Ismail Kadare - The File on H.

“You really are amazing, ” Mr. Rrok was saying, with his face right up to theirs, smiling under their noses. “Myself, for instance, I deal in soap, and I reckon I understand a bit about the world insofar as well, we all have something to do with soap, don’t we, all day long, from dawn to dusk. So, as a result, when I think about it, I say to myself, Soap is important, universal, and it seems everybody else thinks that way too. Because in fact you know it’s not a joke, it’s something that has to do with the body. There’s soap for shampoo, there’s toilet soap that does its job well or not so well, aside from all questions of scent, not to mention any other qualities or defects, for instance excessive acidity, which can be harmful, as you may well understand, to the delicate skins of ladies, especially when they wash their private … Ha! So anyway, I can have the illusion that everyone thinks of soap just like I do. But then along come two gentlemen like you, who are not in the least interested in my bars of soap and who have got it into their heads to come all the way to the end of the world to stay in a pigsty of an inn and try to find out about a blind guy who lived a million years ago! What a funny world this is!”

“What a dismal idiot," the governor said to himself. The revenue inspector had not been wrong a couple of years ago when, over some card-game squabble, he had told Mr. Rrok to go jump into his own vat and tern himself into a bar of soap.

With the help of her maid, Daisy served coffee. As the governor sipped from his cup, his mind wandered to the hotel manager, who would by now have had ample time to sift through the entire contents of the travelers’ suitcases.

The foreigners’ faces were now showing signs of real weariness. And the evanescence of the face powder of the postmaster’s wife was an unmistakable sign, well known in the tiny social world of N—, that midnight was nigh. Despite everyone’s efforts at stifling their yawns, sleep hovered in the air.

A lull in the conversation gave the foreigners an opportunity to make their farewells. They stood up and bowed and, on the landings were asked by those showing them out whether they remembered the way back to their hotel or if they would like an escort. Then Mr. Rrok declared that he would like to walk them back himself, which aroused both general approval and a degree of regret, though at this late hour of the night no one could rightly say what the grounds of the regret were, or if indeed they had any relevance to soap.

Shortly after, the other guests took their leave, and the house soon resounded only to the couple’s own footsteps. In the tense silence of the night, the sound seemed to take the two away from each other, though they must have ended up in the bedroom together. As she undressed before joining her husband in bed, Daisy tried her best to put the two foreigners (or, more exactly, one of them) out of her mind, but once the bedroom had become totally dark and silent and the faint squares of the windowpanes could be made out opposite the marital bed, at long last, as if she had found the path on which to direct her thoughts, she turned them with complete naturalness toward the man she had just met, just as she used to do when she was a girl. What could he be doing at that moment?

The two Irishmen got back to their hotel a little before midnight, Dull Baxhaja wrote in his report. As per instructions, he had gone up into the attic, and well before they got back from the party, in fact at ten-thirty precisely, he had taken his position over the room where the foreigners were staying. After checking the state of the ceiling (the gaps between the boards would permit him not only to hear whatever might be said but also to see a bit), after checking also what kind of creaking would occur if and when he was obliged to move one or another of his limbs, and, furthermore, after ascertaining the risk of falling through a rotten plank (even now, after so many years, he still felt horror at the memory of the night when his right leg had suddenly gone through the ceiling of the Shkjezis' bedroom, sticking down like a surrealist lamp fixture and giving the old lady the heart attack that took her to an early grave) — after having taken all precautions, then, and despite the fact that the rafters were crawling with bugs and other repulsive creatures, he applied the rules recently issued by counterespionage personnel management (rules intended in the first place to minimize drowsiness and above all actual sleep among on-duty surveillance operatives) and took out his little tin of personal bugs and spread them about his person.

As mentioned at the head of the present report, Dull Baxhaja continued, the two foreigners had returned to their room a little before midnight, and they had begun to pace back and forth, from corridor to bathroom door, as if worried about something. From time to time they exchanged a few words in their own language, which made no sense at all to the present observer, and that was not because some of the words were uttered by one or the other of the suspects while brushing his teeth: as the governor would know, the present observer was able to distinguish words pronounced by individuals having not just a toothbrush but any manner of object in their mouths, be it a pipe, a cigar, or, as in the case of Maria K., who habitually put it there during lovemaking (the governor will pardon the following), an organ that cannot possibly be named in the context of the present report. The present writer was thus perfectly able not only to grasp all such speech but also to understand a suspect who spoke while chewing, or with a sore throat, or with three-quarters of his teeth missing, and in many analogous circumstances, to such a degree that — as the governor must have been informed — Dull Baxhaja, “The Eaves, ” was the one and only spy in the whole Northern Zone of the kingdom capable of interpreting the speech of a man struck down with apoplexy. No, to repeat, if he had been unable to understand the dialogue between the two suspects, it was not because they were brushing their teeth most of the time (a dialogue, and a brushing, that went on for some considerable length of time), but for the simple and obvious reason that the conversation took place in English, an idiom that, as the governor must surely be aware the sleuth Dull Baxhaja did not understand.

After brushing their teeth, the two foreigners opened their suitcases, took out their pajamas and went to bed. It must be emphasized that they exchanged yet more words in the dark before going to sleep. Nothing to report for the rest of the night. Nobody knocked at the door; our two customers therefore did not open it; nor did either of them go to the window so no signal was given by lantern by lighter, or by any other means. The only detail perhaps worth recording: one of them went to sleeps as the observer realized straightaway but the other stayed awake, tossed and turned in bed, sighing heavily and scratching himself. With the exception of the last detail whose cause was easily guessed (though the hotel manager had sworn thrice over that there were no bedbugs here), it was hard to understand why one of the miscreants should have sunk into slumber while the other stayed awake and even harder to grasp the reasons for the contortions and sighs of the latter. The sleuth would like simply to observe that his long experience had taught him that in similar cases — in other words., where the miscreants are two in number — it is not unusual for fear, doubt, anxiety indeed even thoughts of betrayal, to prevent one of the partners in crime from sleeping in peace. So that was perhaps the reason for the difference in behavior between the two in the present case also. But there could of course have been other reasons: for example one of them may have had a guilty conscience and as everyone knows that can disturb one’s sleep, whereas the other, the less dishonest of the pair, could sleep like a log; unless it was the other way around — that the really crooked one, hardened to this kind of adventure despite his tarnished conscience, was sleeping soundly, while the one who was but a beginner in the trade and had not yet been blooded was unable to quell his inner torments. These finer points perhaps went beyond the sleuth’s mission, and the governor may well have formed the view that his agent was treading on ground well outside his areas of competence for the pettiest of motives, such as ambition, a desire for promotion, or just vainglory. But he wanted it understood that no such assumption would be justified, and that if he expanded on such and such topic or came close to appearing impertinent by dealing with matters that were not strictly his concern, then he did so not for any of the base motives mentioned but because he was convinced that he was thereby doing his job more satisfactorily, for when all is said and done, did the governor himself not declare, at that meeting he held with us all, that spies were not merely listening instruments but living beings, servants of the state enjoying not only the right but even the duty to interpret what they had been asked to do in as creative a manner as possible?