She imagined a carriage with curtains drawn setting off behind a pair of horses. Inside, a woman wearing a black veil, who would be herself. Oh, Lord, she had seen that a hundred times at the movies…. But the carriage conveying the worried woman kept on rolling toward the Inn of the Bone of the Buffalo.
The English-speaking spy arrived at N— at the end of the week. Apart from the governor and one of his staff, no one was aware of the real trade of the black-suited gentleman with the handlebar mustache who took a room at the Globe Hotel It was natural that inquisitive townsfolk should seek to discover the real reason for the presence of this visitor from the capital, beginning at the very moment of his arrival, and as the information they picked up was not sufficient to satisfy their curiosity, it was even more natural that their inquisitiveness should intensify throughout the following week. It was variously reported that he was a collector of antiques and ancient manuscripts, a beekeeper, and a psychopath who benefited from mountain ain Other hypotheses that would have accounted more or less satisfactorily for the visitor’s frequent absences from the hotel might well have done the rounds had a tiny part of the truth not come to light. Did the suspicion first emerge among the town’s informers, for entirely comprehensible reasons (relations between colleagues, professional rivalries, and so on)? Or did the spies pick up the rumor somewhere and then, for the same reasons as before, adopt the story for themselves? It’s hard to say. But the spies’ own interest in getting to the bottom of it is easy to explain. As in all closed circles, in the world of shadows and muffled whispers that was the informers’ community, there were stars and there were black sheep, beginners full of admiration for their mentors as well as emotions of jealousy and hatred; there were tyros dreaming of future glory, along with legends about the exploits and adventures of Tirana spies, and lamentations on the difficulties of working in the provinces, and so on. All these tensions were suddenly reenlivened by the arrival of that confident man of the world with oiled hair and handlebar mustache who sauntered infrequently into the dining room of the Globe Hotel.
The most surprising thing was that the rumors circulating in the closed society of the informers ended up leaking out into the wider world. It had been an open secret for years, of course, that the loyalty and commitment of the spies at N fell some way short of absolute; indeed, it had been a well-known fact ever since the declaration of the monarchy and the founding of what was then a new profession in N—— by the unforgettable Palok Veshi (“The Ear’), whose real name was actually Gjoku (it had been changed for obvious reasons). But for things to reach such a scandalous pass — in other words, for a rumor to escape from the magic circle of the spies own community and to resurface in the population at large — well, that really was the limit!
The governor went over the case at great length in discussions with his subordinates and came to the conclusion that the leaking of the secret was not in this case, as it would have been in ordinary circumstances, the result of someone’s unavowed wish to forewarn the suspects so as to help them keep out of danger. In his judgment, what confronted him was a phenomenon of a diametrically opposite kind, which is to say that the leak, far from being prompted by compassion for the two foreigners, was in all probability the result of a surge of patriotism among the inhabitants of N who had received the spy from Tirana with great enthusiasm. (So you think you can step right in with your fat cigars and your funny machines and do whatever you want in these parts? Well, Mr. Foreigner, you’d better think again! You can’t even begin to imagine what we’re going to do to you, Mr. Foreigner, sir! We’re going to get to the bottom of all your little plans and even of your English!) That’s what seemed to be the real reason for the leak.
This analysis of the rumor’s origin (a resurgence of the patriotic ardor that had admittedly been somewhat muted in recent years in N ) put the governor’s mind at rest, so he promptly turned a deaf ear to the further circulation of the news.
Meanwhile the rumor kept on spreading. Even the new spy’s real name was now on the lips of the local gossips. There was mention of his special services to the king in Tirana, of his sentimental involvements with society ladies in the capital, including the wives of ambassadors, and much else besides. He was a spy of the very first rank, you couldn’t deny it, the local underlings admitted with envy; he was accustomed to working in the vaults of palaces and cathedrals, not in bug-ridden, dung-filled barns, as they were. Dull Baxhaja, who had occasion to crouch alongside the man from the capital in the roof space of the Buffalo Inn, must be feeling quite diminished. But it would actually be a great honor for him to be allowed to work alongside such a star. Unless Dull had been considered unnecessary now and had been moved off the Irish job? Yes, sure, he must have been taken off the job. What use would he be now that the maestro was there?
According to another rumor, however, Dull was carrying on with his surveillance of the foreigners. It was only common senses even the man from Tirana couldn’t stay up in the rafters twenty-four hours a day, and in any case that wasn’t even essential He listened only at quite specific times, and at night he would go back to his comfortable hotel bedroom, leaving Dull in the attic.
One day, Daisy said to her husband:
“I heard about the arrival of a spy who speaks English, but you said nothing about it to me!"
"So what? It’s not as if it were important news!”
She carefully watched her husband’s eyes shifting desperately around the sitting room, seeking something to look at.
“Thank you at least for not trying to deny it this time.”
“Eh?” he said, as he left the room, still pretending to be hunting for something he had lost.
Daisy sank into an armchair and stared at the carpet. From time to time she was overcome by a particular kind of sadness, a slow-moving sadness like a slab of melting snow, more bearable than the pangs of real, acute melancholy. She had not made up her mind to go all the way to the inn. She had dithered and backed off, not seeing how to overcome some of the obstacles, such as whom to choose to accompany her and what explanation to invent for her visit. Sometimes she calmed herself down by saying that what had to happen had happened, that the eavesdropping had been put in place and she could be of no further use to the foreigners, but the opposite thought immediately followed; maybe they had not yet said anything compromising, maybe the disaster could still be stayed. And so the temptation to dash out to the inn would come to the fore again, and she would work out the words she would say to her only real friend, the postmaster’s wife, to explain why she had gone to the inn, and then she would once more fall prey to doubts and hesitations: How much of the truth should she tell? And just what would she say exactly?…
This is utter torture, she would groan inwardly from time to time. She had never thought she would be so in. capable of making a decision. Yet she had to act at once! If she could only manage to tell the Irishmen not to talk about her, so that the filthy ears of the eavesdroppers would at least not hear her name! Maybe they would take the hint and understand all the rest?
The skies were still overcast, but March had nonetheless changed the quality of the light and widened the expanse of the heavens. Bill stood at the window and looked outside, while Max was busy with the tape recorder behind him. The rhapsode’s monotonous chant made him sleepy.
Bill was startled out of his daydream by the noise of a carriage in the courtyard of the inn. He leaned closer to the windowpane, wiped off the condensation, but still could not make out who it was walking back to the carriage. For a second he thought he recognized the silhouette, but the form blurred into vagueness once again.
Who is that woman? he wondered. I think I’ve seen her somewhere before. He rubbed the glass pane with his hand and then shuddered from head to toe as he realized that the haze belonged not to the image itself but to his own vision of it. Were his eyes now so weak as to prevent his making out a person only a few yards away?
He had been increasingly concerned about his ey
esight for some time. “Galloping glaucoma,” he mumbled, diagnosing the malady that had recently become his living nightmare. He closed his eyes, then immediately opened them, hoping that he had suffered only a momentary loss of vision and he would now be able to see the woman getting into the horse-drawn carriage. But it was as before, and everything, even the carriage, seemed to have been swallowed up by fog.
“Max,” he said, turning around to speak to his friend. “We must go to Tirana right away. I can hardly see anything anymore.”
The governor could hardly believe his eyes when he slit open the envelope. Instead of Dull’s daily report, it contained a letter of resignation.
“Have I gone mad or has Dull?" he cried out. “Resigning just when the affair of the two foreigners is about to bear fruit?”
To the governor’s amazement, the informer began his letter by begging to be excused for causing such trouble, but once he had read the submission, the governor would probably think that either he himsel had lost his marbles or it was the present writer. Dull who had gone off his rocker.
But no, the spy went on, it was not so: the governor was not hallucinating, and he. Dull, had not gone mad. He was in full possession of his mental and physical faculties, and he was asking to be relieved of his responsibilities.
Malicious persons, he continued, would no doubt attempt to explain this request as a petty maneuver related to dissatisfaction over his rank, for instance, or his salary, etc., but he trusted that the governor knew Dull well enough to believe that he had never allowed ambition or personal interests to influence his work. People of ill will would perhaps attribute his resignation to the humiliation, or even the jealousy he had allegedly experienced on the arrival of the English-speaking spy. Coming from them, such an explanation was entirely natural, since just as a cucumber is nine-tenths water, so their lives consisted in equal proportion of offenses suffered and resentments harbored.
Nine-tenths water! the governor repeated to himself. Dull knew so many things! More than a mere spy, that man had the makings of a university professor, he thought.
That’s what such sorts might think, the spy wrote, whereas the governor himself certainly remembered that it was he. Dull, who had clamored, perhaps to the point of irritating the governor, for the detachment to N—— of his colleague from the capital.
No, he concluded, absolutely no part of what was going to be said about him would be true. And to make a long story short, he would now lay out with as much clarity and honesty as he could the real reason for his resignation: on 11 March, at 11:00 A.M. precisely, after seven years of true and loyal service to the kingdom as an informer, he had for the first time nodded off while on duty.
Oh, so that’s it. The governor sighed with relief. It was an open secret that most officials in N—— took a nap during working hours, especially during the summer. But Dull wanted to be different. And to make his confession look all the more tragic, the spy had framed it in thick black lines, as if it were a bereavement card.
Nobody had seen him, Dull went on, so he could have confessed nothing, seeing that he was at that time alone in the attic of the Buffalo Inn. He could have kept quiet about it, but he didn’t have it in him to cheat. He had never hidden anything from the state. With only his own conscience to keep watch over him, over the years he had undertaken all the exercises that a good spy should practice on his own, such as training his ear in difficult, not to say extremely hard acoustic conditions — against the howling wind, the pelting rain, the rumble of thunder, the sound of the sea, dogs barking, crows crowing, owls hooting, and so on. He had never allowed himself to be overcome by sleep, neither in sultry summer heat nor in winter’s icy blast; he had kept awake forty-eight hours at a stretch and even resisted, as he crouched in attics, the snoring of his dozing suspects below. In addition, he had always reported in writing everything he had heard and seen, without adding or omitting anything at all, without having recourse to any tricks or wheezes. He had accomplished his task in secret and in silence, as is the lot of every spy; he had made every effort not to breathe a word of it to anyone and to remain unseen, and on the other hand to be as open and frank to the state as was imaginable. For which reason he could not hide what had happened to him on that morning of March 11. The governor sighed deeply before reading on. On March 11, at 11:00 A.M., the informer related, while lying as per usual above the ceiling of the room at the Buffalo Inn where the two Irishmen had been listening for some time to a recording of a rhapsode, he had suddenly become aware of the rumble of a carriage in the backyard of the inn. What carriage is this? he asked himself straightaway. Where has it come from? Why had he not heard it coming sooner? He rubbed his eyes, thinking he must have been drowsing for a second. Drowsing, indeed! To his great shame, he had actually fallen asleep! To such an extent that when he had been wakened by the noise of the carriage, he had not had all his wits about him and so he only half saw a woman as through a thick fog getting into the carriage and speeding off.
There was no point going on at any length about the shock he had suffered. It was not simply that he had failed to recognize the woman, not merely that he had missed the conversation she might have had with the suspects. In fact, it was impossible to tell whether she had actually met them. As for her identity, that would presumably come to light later on. But those were not the real reasons for his upset; far from it. The catastrophe had happened inside himself: it made him feel like a cracked vase, shattered from top to bottom. Suffering intolerable pain, consumed with howling remorse, he had fallen into a state of irremediable despair. He would ask for neither pardon nor comfort. Words of consolation would simply exacerbate his torment. He asked one thing only: the right to retire to a life of oblivion. Which was why he was submitting to the governor in accordance with all necessary regulations, his official request to be relieved of his functions as informer to the kingdom.
The governor gazed for a long while at the signature that he had got to know so well He felt a wave of sorrow and, simultaneously, acute irritation. What sense did this abrupt resignation make? Was it really conscience-stricken remorse, or was it a cover for something else?
Dark and turgid thoughts, heaped one upon the other like rain clouds, floated through his mind. Who could the woman be? Alongside the sadness he experienced at the prospect of life without Dull’s reports — a sharp pang of regret, with a vague touch of nostalgia for his lost youth, as if this episode were the end of an era — he also felt suspicions: had Dull really not recognized the woman, or was he behaving this way so as not to have to give her away?
The governor’s head was throbbing, an aftermath, it seemed, of an odd spell. "Retire to a life of oblivion,” he said aloud, repeating Dull’s words. He would bet that Dull wasn’t going to vanish from circulation, except in order to reappear later as a mysterious visitor, or a prophet, or even as a claimant to the throne! God knows, with a man like that, you could not rule anything out! It sometimes occurred to him that his favorite spy had the potential to rise to inaccessible heights, to the very stratosphere, to the rank of chief spy to the terrestrial globe! That last thought brought a shiver to his spine. He could feel his mind going over the brink, but he was unable to stop himself. The hermit’s ramblings about the eye of the world somewhere in the Central Asian plain had had their effect….
He suddenly realized that he had never actually seen Dull Baxhaja, “The Eaves.” Year after year, he had read his reports without having the slightest notion of the man’s appearance or his voice. Without ever having seen or heard him! And in the whirl of his mind he almost shouted, "Does he really exist?’’
He stood up from his chair sharply to put a stop to this latest wave of dementia.
12
EACH DROP OF THE LIQUID made the blank stare of the pupil seem even more pitiable. The first drop, then the second, then the third clouded the pupil beneath a glaucous film.
After four days’ treatment with a new and powerful medicine that had only just come onto th
e market and which they had been amazed to find available in a Tirana pharmacy (apparently the queen mother, who had problems with her eyes too, had ordered it from abroad), Bill had the feeling that his eyesight was improving slightly.
As a result, the scholars' morale, which had been badly dented by Bill’s state of health, took a turn for the better. The gradual lifting of the winter weather contributed to their spirits. That very morning, Bill had been full of good cheer and had shouted out:
"Hey, Max, do you see that bird? It’s flying toward the Accursed Mountains, isn’t it?”
Max turned his head toward the window.
“That’s where it’s heading, all right. It’s a miracle. Bill.”
Bill was perfectly aware of the double meaning of these words. It was a miracle that he had managed to make out a bird in flight and, what’s more, tell where it was flying. Also miraculous was that the flight of the bird confirmed the advent of spring. For most of the year, no birds overflew the Accursed Mountains; that was one of the reasons for the mountains' name.
“A holy miracle, Bill!” Max emphasized, clapping his hands.
Bill's sickness had ruled out their planned trek into the hills for some time, but now it seemed that it could come back onto the agenda. They even asked Shtjefen to hire a carriage for them and to permit Martin to accompany them, if they undertook the expedition.
The File on H. Page 13
