The File on H. (12 page)

Half an hour later; dressed up in their dark suits, they were being chauffeured in an antiquated jalopy across a darkening, frosted plain that seemed strewn with enigmas. Here and there ghostly haystacks tried to duck under the headlights. Now and again Bill muttered under his breath, "Oh Lord, where are we going?" He needed to think hard to remind himself that they were on their way to the local governor's ball, but no sooner had he come to his senses than his imagination raced again, inventing a thousand hidden dangers all around, long smothered by the ice but now reluctantly, and all the more distressingly, awakening from their slumbers.

He heard Max whisper into his ear: "I've never seen such a sunset!”

It was indeed a unique sunset, spread across an ink-black sky swept clean of every speck of Stardust, every source of light, all hint of softness. A fine night to be kidnapped! thought Bill The governor's wife — or her husband — with a torch between her or his teeth (depending on which rhapsode's version you listened to)… oh, those epics could set your nerves on edge!

Bill sighed with relief when he could make out the twinkling lights of the little town in the distance. Lanterns burned brightly at the door of the governor's house. In the salon they found the same guests as on their first visit, and some new faces as well, presumably representing local high society.

“We are delighted to see you among us once again,” said the governor as he introduced them to the other guests. “The local gynecologist…The lawyer and his wife … Mr. Rrok — but you know him already, don't you … And the postmaster too. It is really a great pleasure to have you back. The head of the regional recruitment office … And this is my wife."

The scholars felt just as foreign after an hour in the place as they had on first arriving. Like everyone else, they had glasses in their hands, they had even had a dance (just one), but they could not feel part of anything in that environment. It all seemed made of cardboard, as false as it was ridiculous. They realized how impossible it was to tear oneself away from the world of epic poetry and behave as one should at a ball Women whispering in corners kept looking at them sideways, presumably gossiping about them, but that didn't matten The two foreigners felt miles away; they were still at the inn, where the people, and their clothes, and their gestures, and their code of conduct, were so different,…

Leaning against the marble mantelpiece, Bill cast his mind back to the travelers who had stayed at the inn, their costumes decorated with designs suggestive of snow or frost, decorations that seemed to have been put on by a machine able to embroider the pattern of lightning.

As for the folk sitting around the governor's salon, the alleged elite of the town of N—-, well, they were just straw men, ridiculous bureaucrats. They made you want to laugh, or be sick.

The hostess sidled up to Bill and said, “You don't look as though you're quite at your ease. Of course you're bored. This is the end of the world, so what can you expect?”

“But of course not, madam,” Bill said, not really knowing how to respond.

To tell the truth, she was the only person in the whole pantomime who seemed to be different, and he did not want to offend her.

Her bright, submissive, and liquid eyes came close, appearing to bear the mark of the last weeks separation. Even the ring that sparkled on the hand that held the glass seemed to have acquired some of its mistress's yearning.

Bill could smell her perfume, and he suddenly felt like blurting out the question: How could two Albanias coexist, in the same place, in the same period, when they were so completely different — eternal Albania, bearing its tragic destiny with dignity, as he had come to know it not only from its epic poetry but also at the inn up there, beside the main road; and the other Albania, the one he could see here and (he was sorry, but he had to be blunt) that struck him as nothing more than a dumb show.

“You're dreaming …,” she said. “You say nothing and you dream. But I have a weakness for people like that.…”

“I
am
a little perplexed,” Bill replied. “In fact, I was about to ask you a question."

He thought he saw the ring on her finger quiver. Maybe she would not understand what he meant. It was quite possible that she knew absolutely nothing of the other Albania. Actually, anyone could well doubt its existence. Was old Albania really the way he saw it, or was his vision of it only a poet's reverie?

He picked up the glass he had left on the mantelpiece, took a sip, and put it down again. A piece he had read by a young Albanian writer claimed that the high-landers who appeared to be so valiant and rebellious, were capable of giving in overnight and of crawling before the power of the state. Seen from a greater distance, however, things looked very different. There was nothing really surprising about it. Did people of the Homeric period behave in epic fashion? And what about Homer himself… ? A horrible vision (as when you see yourself sleeping with your own mother) had seized upon his mind and would not go away: Homer, having just finished chanting the second or the seventh book of the
Iliad
, completely obsessed with counting out his pay … He had been delivered from this agonizing vision only when he learned that the Albanian rhapsodes would accept no form of reward. Please God, that had only been a suspicion!

“Did you want to say something to me?” Daisy whispered.

He looked her in the eye for a long moment. He would have to be quite mad to tell her what was in his mind, her especially, the first lady of N——.

He talked about his concerns to Max as soon as they were in the car on the way back to the inn. It was a safe bet that the governor's other guests, as they walked home, were having a good gossip about the foreigners, calling them antisocial, uncivilized, pretentious, or just plain mad.

While he spoke. Bill could not take his eyes off a solitary light blinking in the distance, which only underscored the atmosphere of fright and doom that the black night aroused.

He waited for Max to answer. But Max was silent. He must have gone to sleep.

March 14, Buffalo Inn

W
E >WERE EXPECTING
the weather to get a bit milder, but suddenly winter has returned with a vengeance.

Fortunately, the cold has not prevented us from making more recordings. Some of them are rerecordings of the same rhapsode, and thafs our main triumph
.

Our hypotheses about forgetting are being borne out all the time: none of the rerecordings is identical to the first versions. Sung afresh after a week or more (we have no material with a shorter time span), every ballad already bears the first sign of the process of forgetting
.

Does this sign foretell the poem's ultimate disappearance
f
Is it the germ of the disease that will eventually kill it? Or is it, on the contrary, the serum that will protect the ballad from time's attrition? From what we know, it
seems that the last conjecture is nearer to the truth
.

So we are getting evidence of what we dimly suspected back in New York:

The loss of material from oral epic has nothing to do with the limits of men's power to memorize
.

Forgetting is a constituent part of the laboratory
.

Just as in the metabolism of living beings, so in oral poetry, death is what guarantees that life goes on
.

The question that we first asked
—
is the forgetting intentional or accidental?
—
now seems to us too naive. None of the rhapsodes has answered the question so far; but it was not just that no one answered, every one we asked appeared not to understand the question. It seems to me that both kinds of forgetting are part of the process, but are related to each other in ways that remain a mystery (a providential term in this sort of work!)
.

I must add that omission is only one side of the coin. The other side, which is closely related, is constituted by additions
. Lahuta
players add lines as often as they leave lines out
.

Then we must tackle an apparently vital issue: what is the rate of loss by any given measure of time
—
by ten weeks, by ten years, by two hundred fifty years, by a millennium
…
?

At first glance you would think that the epic corpus is in a state of partial but progressive decay; but the sheer age of the corpus serves to contradict that view
.

We did some simple sums, with results that are flabbergasting:

In the ballad about the betrayal of Muj's wife, the modification of the text in the space of a fortnight came to about one thousandth part of the total At that rate, at the end of two thousand weeks, that is to say forty-odd years, the epic should have disaggregated entirely. But that is far from being the case
.

So what has happened?

We scratched our heads long and hard over that problem and came to the conclusion that the greater part of the omissions and additions are no such thing and that they should be renamed
pseudo-omissions
and
pseudo-additions.

In other words, most of the apparently new lines are nothing but previous omissions that the bard has decided to restore, just as the omissions concern temporary additions that the bard, for reasons that he is not necessarily
aware of himself, decides to clear away from his text. And so on, ad infinitum
.

When we have collected dozens and dozens more recordings, then maybe we will be in a better position to elucidate this strange commerce between memory and forgetting. More material would enable us to distinguish the genuine omissions and additions from those that only seem so
.

But even that method is not foolproof. How are we going to know why and by what mysterious means a line that has been forgotten and shrouded in darkness for years may reemerge into the light once again? And that's leaving aside the fact that the phenomenon does not just occur within the repertoire of an individual rhapsode but, as if carried along by a subterranean stream, an omitted line can be restored by some other rhapsode, in a different time and place. Epic fragments seem able to climb out of the grave where the bard's body has been rotting away for years, claw their way through the earth, and come alive in another's song, as if death had not changed them one bit
.

Mid-March at the Inn

Brief notes on the role of the ear in oral poetry; eye-ear relations;
Majekrah
(wing tip): 
The German Albanologists who first described the ancient gesture
o/majekrah
(and published a sketch of it) advanced the idea that it may just be a response to a physiological need. Nothing more
.

We believe that one has to go into this more deeply. When we asked the innkeeper what meaning the gesture had for him, whether for instance it was related to some ancient ritual or had a symbolic significance, he gave only the vaguest answer, more or less along the lines of the Germans explanation. Apparently the rhapsodes need to shut off one ear while singing: it has something to do with the modulation of their chanting voice, which resonates not in the thorax but in the head; and also to do with their need to keep their balance, to prevent the chanting from making them dizzy
.

“You can't imagine how difficult it is to sing the epic ballads,” the innkeeper said. “Long ago I tried it myself, but I got nowhere. It makes thunder inside your head, like the sound of an avalanche. If you are not used to it, you could go out of your mind.”

There is no doubt that oral epic is primarily an art of the ear. The eye that allows us to understand the literature of today played no great role in the Homeric period. It could even become an obstacle. It is no coincidence
that Homer is imagined as a man deprived of sight.

In fact, the rhapsodes are mostly poor-sighted. It's a foregone conclusion that they all feel a degree of scorn for their eyes. Maybe they let their sight deteriorate in a secret manner that only they possess? (Isn't it said that Democritus blinded himself because his eyes interfered with total concentration on his thoughts?)

But imagining the rhapsodes as blind men is maybe only an act of faith, proof of the need to put a distance between art and the everyday world. Blindness, or at least poor sight, is an integral part of the machinery that produces epic poetry. After all, aren't the blind supposed to have memories that are different from those of the sighted?

These are rather attractive ideas, but first of all we should establish whether today's
lahuta
players really are poor-sighted or not. We can easily make up some sight-test cards like those used by opticians.

March 21, Buffalo Inn

Wonderful! We've done a sequence of recordings, some of them repeats
.

We've decided to look at the system of oral
transmission, that is to say how one rhapsode borrows material from another and how the borrowed material influences the repertoire. To do that we need to establish a corpus of recordings that would allow us to compare, let us say, the ballad chanted by rhapsode A with the version of the same ballad as performed by rhapsode B who did not usually recite that ballad but picked it up from listening to As performance
.

No easy task. Especially since
lahuta
players are such awkward and unbending people
.

The diffusion of oral ballads must follow rules of its own, rules that are quite different from the way things get published nowadays. However, oral diffusion must presumably also have its equivalent of overnight hits, failures, and bestsellers
.

But thafs only a first step. Finding out what are the changes in a ballad as it passes from one rhapsode to another is not enough. We must also try to find out what happens when the ballad is passed on from one generation of singers to the next. And what happens when the song is transmitted from one period to another, or even over the abyss separating two different eras. And what happens after that
.