The File on H. by Ismaíl Kadaré Page B

from
magnetic
and
sound,
the magnetophone, or, as the manufacturers call it for simplicity’s sake, the
tape recorder.
    It is a machine that records the human voice. That you can take with you, wherever you go. That not only records but plays back, as often as you want
…
Ifs exactly what we need! Like a gift from the heavens! Sent to us by providence! From Olympus!
    Hmm … The governor stifled a cough. So that’s all their machine could do He had been imagining all sorts of things: a cinema camera, an oilfield detector a bomb intended to blow up Parliament…
    Careful now! he warned himself as his eyes fell on the name of the king:
    We are also learning more and more about Albania. A small country with an ancient population. Tragic history. To begin with, a European country. Then Asian overlords. Return to Europe in the twentieth century. Half of all Albanians live-outside the current borders
.
    Apart from the epic, which constitutes its principal treasure, in our view, Albania also has chrome and oil And a king, Zog, whose name means “bird.” King Bird the First
.
    I had another appointment with the optician. Got a fresh prescription
.
    Max is having problems with his wife
.
    We’re trying to get the money together so as to buy the tape recorder as soon as possible
.
    We are revising all our ideas in the light of the machine. Oddly enough, bringing a tape recorder into our work is no trouble at all The device fits our project so well that it seems as if we had designed it all from the start with the machine in mind. As if, sub
consciously, it had preexisted its own invention
…
    The governor skipped through several more unutterably boring sheets. His eyelids were drooping but he sat up with a start when he came across the words
minister
and
spy
.
    "You’re getting closer and closer, my friends," he mumbled as he reached for his cigarettes. "You’re walking right into the noose."
    As he read on he said those words to himself over and over, but without really knowing whether the
noose
was the Albanian Legation in Washington or Albania itself.
    We just got back from Washington, where we submitted our applications for Albanian visas. I can’t bide the fact that we were rather disappointed by the way the Albanian Legation treated us. Not at all warm. On the contrary, the atmosphere was all suspicion and mistrust
.
    The plenipotentiary, who saw us in person, took our breath away. The representative of this partly archaic and partly grotesque little monarchy turned out to be intelligent, crafty, and witty, to have an extraordinary knowledge of world literature, to speak all the main European languages (including Swedish). He was even the friend and patron of the French poet Apollinaire, and he pokes fun at
everything, most especially at his own country and its people. Although we were trying to be as vague as possible about the reasons for our visit, we couldn’t help mentioning the name of Homer
—
and the diplomat interjected:
    â€œDid you know that some people claim that in the first line of the
Iliad, “Menin aeide, thea, Péleíadéo Achiléos”
(‘Sing, goddess, of the anger of Achilles, son of Peleus, the word
ménin,
as you can see for yourselves, is the Albanian word
meni,
meaning ‘resentment’? Which means that of the first three or four words of world literature, the first and unfortunately the bitterest is in Albanian…. Ha ha!”
    Then he went on talking about Albania with such cutting irony that in the end Max said to him:
    â€œYour Excellency, I find it hard to know when you are speaking seriously and when you are joking. For instance, what you said about the word
mení,
which you find in Homer — is that a learned jest or is it
…
?”
    The diplomat’s eyes flashed with a fearsome mixture of intelligence, cynicism, bitterness, and malice
.
    â€œAs far as the word is concerned, I believe that what I