The General of the Dead Army (3 page)

The priest had gone up to his without even pausing at the desk.

An hour later, having bathed and changed, they were both seated at a table in the ground-floor lounge.

The general ordered brandy. The priest asked for a hot chocolate. It was Saturday. The sounds of a dance band could be heard from the taverna in the basement. Young couples going down into the taverna or coming up from it were visible from time to time at the other end of the lounge. There were people, who were coming in and going out, in the lobby too. The lounge, with its dark curtains and its deep armchairs, had an austere air about it.

“Well, our first tour is over at last,” the general said.

They rehearsed the same discussions they had had time and again on their dreary trip: mulling over whether they’d get it all done inside a year, unexpected snags, sudden spells of bad weather.

“Up in the mountains it’s going to be tough.”

“Yes, I’m very much afraid it is.”

“Tomorrow I must get my maps out again and plan the best itinerary for our second tour.”

“I only hope the weather is not too unkind to us.”

“Well, there’s nothing we can do about it. It’s the time of year.”

The priest sat tranquilly sipping his chocolate, the cup held between thumb and forefinger of one long, slender hand.

A good-looking man, the general thought to himself as he sat looking at the priest’s severe profile and impassive, masklike features. Then suddenly he wondered: What was his relationship with the colonel’s widow? There must be something between them. She is pretty, quite ravishing in fact, especially in a bathing suit. He remembered that when he had alluded to the priest on one occasion she had been unable to stop herself blushing and had lowered her eyes. What can their relationship be? the general asked himself again, still watching his companion’s face.

“Despite all our efforts we have been unable to find the remains of Colonel Z.,” he remarked in a detached tone.

“All the possibilities haven’t been exhausted yet,” the priest answered, bowing his head. “I have high hopes.”

“It will be difficult though, since we know nothing about the circumstances of his death.”

“No, it won’t be easy,” the priest agreed curtly, “but we are still only at the beginning of our mission, we have plenty of time ahead of us.”

How far did he manage to go in his relations with the colonel’s widow, the general wondered yet again. He was itching to know just how far this reverend father was able to try conclusions with a pretty woman.

“We must find the colonel’s remains at all costs,” he went on. “The remains of all the other high-ranking officers were repatriated a long time ago. He is the only one who has not been brought home yet. And his family, as you know, is waiting most anxiously to hear the results of our researches. His wife especially.”

“Yes,” the priest said, “she is very interested in our efforts.”

“Have you seen the colonel’s tomb? The sumptuous marble tomb they have erected for him?”

“Yes, I went to see it before we left.”

“A truly imposing monument,” the general continued, “with its statue and those beds planted with red and white roses all around it. But it is empty.”

The priest made no answer.

Both men remained silent for some time. The general sipped at his cognac and let his eyes wander about him, realizing as he did so how foreign the whole atmosphere of this place was to him. He suddenly felt quite alone. Alone among the graves of his dead countrymen. Dammit! he wanted to rid his mind of the sight of those graves - those places where his “brothers” lay buried - and not think about them again at any price. He had spent three weeks wandering amongst them. Three weeks on end, day and night, every hour, every minute spent giving himself up solely to those graves. And now he wanted to free himself from them. He had looked forward avidly to this day of rest. It was Saturday and he desperately wanted to relax. After all, he was still alive. It was a right conferred by nature itself.

From the basement he could hear the sound of music. They were drinking down there, drinking and dancing. “We ought to rest,” he said softly. But as he said “rest,” so he thought “enjoy ourselves”.

The priest raised his eyes. No, they said.

It was true. He was a foreign general, and here on government business. Moreover that business was of a particularly lugubrious nature. And lastly he was in the midst of a people who had killed and been killed by his own soldiers in the war.

The general lowered his gaze to the ashtray filled with cigarette ends. He knew inside himself that in the weeks and months ahead, throughout the long pilgrimage that had only just begun, he would never say those words again. His brief rebellion had been nipped in the bud. From now on he would be with his dead alone. All the time.

Yes, he was really very tired. All those worn-out roads, those muddy graves, piled one on top of another in some places, scattered yards apart in others, that eternal and depressing mud, those half-ruined blockhouses - reduced to skeletons, like the soldiers, and then the confusion when the graves of other nations’ soldiers overlapped with theirs, the reports to be made out, the receipts to be written and checked with the rural district councils, the complications created at the bank over his foreign currency, so many difficulties one on top of another! The trickiest part was sorting out their own dead from those of the various other armies. Often discrepancies appeared between the statements. The old men confused the events and battles of the last war with those of preceding ones. Nothing that offered even asemblance of certainty. The mud alone held the truth.

The general drank another glass of brandy. “That shed, out there, in the plain,” he said in a low voice, as though talking to himself. “With that sinister storekeeper.” They were forbidden to bring the bones into the towns, so before coming back into Tirana they had delivered all the remains they had collected to a shed erected for the purpose, according to the terms of the contract, on a stretch of waste land on the outskirts.

“Ashed, a storekeeper … and a dog in front of the door.”

The priest did not speak.

In the course of the preliminary discussions they had had with the Albanian officials, there had been notable problems in agreeing on taking the loads of bones through the towns. The authorities had reckoned that this was unacceptable. The mission had never been able to establish precisely why they took this line, but in the end they had to live with it. So each time they reached a town they had to leave the main road to find some sinister shed out on a piece of waste ground, and even now the mere thought of it made the general heave a sigh of exasperation.

He glanced around him. The lounge was quiet as usual. The only exception, only a little way away from him, to one side of the big room, was a group of young men apparently telling stories and laughing from time to time. He could see only their backs. At the far end of the room a young man and a girl, engaged by the look of it, were sitting side by side. They were looking into one another’s eyes, only rarely exchanging a few words. The boy had a regularly shaped head, a high, sloping forehead, rather broad lower jaw. An Alpine type, the general said to himself.

The barman’s serene round face, as he stood behind his bar, looked like a cut-out moon between two dishes piled high with oranges and apples.

A slim man came in carrying a briefcase. He sat down at a table over by the radio.

“The usual,” he said to the barman.

While his coffee was being prepared, the man drew a large exercise book from his briefcase and began to write in it. His jaw was narrow and his cheeks flat. When he drew on his cigarette his cheeks were sucked into hollows.

“So here they are, these Albanians,” the general said, as though he were continuing some interrupted discussion. “Men just like anyone else. You would never believe that in battle they would turn into wild beasts.”

“True, the transformation in them, once they begin fighting, is quite astounding.”

“And to think there are so few of them.”

“Not so few as all that,” the priest said.

Another man with a sloping forehead walked into the lounge.

“What a damned business this is we’ve got on our hands!” the general said. “I can’t even pass anyone in the street or see anyone in a café now without automatically checking to see what type his skull is.”

“I hope you will forgive me for venturing the observation, but I think you’re drinking a little too much,” the priest said amiably, fixing him with his grey eyes.

At that moment the general saw the colour of those eyes as somehow the same as the television screen at the other end of the lounge. The colour of a television that never lights up! the general said to himself. Or rather of a television screen perpetually showing the same utterly incomprehensible programme. He looked down for an instant into his now colourless glass as he twisted it round and round in his fingers.

“And what else should I be doing, in your opinion?” he asked with a certain amount of irritation. “What advice have you to offer me? Should I be taking photos to show to my wife when I get back, or keeping a diary and making notes of all the places of interest? Eh? What do you think?”

“I didn’t say that. I simply pointed out that you are perhaps drinking a little too much.”

“Whereas I find it astonishing that you don’t drink. Very astonishing in fact.”

“I have never drunk alcohol,” the priest said.

“That’s no reason not to drink it now. Do as I do: drink every evening in order to forget what you see all day long.”

“And why should I forget what I see during the day?”

“Because we come from the same country as all these poor wretches,” the general said, tapping with his finger on his brief case. “Don’t you feel sorry for them?”

“Please don’t attack me,” the priest said. “I am just as attached to my country as you are.”

The general smiled.

“Do you know something?” he said. “I’ve noticed that our conversations during the past three days or so have the oddest way of sounding like dialogues from some of the modern plays I’ve seen. Extremely boring ones, I might add.” The priest smiled in his turn.

“That is in the nature of things. Any conversation is bound to bear a resemblance to the dialogue in some play or comedy.”

“Do you enjoy the modern theatre?”

“Yes, to a certain extent.”

The general looked into the priest’s eyes for a long moment before averting his gaze. “My poor soldiers,” he said suddenly, as though waking from a dream. “It tears at my heart when I think of them. I feel like a foster father trying to make it up to children that others have abandoned. You can sometimes feel even fonder of other people’s children who have been left by them than of your own. But what can I do for them? How can I avenge them?”

“It tears my heart too,” the priest said.

“We are so powerless. We have nothing but lists and reports in our hands. All we can do is hunt out their graves. And one by one at that. It is sad to have been reduced to such impotence.”

“That is fate.”

The general nodded.

Again just like a play! he thought to himself. He acts as though he’s made of metal, that priest. But I’d be curious to know, all the same, whether he was as metallic as this when he was alone with Colonel Z.’s beautiful widow. And he tried to picture to himself how he would have to pull up his cassock in order to kneel down in front of her. Did she just find him attractive, or was there an ulterior motive that made her encourage him? Did anything really happen between them …? But, after all, of what interest is it to me?

A voice emerging from the television in the lounge drew his attention. He turned his head to listen. Albanian struck him as a harsh language. He had heard it spoken quite a lot by this time by the country people who came to help with their excavations in the local cemeteries. And those dead soldiers, he thought, they must certainly have heard it too - a fatal tongue for them.

This must be the news now by the sound of it, he thought. And then he did in fact begin to catch familiar syllables: Tel-Aviv, Bonn, Laos …

So many cities scattered all over the face of the earth, he thought to himself, and his mind harked back once more to all those soldiers who had come to Albania from so many different countries, to the inscriptions on the rusty metal labels, to the crosses, to the marks on the earth, to the clumsily printed names.

But most of the graves had no distinguishing marks over them at all. Worse still, the majority of the dead men they were seeking hadn’t been given proper burial. They had simply been piled up in common graves, thrown into hurriedly dug trenches, just dropped into the mud. And there were some who had even been deprived of that muddy ground as a resting place - those that existed solely in his lists. They had found the remains of one of their soldiers in a museum case in a tiny little town towards the south. The museum had been founded by a little group of citizens passionately proud of their native town’s history. In a deep dungeon below the ancient citadel, among other vestiges of the past, they had unearthed some human remains. For weeks on end, sitting in a local café, these amateur archaeologists had argued over their conflicting theories as to the origins of these remains. Two of them were even in the process of writing an article for a magazine, expressing their learned and audacious theses, when the little group of bonehunters arrived. Having wandered into the museum quite by chance, the expert had of course recognized the skeleton immediately for what it was by the regulation medallion. (In their article, the local archaeologists were advancing two possible hypotheses on the origin of this object: it was, they said, either a coin or a personal adornment dating from Roman times.) But the expert’s visit to the museum put an end to all such conjectures. Only a single point remained to be elucidated: how had the soldier managed to find his way into the impenetrable labyrinth beneath the citadel, and why?

He asked the priest, but he had no clear recollection of the episode.

“You’re right,” said the general. “One remembers so many stories, and many of them are strangely similar, just as the names are. Really the lists are too long, and sometimes I feel I don’t remember a thing.”