The File on H. (14 page)

“No, not at all." said Bill “We would also enjoy chatting with you. We came thousands of miles precisely in order to make contact with people such as yourself.”

“And it could turn out to be very helpful," Max added, as he asked the monk to be seated. He now felt he had been wrong to be suspicious, “What can I get for you?”

“Thanks, but this round is mine. Even if I'm not from these parts exactly, I am a neighbor I don't live a thousand miles away."

“Peja is in Kosovo, isn't it, over the Yugoslav border?” Bill asked.

“That's correct."

They ordered three glasses of raki. When he brought the drinks Shtjefen looked askance at the visitor.

In no time at all, they were having a lively, even a heated conversation, as if they were old friends. As he listened to Bill and Max, the monk nodded with surprise and admiration, exclaiming, “We have all this material on our plates and haven't begun to look at it properly, … What miserable ignoramuses we monks are! It's heartbreaking!”

After his second glass of raki, the monk's eyes narrowed and his glance grew more piercing.

“But tell me, are you working exclusively on the Albanian ballads? You must know as well as I do that the epic corpus also exists in another language, Serbo-Croatian.”

“Yes indeed,” said Max. “Obviously we are aware that the epics exist in both languages. But for the moment we're looking only at the versions one gets here.”

“If I may be so bold as to ask, why?”

The Irishmen exchanged rapid glances.

The monk's smile began to twist into a different kind of expression but still would not quite leave his face. They had never seen a smile change into its opposite like that while retaining the hallmark, so to speak, of its origin. Such a paradoxical expression made the monk seem all the more poisonous.

“We're scholars," said Bill, “and we have not the slightest wish to get involved in local… shall we say Balkan squabbles."

“Never take sides in arguments,” the American consul in Tirana had advised them at the one meeting they had had with him. “In this country, disagreements rapidly escalate into armed conflicts. Especially if what's at stake is the ancestry or the paternity of epic poetry. Both sides treat the question as a fundamental part of the national issue and connect it to ethnic origins, to historic rights over Kosovo, and even to current political alliances.“

The consul had shown them a pile of Albanian and Yugoslav newspapers and, with a smile, translated extracts, so as to give them an idea of the style of polemical writing in the Balkans. Once both sides had exhausted their available stock of all imaginable insults, the Serbian press declared that for the greater good of Europe, Albania should be wiped off the map of the continent — and the Albanian papers, which presumably thought the same of Serbia, brought the argument to a conclusion by stating that no dialogue was possible between two peoples whose names derived, on the one hand, from the word for “snake” and, on the other, from the word meaning “eagle.”

In the ensuing silence at the inn, Max, though tempted to give his opinion, just stretched his arms out wide and said.

“I hope you understand our position, especially as you are a man of the cloth.“

“Of course, of course …, said the monk. In a flashy he reassembled the fragments of his smile and beamed as he had at the start. He went on in a good-humored way:

“It's of no matter, gentlemen. You have done me a great honor by deigning to exchange a few ideas with a poor ignorant monk. Please, again, pardon me my excitement, if I may use such an expression. But I think you understand me — I am Serbian, and I support my nation's cause. It's unavoidable, especially here in the Balkans. Please don't take my reactions amiss."

“No, of course we don't!” said the two scholars as one man. “That's a perfectly comprehensible attitude, and not just in the Balkans, you know.”

There followed a short silence, which palpably needed to be brought to an end,

“If I have understood correctly, you aim to use your study of the oral epics to discover just who Homer was?”

Max nodded.

“Indirectly, you are doing the Albanian epic, and the Albanian people in general, a great honor, aren't you?”

“Definitely.”

The monk beamed even more sunnily. His face was now that of a profoundly good and even jovial man.

“I won't hide the fact that I am very envious, I would have liked such an honor for my own people. But what can I do?”

“True enough, there's nothing that can be done,” the Irishmen replied.

The monk took a pocket watch from his robe.

“Well, well, how time passes, I must go, gentlemen, I will always be glad to have good news of you.”

He hastened away. Bill and Max went back up to their room and watched him through the window. He mounted his horse and rode off at a gallop. From a distance the horse seemed to be pounding the earth with a heavy and furious hoof.

O
N SOME DAYS THEY IMAGINED
that they had succeeded in mastering the vast continent of Albanian heroic poetry that they had encompassed it in its entirety. But such illusions were quickly dissipated. by the next day, the firm outlines of the epic would grow blurred would shift and once again vanish into thin air; and then the same thing would happen not just at the outer edges but in every other part of the poetic mass' including its core. At such moments it seemed unthinkable that they could ever really command the subjects any more than they could control a chaotic nightmare in which characters, events and catastrophes were forever changing their shape.

The great epic tradition itself seemed to have suffered catastrophic damage. Splits and cracks ran right across it; whole sections had been swept away by the impact. From the rubble, bleeding heroes reemerged their faces expressing unspeakable horror.

When did the disaster occur? Had the epic tradition lost its integrity as a result, or had it always been thus, a poetic haze awaiting the right conditions for condensation? They struggled with these questions in dozens of discussions, for they were just as relevant to the origins of Homeric poetry. If the Greek tradition had similarly been just a quantity of unelaborated poetic material at the starts then Homer's greatness would be all the more apparent, for it would have been he who had succeeded in giving it order and discipline. People were wrong to think that Homer was the lesser poet for not having been the only begetter of his works. In all probability, his standing as a redactor would deserve to be higher than if he had been only a rhapsode.

As they tossed these ideas around, the two scholars tried to put themselves in Homer's position, to imagine themselves working in the same conditions, that is to say without books or file cards or a tape recorder, and to cap it all, without eyesight! Good God, they thought, with none of these tools, how did he manage to collect all the lines of the
Iliad
, or rather of the
proto-Iliad'
which he then transformed into the epic that we now have? How did he do it? No sooner did they feel that they were on their way to the right answer than the solution disappeared over the horizon once again. Their vision of the problem grew now clearer and now hazier, swinging back and forth like a pendulum between the contemporary world and the remotest past, as if they were divers returning to the surface for air before going back down into the deep.

It was all closely bound up with the question of who H. was. A poet of genius or a skillful editor? A conformist, a troublemaker, or an establishment figure? Had he been a kind of publisher of his day, the gossip columnist of Mount Olympus, or had he been a spokesman for officialdom? (Some passages in the
Iliad
sound quite like press releases, after all.) Or was he a leader, and, like any other leader, did he have a whole team of underlings? Or was he not any of these things, was he perhaps not even an individual but an institution? So his name may not have been "Homer” at all but a set of initials, an acronym that should be written HOMER …

Some of their ideas made them smile, but that didn't stop them from pressing forward with their hypotheses. However bizarre, ideas like these were the urns in which the ashes of the truth would be found in the end. Homer probably suffered some major physical defect, but rather than blindness, his disability was more likely to have been deafness. Deafness brought on by listening to tens of thousands of hexameters? Actually, deafness suited Homer rather well. Blindness was more suitable for later times, when books had been invented. All the same, statues did usually portray Homer as eyeless. But maybe deafness was simply impossible to represent in marble? Maybe the sculptors had solved the problem by substituting one disability for another? In the last analysis, haven't eyes and ears always been associated with each other as the two most characteristic, visible organs of humankind?

“If we go on like that,” Bill joked, “we'll end up poking our own eyes out!”

Max looked at him out of the corner of his eye. It wasn't Bill's words about going down the wrong track that struck him, but his friend's allusion to losing his eyes. Bill's eyesight had been getting steadily worse, and Max had thought of asking the governor, at the first opportunity, to help him find an optician. There weren't any at N----, and they would have to go all the way to Tirana. Recently, Max had done his best to steer their discussions away from any questions relating to Homer's blindness.

They kept coming back to the idea that the epic must have had a different structure before the Catastrophe (they used the term now as if it were a proper name). If there had indeed been some catastrophe, then it must have happened at the time of Albania's battle with the Turks. The clash between Christian Europe and the world of Islam had been more brutal and harsh in Albania than anywhere else. The whole country had been shattered, ruined, destabilized; its epic poetry must have suffered the same fate. Whole sections of it were buried beneath the rubble, and the tradition of recitation was banned. The rhapsodes who bore the knowledge of the verse had to flee to the mountains, and they lost all contact with the rest of the world. In those circumstances, preserving the tradition became difficult, because, like everything that has to go underground, it began to change. So that may have been the explanation for the fragmentation of the epic, for the multiplicity of variants, which made it seem unstable and unmasterable.

They thought that if Homer's version of the
Iliad
had not been written down and subsequently published, then it too could easily have fragmented and then been reassembled later on into a quite different shape. The cycles of condensation and dissolution of this kind of epic poetry must have some resemblance to the cycles of creation, fragmentation, and re-creation of possible worlds from cosmic dust.

More and more, epic poetry seemed to them like a kind of poetic galaxy under the sway of mysterious forces. Maybe there were hidden directives coming from the magnetic center, to which the rhapsodes responded by limiting their own freedom, resisting their desire to change, and holding back their rebelliousness. If you looked at it that way, maybe you could understand why rhapsodes always seemed slightly deranged, with a distant look in their eyes, and sang in an unearthly voice whose timbre could have been perfected only in interstellar space.

On other occasions they told themselves that oral epic could only ever exist in the scattered form in which they found it, and they were betraying and altering their material by trying to put its pieces together. In that way of thinking, oral recitation was less like a poetic entity than a medieval order whose members, the rhapsodes, had converted singing into a ritual and spread it far and wide, as if they had been propagating a gospel or a liturgy. A national testament could only have been thus: for the epic corpus that foretold and lamented in advance the nation's division into two parts obviously constituted the First Commandment of the Albanian people. That was how you could account for this thousand-year-long lamentation, this monotonous wail of foreboding made of the unending repetition of an archaic order.

Their minds were so intensely preoccupied with their studies that their dreams sometimes seemed to be no more than the continuation of their thinking, and what they saw while dreaming was hardly different from what they thought about during their waking hours of reading and listening to the tapes. The lack of distinction between waking and dreaming was very much in the spirit of the epics themselves. Space and time obeyed their own fantastical laws in epic poetry: action was spread out over hundreds of years, characters died or were plunged into deep sleep by a spell and then woke, half dead and half alive, to take up the fight; they married in the lull between two wars, went to rest for a while in their graves (Good grief!" Bill exclaimed one day. “It's as if they were going on vacation!”), then rose again to pursue their gloomy destinies, and so on and so forth. It constituted a faithful representation of a millennial conflict that like a whirlwind had swept away everything in its path. For seven hundred years I shall slay thy progeny, Muj had threatened the mother-in-law of his Serbian foe. His own seven sons, all called Omer, had been slaughtered by Rado the Serb, and all seven had been buried in the Accursed Mountains, Bjeshkét e Nemuna.

In epic poetry, time sometimes flew by at the speed of lightning, and everything that had been foretold for the end of the world would happen in a few instants; in other passages, however, time would decelerate sharply, would slow to a snail's pace: a wound would take ten years to heal; a wedding procession would be arrested and frozen in ice, and would thaw out only after time had gone by, before moving on again to the bridegroom's house where, despite an interval of several years, people still waited for the procession to arrive, just as they had on the first day.