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

epic poetry. The rest of the planet had passed through menopause. The only fecund region
was there. The only place that was still hot. The only place that could still he made pregnant with the very latest epic. If we waited any more, it would be too late for anything. Sand and forgetting would cover it all over, all of it even the puzzle itself ...
    â€œWe’d already caught on to that,”the governor said to himself as he scrabbled for a cigarette with a hand that shook from excitement. “Yes, we’d already caught on, you old crook!” he said aloud.
    He needed a few minutes to be able to concentrate on reading again. As was to be expected, one of the pigeons had let on to the other, and both of them were now overcome by their “discovery."
    We were both high on thoughts of all that was going to happen. It would shake the world! They would beg us to accept a chair at MIT! Definitive papers at the World Congress of Mediterranean Archaeology! And in our old Irish hometown people would shake their heads in disbelief Bill Norton and Max Ross? You must have got the names wrong. It must be some other pair…
    We laughed and laughed. And then we started imagining all the consequences again. Sing, O muse, of Harvard’s anger! And of the International Center for Homeric Re
search! "And of my stupid mother-in-law
, 
Diana Stratford,” Max added
.…
    But we had done enough laughing. We had to leave at once for those distant parts, had to get there, to the area, to the expiring laboratory. Issue a press release right away? No, quite the opposite: keep it all very, very secret Pretend the idea had never occurred to us. All that remained was to get started, there and then. Without telling anyone what we were up to
.
    We went over our good resolutions again and again, and then Max looked hard at me and said quietly, after a pause; “It is a good idea, undoubtedly, but in any event, you can’t do anything without proper preparation.”
    Those were the first cold drops to fall on the heat of our enthusiasm
.
    â€œWe’d already caught on to that one as well.” the governor mumbled as he stubbed out his cigarette in the ashtray…"OK, let’s see where the fox goes to ground…
.”
    He was convinced that the plot was right there but a little more effort was needed to coax it out into the light.
    â€¦
Who was Homer? A blind poet, as millions of educated folk imagine, or a redactor, or even, as Stewart claims, an editor in chief? The ancient poems of the
Iliad
and the
Odyssey
edited and published by Sir J. R Homer, of the Grecian Academy
—
ha ha ha!
    Meanwhile our minds were racing toward the Balkan peninsula. According to Stewart, there were rhapsodes still living there. Certainly the very last of the rhapsodes, the last Homeric singers. We would listen to their ballads and record them. That much was clear. But we wouldn’t just record different singers; we would compare them each to each. That was also common sense: confronting different rhapsodes and comparing the different versions. But would that be enough? We entered the two types of work into our notebooks, and as we did so we realized that the adventure that lay ahead would be much more complex than we had thought at first
.
    The governor reread the paragraphs he had just deciphered: proper preparation … comparing the different versions … adventure that lay ahead …
    OK, let’s see where you go to get your instructions he thought. Your university — or some office of the Greek intelligence service?
    Once again he was disappointed. The glimmer of light that had begun to clarify his suspicions was replaced by a thick fog of boring prose.
    We finally laid our hands on a recent and very complete edition of Albanian epic poetry
.
With the names of the itinerant singers whose ballads were reproduced. We could publish a collection of the songs of other rhapsodes. That way epic poetry would