was only a country doctor he was a gentleman nonetheless and that she could trust that her husband would never know anything at all…

Well, well, well, the doctor mused, still standing at the window, made opaque by the rain. Who could guess what really goes on in the back of beyond? And he felt a pang of regret, like a bout of rheumatism brought on by the damp, that he had never made a record of all the bizarre episodes that had cropped up in the course of his long careen

It must have been the same day that Bill Norton and Max Ross, wrapped in traveling capes, stood on the deck of the Durres-Bari steamer and watched the coast of Albania recede into the distance. Actually, only Max was watching, because Bill could not really see anything anymore. During the week they had spent waiting for the ferry, Max had tried to persuade his companion to resume the eye drop treatment, but Bill received these pleas with profound indifference. Once, he said he would start proper treatment when he got back to New York, but his tone made his fatalistic attitude pretty clear.

Max looked at his friend from the side and recalled that he too had once felt resigned to a disastrous end. Homer’s revenge. He tried in vain to rid himself of that thought, but it had wormed its way into his mind. Perhaps that was how the Blind Bard would always take his revenge on those who sought to solve his riddle …?

The mere thought made Max shudder. Was the loss of sight perhaps a necessary precondition for entering the Homeric night?

He shook himself as if to cast off these gloomy musings. Remembering that he had bought the day’s newspaper on the dockside and still had it in his pocket, he took it out and, struggling to prevent the wind from blowing the paper away, said to Bill:

“Hey, look! We’re in the news….”

“Really?”

They found a wind-sheltered spot, and Max read the article to himself first of all.

“The trial of the bandits will start very soon,” he said to Bill a few minutes later in the midst of his reading. “There’s an interesting hypothesis about the instigators “

“Really?”

“They’re saying something about Serbs,” said Max as he tried to flatten down the wind-blown newspaper.

“Do you remember that monk with the jolly face?” Bill remarked.

The paper in Max’s hands flapped about dement-edly.

“Listen to what it says here, though: ‘This is not the first time that Slav chauvinists have brutally attacked scholars working on Albania’s classical roots. Any mention of the Illyrian origins of the Albanians, in particular, arouses in them barbaric and murderous jealousy, which is, alas, just as widespread here, in the Balkans.' Well… hang on, what’s this? ‘Anyone who deals directly or indirectly with this topic is in their eyes an enemy. And the hand that wielded the crowbar that struck down the Yugoslav scholar Milan Sufflay in a Zagreb back street some ten years ago did not tremble at the prospect of slaying two Homeric researchers from across the Atlantic.’"

Bill touched the place on his head where he had been hit. He could still feel the swelling.

“But look here, there’s something else about us on the inside pages."

Max’s brow furrowed impatiently as he read on. He nodded once or twice, seemed about to smile, then muttered: “Unbelievable!”

“So what is it?” Bill asked.

“It’s incredible, Bill!” said Max, without raising his eyes from the paper. “The epivent we were waiting forwell, here it is! And do you know what the subject is? It’s the most recent episode you could possibly imagine: it’s an epic poem … about us!”

“What are you saying?”

“Look here. Oh, but of course you can’t make out the letters. … Sorry, Bill, I got carried away. Wait, I’ll read it aloud. “A black aprath rose from the waves….’ That’s how it begins.”

“What? What do you mean?” Bill stammered.

“A black aprath rose from the waves.”

“What’s an aprath? I don’t get it.”

“I suppose it’s an Albanian version of the German word Apparat , meaning a piece of equipment — that’s the tape recorder,” said Max. “Yes it has to be that. Hey listen to the rest of it:

“A black aprath rose from the waves.

Some said it came for our good.

It will bring only grief, said the others.

Some said it brings frozen nightingales to life.

By God it freezes the lahuta, said the others . …”

Max looked up as if to share his friend’s astonishment. He could not yet believe what he had read. “Is there more?” Bill asked, “Go on!.”

Max swallowed and continued to recite from the page:

“Hermit Frok came out of the cave

Where he had been hiding for seven years

Some think him a good man —

He is evil incarnate, say the others.

O Lord! He lay into the aprath,

He made it bleed black bile —

Slowly pulled out all its entrails, A

nd the hills and the heavens shook with his cries….”

Max glanced up at his friend once again. Bill had recently acquired a kind of detached stare that seemed quite impenetrable.

“It really is about us…,” he said reflexively in Albanian.

“What a tragic misunderstanding!”

It was too late now to try to put it right. By the fact of that misunderstandings they had now become an integral part of a mysterious universe. Things had come full circle.