The File on H. (13 page)

But there's still more. Since the epics
exist in two different languages, the problems are even more inextricable. The bilingualism of these epic poems makes every one of the issues concerning them infinitely more difficult, and we have no clue at the moment to how to cope with this aspect of the subject. These epics seem to constitute the only art form in the world that exists, so to speak, in duplicate. But to say they are bilingual or duplicate is to underestimate the acuteness of the problem: they exist in the languages of two nations that are enemies. And both sides, the Serbs and the Albanians, use the epic in exactly the same way, as a weapon in a tragic duel that is unique
.

A ballad in one of the two languages is like an upside-down version of the same ballad in the other language: a magic mirror, making the hero of the one the antihero of the other, the black of the one the white of the other, with all the emotions
—
bitterness, joy, victory, defeat
—
-inverted to the very end
.

It would be childish to imagine that each of these nations invented epic poetry independently. One of them must be the originator and the other the borrower. We are personally convinced that, as they are the most ancient inhabitants of the peninsula, the
Albanians must have been the originators of oral epic. (The fact that their versions are much closer to Homeric models tends to confirm this view.) But we will not get ourselves involved in this polemic, or in anything that takes us away from our main aim, which is to lay bare the techniques of Homeric poetry. We will deal with the duplication only insofar as it relates to the mechanisms of forgetting, with the formulation of variants, and with the processes of transmission
—
and no further.

Max has stuck a strip of paper over the mantelpiece saying: WE ARE HOMERIC SCHOLARS FIRST AND FOREMOST

March, at the Inn

The transformation of a real-life event into an epic
— Homerization":

That's a topic we keep coming back to. It raises many issues. For instance, what criteria determined the choice of events to be turned into epic material? How did the embalming process begin, so as to start turning an event into an immortal story? What are the soft parts -
—
the details and incidents
—
that got stripped away, and what ancient formulae and poetical models played the role of the embalming fluid?

In order to compare a real event with its Homerized version, we looked for the most recent event we could find that had been turned into ballad material All we found were twelve lines, no more, referring to the Congress of Berlin of 1878. Like some cold-weather hydra staying hidden in the fog, not daring to come any closer to our times, epic poetry seems to have stopped in that year. Why 1878i What prevented its moving forward? What has frightened it off?

It seems that oral epic had long been wary of approaching the shores of the modern world, which is so foreign to it
.

We compiled a very detailed file on the Berlin Congress: the agenda, the statements of the participating governments, the attitude of the Great Powers to the Ottoman Empire and to Albania, the decisions taken; and we even made notes on the maneuvers behind the scenes. The real events seem like a still-warm corpse beside the mummified version the ballad gives
.

We are looking without success for a more recent event. We are astonished to find barely a line in the oral epics about 1913, the black year of Albania's dismemberment, a year that ought to echo through the whole of the rhapsodes corpus! Which suggests very firmly
that the art of oral epic has indeed become arthritic with age
.

March, at the Inn

What shifts and what stays fixed in epic poetry? Is there an unchanging core of material that ensures the integrity of the art form over the centuries?

Up to now we believed that the anchoring role was played by the figures of speech, the models or fixed forms of the language, or, to put it another way, the basic molds into which epic material was poured
.

So we were convinced that the ancient laboratory's linguistic equipment, which was itself unchanging, guaranteed the homogeneity of its poetic production
.

However, the more we progress with our research, the more we come to see that, like the laboratory itself, figures of speech and linguistic formulae are also subject to change. Except that the rate of change is so slow as to be imperceptible, just like our own aging
.

B
ILL AND MAX FELT EXHAUSTED
by the superhuman perspectives that their research sometimes opened up, and so they came back to simpler and more concrete issues, such as the potential influence of a rhapsode's personal life on the omissions or additions that he made to his ballads. If a
lahuta
player stressed the jealousy motif in the rape of Muj's wife, for instance, then the explanation was to be found hidden in the player's own soul. It would have been marvelous to be able to conduct a fully detailed investigation of that kind, but it was a lost hope since, as they had come to realize full well, highlanders would not allow any questions about their private lives. How wonderful it would have been to clarify everything! To elucidate a passage where, for instance, a bridal procession is caught in ice as it crosses the mountains, it would have been desirable to have the details of the rhapsode's own wedding, of the dangers encountered, of whatever worries he had experienced, and so on. Comparing all such information provided by different rhapsodes would have allowed the scholars to establish particularly valuable criteria for measuring the "tragic quotient” of each version.

As the days went by, they began to notice strange correspondences between the epics and memories of their own lives. Half joking, half serious, they started talking about everyday episodes from their respective pasts. Some had taken place in their homes in lreland, others in telephone booths and bars in New York, then there was the route the taxi took the day Max got married, and his feelings one weekend the previous summer when his wife left a note saying she had gone to see her parents, whereas he suspected her of an affair with an old flame, Bill, for his part, recalled his mother's remarriage, a painful memory that was still torture for him fifteen years after the event. Little by little they hammered out their entire lives on the formidable anvil of the oral epic, and by dusk, they could see the green pastures of the Emerald Isle as well as the skyscrapers of Manhattan against the now familiar backdrop of the Accursed Mountains. on which they had still not set foot.

Had it begun to snow again outside. or was it just an impression caused by his weakening eyes? Bill went closer to the frosted windowpane. It really was snowing. A thin sprinkling of snowflakes. Max was busy with the tape recorder.

Ever since Shtjefen had told them that all sorts of rumors were flying around about their machine, they had tried to keep its volume turned down as low as possible. On one occasion. the screech of the tape rewinding had terrified one of the guests downstairs, who started to scream that a murder was going on upstairs, that someone was being strangled, having his neck wrung. The innkeeper had tried in vain to calm the man by explaining what the noise actually was. But the man only got angrier.

"So our bards' voices are being put through that torture? Those aren't human voices now, they're the voices of demons! Do you mean to say that you are allowing your inn to be used for such an abomination? Shtjefen, you should be ashamed of yourself!”

As he departed, he yelled out again from the road:

"Take care, Shtjefen! You have allowed the devil into your house, do you hear?”

Although the innkeeper told them about only part of this exchange, they were very annoyed. Then, calming down, they persuaded themselves that they could not have expected anything but such disapproval of their work. The publication of part of the corpus of epic poetry some years previously and now their recording heralded the rhapsodes imminent disappearance. They were becoming increasingly dispensable, and soon, as the days went by, there would be fewer and fewer ballad-carriers, until finally they would become extinct, just as in everyday life technological progress would soon make street sweepers redundant.

They were discussing this topic (Bill remarking that the expression "ballad-carriers” might sound eloquent but was actually inadequate, since the rhapsodes were much more than mere carriers; their decline had much more to do with the aging and rusting of the entire machinery of. oral poetry), when they heard a familiar knock at the door: Shtjefen. Even before they could see that the envelopes in his hand were addressed to them, the diagonal red and blue stripes made their hearts leap with joy at the prospect of receiving news from home.

The mail was indeed for them. So the post office had not forgotten them, it had tracked them down to the end of the earth. They tore the envelopes from the innkeeper's hand and began to open them indiscriminately.

“Look, Max!' said Bill as he pulled some press clippings out of one of the larger envelopes,

“Newspapers!” Max mumbled as he looked over. Are the stories about us?”

They abandoned the letters for a moment and put their heads together to scan the headlines

IS THIS THE END OF THE HOMERIC ENIGMA? There were pieces from the
New York Times
and the
Washington Post:
 A BIZARRE ADVENTURE IN A LAND BELIEVED TO BE THE LAST EXTANT CRADLE OF HOMERIC POETRY. Then clippings from two Boston newspapers, and the
Chicago Tribune
.

“What we're doing is out in the open now,“ Bill said.

They read it all over several times. Some journalists were appreciative, others were not. One article compared their discreet departure from New York to the way that Don Quixote and Sancho Panza left their village on the morning when their tragicomic adventures began. But it didn't say which of them was the knight and which the squire.

The inn had its own life, and as they paid attention to it only intermittently, when they needed rest from their work, it seemed all the more foreign and impenetrable to them. What went on downstairs was always muffled by whispering and shrouded in mystery. The Albanian high-landers were dour folk, who never talked a lot or laughed out loud. They were rarely seen and always vanished like ghosts at first light.

Martin sometimes told Max and Bill what had been going on. One evening there came a group of men looking as dark as the grave, apparently on someone's trail A few minutes after the group left, the Royal Police Force turned up — and almost immediately after, the fugitive himself. Who knew what was really going on?

Another day, highlanders from the Black Ravine who were taking a sick man to the hospital turned up and asked to stay the night. When the Irishmen went down for their coffee at dawn the unfortunate man was still there on his stretcher. His face looked like a death mask. They asked what his sickness was, and Martin assured them that it was not a contagious disease.

"They suspect that his shadow has been walled up,” he explained. “If that is the case, there will be no point in taking him to Tirana. He won't pull through.”

"What do you mean by ‘his shadow has been walled up'?" Max asked.

Martin tried to explain. It was a fatal malady. The victim was a stonemason, and during the construction of a k
ulla
, or round tower, such as you find in the Albanian uplands, one of his workmates had apparently walled up his shadow, accidentally or on purpose; that is, he had cemented a stone onto a wall exactly where the victim's shadow was falling at that moment. Highland builders usually avoid walling up a shadow, as if it were the devil himself, for they all knew full well that if your shadow is trapped in a wall, then you are also imprisoned by it and must surely die. The man lying on the stretcher was, they said, a novice mason, without much experience.

"So there you are,” Martin said. “Whether they meant to or not, they have robbed him of his life. It's a terrible shame. To think he is barely twenty years old!”

The Irishmen looked at each other.

"But maybe that is not what is really wrong with him?” Bill queried, "You said it was only a supposition.”

“Of course it is only a supposition. Otherwise why would they bother to carry him to town?”

"A strange business!” Bill exclaimed when the two scholars got back to their room. “Very ancient maladies, or rather, an antique explanation given for a malady … It makes your hair stand on end!”

The low rays of the afternoon sun caught the metal case of the tape recorder, which answered with a sinister glint. Bill and Max tried not to look at it, but though they did not admit it to themselves, they knew that the machine was at the root of their anxiety, of the obscure and unfocused worry that was eating at them and that neither death nor logic could explain.

One Saturday, they came back to the inn from their morning stroll to find Martin unsaddling a horse in the yard. He told them that a visitor was waiting inside and wanted to talk to them.

A tall man dressed partly in monk's robes, the visitor had the round and ruddy face of a peasant. With a broad smile that spread across his face, he would have seemed a good-natured fellow had there not been a suspicious sparkle in his eyes. According to Martin, he spoke English, Albanian, and Serbo-Croatian.

“I was just passing by when I heard about you and the work you have thrown yourselves into.” he said, smiling first to one and then to the other of the Irishmen. “I must say it is a magnificent project, and I wanted to meet you, I am Serbian myself, from the archdiocese of Peja, a long way away from here. I'm on my way to Shkodér, on business — monastic business !”

“I see,” said Max, blankly.

“Yes, and I wanted to tell you," the monk went on, "I've had occasion to collect a few epic poems here and there. To the best of my limited abilities, of course, and only in my spare time. We monks do sometimes take an interest in such things. But obviously we're only amateurs, and there's no question of our wanting to set about it in scholarly fashion. What can you expect of a mere monk on his own? Cut off from the world, totally isolated, that's our lot,… To be honest, Fve always dreamed of meeting people like you. To be able to discuss the ancient epics. But you must be very busy, your time must be very precious...”