The General of the Dead Army (23 page)

I don’t know what army you are part of, because I’ve never been able to recognize uniforms, and I’m too old now to start, but you are a foreigner and you belong to one of those armies that killed my family. That’s clear enough. To judge by your insignia, invading people is your trade and you are one of those who broke my life, who turned me into the unhappy old woman I am, an old woman who has come to a wedding feast that is nothing to do with her and sits in a corner mumbling like this. No one can hear what I am saying because everyone here is merry and I don’t want to spoil the joy of their feast. And it is precisely because I don’t want to spoil anyone’s joy that I am staying here in my corner cursing you between my teeth, quietly, oh very quietly, so that no one will hear. I should like to know what made you come here to this wedding feast, and why your legs did not give way under you before they brought you here. You are sitting there, at that table, and laughing like an idiot child. Get up, cant you, throw your coat over your shoulders, go back through the rain to where you came from! Cant you understand that you are not wanted here, accursed man?

The women were still singing. The general felt a warm breath of tender emotion flooding through his breast. He had the sensation of being laved in a delightful bath of sounds and light. And the waves of sound and light pouring over him like the waters of a healing spring were warming him, purifying his body of all that graveyard mud, that foul mud with its unmistakable odour of putrefaction and of death.

Now that his first dazed reaction had passed, the general had regained all his good humour. He felt he wanted to talk, to keep himself from thinking with a flow of words. He tried to catch the eye of the priest, who was sitting one place away down the table on the other side. He was obviously in a state of great unease.

The general leaned over to him. “You see, it’s all perfectly all right.”

The priest didn’t answer.

The general stiffened. He could feel the glances of the people around him falling on him like silent arrows. They were falling on his pockets, on his epaulettes, and occasionally, very occasionally, on his eyes; the dark, heavy arrows of the men, and the nimble, glittering, uncertain arrows of the young girls.

(Like a wounded but indomitable bird, you will fly on …)

“It’s interesting, isn’t it?” he said, addressing himself once again to the priest.

But the priest still did not reply. He merely looked at the general as though to say “Possibly,” then turned his eyes away again.

“These people are showing us respect,” the general said.

“Death commands respect everywhere.”

“Death …? I don’t think it’s written on our faces,” the general retorted. He tried to smile, but failed. “It is a long time since the war was over. The past is forgotten. I am certain that no one at this wedding has a thought for past enmities.”

The priest did not speak. The general decided to cease addressing him - and yet, somehow, a piece of his companion’s cassock, a black patch, seemed to stay dancing in front of his eyes.

The priest obviously feels unwanted, he thought to himself.

And wouldn’t that mean that I was too? It’s very difficult to say But it’s done now. Here we are. Wanted or not wanted, there is no way of leaving. It would be easier to retreat under machine-gun fire than to stand up now, throw our coats over our shoulders, and walk out into the rain.

You know quite well you re not wanted here. You can feel there’s someone at this feast who is cursing you; and a mother’s curse is never voiced in vain. Despite the respect they are showing you, you know well enough that you should never have set foot in this place. You are trying to persuade yourself it isn’t so, but it’s no good, is it? Your hand trembles as you raise your glass, and the shadows that pass across your eyes betray the terror that you feel!

The drum was beating again. A clarinet began to lament, then several violins joined in. A fresh group of belated guests arrived, their cloaks dripping. They had been held up by the rising river and forced to wait for several hours before they could cross it. They went round the room formally greeting all those present, then took their places around the big table. It’s as though a wedding feast represents something really sacred for these people, the general mused, otherwise they would hardly take the trouble to travel on a night like this just for a little share of someone else’s joy. It must be absolutely teeming. On such a night you couldn’t even dig a grave: it would fill with water as you were digging it.

It seems you ve come here to collect all the dead men who came from your country. Perhaps you’ve already dug up a great many, and perhaps you will find a lot more, perhaps you will collect them all, but I want you to know that one of them, yes one of them you’ll never find, never till the end of time, just as I shall never find my little girl or my husband again in all the ages to come. How I should like to speak to you about the one you’ll never find! And if I don t, it’s because I don’t want to bring back all their sad war memories to all these guests. She was my daughter, I was her mother. As our elders used to say: you ve become a mother, evil has befallen you - and so it has, wretched as I am! How it rained that night! Harder even than tonight. The water was streaming everywhere. You couldnt dig a grave because it filled with water as you dug, with water as black as pitch that seemed to well up out of the darkness. And yet I did dig one, I did dig one! But I mustnt tell you about it because I don’t want to spoil other peoples joy, not even yours, curses on you!

The general lit a cigarette, then felt in some strange way that it was too small, that it was pitifully impotent compared with the long, black pipes whose big boxwood bowls the old men were clasping in their brown hands, and on which they drew from time to time as they talked, as though to punctuate the rhythms of their conversation.

The master of the house, the same old man who had greeted them in the passage on their arrival, came and sat by him, his pipe in his fist just like the other old men and a medal on a yellow ribbon dangling from his thick, black homespun jacket. The general knew them well, those medals, from having seen them on the chests of so many other peasants, and it now seemed to him that each one of them bore on its reverse the pale face of a soldier from his dead army. He smiled at the old man’s furrowed face. It made him think of a knotty, cracked tree-trunk but still full of sap. A man sitting beside him, the one who had urged him to drink earlier on, translated the old man’s first words to him. The old man was apologizing to his guest for not having come to speak to him earlier, but the guests were still arriving and he must by custom be there to receive them all.

The general replied with a profusion of polite phrases and much deferential nodding of the head. The old man was silent for a while, then he puffed gently at his pipe and asked the general in calm tones:

“Where are you from?” The general told him.

The old man shook his head in a wondering way that conveyed to the general that he had never heard of such a town - despite the fact that it was a large and very well known one.

“Have you a wife? And children?” the old man then asked.

The general nodded and the other said: “May they enjoy long life!”

The old man drew another puff of smoke from his pipe and the furrows on his brow visibly deepened. He seemed to want to speak, and the general sensed that he was about to say precisely what he was most apprehensive of hearing that evening.

“I know why you have come to our country,” his host went on, still in the same perfectly even tone, and the general felt the words pierce his heart like a dagger.

Ever since the evening began he had been fearing a conversation of this sort, one that might develop into some kind of provocation, and he had studiously obliterated the reason for his presence in that place from his mind, under the illusion that his own forget-fulness would ensure that of others. That evening he would have liked to be nothing more than a simple tourist, taking an interest in the fascinating customs of a people with a long past so that he could talk about them later to his friends, back in his own country. And now at last the accursed subject of conversation had proved unavoidable and the general was sorry he had come.

“Yes,” the old man said, “it is good that you should collect the remains of your dead soldiers the way you are doing. All God’s creatures should rest in the earth from which they sprang.”

The general expressed his acquiescence to this sentiment by bowing his head. The old man shook out his pipe, then rested his eyes on its embers.

“You had poor weather,” he said. Again the general nodded.

The other gave a deep sigh.

“As the saying goes: rain and death are met with the world over.”

The general found the expression enigmatic, but dared not ask that it be interpreted for him.

After a moment more his host gravely rose and excused himself; he had to do the honours of his house to other newly arrived guests.

The general returned to his drink with relief. His good humour had returned once again. The danger of provocation seemed to have passed. He could now follow the development of the wedding feast without uneasiness and drink as much as he liked.

“You see?” he said once more to the priest (his words were already slightly slurred). “They respect us. I told you so. The past is forgotten. What do you say?”

“I have already said that on such occasions it is not easy to make out the exact dividing line between a respect for customs and a respect for persons,” the priest replied.

“Generals always inspire respect.” The general finished off another glass.

“You know something?” he said, pushing his face nearer to the priest’s and speaking with a certain hint of malice. “I’ve had an idea. I wouldn’t mind getting up and dancing with them.”

The priest looked dumbstruck. “You don’t mean that seriously?”

“Yes, why shouldn’t I?”

The priest gave a nervous shake of the head.

“I just can’t understand what’s got into you this evening.”

The general was irritated by the remark.

“You’ve played the nanny long enough now. It’s time you let me be, damn it all! I don’t want anyone keeping tabs on me.”

“Not so loud,” the priest said. “There are people listening.”

“When is it going to be abolished, I’d like to know, this loathsome practice of keeping generals under supervision?”

The priest rested his forehead in the palm of his hand as if to say: “This is all we needed!”

“I’m going to get up and dance, and that’s all there is to it!”

“But you don’t know the dance, you’ll just make yourself ridiculous.”

“Not in the slightest. The steps are extremely simple. And besides, who is it I’m going to make myself ridiculous to? These peasants?”

The priest rested his forehead on his hand again.

This evening it seems someone was asking in the club about him. I think you ve been looking for him a long time, havent you? And all in vain. But why should you want to find him, that horrible colonel? Was he a friend of yours? Yes, he must have been, because otherwise you wouldn’t be so interested in him. Everyone was questioned in the village this evening. But it was no good: even though they know he is buried somewhere around here no one will ever guess the exact spot. You will leave without him, your friend, your wretched friend who turned my life to mourning. Go quickly, quickly, because you are as cursed as he was. Oh yes, now you ‘re behaving as gentle as any lamb, and there is a smile on your lips as you watch them dancing, but I know what’s going on in the back of that mind of yours! You ‘re thinking that one fine day you will trample your way across this country with your troops so that you can burn our houses and massacre us just the way your comrades did. You should never have come to this feast. You should have felt your knees trembling under you when you decided to set out. Even ifonly out of regard for me, a poor bewildered old woman whose fate has been so cruel and black. But what is this? You are going to enter the circle! You have the gall to leave your chair? You even dare to smile! Yes, you are standing up! And they are breaking the circle to let you in! No, wait! What are you doing? This is too much! It is a profanation!

The drum beat out its summons yet again, like cannon firing. The clarinet resumed its lamentations, while the violins accompanied it with their slender, almost feminine voices. In the middle of the room the rudiments of a farandole were forming as two, then three, then a steadily increasing number of dancers took the floor.

The general looked at the circle. Then he looked back at the priest. Then at the circle. Then at the priest. At the circle. The priest. The circle …

He had risen from his place. What had to happen had happened. He was there, on his feet, swaying like one drunk, prepared to enter the circle of dancers that seemed to him now like a circle of fire. He stretched out his arms two or three times, then immediately withdrew them again as though his hands had been burned. The dancing circle span before him like a top, and the old man leading the dance bent his legs, squatted almost, then rose again, slapped his sole on the floor as though to say: “That’s how it is and that’s how it always will be!” whirled his white handkerchief, released his partner’s hand in order to execute a pirouette, bent his knees again, seemed certain to collapse on the floor, his legs cut from under him as though by a sickle, then rose again and sank again, like one struck by lightning, only to spring to life again at the instant that the thunder rumbled out. The drum was beating with redoubled fury, the cries of the clarinet were pouring out in wilder and stronger waves, like sobs emerging from the throat of some Titan, and the violins’ strings were vibrating like lost souls. The drum beat quicker and quicker, so that now, through the lament, it was as though great rocks could be heard thundering down from the mountains. The general, still on his feet, was seized by giddiness in the face of this frenetic and dazzling abandon. He had no idea how long it all took. For the space of a few seconds, as though through a veil, he stood there seeing the sweating faces of the musicians, the mouth of the clarinet swaying up and down like the barrel of an anti-aircraft gun following a moving target, the closed, ecstatic eyes of the dancers. Then the drum fell silent, the violins relaxed, and there followed an enchanted calm.