The File on H. (11 page)
“Morning,” he said.
“Good mornings Martin. Did you have a good night?” asked Max.
“Hmm ⦠So-so ⦠I was worried about⦠about the recorderâ¦.”
“Why so?” Bill queried
“Well, how should I know?” he stammered, “Anything could happen, couldn't it?”
Martin's face looked vaguely worried, and Bill remembered his own bad night and the anxiety that had seemed to rise from below, as if it were coming from another ageâ¦.
February 27,
at the Inn of the Bone of the Buffalo
Today we really began our work on the Homeric enigma
.
We listened several times to the two poems sung by the rhapsode last night. Each song has about a thousand lines
.
We compared both of them to the published versions, and as we expected, we found significant variations
.
The first one tells of the treachery of Ajkuna, wife of the valiant Muj. German
scholars saw her as a kind of Helen of Troy of Albanian epic. Except that her story is enough to make your blood curdle
.
The other song must be a version of the epic of Zuk the Standard Bearer. It would be hard to think up a more tragic tale. A young woman is in the mountains. looking for her brother, who has been mortally wounded by his enemies. She finds him at last, drowning in his own blood. The wounded man asks for a drink, but there is no spring near at hand, and she is afraid that if she leaves him, she would not find her way back; so he tells her to soak a strip of cloth from her dress in his blood and let it drip as she walks, to mark her route; she follows his advice, but the rain comes and washes away the drops of blood. She loses her way and wanders around the mountains until she is confronted by a crow and a bear. The crow confesses that he has just picked out the eyes of a wounded man, and the bear admits he gobbled up the man's head; so she flees, screaming, across the fog-enshrouded mountain
.
“How horrible!” Max exclaimed when he turned off the recording
.
We spent the rest of the day transcribing this ballad. No doubt we'll spend more days on it.
Late February,
at the Inn of the Bone of the Buffalo
We're waiting with impatience, not to say anxiety, for the rhapsode to come back
.
Sometimes we are frightened of burying ourselves in the world of the epic and losing sight of the main aim of our visit We are Homeric scholars. That's what we keep telling ourselves, every day, reminding ourselves that we came here not to study the Albanians' epic poetry but to try to solve the enigma of Homer
.
Easier said than done. In spite of ourselves, epic absorbs us. And then we encounter issues that are more tangled than grass roots. For example, we have now identified two other versions of the adventures of Ajkuna, wife of Muj, and they give quite different explanations for what happened to hen It must have been the same with the rape of Helen in pre-Homeric poems â until Homer came along and chose one of the variants
.
The Homeric account itself implies that there had been various different earlier views of Helen's position. The whole story of the rape of the queen is deeply ambiguous. Did she follow Paris of her own free will, or was she taken by force before she fell in love with him? Maybe she never did love her violator
but was just his slave! Alternatively, was she first fascinated by Paris, then, when tricked, did her feelings abate? Or was it rather he who first fell in love with her, then felt his passion waning, which is not exactly a rare event in such circumstances?
Homer manages to keep all these questions in the air. He never gives a final answer, neither during the Trojan War nor afterward, when the enigma of Helen's absconding ought to be explained. All you find is a degree of remorse for all that happened, and that sentiment is, moreover, spread rather thin. As for her behavior toward Menelaus, her lawful husband, that too is hardly transparent: we do not know if she hated him, despised him, or loved him
.
Though each of them recounts Ajkuna's position variantly, the different versions of the Albanian ballad are, individually, clear and straightforward. In one version, Ajkuna is carried off into slavery by Muj's Slav rival and, like any prisoner, spends her time waiting for her release from captivity. But there is another version, where the kidnapper is so fascinated by her that he turns her into a princess. Not only does he abandon his wife, but he forces her to hold a torch between her teeth to illuminate the first night of his love-making with Ajkuna. This variant does not mention
Ajkuna's own feelings; hut in two other versions, those feelings are clearly delineated. In one despite being made a princess, Ajkuna remains faithful to her first husband; in the other, she falls in love with her kidnapper as soon as she is carried off and furthermore, when Muj comes to rescue her, she cheats on him heartlessly. That was the version the rhapsode had sung
â
where Muj is betrayed, is chained to the lovers
3
bed, and has a flaming pine branch forced between his teeth, illuminating the lovers pleasure
.
It is obvious that each of the four Ajkunas overlaps with a part of Helen of Troy, or rather that Helen of Troy is an amalgam of these four different figures. As Homer depicts her, Helen is a rather muddled character, and the behavior of Menelaus is no less a confusion
.
March 1,
at the Inn of the Bone of the Buffalo
This sun shines brightly but gives little warmth
. â¦
It is cold, but we are contented. We have ended up discovering the foundations of a common Greco-Illyrian-Albanian proto-universe. Medieval Albanian poets went on
asserting its existence for hundreds of years, but as is often the way with poets, they made themselves heard only when it was too late
.
We're trying to put ourselves inside Homer's skin to understand what kind of tyrannical power he must have had to contain such a bubbling cauldron of artistic activity
.
The old worries still surface from time to time: are we going to get lost in the maelstrom? And another, more material worry; is the first rhapsode going to come back?
March 3, at the Inn
We were counting the hours until our
lahuta
player was due back, and then two other rhapsodes arrived, unannounced. We were really in luck, Shtjefen told us; it had been a long while since so many singers were seen in the space of a few days. One of the singers was placid and not at all talkative, like all the highlanders, but the other was a nervous, jumpy fellow. Always getting up and sitting down, going to the door, watching the road as if he was expecting something, good news or bad. Oddly enough, after Shtjefen had discussed matters with the rhapsodes, it was the jumpy one who agreed to sing for the two foreigners
.
Contrary to expectations, he declared that he would sing without accompanying himself on the
laheta.
He did not explain why. Was the string of his instrument broken? Or his hand not in good shape? Everyone fell silent around him, like the last time, but before starting to chant, the rhapsode raised his right arm, opened his hand wide, and placed the flat palm on his cheekbone, beside his ear. His outstretched fingers appeared to be sticking out from the back of his head, like a crest or comb
â
and Bill and I both muttered in astonishment
, Majekrah
(wing tip)! We had just seen, right before our eyes, the ancient ritual gesture with its untranslatable name that we knew about from the scholarly literature
.
There was a long silence before the bard began his chant. He started by declaiming these lines:
Today I shall reclaim an ancient debt of blood â No one else on earth has ever reclaimed so much
â¦
Max and I shouted out in unison, “This the ballad of Zuk the Standard Bearer!"
And indeed it was that entrancing ballad he sang, and what's more, in its full version. We had dreamed of hearing this poem ever since we first got interested in Albanian epic. Not for nothing have German scholars called it
the Albanian
Or esteia.
It has all the elements of ancient drama. a mother's betrayal, a sister inciting her brother to matricide, and Furies, and retribution...
When he had finished, we asked the rhapsode when he would be back, but to our great surprise (and to Shtjefen's surprise, above all), he replied that he would never return to the Rrafsh
.
Shtjefen was struck dumb by the answer. A highlander leaving the plateau forever was unthinkable, and worse still, it was a bad omen, a sign of terrible misfortunes to come
.
“We live in bad times,” said Shtjefen. “The worst things can happen.”
March
The inn is empty. We keep working, but now and again our spirits sink. The first rhapsode has not reappeared
.
His coming back is of vital importance to us. We are sure of recording and rerecording the singing of other rhapsodes, but if the first one doesn't return, it will feel like an emotional hurt, like the wound that first love makes in your heart
.
Shtjefen keeps glancing at us guiltily. It's obvious that he is more upset than we are about the long wait. Sometimes he goes out onto the doorstep and peers at the road as
it disappears into the fog. It isn't a view that inspires optimism, especially when ifs raining
.
Yesterday there was an unusual noise when we were downstairs drinking our morning coffee. A distant thrumming. We went outside to have a look. Shtjefen also came out and looked up into the sky
.
“It's a civilian airplane, which overflies this area twice a month,” he said
.
“With passengers?"
Bill and I exchanged glances, and our looks of suspicion did not escape Shtjefen, who came up to us and whispered:
“Don't worry. Up there”
â
he made a vague gesture to where the noise was coming from â “in the Rrafsh, there are no airports, and even if there were, no highlander would ever get on board an airplane.”
“Oh, really?” said Max. “And why not?”
“There are lots of reasons, believe me,” Shtjefen answered. “But one will be enough for you: the price of a plane ticket would come to two or three years of a highlandefs income.”
We nodded to indicate that we understood
.
“Therefore he will return, without fail,” Shtjefen went on, accentuating each word. Then his voice faltered. “Unless unless he is dead.”
I
N FACT, THE INNKEEPER'S PREDICTION
was borne out, and the rhapsode did return. It happened on a muffled, darkly overcast day. Everything seemed to be frozen still and the singing forgotten forever. The man looked so worn out that the Irishmen wondered what could have happened to him, but they did not dare ask. They did not even hope to hear the man sing again; they asked the innkeeper not to remind the traveler of his promise, but Shtjefen shook his head in disagreements the rhapsode would sing without fail; he had given his word. And he did indeed keep his promise. Without saying anything, as if fulfilling a duty, he took his place in a wooden chair in front of the microphone and began to chant first the one, then the other of the two ballads.
As soon as the rhapsode had left, Bill and Max started to compare the new recording with their transcription of the original performance, and they went on until late in the evening and again on the next day. They had thought that with his ashen face, the exhausted bard would have modified the words quite a lot. As a heading to the tape, Max recorded himself saying in English: “Ballad sung two weeks later by the same rhapsode, who appears to have suffered a psychological shock or deep distress in the meantime.“
However, to their acute astonishment they discovered that the two texts were to all intents and purposes identical In one thousand lines of verse, there were only two omissions; and in the scene where Muj is chained up, the line
The remains of the burnt pinewood
blackened Muj's chin
was reformulated as
The burnt remains of the pinewood mingled
with the foam from his mouth
The two of them discussed the reasons for this change at some length. On the one hand, it seemed that this tiny alteration and the omission of two lines out of a thousand were the very least of the losses that might be expected; on the other hand, the change could be accounted for by the singer's low spirits adding to the bitterness of his song.
Then they set that explanation aside, feeling it to be quite secondary, and looked more closely at the altered line. It was amazing. They had before their eyes their first, long-awaited free variant! There it was, not as a theoretical construct but as a real and living thing. The omission of two lines, that tiny void in the text, was the first example of forgetting that they had pinned down alive. They were fascinated and did not tire of examining both the variant and the absent lines, and suddenly everything seemed possible. They had in their hands one of the main threads of the Homeric tangle: what happened with a single rhapsode in a fortnight. Over several years or a century, or five hundred years, how many instances of forgetting would there be, and not just in a single rhapsode's performances but in a whole series of them, over a generation and from one generation to the next? The device of forgetting suddenly grew to huge and striking size, and they could feel their pulses throbbing in their temples as they tried to get their brains to cope with such vast dimensions.
They were completely buried in their work when they got an invitation to a ball to be given by the governor and his wife. At first they did not really understand what it was about, since the approach seemed so peculiar out of place, irrelevant, so pointless and absurd. Both said “No!” instinctively. What use is that to us? It must be a mistake,”Unable to get used to the idea that they had indeed been invited to a dance, they persuaded themselves that it must be a mix-up and that the invitation cards were really intended for someone else. However their own names were handwritten on the invitation cards. Moreover the governor's long-nosed limousine was parked right there in front of the inn. Not only had they been invited to a ball; they had been assigned a car to take them there! They were about to reiterate their refusal, when they vaguely remembered that there had been some talk of a ball at the soiree they attended on their first night in N---- and that in addition this whole area and maybe the inns and some of the itinerant singers came under the governor's jurisdictionâ¦.