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.
10
ON 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.
They had come across nothing like this special use of time in any other European epic poetry, not even in the Icelandic sagas.
It was March, but the days were still as short and dark as in February. Waiting impatiently for the weather to improve, the Irishmen feared from time to time that the first warmth of spring would take them away from the climate of the epic — for, as they had come to realize, epic weather was always wintry. It was initially rather astonishing that a Mediterranean country like Albania could have engendered a poetic climate that was all north wind and glistening snow and ice. The entire corpus of the epic seemed to crackle underfoot like an icebound field. But epic cold was generous, for the snow never melted sufficiently to reveal the mud underneath, and it struck the scholars that the climate had been specially invented to allow its characters to hibernate and to reawaken years later. At first they had taken it for granted that epic poetry originating at six thousand feet above sea level would necessarily be set in a snow-laden landscape, but as more detailed study of the ballads demonstrated, the characteristic climate of the Albanian epic corresponded to a much higher altitude than that, and it was safe to suppose without risk of error that the action was located in an area situated between twelve and fifteen thousand feet above sea level — halfway between the earth and the heavens.
They had been making more recordings, many of them providing perfect material, and were quite satisfied with their progress. The work was going well. They had succeeded in completing their inventory of instances where the Albanian epics coincided with those of the ancient Greeks, They had identified the equivalents of the House of Atreus and of Ulysses, and beyond that they had found doubles of Circe, Nausicaa, and Medea, as well as figures identical to the Furies and the Eumenides, whom the Albanians called Ora and Zana, They had undertaken further research on the question of forgetting by looking at details such as the rhapsodes diet, including their consumption of phosphorus. (Oddly enough, it turned out that the highlanders? diet contained virtually no fish and even less of the minerals, such as phosphorus compounds, that are believed to improve the memory. Any rhapsode offered such nourishment would doubtless have treated it as a magic potion intended either to intensify memory or to annihilate it.) What’s more, they had succeeded in recording a ballad sung by a rhapsode who was thought to have committed a murder the previous week (a “blood debt” paid off), though they failed to establish whether or not this experience had exercised any influence on the poem or its delivery.
Despite all these elements, which complicated their task, Bill and Max felt that they had succeeded in weaving the Albanian epic onto the reels of their tape-recording machine. Each morning when they woke, their eyes turned automatically toward its quietly gleaming lid. They liked to remind themselves that the creation of that device was like a miracle. It seemed to have been decreed that the solution of the Homeric enigma had had to wait until tape recorders had been invented.
Thinking such thoughts bolstered their confidence and swept away their doubts. They imagined their predecessors in Homeric studies who, after struggling to pierce the mystery as they were doing, had eventually given up, and become ironical, not to say sarcastic, about their original enthusiasm, about their own gullibility, and about anyone who might try the same research again. But the tape recorder was the Irishmen’s rampart against failure and ridicule. Earlier scholars, they assumed, would have solved the puzzle of H. long since had they had a tape recorder to help them. The Irishmen were lucky to be alive at the right time: the key to success had fallen into their lap, and in the last analysis, they were simply carrying out the imperatives of their own time.
They had a dreadful fright one night when they thought that the machine had broken down. It was very late, and they were playing back a recorded tape. All at once the volume rose, then the voice slowed down and trailed off into a croak that sounded like a man dying of apoplexy. Bill and Max went as white as sheets. They could not have been more agitated had they been watching one of their nearest and dearest suffering a stroke. They panicked, paced up and down, tore their hair out, turned the instruction manual inside out, until Max suddenly thought of checking the batteries. Thank the Lord! they sighed with relief, when they realized that the only thing wrong was that the batteries were dead.
However, the croaking drawl of the failing tape stuck in their minds. That must be how the entire machinery of the oral epic had run down: its present voice only muffled the death rattle that could be heard nonetheless. The machine had produced just twelve lines for the year 1878 and had painfully squeezed out only four or five for 1913 like the last words of a delirious patient. The epic was now comatose. There was not much chance that it would come to in time to mumble a few more words before freezing forever in the silence of death.
One nighty they recorded the rumble of thunder over the high mountains and another night, the howling wind. They thought that these noises would help them to recreate the right atmosphere back in New York when they would be working on the tapes at home.
Martin told them one day that he had seen the Serbian monk wandering around the area again; but the scholars hardly remembered whom he was talking about.
Before reporting the significant results of the surveillance carried out this day of the cave known as the Screech Owl’s Cavern (or the Hermits Cave, to give it its other name), I should like to remind the governor that in my report oft February I referred to a conversation between the tw
o Irishmen and the Serbian monk Dushan, who in the course of a journey to Shkoder stopped for the best part of half a day at the Buffalo Inn. If I am so bold as to remind you, sir, it is because the significance of the dialogue overheard today at the Screech Owl’s Cavern will perhaps be easier to grasp if put in the context of the conversation mentioned above. In addition, prior to giving an account of the later conversation, I should like to forewarn you, sir — and I do this not for the sake of justifying any failings on my part, sir, or to cover up any slackness in my conduct of the surveillance, but solely out of respect for the truth — I must therefore advise you forthwith, sir, that said conversation was closer to the gabbling of a pair of lunatics than to a normal discussion, and that given these circumstances, the governor will naturally understand the extent of the difficulty one has in reproducing its tone correctly. I must repeat that I do not wish thereby to justify in any way.…
“What a terrific fellow!” the governor said to himself as he raised his coffee cup from the circular mark that it had left, like a seal, on Dull Baxhaja’s latest report. “He’s the greatest!” Lower down, the spy gave the governor his formal assurance that he had always been careful to have his hearing tested, that he had taken the test required by regulations only a fortnight before, and that he had official certification that his hearing was A-1 and 20/20. Furthermore, keen as he was to maintain his memory in tiptop shape, he observed all appropriate dietary regulations, did not drink alcohol, and even though he would prefer to eat rather tastier morsels, he consumed the required weight of fish per week to provide his system with the right amount of phosphorus, and even went so far as to take the elderberry syrup that the doctor had prescribed for him three times a day. He begged the governor to forgive him his second digression, a liberty taken not at all for the purpose of obtaining a pay raise or promoting his career but solely in order to establish the credibility of this report and to fulfill the task allotted to him, insofar as the slightest doubt that might be raised as to its truthfulness could jeopardize the further conduct of the surveillance of the two suspects,