The General of the Dead Army (2 page)

He was the representative of a great and civilized country and his work must be greatly worthy of it. In the task he was now undertaking there was something of the majesty of the Greeks and the Trojans, of the solemnity of Homeric funeral rites.

The general drank another glass of brandy. And from this night onwards, every day, every night, far though he was from his country, all those awaiting his return would be saying as they thought of him: “At this moment he is searching. We are here, out strolling for our pleasure, going to the cinema, to restaurants, while he is over there, leaving no path untrodden in that foreign land in order to recover our unhappy sons. Oh, truly that man’s task is a heavy one! But he will make a success of it. He will not have been sent in vain. And may God be with him!”

T
HE EXHUMATION OF THE ARMY
began on 29 October at 1400 hours.

The pick sank into the ground with a dull thud. The priest made the sign of the cross. The general gave a military salute. The old roadmender, lent to them by the local government association, raised his pick and brought it thudding down a second time.

There, the task has begun, the general thought to himself with emotion as he watched the first clods of damp earth roll to a halt at their feet. It was the first grave to be opened, and all those involved were standing around it in silence, like figures of stone. The Albanian expert, a blond and elegant young man with a very thin face, scribbled in his notebook. Two of the other workmen were smoking cigarettes, a third had a pipe in his mouth, and the last, the youngest, wearing a roll-neck pullover, was leaning on the handle of his pick and simply observing the scene with a pensive air. All four were closely following the opening of this first grave so as to learn the correct procedure to be observed in their work - the exhumation procedure described in detail in the contract: appendix 4, paragraphs 7 and 8.

The general’s eyes remained fixed on the steadily growing pile of clods at his feet. They were black and friable, and as they crumbled they gave off faint wisps of vapour.

So there it is, that foreign soil, he said to himself. The same black mud as everywhere else, the same stones, the same roots, the same vapour. Earth like earth anywhere. And yet - foreign.

Behind them, on the road, the cars flashing past occasionally sounded their horns at one another. The cemetery, like most military cemeteries, flanked the road with one of its sides. Beyond the road there were cows grazing, and occasionally one would send a peaceful moo floating across the valley.

The general was uneasy. The pile of earth was perpetually growing, and now, after half an hour, the old workman was buried up to his knees in the trench. He climbed out to rest for a moment, just long enough to allow one of his comrades to shovel out the earth he had just loosened with his pick, then he climbed back into the hole.

High in the sky a flight of wild geese passed over their heads.

A lone villager, leading his horse by the bridle, walked solitarily past along the road. Apparently unaware of the nature of their labours, he shouted down: “Keep at it!”

No one replied, and the peasant continued on his way.

The general gazed in turn at the dug earth and the calm, grave faces of the workmen.

“What can they be thinking of all this?” he wondered. “Five of them, just five, and they are about to dig up a whole army.”

But there was nothing to be learned from their expressionless features. Two of them lit further cigarettes, the third pulled yet again on his pipe, and the fourth, the youngest, still leaning on the handle of his pick, was looking on with the same absent gaze.

The old roadmender, now only visible from the waist upwards, was listening to the expert explaining something. After a few moments’ discussion he resumed his task.

“What did he say?” the general asked.

“I didn’t quite catch it,” the priest answered.

The entire group resumed its deathly silence.

“We shall be lucky if it doesn’t rain!” the priest remarked suddenly.

The general raised his eyes. The mist concealed the horizon on every side, and it would have been impossible to say whether the darker shapes distinguishable in the distance, far in the distance, were thicker banks of mist or enormous mountains. As he continued to dig, the workman sank deeper and deeper into the earth. The general kept his eyes fixed on the snowy head as it moved back and forth in time to the blows of the pick.

You can see he knows his job, he thought to himself. Naturally.

If he didn’t they presumably wouldn’t have given him to us as a foreman. But the general would have liked to see the old roadmender dig even more quickly, to see all the graves opened up as quickly as possible, and all those dead men found. He was impatient to see the other workmen begin digging too. Then he would be able to take out his lists and start covering them with little crosses - one little cross for every soldier found.

Now the pick was striking the earth with a muffled sound that seemed to spring from the very bowels of the earth. The general suddenly felt alarm run through every fibre of his being. What if they didn’t find anything down there? What if the maps were wrong and they were obliged to dig in two, three, ten different spots? Just to find a single soldier! “What if we don’t find anything?” he said to the priest.

“We tell them to dig somewhere else. We can pay them double if necessary.”

“It’s not a matter of money. The only thing that counts is to find all the bodies on our lists.”

“We’ll find them. We can’t afford not to.”

After a moment the general spoke again, perplexedly:

“It’s as though there had never been a battle here, as though this ground had never been trodden by anything but those brown cows grazing so quietly over there.”

“One always has that impression afterwards,” the priest said.

“Remember, more than twenty years have gone by.”

“Yes, it was a long time ago, it’s true. And that’s what worries me.”

“Why? Why should it?” the priest asked. “The earth here is firm enough. Anything buried in it wouldn’t move for a great many years.”

“Yes, that’s true too. But I don’t know, I just can’t get used to the idea of them being down there at all, so close to us, only six feet away.”

“That’s because you were never in Albania during the war,” the priest said. “Was it really so terrible?” The priest nodded.

The old workman had by now almost completely vanished into the earth. The little circle had tightened more closely around him. The Albanian expert, doubled over at the waist, continued to pour instructions down into the trench.

The shovel produced a harsh, dull sound as it scraped against the pebbles. The general felt as though he were hearing fragments of the stories he had been told by the ex-soldiers who had come to see him before he left, hoping to be of help to him in his search for the graves of their comrades, dead and buried here in Albania.

The noise of my dagger grating against the pebbles made me shudder. But no matter how hard I tried I could make no impression on the ground with my makeshift tool. After a tremendous effort all I’d managed to get out was a wretched fistful of dirt, and I thought to myself sadly: “Ah, if only I’d been sent to the Engineers I’d have a shovel, and then I could dig faster, really quickly!”, because only a few yards away my best mate was lying on his belly with his legs sticking out over a ditch half full of water. I pulled out the dagger from his belt too and began digging again with both hands. I wanted the hole to be really deep, because that s what he’d asked for. Hed said to me: “If I’m killed when I’m with you
,
then bury me in the ground as deep as you can. I’m afraid those dogs and jackals will find me. Like that time outside that little town. Tepelene wasn’t it called? You remember those dogs there?” “Yes, I remember them all right,” I answered, taking a drag at my cigarette. And now he was dead, and I kept saying to him as I went on digging: “Don’t worry, don’t worry, your graves going to be deep, really deep!” And when I’d finished everything I flattened the earth down as best as I could, making sure not to leave any clues behind, for fear someone might just notice something and dig his body up again. And then, turning my back on the machine-gunfire, I made off into the darkness and, after I’d walked a little way, I turned just once to look back into the blackness where I d just left him, and I said to him in my mind: “Don’t be afraid, they won’t find you.”

“Still nothing, apparently,” the general said, failing to disguise his nervousness.

“It’s still too early to say,” the priest answered, “but there’s no reason to give up hope yet.”

“All the same, it’s unusual in wartime to bury the dead so deeply.”

“Perhaps this was his second burial. They were sometimes exhumed and reburied a second, or even a third time.”

“Possibly. But if all the graves are as deep as this we shall never finish.”

“We’ll have to take on extra workmen sometimes, that’s all,” the priest said. “Even if it is only for short periods.”

“But what are they doing, for goodness sake?” the general broke out after a pause. “Haven’t they found anything yet?”

“They have reached the maximum depth,” the priest said. “If there is anything to be found, it is now or never.”

“I’m afraid we’re off to a bad start.”

“Perhaps there has been a subsidence of the subsoil,” the priest said, “though the map doesn t show any seismic zone.”

The expert leaned even further down into the trench. The others moved closer.

“Here we are! I’ve found him!” the old workman cried in a voice that came up to them sounding cavernous and muffled, for he had shouted the words with his head lowered, into the bottom of the grave.

“He has found him,” the priest echoed.

The general uttered a deep sigh. The other workmen emerged from their torpor. The youngest, the one who had been standing so pensively leaning on the handle of his pick, asked one of his companions for a cigarette and lit it.

The old workman began depositing the bones, shovelful by shovelful, on the edges of the grave. There was nothing very impressive in these remains. Mixed with the crumbling soil they looked like pieces of dead wood. All around there hung the aroma of the freshly turned earth.

“The disinfectant,” the expert cried. “Bring the disinfectant!”

Two workmen hurried over to the lorry parked behind the car on the side of the road.

The expert, who had found a small object of some kind among the bones, held it out to the general, gripped in a pair of pincers.

“It s an identity medallion,” he said. “Please don t touch it.”

The general brought his face closer to the object and with difficulty made out the figure of the Virgin Mary. “Our army’s medallion!” he said in a low voice.

“Do you know why we wear this medallion?” he said to me one day. “So that they’ll be able to identify our remains if were killed.” And there was irony in his smile. “Do you really imagine theyll bother to look for our remains? O.K., so let’s suppose they do search one day. Do you think I get any consolation out of that thought? Theres nothing more hypocritical, if you ask me, than going around looking for bones when the war s over. It’s a favour I can certainly do without. Let them just leave me be where I fall, I say. I shall chuck this rotten medallion of theirs away. “And that’s what he did in the end. One fine day he just threw it away and never wore one again
.

The disinfecting done, the expert took the measurements of each bone in turn, spent a short while making calculations in his notebook, his pen held aslant in his long, thin fingers, then lifted his head and said: “Height five foot eight.”

“Correct,” the general said, after checking to see that the figure tallied with that on his list.

“Pack the bones!” the expert told the workmen.

The general followed the roadmender with his eyes as the old man walked over to the road and, obviously tired, sat down on a stone, pulled his tobacco pouch from his pocket and began rolling a cigarette.

Why is that man looking at me like that? the general thought.

A few minutes later the workmen began digging in five different places at once.

Chapter without a Number

“NOW THERE’S NO KNOWING
where we are,” said the general smiting his brow. “This looks to me like a complete dead-end.”

“Why don’t we take another look at the maps?”

“Because they’re meaningless. Because none of our references seem to refer to them!”

“And it looks as though the sketch-map of the cemetery was made in a terrible hurry. While they were actually retreating.”

“Quite possible.”

“Why don’t we try over there, to the right? Where does that track lead to?”

“Those are all fields belonging to a co-operative. In cultivation.”

“Well, let’s try that way.”

“It’s a waste of time.”

“And this damnable mud on top of it all!”

“We shall have to try over to the right there eventually, you know.”

“Very well, but it won’t get us anywhere.”

“This isn’t a search, it’s a wild-goose chase!”

“What’s that you said?”

“Oh, this blasted mud!”

“We’re stuck.”

The fretful voices and the footsteps moved off together across the plain.

A
T THE END OF TWENTY DAYS
they returned to Tirana. Dusk had fallen. Their green limousine drew up outside the Hotel Dajti, at the foot of the curtain of great pine trees that tower in front of the building. The general emerged first. He looked tired, depressed, drawn-featured. His fixed gaze halted for a moment on the car. If only they’d at least wiped off that mud, he thought irritably. But they had only just arrived back, so he could hardly blame the driver because the car was dirty. The general realized that, but he brushed such rational considerations aside.

He walked swiftly up the entrance steps, collected his mail at the desk, asked for a call to be put through to his family, and continued slowly on up to his room.