The General of the Dead Army (20 page)

“He should really have been taken into the town yesterday evening.”

“The road is bad; it’s a long time since it was last used. It isn’t an easy journey even in daytime.”

“But all the same…”

“They’ll be in time, even setting out now. I don’t think he’s in any great danger. Modern drugs can usually cope with infections of this sort.”

The general buried himself again beneath his thick woollen blanket.

“What’s the weather like?” he asked. “Cloudy,” the priest replied.

When they emerged from their tent a few of the workmen were already at work. The others were standing outside the hut drinking their morning coffee.

“The expert being away is going to hold up the work,” the priest said. “The workmen don’t really know where to dig.”

“Do you think there may be other infected remains?”

“Why shouldn’t there be?”

“Perhaps we should throw quicklime in the graves already opened,” the general said.

“We must ask the expert. He’s the one who knows all about these things.”

They reached the hut and ordered a coffee each.

“The germ can stay buried there for twenty years, then suddenly jump out as virulent as ever. It’s strange,” the general said.

“But true,” the priest added. “At the first contact with air and sunlight it returns to life.”

“Like a wild animal coming out of hibernation.” The priest sipped slowly at his coffee. “I think it’s going to rain this afternoon.”

And it proved a gloomy day indeed. They wandered about all morning not knowing what to do with themselves. Then in the afternoon the rain began to fall again.

“If anything happens to him we shall have to indemnify his family,” the general said. “A life pension?”

“Yes, it’s stipulated in the contract. Section 4, Paragraph
??
, if I remember rightly.”

The priest entered the tent and re-emerged with a sheaf of papers in his hand. “Yes, that’s it,” he said. “It’s stipulated in Section 4, Paragraph
??
. In the event of a fatal accident, the family is entitled to a life pension.”

“Maybe he’ll pull through,” said the general. “Pray God!”

The expert returned next morning. The lorry driver was the first to see the car as it toiled its way towards them along the mountain road.

“Here they are!” he shouted. “They’re back!”

The general, the priest, and the workmen, who were all huddled in the hut sheltering from the rain, immediately came out to see.

Still a long way off, picking its way among the big stones scattered across the roadway, the green car was climbing slowly upwards.

“He must be better,” someone said.

As the car got closer they saw that it was spattered all over with mud.

The expert was the first to emerge. His face was pale, his features drawn, his expression tired and haggard. He pushed out one leg first, then the other, and glanced around him with an indifferent, absent air.

“Well? What happened?” someone asked, breaking the silence. “What’ve you done with Gjoleka?”

The expert turned to look at the speaker as though amazed by such a question.

“Gjoleka? He is dead,” he answered, articulating each word.

“Dead! You’re not saying … “

The driver, who got out of the car after the expert, came forward reeling like a drunkard. His eyes were red, his hands mud-caked.

“What? Don’t you believe us?” he shouted huskily. “Run along to the hospital morgue if you want to make sure.”

It took them a little while to get over the shock and express their thoughts.

“When?” another voice asked.

“About midnight.”

“It was a terrible infection he had,” the expert said, as though to himself.

The little group made its way in silence back to the hut. “Make them some coffee, can’t you see they’re all in!” someone shouted at the licensee.

“Have a brandy too. That will make you feel better.”

“Right, a brandy I certainly wouldn’t say no to!”

“Now then, tell us a bit about it, if you can.”

The driver downed the brandy in one gulp.

“Fill that up again for me,” he told the licensee. “What a night!

During the whole drive he didn’t once open his mouth. Sometimes he shivered till his teeth chattered, sometimes he seemed to be on fire. Then he began getting dizzy spells. We told him to lie down, and he stretched out as best he could on the back seat, but it didn’t seem to help him at all. You can imagine I had my foot down as much as I dared. God knows how we didn’t end up in a ravine! We kept on asking him ‘How are you feeling?’, but he never opened his mouth, not once. He just stared back at us as though he was saying ‘Bad, chum, bad!’ Well we got to the town at last and they took him straight into the hospital. We went every half hour to ask how he was. We could tell from the nurses’ faces he wasn’t doing too well. One of them told us: ‘You should have brought him in earlier.’ That was when we really realized how bad it was. We asked to see him. They wouldn’t let us. By that time it was dark. We just went from café to café. We were too worried to go to a hotel and get some rest. About eleven we went back to the hospital again to see how he was. We were pretty surprised when they told us we could go straight in and see him. We asked how he was. ‘Very ill,’ the nurse told us, ‘he won’t last the night.’ That was why they’d let us go straight in. You could see he wasn’t going to last much longer. His face was lead-coloured, he’d tremble all over for a moment then go stiff, just as though he was made of stone. He looked up at us sort of nodding his head. Then he began staring and staring at the scratch on his hand as though he was saying: ‘You’re what did for me, you rotten bastard!’ About midnight he had some sort of terrible fit, then a little while after that when the agony was over, he just faded away. And that’s all there is to tell. Just fill that glass again will you, for the love of heaven! What a business!”

There was silence in the hut, except for the sound of a torn strip of tarred paper flapping on the dilapidated roof.

“I just can’t believe it,” someone said. “To think he was here with us only a few hours ago, and now we shan’t ever see him again.”

“Yes, poor old Gjoleka has left us. Just whisked away without us even realizing.”

“He was a good fellow,” someone else put in, “always kind to everyone, and not proud.”

“Who’s going to tell his wife?”

“That won’t be an easy task!”

“Poor woman, she didn’t like him doing this job anyway. It was as though she had a presentiment of this. She used to write in every letter: ‘When are you going to finish with those graves?’

And he’d answer: ‘Just a little while now and it will all be over.’”

“Poor woman,” the driver said. “Once when I delivered a letter from him to their home, in Tirana, she even complained to me about it. She worried about him constantly. She had waited for him so many years during the war, and now she felt somehow that he was away fighting again.”

“He was always saying much the same thing himself: ‘The Fascists kept me busy while they were alive, and now that they’re dead I’m still having to hunt for them, they’re still keeping me busy!’”

“Yes! He fought against them so many years, and he beat them. But it was them that got him in the end. What pig luck!”

“Like a revenge after death.”

“They waited twenty years for it too. But all the same, when he fought them he fought them fairly, in open war, whereas they killed him with a rusty button like filthy cowards.”

“The enemy is always the same, even when he’s dead.”

“They stand up there, not talking, like two crows,” the driver said in a hoarse voice, casting a look of hate at the priest and the general standing wrapped in their long capes by the ruins of the bridge. “Well, are you satisfied now?”

“Hush!” someone said. “Be sensible, Lilo!”

A heavy silence descended once more in the hut. There was just the sound of the wind flattening the strip of tarred paper on the roof, then lifting it up again. “They’ve killed him and we shan’t see him again,” someone said through a sob. “They’ve taken him away from us!”

Night fell, gloomier than ever. The general could not get to sleep and twice had to take a sleeping pill. He slipped into a disturbed sleep interspersed with wakeful periods. The death had quite unsettled him. Sometimes, in his dismay, he exaggerated the degree of adversity he had to cope with.

It was quite a new death and thus seemed both unacceptable and a promise of further ills. In this realm of silica grown cold over twenty years, such a death seemed as alien as could be.

The general felt panic-stricken without knowing why. As he tossed and turned on his camp bed, he thought he heard the priest praying.

Chapter without a Number

NOTHING. BEFORE THE EXPERT
said a word, the priest had alreadyunderstood.

“No, nothing,” the expert answered in a tired voice as he picked his way carefully over the great gouts of slippery clay.

“It’s very odd,” the priest said.

“We’re going to dig in two more places, one on each side of the spot marked on your map. He must be somewhere round here after all.”

The general came over. His boots were caked with mud and he was having difficulty unsticking them from the ground at every step.

“Well?” he asked the expert. “Still no luck.”

“We shall have to give this one up,” the general said. “What was his rank?”

“Lieutenant.”

“He could have dragged himself a long way from here, after he was wounded.”

A few scattered drops of rain fell onto the red mud heaped up on both sides of the trench. They hunted till about noon, when suddenly they heard a cry from one of the workmen further off:

“Here! Here! We’ve found him!”

The expert, taking his time in case he should slip, made his way over to the freshly dug trench. The priest followed.

They hovered for a long while beside the opened grave, and finally the priest returned with a crestfallen air.

“We might have saved our trouble,” he said wearily. “It wasn’t one of ours.”

“Who was it then?” the general asked. “According to the expert it must be a British pilot.”

The expert came over to them again. “I’m afraid we’ve gone to all this trouble for nothing,” he told them.

“What do we do now?” one of the workmen called over as he walked towards them.

“We’re going. There’s nothing more we can do here.”

“And the Englishman?” the workman asked.

“Bury him again,” the priest said. “There’s nothing we can do for him.”

“Nothing we can do. Re-bury him,” the general concurred. The expert turned towards the grave. “Bury him again,” he told the workmen.

Two of them threw the bones back into the trench and began filling it in as the little group moved off. When the general turned back, after a moment or two, the two men were still at work and he could see their shovels moving up and down in time with one another. A little later, when he turned to look again, he supposed they must have finished, since he could see them walking back down the hill, their tools over their shoulders, and there didn’t even seem to be a mark on the earth where the grave had been filled in.

“A day wasted,” the general said, “totally wasted.”

Another Chapter without a Number

BONE BY BONE
, vertebra by vertebra, the skeleton of the great reptile reached completion. Here and there the odd gap subsisted. And there were not a few uncertainties. Just as he heard the remains of the last bugler being dug out from the common grave, the general fancied he heard the solitary sound of his instrument.

These common graves had become his terror. Luckily they were only three in number; in two the identification of the skeletons was finally completed. The work still remained to be carried out in the third, the hardest - it lay at the bottom of a stony ravine.

Some months earlier they had wasted several days hereabouts, on the false indications of a peasant who had claimed that he had seen with his own eyes a great mass of bones in the cellars of a ruined fort. Even though every weapon lying about them had been collected up previously, it was clear from the first glance that the bones belonged to soldiers of an earlier age. It took the expert no time to convince the general to stop searching here.

There were no medallions struck with the picture of the Virgin anywhere near any skeleton, so it had been pointed out to him by someone handing him a metal disc in the shape of a many-pointed star.

This symbol was the only one turned up and, so far as the expert knew, it belonged to the
munadjim
, the Ottoman army’s astrologer. The general held the metal star for a while in the palm of his hand, but came nowhere close to understanding just what the astrologer in question was hoping to find in these trench bottoms - the worst place in the world to find any part in the things of Heaven.

Another Chapter without a Number

THE THIRD COMMON GRAVE
was to be found at a place known as Wind Ridge. This was the one that gave them the most trouble, and it was clear that it had cost the general a great deal of sleep three months earlier, when they were not yet anywhere near it. Then it had disturbed his nights again two weeks ago, as they were approaching the region in which it lay. And of course the last week, while they were striving to glean some information about it. He had a chronic headache. The skein that appeared at the last moment to be on the point of coming untangled in fact was getting into only a worse tangle, as in a nightmare. All they had gathered with regard to this grave pointed in totally opposing directions: the notes from his Ministry, depositions by other soldiers, letters that had a bearing on it, a telephone conversation of twenty years back, an article in the local press about flooding that had ravaged the area, accounts by elderly villagers, the deposition of a Greek soldier taken prisoner in Albania, who had noted things told him by a cell-mate, gypsies’ tales, a police report, another by a schizophrenic - so many elements combined together, it seemed, only the better to contradict each other. Occasionally he would console himself with the thought that, in the end, among all these endless catacombs this one grave constituted only a tiny detail. But the next day he remained persuaded that until he had dug out this grave right to the bottom he could not consider his mission accomplished. He had the feeling that everything was tied to this excavation, as by a double knot: his sleep, Colonel Z., the misfortunes that kept up their latest barrage … Some of the locals maintained that the grave went back to the first winter of the war, while others said it was more recent. Some maintained that it had first been dug by gypsies looking for dead men’s medallions, imagining that the metal had some value, and then they had hastily piled the bodies in a heap.