The General of the Dead Army Read online

  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 fiel
ds 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.

  3

  AT 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.

  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.