Ismail Kadare - The File on H.

She felt suddenly that if she should have a sleepless night, her insomnia would be caused not by her being attracted to one or the other of them, as she had hoped, or by bitter disillusionment, but by something else, by the effort she was making to come to terms with the real appearance of the two visitors. During the night, and maybe for many more nights, she would suffer the changes that were needed to make her just as receptive to the reality of the Irishmen as she had been to her imagination of them.

Meanwhile the introductions were over, and the two foreigners felt that momentary awkwardness of blundering into a social gathering that had been in progress for some time. They smiled again at everyone, then once more at various individuals, until the governor seeking to put everyone at ease, asked:

“Would you care for anything to drink, gentlemen?”

The thought of drinks and prospect of the visitors choices relaxed the company somewhat. Everyone expected the foreigners to be connoisseurs of fine wines. Oddly enough, they were not. Perhaps this was what prompted the regulars to notice that the guests attire was also quite surprising. It was, so to speak, rather casual, to put it mildly. All of which contributed to loosening the governor’s tongue:

“I learned of your arrival in our fair city and I thought, They are far from their families, in a foreign land, in the back of beyond, and quite alone. That’s right? So then I thought you might like to come to play bridge, that way you would feel less cut off….”

The governor spoke slowly and articulated his words so as to be understood, and the foreigners nodded their heads.

"We thank thee, good sir." said the one with the crew-cut hair. “Albanians are for hospitality renowned.”

“Do you expect to stay for a while?” Mr. Rrok inquired.

The foreigners shrugged their shoulders.

“Methinks a goodly length of time.”

“We are delighted." the governor replied.

“Thank you, good sir.”

Daisy thought that she recognized something familiar about their intonation … classes on ancient Albanian versification at the girls’ school. But she found it hard to concentrate.

“From what I have heard about you, you intend to study our folklore?” said the governor.

One of the visitors raised his eyebrows as if to delay replying, while the governor exchanged a rapid glance with the magistrate, the only person with whom he had shared his suspicions.

“How can I put it? Verily, indeed … and perchance other matters too,” came the reply, from the one called Bill Norton.

“I'm sorry, but I did not quite understand. ”

The other foreigner furrowed his brow once again, “We purport to have much ado with your ancient song,” he explained. “And perchance …”

“'Dawn came up from the couch of her reclining …,’“ Daisy recited to herself, the opening line of one of the epic poems in all the anthologies. That was the rhythm she could hear in the speech of the two visitors.

“… and perchance with something most closely allied to it,” the fair one went on. “We mean to say: Homer,"

“Your good health!” said the postmaster’s wife, as she raised her glass of port.

Despite her powdered face, she was visibly impatient to have these boring questions and answers come to an end and to learn more interesting things from the foreigners. Daisy had mentioned something about their having brought with them the very latest in gramophones. So what were people dancing to these days over there, from New York to California?

“You mentioned Homer?” the governor continued. “As far as I recall, a blind old Greek poet?”

“Why, yes!” Bill exclaimed in English, to Daisy’s great joy. She turned triumphantly to the other women in the room, as if to say: Now you can see that they’re real foreigners, speaking in English like that!

“Really, Homer? For three hundred years there has been some debate about whether there was one or several Homers… .”

Mr. Rrok, the factory owner, straightened his bow tie, spread a smile across his face from ear to ear, and shyly intervened:

“Pardon me, gentlemen. Out here in the back of beyond, we do not have much by way of scholarship. Myself, for instance, as I told you a few moments ago, I deal with soap — Venus soap, toilet soap for ladies.… Ha ha, that sort of thing I have at my fingertips. But as for deep questions of philosophy, Homer, Verdi, or what have you, I haven’t got a clue. So please excuse my ignorance, but tell me: what connection can there be between Homer and your esteemed journey to Albania? If I am not mistaken, Homer lived four or five thousand years ago and quite a long way away from here, didn’t he?”

The postmaster’s wife could not restrain herself from a loud sigh of exasperation. Daisy had always told her that Mr. Rrok had no more brains than his bars of soap had legs.

The foreigners exchanged smiles that the governor judged to be full of meaning.

Verily, about three thousand years ago, good sir,” one of them said. “ And far away from this place. But the connection exists nonetheless.”

The shadowy smiles that the governor had thought full of meaning returned to their faces. Hmm, now they’re making fun of us openly, he thought. They’re definitely trying to pull our legs. How could one believe that they were really looking for a solution to the mystery of Homer in a small town that had never had any connection whatsoever with the poet? Couldn’t they have found a more plausible excuse for coming? But even on that score they didn’t seem to have made much of an effort. Provincial they must have thought peasants living in a backwater…. Ha! We shall see who has the last laugh! You two may have seen all sorts of things., the governor continued to himself while maintaining his unwavering smile, you may have looked at skyscrapers and things of that kind, but what you’ve never met before is Dull Baxhaja. When he gets on your tail he’ll stick there like a leech, no matter where you are — on top of a skyscraper or in the ninth circle of hell!

The thought of Dull calmed him down for a moment. Then his mind went back to the note from the Minister of the Interior, or rather to the phrase about their being "caught in flagrante,” after which, the minister said, "your mission will be terminated, the remainder being my concern.“ To tell the truth, the governor had no clear idea of what would constitute being "caught in flagrante.“ On this point the minister’s epistle seemed to have been written hurriedly, even impatiently: he had gone so far as to give the bizarre advice to treat the foreigners well “even after they’ve been nabbed,” “Treat them as before, but get them to understand that they’ve been caught in the act and that there’s no point trying to get off the hook."

Now that he thought about it, the minister’s letter seemed even odder than it had at first sight. It all might have seemed part of a game, if the minister hadn’t repeated how important the whole matter was, much more important that a provincial official could imagine.

Taking pains not to be noticed, the governor looked at his watch. At the present moment, Pjeter Prenushi should surely have managed to open the suitcases and to photograph the piles of notes and documents that the customs report said they contained. And then, following the orders he had been given, he would have what looked like the most interesting texts translated, so as to get them on his boss’s desk by dawn.

Feeling content, the governor was able now to smile without effort at everyone, including those who in his view did not deserve his attention. Pjeter Prenushi would definitely be running over to the ridiculous shack above whose front door a signboard announced in blue hand lettering, Photo Lux , while the owner of the premises, bent double by his painful piles, would be waiting inside in a state of terror. He would stop trembling only when he saw that he had to deal with texts written in English. Shots of corpses, of stolen bracelets, and especially of naked women, gave him the shakes.