Bill touched the place on his head where he had been hit. He could still feel the swelling.
“But look here, there’s something else about us on the inside pages."
Max’s brow furrowed impatiently as he read on. He nodded once or twice, seemed about to smile, then muttered: “Unbelievable!”
“So what is it?” Bill asked.
“It’s incredible, Bill!” said Max, without raising his eyes from the paper. “The epivent we were waiting forwell, here it is! And do you know what the subject is? It’s the most recent episode you could possibly imagine: it’s an epic poem … about us!”
“What are you saying?”
“Look here. Oh, but of course you can’t make out the letters. … Sorry, Bill, I got carried away. Wait, I’ll read it aloud. “A black aprath rose from the waves….’ That’s how it begins.”
“What? What do you mean?” Bill stammered.
“A black aprath rose from the waves.”
“What’s an aprath? I don’t get it.”
“I suppose it’s an Albanian version of the German word Apparat, meaning a piece of equipment — that’s the tape recorder,” said Max. “Yes it has to be that. Hey listen to the rest of it:
“A black aprath rose from the waves.
Some said it came for our good.
It will bring only grief, said the others.
Some said it brings frozen nightingales to life.
By God it freezes the lahuta, said the others. …”
Max looked up as if to share his friend’s astonishment. He could not yet believe what he had read. “Is there more?” Bill asked, “Go on!.”
Max swallowed and continued to recite from the page:
“Hermit Frok came out of the cave
Where he had been hiding for seven years
Some think him a good man —
He is evil incarnate, say the others.
O Lord! He lay into the aprath,
He made it bleed black bile —
Slowly pulled out all its entrails, A
nd the hills and the heavens shook with his cries….”
Max glanced up at his friend once again. Bill had recently acquired a kind of detached stare that seemed quite impenetrable.
“It really is about us...,” he said reflexively in Albanian.
“What a tragic misunderstanding!”
It was too late now to try to put it right. By the fact of that misunderstandings they had now become an integral part of a mysterious universe. Things had come full circle.
There was a long blast on the ship’s horn. Max was about to go back to reading the paper, but the expression forming on Bill’s face suddenly held his attention. It was as if something were about to boil over on that inwardly thunderstruck face, with its aging, windburned, leathery skin, its eyes, like those of the more or less completely blind, seemingly made of stone.
“A black aprath rose from the waves …,” Bill mumbled.
Somewhat taken aback, Max was on the point of asking, “What do you mean?” but he realized that the question itself would have no meaning.
Suddenly, with a gesture that seemed to belong to another body, Bill pulled his right arm from under his cape, raised it to his face, splayed his fingers, placed his palm against his upper cheek and ear so that his fingers made a kind of ridge visible over the top of his head. Majekrah, Max thought, but he had no time to ponder it, because his companion had meanwhile begun to chant, in a flat and expressionless voice, the lines of verse that he had just heard read to him.
He repeated them with amazing accuracy, and the monotonous tune of his chanting enhanced their dis-tance’ making them seem to come from far away in time and space.
Good God! thought Max. He really is ill. He’s going to die….
The word death crossed his mind twice over, but strangely it now seemed devoid of any significance. It was only a shell that encased something else.
The File on H. Page 16
