The General of the Dead Army (18 page)

“Heaven alone knows where they’re excavating now.”

“In another football stadium I should think. Unless they’ve decided to dig up a main street somewhere.”

“They’re making heavy weather of it, poor things!”

“That’s their affair,” the general said. “All that concerns us is making sure they don’t pinch any more of ours.” They remained silent for the rest of the journey. The monastery where they were going in order to look for the isolated soldier’s grave stood on top of a small hill overlooking a fork in the road.

They began climbing the hill. The general walked at the head of the little group, followed first by the priest and the expert, then by the workmen, their tools on their shoulders.

Outside the monastery stood a few isolated and impressive tombs, obviously ancient, topped with great crosses and carved with Latin inscriptions. The gate, obviously very old too, was closed. In a stone embedded in the arch above it were carved the words
Societas Jesus
.

The expert knocked several times. Eventually answering steps were heard from the other side. A white-haired monk in a black habit appeared on the threshold.

It took them some time to explain what they were after.

“We have written authority from the government and from the archbishop,” the expert added, and began producing some papers from his wallet.

The monk lowered his grey eyes with their lower lids puckered into tiny pouches, and began to read the documents, moving his lips all the while as though chewing something.

“Good,” he said. “Follow me. I’ll take you there at once.” They walked after him along the inside of the monastery wall and eventually arrived at the back of the main building where the church stood.

“There it is,” the monk said. “It’s that grave there.”

It was a very modest grave. At its head, a stone cross and a helmet. The varnish on the helmet had long since worn off, the two sides were embedded in the earth and, when the grass began to sprout in spring, it must certainly be hidden by the green blades.

One of the workmen ripped it out of the ground with his shovel. Two more began removing the cross, and the remaining two prepared to dig.

“Why is this grave on its own like this, so far from all the others?” the general asked.

“It’s because this soldier was killed in extraordinary circumstances,” the old monk said in a deep, muffled voice, “by a man called Nik Martini.”

At the name, the general glanced over questioningly at the priest. “A peasant from the mountains,” the latter explained. “I saw this soldier hit with my own eyes. Nik was firing from that outcrop up there,” the monk said. With a shaky hand he indicated the outcrop where the peasant was supposed to have fired from.

They all turned and looked up at the mass of rock rising sheer above the road like a castle keep. “Was there a battle near here then?” the general asked. “Oh no,” the monk answered. “This whole area, from here down to the sea, is uninhabited. No one ever expected any troops to land here. Nik Martini, the son of Martin Nik, he knew!” The way he spoke, he assumed that they knew all about it.

“When I saw him walking with such a brisk step, even though he had a rifle over his shoulder, it never occurred to me he was going to shoot. The mountain folk always go about like that, and one can never guess from their demeanour whether they’re off to do some shopping in the local market or commit murder.”

Noticing that the others were all hanging on his words, the monk rehearsed his meeting with Nik Martini, the words he had spoken: “Where are you off to, Nik?” I called. “I’m off to fight” he answered. Then the two of them climbed to the top of the bell-tower, from where one could see the hillside swarming with troops. Then what he said to him was: “Nik, you can’t shoot from God’s house.” Then Nik’s anger, the threat of excommunication that he the monk had uttered, the way Nik climbed down from the bell-tower and set off up the hill where he could observe the entire shore.

“And then? He really fought?” the general asked.

“Yes. He kept sniping for ages, until a mortar got the range of him.”

“And that’s when he was killed?”

“No, that’s what we thought at first, when we didn’t hear his gun again. But later on we learned that he had appeared again, further off, on top of another outcrop, and that’s where this poor unfortunate was gunned down,” and he indicated the trench.

“And the mountain fellow, he got out of it alive?” the general asked.

“Nik Martini?” The old monk lifted his grey eyes with their veiled gaze up to the hills. “No,” he answered, “he is dead. He fought in four different places that day, until he had no strength in him left to fight. They say that when all his bullets were gone, and he could see the lorryloads of soldiers still driving past towards Tirana, he began to howl with grief, as our mountain people do when they are mourning the loss of someone near to them. So then they surrounded him. They tore him to pieces with their daggers.” There was a silence lasting several seconds.

“But Nik Martini has no grave,” the old monk added, perhaps under the impression that his visitors were also seeking the hillman’s remains. “No remains, no cross. There is only a song to keep his memory alive. It’s often sung, especially in those two villages, out there on the horizon.” And the monk pointed towards the north-west with a shaky hand. “Last year a mission from the Folklore Institute came this way and, if I’m not mistaken, they collected this song along with others. Then the members of the mission were at sixes and sevens. Some said it was a great deal older and was being erroneously attributed to Nik Martini’s prowess. Others asserted that with this type of song it’s always the same: the trunk goes back a long way but the branches and leaves are of recent date.”

The old monk rambled on but it was some while since anyone had been listening to him.

“It’s astounding,” the general said half an hour later, as they were driving back towards Tirana, “that a single man could have dreamed of fighting an entire army.”

“They cling to the honour of solitary combat,” the priest said.

“It is an ancient tradition among them.” The general lit a cigarette and sighed:

“Another day of war lived through!”

The priest said nothing. He looked out at the fields stretching away on either side of the road. The winter winds were already sweeping across them. A few miles further on the Adriatic reappeared, on their right now, imposing in its immensity.

Small hills with rounded summits overlooked the shore; on their slopes they bore the scattered graves of the Albanians killed on that first day of the war.

In fragments, and from varying sources, the general had gradually pieced together a picture of what had happened during those days along Albania’s two sea-coasts. He had been told how the news had spread through all the regions of the country, and how from all its four corners men set out in groups of five, or ten, or twenty, guns over their shoulders, on their way to fight. They came from considerable distances, without anyone having organized them, crossing mountains and valleys, with a hint of something ancient in their progress, something very ancient that had perhaps been handed on to them like an instinct, from generation to generation, since the legendary times of Gjergj Elez Alika, when evil, like a monster, always emerged from the sea, and had to be exterminated on the very seashore itself if it was to be prevented from insinuating itself inland. It was a very old sensation of alarm that had awakened in them, an ancient apprehension aroused by the sight of blue waters, and more generally by the sight of all flat country, since it was from such country that evil had always sprung. As soon as they sniffed the air from the sea and then saw it lying there so vast before them, these men, coming down from their mountains to join the remnants of the royal army then still fighting on, experienced a sense of awful peril and supposed that what they heard thundering in those waves was the sound of martial music summoning them on to war.

And so it was that on that day, drawn by tradition, many scores of guerrillas came down from the mountains. Among them there were men in felt hats and glasses mingling with tall mountain-dwellers from the far
bayraks
, with those mountain people who still led a patriarchal existence, many of whom were not even concerned to know what country it was now assailing them, or what enemy they were going to fight, since that was a matter of little importance to them. The important thing was that the evil was rising once again from the sea and must be driven back into it. Many had never seen the sea before in their lives, and when the Adriatic appeared before them they must no doubt have cried: “Ah, but how beautiful it is!” And perhaps they could no longer believe it possible that this was the source of the evil. But then they looked out with indifference at the teeming war ships standing off the shore, at the gigantic gun barrels trained on the coast, at the skimming planes, at the landing barges, and without further ado they began the fight, as tradition prescribed. And so they fell, some almost at once, some after a short while.

And then, when the sun was about to set, the latecomers arrived, those who had come from the furthest reaches of the mountains. And without waiting, worn out as they were, dropping from their long journey, they hurled themselves into the battle in their turn, as the sun sank, as the invaders started up their great pumps to wash the streets of Durrës clean of the blood that was making them flame in the westering light.

The mountain men had continued to flow shorewards until night fell. Some had come alone, and they could be seen silhouetted at the summits of the hills, the barrels of their guns pointing skywards above them. Then, as the searchlights revealed their ambushes, so the machine-guns mowed them down, and they lay there on their bellies until the morning, their hair wetted by the dew.

Next day they were buried where they had fallen, and their graves that spring were to be seen all over the slopes that face out to sea, scattered like innumerable grazing sheep. No one knew their names, or even the districts from which they had come. Only the mountain people could tell that from their clothes. Some of them had come from the distant
bayraks
far to the north, from those districts where the whole family dresses in black when a relation dies, and where they stretch a covering of black cloth even over the dead man’s cold, sad
kulla
of stone before they dedicate a song to his memory. And the songs they sang for those who died that day must surely have spoken of the distant and treacherous sea.

T
HE GENERAL ‘S EYE STOPPED
on one sentence: “Usually we spent the entire day smoking, leaning against the bridge parapet.” He almost crossed it out, but his hand hovered over the sheet of paper. He chewed his lips, like one who concedes defeat, and, without touching the sentence, continued to the end of the letter he was writing to his wife.

Since he had noticed that, not only in his conversation but in every episode of his life, alien elements were creeping in little by little, the words of visitors he had received, fragments of letters or diaries of dead soldiers, he had tried to dam up this flow. But this had proved so powerful that the words and phrases, sometimes entire narratives by the dead men, kept invading his mind. They trampled on all else and each day reinforced their tenure.