The File on H. by Ismaíl Kadaré Read Free Book Online

translation.
    â€œOh my God,” Bill groaned, burying his head in the pillow. It wasn’t his first sleepless night, far from it, but it was unlike any other he had known. He felt ever more stressed, and the luminous hands of his watch, which he glanced at every so often, made him shiver as if they glowed with a deathly light.
    The cart rumbled under his window once again at six-thirty. Bill was now quite exhausted, emptied of all his reserves.
    "Good grief, here they are!” mumbled the governor, still half asleep, as he heard the horse-drawn cart trundle up to his door.
    He slipped out of bed very carefully, so as not to wake his wife and went downstairs.
    Pjeter Prenushi, resentment written all over his face, handed him a large envelope.
    "Well done lad,” the governor said, without even looking at the agent. "Off to bed now.”
    The governor went back up to his study and took out the sheets of translation, together with a short covering note: “Herewith the documents you requested urgently. P. P.”
    The governor let out a heartfelt sigh. Ah, it was nothing like Bull’s report writing! Nothing gave the governor as much pleasure as those reports, not even — though he would have been ashamed to admit it — not even romantic novels.
    â€œAt last!” he thought as he unfolded the sheets covered with the priest’s beautiful handwriting. "Now let’s see what those nuts have in their heads," he added, feeling a twinge in his heart. The pain accompanied a vague feeling of guilt at receiving reports from someone other than Dull Baxhaja.
    â€œAt last!” he said a second time, as he settled down to read.
    After a while, the governor raised his head and rubbed his eyes. He had never liked books, but unlike the other officials at N----, he did sometimes read. Gossips said that it was only because of his wife, but he didn’t mind. During their long, boring evenings together, over cast by that marital tension which is far more treacherous than an outright row, what he’d do to clear the atmosphere was not to whisper soothing words to Daisy, or to promise her an outing to Tirana, or to smack her around, as other husbands did, but simply to pick up the book that had been lying for ages on her bedside table and open it. He would then feel his wife’s eyes on him, attentive at first, then sympathetic, as if she felt sorry to see him mortifying himself on her account. Thereafter her toings and froings between bedroom and bath would accelerate, the rustling of silk would become more audible, until the awaited moment when she would tiptoe up to him and place a kiss on his forehead. Those were the sweetest moments they had, especially when with her dainty hand Daisy closed his book and took the spectacles off his brow.
    Reading had thus been long associated in his mind and in his senses with the smell of powder, so that in the absence of this stimuli it seemed doubly tiresome to him.
    However, there was another reason why, on this occasion reading seemed unbearable. He had been waiting to see these pages with impatience, almost with anxiety, and they disappointed him. They were opaque, incomprehensible, and — this was the main thing — profoundly suspect.
    They consisted mostly of notes written in diary form, with a few short letters interspersed. They dealt with learning Albanian and shorthand. Frequently, also, they mentioned keeping things secret. Now and again there was a note of disquiet. "We must hurry, or it will be too late.“
    Why did they have to hurry? For what might they be too late?
    The governor skipped through to the end of the manuscript in the hope of finding further oracular phrases, but there were very few of them, and they were always buried inside stodgy paragraphs that seemed to have been designed to hide them.
    So that’s that, he sighed, when he realized that whether he liked it or not, he was going to have to work through the whole text