The File on H. (16 page)

It has to be said. Dull added, that although the Serbian monk took little part in this conversation, he did nothing to contradict the hermit's assertions. Dushan became a little more talkative when Frok began to explain how he had recently learned to distinguish normal lightning from lightning that the heavens aborted, just like a pregnant woman miscarrying. Overall there was one miscarriage for every seven flashes of lightning, the hermit said, but there were troubled times when the proportion of stillborn lightning was much higher.

That was the tenor of the first part of the conversation, Dull reported, saying that he had not managed to work out whether the monk Dushan already knew the hermit or this was his first visit to the cave. But the spy was now going to relate the second part of the conversation, which was in no way comparable to the foregoing, and begged the governor to forgive him for reproducing excerpts in direct speech, a form that in his view would give a more faithful rendering of what was actually said.

“So now he's going to write dialogue!” the governor exclaimed. “Not what you'd call an uninventive fellow!”

According to Dull's report, the hermit returned to the question of the eyes of the world, or more exactly to the weakening of sight in one of the eyes, which was certainly going to go completely blind, turning the planet into a one-eyed beings and then he went on about what that would mean for life on earth, and also alluded to the future when the remaining eye would go out in its turn, leaving the world completely blind, until the Serbian monk interrupted:

MONK: I guess you know about the two foreigners— they're Irish, I believe — who've been staying at the Buffalo Inn for some time?

HERMIT: I don't want to know about them.

MONK: You're quite right. I feel the same way about them. They are snakes, and poisonous ones at that!

HERMIT: Snakes? Those two? Don't make me laugh!

MONK: To begin with, the pair of them made the same impression on me. They seemed quite laughable. But when I discovered the purpose of their work, my hair stood on end. To call them snakes is short of the mark. They are the very devil, the devil incarnate!

HERMIT: And what is the work they are doing? I've heard say they have some kind of casket with which they wind human voices like string around a drum, so as to unwind it later on.

MONK: Yes, that's the satanic device that they're using to perpetrate their crime quite openly and brazenly, and people just look on and gawk without suspecting the calamity that will come of it. You called it a casket, I would rather call it a coffin, and that's an understatement. It's far, far worse than that. Compared to what that box means, brother Frok, death itself would be sweet.

HERMIT: They say it's a kind of trunk

MONK: A trunk indeed! If they had brought the plague, or a gallows, or a guillotine, it would have been better than visiting that horror upon us! A trunk, you say? It's a crate from hell, brother Frok! I'd better tell you all about it

At this point in the report, the spy requested that the governor forgive him for reverting to classical narrative form, for technical reasons upon which he preferred not to expatiate for fear of irritating his esteemed reader beyond reasonable endurance.

Thereupon the monk proceeded to explain to the hermit how and why the two foreigners were maleficent, and why the casket — the device, or tape recorder, as it was called — was truly infernal. “It is a sinister instrument,” he told him, “more evil than witches who dry up springs or wither grass. For if the witch may lay waste grass and water, this machine walls up the ancient songs, imprisons them within itself, and you know as well as I do what happens to a song when you wall up its voice. It's like when you wall up a man's shadow. He wilts and dies. That's what happens to him. It doesn't matter to me, I'm only a foreigner here myself, my land and my Serbian songs are far away, in a safe place, but I deplore for your sake what's going on. With this machine these Irishmen will cut limbs from your body. They'll mow down all those old songs that are the joy of life, and without them it will be like being deaf. You'll wake up one fine morning and find yourselves in a desert, and you'll hold your heads in your hands; but meanwhile those devils will have fled far away. They'll have robbed you of everything, and you'll be condemned to deafness for the rest of your lives. Generation upon generation of your descendants will curse you for having been so careless. It's as I say.”

Dull went on to report that at first Frok just listened to the monk attentively, but then he began to snort, and you could tell he was getting excited.

“You're making me angry!” he shouted at the monk. "So now tell me what should be done!”

The monk didn't rush to provide an answer to that question. He advised the hermit to think long and hard about the appropriate steps before taking any action. Then he told him quite suddenly that it was getting late, that he was in a hurry, and that he would return some other day to talk again about the whole affair.

The spy concluded his report by noting that as he was returning to the inn, he noticed the monk striding off along the main road into the far distance.

T
HROUGH HALF-CLOSED EYES
, Daisy could just about make out a tuft of her husband's grayish hair on the pillow a few inches away. Still only half awake, she thought. It must be Sunday. Every other day of the week she woke up alone, since her husband went to his office early, and it was only on Sundays that he lay in bed as she did every day.

She opened her eyes fully and looked at her husband for a few moments. His sleeping face asked for pity. The radiators must be off, she thought, and she pulled the blankets up over his shoulders. The last traces of the night's warmth had all but vanished from the bedroom. The mist on the windowpanes had broken up into rivulets here and there, another sign that the heat had gone. The winter really did not want to go away this year. Daisy's mind went over futile and sometimes quite meaningless trifles, as it did every morning, before wandering toward the subject of the two Irishmen, whom she had not seen for quite some time. It was thinking of the winter that kept dragging on that had led her by a curious jump to thoughts of the Irish scholars. They had said something about the end of the winter, hadn't they? Ah yes, that warmer weather would perhaps allow them to set off on a trek into the mountains.

To get even farther away from me! she said inwardly, with a touch of bitterness that was no more consistent than the condensation on the windowpanes. She had never imagined (it's hard to tell why, but even though it was Bill who was mainly in her mind, she always thought of them now as a pair and called them “they”), no, it had never even crossed her mind that they might prove so uninterested in her. But she wasn't offended. She was convinced that it was not true indifference but a side effect of their absence, along with the practical difficulties they would have had if they had tried to come and visit more often. They're so caught up in this Homer business, she thought sourly. She was not far short of feeling outright hostility for all that ancient rubbish.

All the same, she was sure that the Irishmen talked about hen Last time especially, when she was dancing with Bill and he made eyes at her a couple of times, his colleague had offered some remarks and Bill had answered back over her shoulder. Yes, she was sure they had been talking about her.

My lord, my love....
Daisy heaved a great sigh as she recalled the only words of English that she had learned from the cinema screen. The mere thought that somewhere in the middle of the icy plain, in a godforsaken inn, two men were talking about her in English would have elevated her to a plane of ecstasy.

Another ball will be arranged, then a farewell party, she thought, with melancholy. She would indulge in more reveries, would spend more sleepless nights, and then be crushed by disappointment. Her husband and she would do better to forget the receptions. Why walk into turmoil like that again? Why? she moaned, with tears in her eyes. But a few moments later, there she was with them again, at a dinner being held in their honor. All the guests from the previous receptions were there, and the fire was burning in the hearth, as it always did. The only difference was that people's conversation had changed mouths, just as you change guests' places at table. Bill was saying what the postmaster ought to have said, and similar permutations had occurred among the other diners, so that Daisy herself — how flattering! — found herself speaking the words of the soapmaker's wife….

The bedside telephone rang and woke her from her dream. She buried her head in the top of the blanket; the heaving of the bed told her that her husband had reached out an arm in his sleep to take the call

“Hullo,” he said in a sleepy drawl. “Hullo, who is calling?”

Even before his voice changed tone, she could feel his body stiffen as if it had been electrified.

“At your service, sir. I am all yours, Minister,” he blurted out. "Ah, you got it, did you? Delighted, sir. Excuse me? You have authorized the dispatch of an English-speaking informer? Excellent news, sir. To be honest, I had given up hoping. No, no, don't worry, Minister. We'll catch our chickens in the roost. In double-quick time too — I'll vouch for that. Minister.”

During the conversation, Daisy raised the blanket and listened. Who was this English-speaking informer? she wondered confusedly. Her husband went on talking to the minister. He came out with “catch them in the roost” and ‘“chickens” again.

When he put the receiver down, his face looking like a vessel filled to the brim overflowed with a smile.

“Who is this English-speaking informer?” she asked.

“Oh, so you're awake?” he answered gaily, “Obviously you couldn't not be awake. Damned telephone!”

“You were talking about an informer who can speak English …” she repeated.

“It's administration business. You know what a bore all that is.”

“Is it about the two Irishmen?”

“What? Hey, why did you think of them? It's true that…Look, Daisy, why don't you go back to sleep and stop tiring your brain with such nonsense?”

“Are you going to have them watched?”

She felt him tense up in bed. Then the springs of the mattress creaked, as if they had relaxed.

“And what if we did? Let's suppose we did what you just said. Would that be the end of the world?”

She clenched her teeth. There was a bitter taste in her mouth.

“That would not be decent. We invite them to dinner and then …”

“Ho ho!” He burst out laughing. “Will you never grow up?”

He stretched out an arm to stroke her face, but she turned her head away in disgust.

“All the same I love you the way you are.”

“Stop bothering me," she riposted, “and let me sleep.”

She really did seem to go back to sleep, and after waiting for a moment, the governor got out of bed and slipped from the room as noiselessly as he could. He must have gone to his office to telephone his spies, Daisy thought.

She imagined bells ringing in bug-ridden bedrooms, then the bleary-eyed, drink-bloated defectives who called themselves spies reaching for receivers just as her husband had done a few minutes before,

I am the wife of a common petty official, she thought. She had poured out her bile to the prison warden's wife and the wife of the soap manufacturer with no effect. Her husband did dirtier work than theirs, he really did. She was the one to pity, she really was.

She opened her eyes wide. The droplets of condensation on the windowpane reminded her of tears on a tragicomic mask. They're going to listen in on their conversations, she thought with sudden fright. And the Irishmen were so absentminded that they would fall right into the trap. “The chickens..." It was not right to call them that. They were totally lost, as if they had been “let drop
”
by a bird of prey, as Daisy's grandma Mara used to say. Not to mention that those spies would also eavesdrop on the Irishmen's remarks about hen Her own name overheard by mud-filled ears! She tossed and turned in her bed. “I have to do something/” she said to herself. This was no time for daydreaming, like at the movies; it was time to take real action. To warn them …

She imagined a carriage with curtains drawn setting off behind a pair of horses. Inside, a woman wearing a black veil, who would be herself. Oh, Lord, she had seen that a hundred times at the movies…. But the carriage conveying the worried woman kept on rolling toward the Inn of the Bone of the Buffalo.

The English-speaking spy arrived at N— at the end of the week. Apart from the governor and one of his staff, no one was aware of the real trade of the black-suited gentleman with the handlebar mustache who took a room at the Globe Hotel It was natural that inquisitive townsfolk should seek to discover the real reason for the presence of this visitor from the capital, beginning at the very moment of his arrival, and as the information they picked up was not sufficient to satisfy their curiosity, it was even more natural that their inquisitiveness should intensify throughout the following week. It was variously reported that he was a collector of antiques and ancient manuscripts, a beekeeper, and a psychopath who benefited from mountain ain Other hypotheses that would have accounted more or less satisfactorily for the visitor's frequent absences from the hotel might well have done the rounds had a tiny part of the truth not come to light. Did the suspicion first emerge among the town's informers, for entirely comprehensible reasons (relations between colleagues, professional rivalries, and so on)? Or did the spies pick up the rumor somewhere and then, for the same reasons as before, adopt the story for themselves? It's hard to say. But the spies' own interest in getting to the bottom of it is easy to explain. As in all closed circles, in the world of shadows and muffled whispers that was the informers' community, there were stars and there were black sheep, beginners full of admiration for their mentors as well as emotions of jealousy and hatred; there were tyros dreaming of future glory, along with legends about the exploits and adventures of Tirana spies, and lamentations on the difficulties of working in the provinces, and so on. All these tensions were suddenly reenlivened by the arrival of that confident man of the world with oiled hair and handlebar mustache who sauntered infrequently into the dining room of the Globe Hotel.