The General of the Dead Army (21 page)

There were also different versions of the story of the flooding.

Of course it had caused problems, but it had affected every burial ground in the region. There were still lawsuits pending that arose out of it. As for the Bohemians, it was common knowledge that with any disaster of this kind it was always at them that people threw stones. Thank God at least they didn’t single out the Jews in these parts! Believe me, no one tells the truth, everyone’s frightened. This common grave has been here forever. Only it’s normally been emptier rather than fuller. And thus will it always remain, like the roadside inn. As for me, I make no mystery about it. Know it’s where we’ll all fetch up … But why waste your time listening to him, sir, don’t you believe he’s a lunatic? You should rather be asking old Hil, he’s the village memory … Thank you, my child, I’m an old man, but I couldn’t tell a lie even if I wanted to. I address more words to the earth than to men. The earth - the earth never lies. The grass grows up on it each year and it will be our lodging, for all of us, that is its promise … As for the grave at the place they call Wind Ridge, you’ll not find an ounce of truth if you look for it there. Only silence, shadows. Or rather something that you living folk, you’ll never be able to grasp. Better to ask me no questions. My tongue would refuse to answer you even if I wanted it to … Which is just as well for you! …

Another Chapter without a Number

ONCE UPON A
time a general and a priest set off on an adventure together. They were going to collect together all the remains of their soldiers who had been killed in a big war. They walked and walked, they crossed lots of mountains and lots of plains, always hunting for those bones and collecting them up. The country was nasty and rough. But they didn’t turn back, they kept on further and further. They collected as many bones as they could and then they came back to count them. But they realized that there were still a lot they hadn’t found. So they pulled on their boots and their raincoats and they set off on their search again. They walked and they walked, they crossed a lot more mountains and a lot more plains. They were quite exhausted; they felt they were being crushed into the ground by their task. Neither the wind nor the rain would tell them where to look for the soldiers they were seeking. But they collected as many as they could and came back once again to count them. Many of the ones they had been looking for still hadn’t been found. So at the end of their tethers, quite tired out, they set out on another long journey. They walked and they walked, on and on and on. It was winter and it was snowing.

“What about the bear?”

“Then they met a bear…”

The story the general told himself every evening, and intended to tell one of his grand-daughters as soon as he got back, invariably ended with the question: “What about the bear?,” simply because his grand-daughter always asked that question, sooner or later, when listening to a story.

A
T LAST, ON THE TENTH DAY
, they began to come down again. The road was sinking lower and lower and the mountain peaks were rising higher and higher behind them.

They were coming to the end of their last and most arduous tour. Because of the bad weather at this season the remoter regions were even harder to reach. Here and there small villages cropped up, perished with cold; they seemed impatiently waiting to crouch down again in the mist.

The high mountains carried tragic scars whose menace the snow, rather than attenuating, only served to accentuate; the mountains pretended to withdraw only to rear up again a little further on. In spite of everything, they were becoming less steep. Crags ever more spaced out were coming away from the main summits. At the foot of these crags boys and girls were clearing the ground for planting. Here and there the snow cleared only to reappear further down; it looked bland enough but still flashed wickedly.

The Alpine troops who had gone looking for death amid familiar snows had found it. The snow was not the way it looked at first sight: noble, easy on the shovel, no - the snow proved every whit as intransigent as the terrain. Just as it had tormented the last hours of the victims, twenty years before, it was now tormenting those who had come seeking them out, just as badly if not worse.

It had carefully covered everything up, as though refusing to let anyone seize what it protected in its bosom. The general found this more and more natural, accustomed as he was by now to this mute resistance. What did not, in his view, conform to a natural order was his stubborn purpose in wresting from the earth or from the snow these remains with which they were by now familiar.

Let’s be gone, dear Lord, before we’re landed in some nasty surprise, he would sometimes pray inwardly. He had come from afar to disturb the sleep of an entire army. Equipped with map and lists, he had used metal tools to strike the ground that covered them, and had no idea whether they themselves actually wished to be disturbed.

The road snaked and twisted, coiled round each hilltop and dropped down again; he had the impression of going round in circles. It seemed to the general that he was going along exactly the same stretch of road as he had the day before, he had the feeling sometimes that this road was unfailingly going to bring them back to where they started, without ever letting them come out.

He began to distrust the figures he read on the milestones - some of these were truncated, others had been pulled out and stuck back in any old how, even upside down. Indeed, just as his mission was nearing its end, the general sometimes, especially at dusk, had the feeling that he was never going to get out of these mountains again.

They had spent the last two nights in villages swarming with dogs who kept howling. Then came the day when they were to exhume the very last soldier. The general was filled with a sombre premonition. He wondered whether they were not in duty bound to leave this one at least in the ground. He had almost persuaded himself that after all the snags and reverses he’d been obliged to endure these last two years, this much compensation was due.

He was so far persuaded that had he not felt a bit embarrassed by the priest and the Albanian expert, he would have dreamed up some pretext to cut and run without opening up this Alpine soldier’s grave.

With drawn features he watched the workmen breaking open the frozen earth with their pick-axes. He kept rubbing his hands and took note of the fact that it was with these hands and these tools that they had unearthed an entire army.

The final stroke of the pick-axe sounded in his ear like a detonation. A moment later the expert shouted from a distance: “Five foot three! Exactly as listed!”

His regret at not having shown himself better disposed towards the earth was tempered by the idea that, after all, it was a kindness that the earth could maybe do without. The earth still kept back dozens of soldiers who had never been found and, whatever happened, even if several further missions were to be despatched, it would nonetheless keep hold of its share.

Thus he strove to set his mind at rest, but all it took was a panel at the roadside with the words “Caution: Rockfalls” to remind him of his fear. Neither the music nor the news broadcast from the car radio managed to stir him to the point of banishing the most far-fetched of these imaginings. Of these the worst was the thought of being required to hand back this entire army that he had assembled at so great a cost. Then he and his priest would have to resume their journey from hill to hill, from one ravine to the next, like sombre pilgrims, and replace each skeleton, one at a time, at the exact spot from which they had removed it.

He shook his head to free himself of this oppression. No, the story is absolutely at an end now, he told himself, almost out loud.

It was in fact their final day. They were coming down. The hard snow which hitherto had given no sign of softening was starting to give place to the softer snow of the lower slopes, and lower still, in the villages, they were awaited by their old acquaintance, the rain.

Before long he would be home again. Others would take charge of the remains and finish off the task. With this tour his whole mission was coming to its end. Now it was for representatives of the local government association and accountants from both countries to meet around a table and draw up their accounts of the work that had been done. They would start producing great heaps of complicated debit and credit sheets, there would be masses of bills and receipts to be dealt with, and lastly there would come the final, the ultimate report. After that a little banquet would be given, a few brief official speeches made, and after the banquet a solemn Mass for the Dead would be celebrated for the souls of all those dead soldiers. The press agencies would announce that his mission had been brought to a successful conclusion, and once again he would be obliged to answer the questions of a multitude of infuriating journalists at a variety of press conferences.

Meanwhile, unnamed carpenters would have finished making up the thousands of tiny coffins to the precise dimensions stipulated in the contract. Clause 17 a and b: Coffins in half-inch ply, 70 × 40 × 30 cm. White-painted and numbered in black.

In the shed, in the midst of that waste land on the fringes of Tirana, Charon in his long, threadbare overcoat would blow on his fingers and open his thick ledger for the last time. The big dog would stand truculently outside the door while the workmen carefully placed the appropriate blue bag in each coffin.

Companies, battalions, regiments, divisions, and all such categories would blur and melt away in that multitude of coffins. And even the solitary woman would merge indistinguishably into that mass of soldiers, for she was to be treated as a “soldier” too with all the rest, since it takes an anatomist, after all, to distinguish between a woman’s skeleton and a man’s.

The convoy of lorries loaded with the coffins would rumble down towards Durrës. There they would all be loaded onto a big ship, and the ship would manoeuvre heavily out of the harbour, bearing home a whole army now reduced to no more than a few tons of phosphorus and calcium. Then, on the far shore, they would be unloaded, so that each coffin could be despatched to its given address. Some families would perhaps be waiting for their dear ones’ remains on the dockside. But at all events, on that dock the army would finally be disbanded. The “Olympia” bags, loaded into postal delivery vans, into lorries, into buses, into big limousines or little cars, onto the racks of motor bikes or bicycles, or simply a man’s back, would all departin various directions never to be assembled again.

As for those they had failed to find, they would remain in Albania. Later, perhaps, another expedition might come, with another general at its head, to search and excavate again. For there were still about two hundred to be found - with Colonel Z. still heading the list. The new expedition would make the circuit of these same dismal and interminable itineraries in its turn, until all the remains of those poor soldiers were collected one by one. And who knows what thoughts would go through the mind of the officer leading them? Would he cast indirect aspersions on him as people tend to do on their predecessors, or would he meekly bow his head? Listen, he would sometimes say inwardly to the colonel or captain in question (it certainly wouldn’t be a general. They couldn’t send a general for only forty-odd men, after all), listen, my boy, forty lost corpses are quite capable of achieving what proved too much for an army of 40,000 men!

The road was still descending, winding back down all the snaking curves around the mountains that he remembered from the ascent. But the bends were constantly growing wider, and the general had begun to feel that everything was finally untangling itself again, that calm was at last returning to his soul.

During the descent he turned to look back from time to time. The mountains were further away each time. Their jagged outlines were becoming blurred, their threat was fading. The general stared back at them as though to say: “It’s finished, your tyranny over me. I’ve escaped you, escaped you, do you hear?”

Then, as he dozed, he was suddenly gripped by a vague sensation of alarm.

But he wouldn’t be going up there again. Never!

He felt his last moment of fear precisely at the point when he thought they had finally reached the plain. The rumble of the engine dragged him out of his torpor and he was horrified to realize that instead of the plain he was expecting, a steep escarpment stood in front of them. Instead of keeping on down, the car was climbing painfully up to the gorge. He nearly shouted at the driver: Stop! Where are you taking us, back up into the mountains? But he was dissuaded by the peaceful face of the priest sitting beside him. Bewildered as he was, he could not take his eyes off the steep valley slopes he was making for as for an egress.

Calm down! he told himself two or three times. On the roads of Albania sudden climbs and abrupt drops are common currency.

As they penetrated this side-valley, he reckoned once again that this is how it was. From above he noticed the houses of a large village on the mountainside, and they were rapidly dropping down towards it.

So the short interval since he woke had proved sufficient to draw up before him the final torment of this pilgrimage, and it had happened in a flash, the way nightmares come: after pretending to let him go, the mountains at the last moment, right on the border of their territory, had sought to force him back. Perhaps he had somehow wronged them while he was among them, perhaps he had infringed some age-old ritual. Perhaps he now had to do something by way of reparation. Like hand back a part of the army that had been recovered? Or perhaps stay behind as hostage himself to allow this army to …

My nerves are at breaking point, he told himself as he gazed at the village chimneys. He had the feeling that these chimneys would have the power to restore his serenity better than any tranquillizer.

“A village,” observed the priest, who was also watching the scene attentively.

“A large village,” the general corrected him. “My impression is it’s where we’re to spend the night.”