It was cold in the shed. The feeble light that did manage to find its way in through the windows fell on the rows of plastic bags arranged on the long wooden shelves.
The workmen carried the crates into the shed. The storekeeper began removing and counting the nylon bags from the crates.
Then he laid them out along the shelves, muttering their numbers to himself as he did so.
“Not that one,” he said when the workmen brought him the heavy coffin the miller had handed over to them on the road. The expert tried hard to make him change his mind. “No,” the storekeeper said. “It is against the clauses in the contract.”
The workmen carried the coffin out and loaded it back onto the lorry.
When it was all finished the storekeeper opened a drawer and produced from it a thick ledger with a dirty cover. He opened this book, blew on his fingers, then began clumsily leafing through it.
“Here’s the place,” the expert said.
He wrote something then put his signature underneath.
Delivery had been completed.
13
SEVERAL DAYS LATER THE PRIEST and the general were once more facing one another across a table in the Hotel Dajti lounge. The strains of dance music were still rising from the floor below, and the general was aware of the presence, diffused all around them, of foreign life being lived. His features were drawn and his eyes had a wilder look than usual.
“I slept very badly last night,” he said, “I had a strange dream. I saw that prostitute, the one whose story the café-owner told us, you remember?”
“Yes,” the priest said.
“Yes, it was definitely her in my dream. She was dead, laid out in a coffin. And outside the door of the house, all in their coffins too, there was a whole crowd of soldiers waiting their turn with her.”
“What a terrible dream!”
“And yet it all seemed perfectly natural to me. As I was walking past I asked someone: ‘Those soldiers waiting there, are they moving up to the front or coming back from it?’ And the answer was that some were moving up and some were coming back. So then I said: ‘Tell those on their way to the front not to wait; let them go and fight first, then they will have the right to some relaxation, but not till then. Tell those who have just come back from the front to stay in line.’”
“A nightmare,” the priest said.
“Another night I saw Colonel Z. in a dream. He looked at me with an ironical smile and said: ‘Do you really think my height is six foot one? Well I feel bound to tell you, my good sir, that you are mistaken. That is not my height.’ - ‘How tall are you then?’
I asked him. He laughed in my face at that. But then, in a sullen voice, he said: ‘I shan’t tell you!’”
The general took a packet of cigarettes from his pocket and added:
“I have nightmares almost every night.”
“It’s a sign of overwork.”
“Yes of course. That last tour was a backbreaking business. Worse than the others.”
“There’s no help for it, though,” the priest said. “And we’re not at the end of our troubles even yet.”
“We’ve become like pilgrims in the Middle Ages. We keep on and on while the rest of them” - he pointed away towards where he reckoned the men’s families should be - “imagine we just press a button and the bones come popping up out of the ground. They just have no idea what it’s like.”
“It’s not their fault,” the priest said. The general sat tapping his fingers on the table.
“I suppose you’ve read a lot of ancient history and that sort of thing,” the general said. “Have you ever come across cases of people in a situation like ours?”
“No,” the priest answered - though without making it clear whether it was a knowledge of ancient history he was denying or the existence of parallel cases.
“So history is mute on the subject then.”
“Would you like to go for a stroll?” the priest suggested. “It’s quite fine this evening.”
They walked down the hotel entrance steps and set off in the direction of the main university building. There was an unusually large flow of traffic along the boulevard. As the stream of headlights emerged from the bridge, at the corner of the boulevard and the avenue Marcel-Cachin, it divided as some of the cars turned left - up towards the residential district where most of the embassies were to be found - while the rest kept going straight on towards Skanderburg Square. The general and the priest walked as far as the Presidency then turned back. On both sides of the boulevard workmen were in the process of tearing up the mimosas and replacing them with pine trees deeply planted in freshly dug trenches.
“Preparations for the festivities,” the priest commented. “That’s why they’re working so late.”
Outside the hotel entrance they encountered the mayor, on his own.
“Where’s my colleague got to?” asked the general. “He is in central Albania at the moment. We are investigating some sites in the lowlands there just at present. And you?”
“We are taking a few days’ rest.”
As they walked they arrived at the top of the entrance steps.
The mayor said good night to them and moved off towards the lift. They returned to the lounge and sat down again.
The general ordered brandy and lit a cigarette. A bottle of brandy was brought to him. He filled his glass and drank. The contours of the Albanian earth began an obsessive dance before his eyes, and above them, the rows of graves.
I don’t see why our comrades remains should be restored to their families. I don’t believe that was their last wish, as some people claim. To us, to all old soldiers, such displays of sentimentality seem very puerile. A soldier, living or dead, never feels at ease except among his comrades. So leave them together. Don’t split them up. Let their serried graves keep the old warlike spirit of yesterday still alive in us. Don’t listen to those chicken-hearted people always ready to yell at the sight of a drop of blood. Listen to us, we fought here and we know.
The general felt the alcohol going to his head.
I have a whole army of dead men under my command now, he thought. Only instead of uniforms they are all wearing nylon bags. Blue bags with two white stripes and a black edging, made to order by the firm of “Olympia.” And those bags will now be inserted into their coffins, tiny coffins of precisely determined dimensions, of a size stipulated in the contract signed with the local governments’ association. At first there had been just a few sections of coffins, then, gradually, companies and battalions were formed, and now we are on our way to completing regiments and divisions. An entire army clothed in nylon.
“And what shall I do with it, my army?” he said between his teeth.
“You don’t seem quite yourself,” the priest commented. “Perhaps you have a fever coming on.”
“No, it’s nothing,” the general answered, though he could feel the alcohol taking its effect much more rapidly than usual, perhaps because of his excessive fatigue. “It’s really nothing,” he repeated. “I just feel like drinking. But you, priest, colonel, whatever you are, you want to stop me. What is it you want with me, eh?”
The general was suddenly overwhelmed by a feeling of aggression.
“I cannot tolerate this supervision. What is it you want of me?
Speak!” the general almost shouted.
The thin man who was sitting writing, as usual, at the table near the television, turned his head. “Nothing at all, I assure you, general. There is nothing I am preventing you from doing and there is nothing I want of you. The idea of either had not crossed my mind,” the priest said curtly.
“In that case you can just sit there and watch me drink.”
“There is no point in making a scene,” the priest said.
The general raised his glass again. The priest wouldn’t bother him any more now. When it came to the crunch, he was still the boss.
He began thinking about his army. His blue army, with its two white stripes a
nd its black edging. What shall I do with my soldiers? he thought. There are a lot of them now, such a lot of them, and they must be feeling the cold in those thin nylon coats. Those idiot generals of theirs have just abandoned them and left the burden on my shoulders. When I think of all the battles I could have won with them.
He tried to recall the battles he had studied at the Academy so that he could decide which ones he could have won with the forces he now had under his command. He began making tiny sketch-plans on his cigarette packet, marking the positions of the troops, his lines of attack, the points where the decisive assaults would occur. The priest sat silently drinking his chocolate and watching him scribble away. The general began with ancient history. First he surrounded Caesar, then he cut off Charlemagne’s supplies, and after that he staged a whirlwind confrontation with Napoleon and forced him to retreat. But he was not satisfied. He was worried by the fact that he might be winning all these historical battles solely because of the superiority of the modern weapons at his disposal and not as a result of his talent as a general. So he relived the battles of more recent wars. He landed on half the world’s coasts and advanced on capital after capital. His soldiers moved in one bound from the beaches of Normandy to the 38th parallel in Korea. He ordered them into the terrible jungle of Vietnam and led them out again safe and sound. He won many battles that history says were lost. And if he did emerge the victor it was because he led his troops with skill and never abandoned them to their fate. He was a general who knew what it meant to command. And at the moment he was in the throes of a study of warfare in mountainous terrain. And besides, he had brave soldiers under him, oh yes, very brave soldiers. But the reason they’re such daredevils, he thought, is that they’ve nothing left to lose. And he took another drink. The cigarette packet was black with his scribbles, but another battle suddenly came to him. At first he was obliged to fall back, but then, having reinforced his army with dead men not yet inscribed on the lists (and they were the most savage fighters of all when it came to it), he won again.
“And there it is,” he murmured with satisfaction. “Who would dare stand up to my Nylon Army?”
He was dead drunk.
14
THE GENERAL WOKE UP stiff all over. He got up and opened the shutters. It was a cold morning. The clouds stood high and motionless in the grey sky. He leaned against the glass, seized by a slight dizziness. Something not right, he thought. Is it starting up again?
He looked out. The autumn was almost over. The trees in the park facing the hotel were completely bare. It was undoubtedly many weeks since anyone had sat on those green benches. Apart from the dead leaves. But even they were rotting now. The general had been familiar for years with the uniforms of all the various N.A.T.O. forces, but he had never noticed before how their colours echoed the changing tints of the autumn leaves. Green first, then turning to a pale brown, and later a coppery yellow; then when they rotted they turned black.
In the middle of the park, beside the circular dance-floor, the rusty chairs had been stacked in piles for the winter, and the cleared and deserted dance-floor looked very large and sad. The platform for the band and the floor itself were littered with dead leaves, which the sweepers were even now gathering together into big piles.
Yes, there’s something wrong with me, the general said to himself as he walked downstairs to breakfast.
“You look unwell,” the priest said to him when they had sat down at their table. “Perhaps you need a little rest.”
“I don’t know myself what’s wrong with me,” the general said, “but it’s true I don’t really feel at all well. I seem to remember being rather offensive to you yesterday evening. I apologize. I had drunk rather too much.”
“Oh please,” the priest said affably.
“What appalling weather they have in this damned country!”
“It would perhaps be best if you didn’t come with us tomorrow. I imagine our investigations will be much less arduous in the coastal districts than up in the mountains,” the priest said.
“Yes, I had been assuming so myself.”
“Rest a little. And one evening you ought to go to the theatre, or the opera.”
“I am sleeping badly. I ought to take a sleeping pill.”
They went out for another stroll along the boulevard after breakfast, walking up and down the wide pavement with its edging of tall pines. Groups of young men and girls passed from time to time - presumably students hurrying to lectures.
“What is this loathsome task we have been burdened with?” the general suddenly said, as though he were continuing some interrupted discussion. “I feel it would be easier to dig out the pharaohs still buried in the depths of their great pyramids than to excavate a mere two feet of earth in order to retrieve these soldiers of ours.”
“You can’t tear your mind away from that subject, can you? Perhaps that is why you are feeling unwell.”
“The war here wasn’t like other wars,” the general went on. “There were no proper fronts, no direct confrontations. The war simply insinuated itself all over the country, like a breeding worm burrowing into the country’s every cell. That’s why it was so different from the sort of war that’s fought elsewhere.”
“That is because the Albanians are given to war by their very nature,” the priest said. “They hurl themselves into it with all their hearts and with eyes wide open. Once they’ve been given a shot of it they become intoxicated with it the way other peoples do with alcohol. Their psychological conditioning … “
“Yes, you said something of the sort once before,” the general said.
“Yes, I remember. Maybe I’ve bored you.”
“No, please don’t think that. I enjoy listening to you. You were speaking of the Albanians’ warlike nature.”
“Yes,” the priest said. “It is a state of mind that goes back a long way. All through their history the Albanians have gone everywhere with weapons slung over their shoulders. The mountain people who lived a patriarchal existence may have been still living in the stone age until a few years ago, but that didn’t stop them being equipped with the most modern of guns. Just think of the contrast! I have told you as much before: deprived of war and weapons this people would wither away, its roots would dry up and it would eventually just disappear.”
“Whereas with war and weapons it will always regenerate itself?”
“So they believe. Though in fact weapons will reduce them to non-existence even more rapidly.”
“According to you then, war is a sort of sport for them, an exercise they need in order to keep their circulation going and stay fit?”
“That is its effect for a while, yes,” the priest said.
“In other words, with weapons or without, they are a people doomed to annihilation.”
“It would seem so, yes. Their government has raised the nation’s ancient propensity for war to the status of a political principle and embodied it in their policies. It is fortunate for their neighbours that the Albanians number only a few million.”
The general lit a cigarette but did not speak.
“Do you remember the songs our workmen sang those nights we were under canvas?” the priest went on. “Do you remember the melancholy, the depression we felt as we listened to them?”
“I remember,” the general said. “There are some things not easily forgotten.”
“The predominant themes of their songs are destruction and death. That is characteristic of all their art. You find it in their songs, in their dress, in the whole of their existence. It is a characteristic common to all Balkan peoples of course; but it is even more pronounced in the Albanians than anywhere else. Look at their national flag: simply a symbol of blood and mourning.”
“You speak with great passion on the subject,” the general observed.
“I have given a great deal of thought to these matters,” the priest answered. “Oscar Wilde said that people of the lower classes feel a need to commit crimes in order to experien
ce the strong emotions that we can derive from art. His epigram might well be applied to the Albanians, if one were to substitute the words “war” or “vengeance” for “crime”. For if we are to be objective we must admit that the Albanians are not criminals in the common law sense. The murders they commit are always done in conformity with rules laid down by age-old customs. Their vendetta is like a play composed in accordance with all the laws of tragedy, with a prologue, continually growing dramatic tension, and an epilogue that inevitably entails a death. The vendetta could be likened to a raging bull let loose in the hills and laying waste everything in its path. And yet they have hung around the beast’s neck a quantity of ornaments and decorations that correspond to their conception of beauty, so that when the beast is loosed, and even while it is spreading death on every side, they can derive aesthetic satisfactions from those events at the same time.”
The general listened attentively
“The life of the Albanian,” the priest continued, “is like a theatrical performance governed by age-old customs. The Albanian lives and dies as though he were interpreting a role in a play, with the one great difference that the scenery is provided by the plateaux or the mountains where he and his kind pass their lives in such harsh penury. And when he dies, it is often because certain customs must be respected, not for objectively valid reasons. The life that succeeds in subsisting on these rocks amid so many ordeals and privations, a life that has never succeeded in eliminating either cold, or hunger, or the avalanche, is snuffed out suddenly as the result of an imprudent remark, a joke that went a little too far, or a covetous glance at a woman. The vendetta is often set in motion without the slightest passion behind it, solely in order to conform with tradition. And even when the avenger kills his victim he is doing no more than obeying a clause of unwritten law. And so these time-honoured and unspoken rules go on twisting themselves around these people’s legs throughout their lives, until the day comes when they inevitably trip them up. And once they are down they never rise again. So that it is true to say that for centuries now the Albanians have been acting out a blood-thirsty and tragic play.”