The General of the Dead Army

  The pavements were crammed with strollers. He gave barely a glance at the cinema posters, his mind was otherwise occupied, so much so that two steps beyond he had forgotten the titles of the films.

  He looked at his watch. Eleven o’clock.

  I’ll collect my ticket after the service, he thought, and turned left. Outside the bank, just behind the Studenti café, there was a veritable horde of travellers by the bus stops. It was the terminus for the routes serving the suburbs. The church where the De Profundis was to be intoned was only one stop further on, so the general decided to continue on foot. He crossed to the central pavement and let his thoughts return to the colonel’s remains as he walked along it.

  He could no longer remember exactly what had happened. He could only recall that he had been in a black and somehow mindless mood. He had felt his soul being crushed under a great weight. But now, looking back, his action seemed to him to have been totally senseless.

  But in any case there must surely be a way of setting the matter to rights. He would discuss it with the priest. There were quite a number of soldiers measuring six foot one - the colonel’s height. As for the teeth, that could easily be arranged. And who would ever suspect that the colonel’s remains weren’t really his? The more he thought about it, the more he felt it should be possible to reach an agreement with the priest. Then he tried to recall some of the soldiers who were the same height as Colonel Z., but without success. Every time during the course of their excavations that the expert had called out “Six foot one” he had been unable to prevent himself thinking: Like Colonel Z. But at this moment he just couldn’t recall a single one of them.

  He could only remember the British flyer they had found by chance under the ruts of a village road - and then reburied in the exact spot where they had found him.

  Then he remembered the diary soldier. He certainly measured six foot one. The general began to imagine what it would be like if they were to substitute that soldier’s remains for those of the colonel. He pictured to himself the reception that the colonel’s assembled family would accord to the remains of that simple soldier, the grandiose funeral service, the solemn obsequies, Betty in deepest mourning, weeping while the dead man’s old mother on her arm went on talking and talking relentlessly about her son to anyone who would listen. Then the poor fellow’s bones would be transported to his murderer’s magnificent tomb, the bells would ring out, a general would deliver a funeral oration, and the whole thing would be an outrage against nature, the whole thing would be a perversion, a cheat, a profanation. And if ghosts and spirits really did exist, then the soldier would rise from his tomb that very night. No! the general thought. We had better find another. There must surely be one. He began to step out. He only had two more minutes before the Mass was due to begin. He was already in sight of the church, a handsome modern edifice with its main door leading almost directly onto the street. And parked along the pavement on either side of the entrance were a number of luxurious cars of various makes.

  Members of the diplomatic corps, the general thought to himself, and walked swiftly up the marble steps. The Mass had barely begun as he entered the church. He dipped a finger in the stoup on his right, crossed himself and found a seat on the side. He fixed his eyes on the priest and listened to him speaking, but without actually managing to grasp the meaning of anything he said. He was only really aware of the customary black hangings covering the side walls of the church and the empty coffin in front of the choir, also draped with black cloth. The hangings and the congregation’s black clothes seemed to deaden the guttering light of the candles; moreover the windows were set very high, and the light they gave had in any case been filtered through their multicoloured stained glass, so that the church seemed even darker and colder than it really was.

  The priest was praying for the souls of the dead soldiers. Lack of sleep had made his face even paler than usual, and his eyes looked tired and tormented. The diplomats all sat listening attentively, their faces set in grave expressions, and mingling with the smell of the burning candles there was a faint whiff of scent hovering in the nave.

  A woman in front of the general began to weep silently.

  The priest’s voice carried to the four corners of the church, solemn and sonorous:

  Requiem aeternam dona eis!

  The woman’s sobs redoubled and she pulled a handkerchief out of her bag.

  Et lux perpetua luceat eis! the priest went on, raising his eyes to the great crucifix.

  Then his voice thundered out even more solemnly and sank to an even deeper note:

  Requiescant in pace! he concluded, and his words echoed back from every corner of the church.

  Amen! the deacon said.

  For a few seconds the general thought he could hear the tiny sound of the candle flames burning.

  May they rest in peace! he repeated to himself, and a sudden wave of emotion engulfed him.

  So that as the priest raised the wafer and the chalice over the kneeling congregation, then went on to eat of the bread and drink of the wine for the salvation of the soldiers’ souls, it suddenly seemed to the general that he was seeing them, thousand upon thousand of them, their aluminium mess-tins in their hands, queuing up for their evening stew from the big dixies, just at that moment of the day when the sun’s last rays were lighting up their mess-tins and the steel of their helmets with glints of scarlet and eternal light.

  And may light eternal shine on them! he breathed between his lips, after he had kneeled down, staring with wild and sombre gaze at the marble flagstones on the floor.

  The little bell rang and everyone rose.

  Ite, missa est! the priest’s voice rang out. Deo gratias! the deacon added.

  People began to move towards the doors. Even from inside the church one could hear the car engines starting up, and as the general emerged through the main door he saw that the diplomats’ cars were already moving off one by one. He walked over to wait for a bus at the stop just outside the church. Once in the bus he remained standing at the back of the vehicle, near the big rear window.

  “Tickets, comrades,” the conductress cried.

  He understood the word for ticket and realized that of course he would have to buy one. He pulled a hundred-lek note out of his pocket and held it out to her.

  “Haven’t you anything smaller?”

  Sensing what she said rather than actually understanding it he shook his head.

  “It’s three leks,” the conductress said, and held up three fingers in front of his face. “Haven’t you got three leks in coins?”

  The general once more shook his head apologetically.

  “He is a foreigner, comrade,” a tall youth with an oddly sedate way of speaking said to the conductress.

  “So it seems,” she answered, and began counting out change.

  “He must be an Albanian just back from America,” an old man sitting behind the conductress broke in. “There are some that forget our language completely over there.”

  “No, grandad, he’s a foreigner, I’m sure of that,” the sedate-voiced youth repeated.

  “Oh no,” the old man insisted, “you mark my words, he’s an Albanian just come home again. I can recognize them at a glance, I tell you.”

  The general sensed that they must be discussing him and supposed that he had been taken for an American.

  The pair continued to argue in front of his face, and went so far as to point at the general without the smallest inhibition.

  My goodness, he thought, even if I were a shade they ought to show me a little more respect!

  Suddenly the idea that they and he belonged to utterly different worlds, with no point of contact be it physical or mental, and that they lived in complete mutual ignorance, froze him to the marrow.

  When the bus stopped at the State Bank and the passengers alighted, he caught the old man’s eye. “O.K.” the old man said to him with a smile of self-satisfaction on his face before he disappeared.

  Th
e general made his way through the crowd of country people who were waiting for their bus and then turned into the main boulevard.

  The pavements along Dibër Street were packed with people, particularly outside the buffet-bars and the People’s Department Store. As he walked past the latter he suddenly had the idea of buying a souvenir. He stopped and looked in the windows for a moment, then walked in. There were a number of little figures of all kinds on display along the counters and he examined them slowly one by one. He had always had a weakness for such objects - most of them figurines in various national costumes.

  What would our soldiers leaving Albania have chosen? he wondered. All soldiers abroad seem to buy exactly the same knick-knack to bring back. Their telegrams are identical too. And even their letters as near as damn it.

  Suddenly the gnome began playing its drum again inside his skull; slowly at first, then faster, faster, ever faster. Only now he wasn’t sitting inside his head cross-legged, he was standing up, black and white and shining, in his red tunic with its black edging, his tall cap on his head. And there he was at the same time inside the glass display counter, standing beating his drum, neatly fashioned out of gleaming porcelain, and the general couldn’t tear his eyes away. He pointed to it.

  “The mountain peasant with the drum?” the assistant asked. The general nodded.

  The girl removed the figure from the counter, wrapped it up and handed it to him.

  “That will be eighteen leks twenty, please.”

  He paid, walked out of the shop and turned up towards the street of the Barricades.

  23

  BOOM, BOOM, TARARABOOM …

  “Hello there!”

  The general wheeled around in surprise.

  “Oh, hello,” he replied.

  It was the lieutenant-general, standing outside the hotel on the pavement. He still had the left sleeve of his greatcoat tucked into his pocket, and the remaining hand still held a pipe. “How are you?”

  The lieutenant-general drew on his pipe, then removed it from between his lips and watched the smoke curling up out of his mouth.

  “Before anything else, though it’s a long time ago now of course, I do want to apologize to you over that nasty business last year. We did receive your complaint. I hope you will believe that I was in no way responsible, and that I was genuinely distressed at the incident.”

  The general let his gaze rest on the other somewhat absently.

  “Who was to blame then?” he asked.

  “My second-in-command. He was behind the whole hideous mess. But why don’t we go and sit down somewhere, then I can explain the whole thing properly.”

  “I’m sorry, but I really haven’t the time just now. Can’t we just talk for a while here?”

  “In that case it would be better if we postponed it till this evening. But tell me first, how are you getting on with your work here?”

  “Badly, as I told you,” the general answered. “The going is pretty tough.”

  “Indeed it is.”

  “And then on top of everything one of our workmen died.”

  “Died? What of? Did you have an accident?”

  “No, it was an infection.”

  “How did he get it?”

  “No one is quite certain. A bone perhaps, or a sliver of metal.”

  The lieutenant-general looked duly shocked.

  “You will have to compensate the family of course?”

  The general nodded. Then after a brief silence he added:

  “I’ve never seen so many mountains!”

  “And there are still a lot to come!”

  “No, we’ve finished. We’ve just come back from our final tour.”

  “You’ve finished! You’re damned lucky then! I’ve got a lot more mountains ahead of me.”

  “Mountains everywhere. And those young people everywhere terracing them into fields, have you seen them too?”

  “Of course. They’re always up there digging away.”

  “They’re clearing new land to grow cereal crops on.”

  “In one place I noticed they’d sown wheat beside a railway track right up to the very edge of the ballast.”

  “They’ll sow any scrap of land they can find. Presumably their present fields just aren’t sufficient for their needs.”

  “They’re in a state of blockade, remember. The U.S.S.R. has refused to let them have any more wheat.”

  “They’re certainly delighted to see the back of our soldiers, that’s for sure.”

  “Indeed they are. The cemeteries are sown almost before we’ve emptied them. Instant deconsecration it’s called.”

  The general laughed.

  “But your work, how is that going?”

  “Very badly indeed,” the other replied. “We’ve been rushing up hill and down dale all over Albania for eighteen months now, but the fact is that we’ve got very little to show for it.”

  “You’ve had a great many setbacks, I take it.”

  “A great many,” the lieutenant-general agreed with a sigh. “And as if that weren’t enough it now looks as though we’re going to have a very ugly scandal on our hands.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Oh, it’s a nasty business. Haven’t you noticed that I’m on my own? By the way, I was about to ask you: where is your colleague, the reverend father?”

  “Up in his room, I imagine.”

  The other chuckled.

  “I’m afraid a nasty suspicion crossed my mind,” he said. “Because you see my mayor is probably in very hot water just at this moment.”

  “Oh? What has happened to him then?”

  “He received an urgent recall,” the lieutenant-general said. “It’s several weeks now since we suspended our operations on his account.”

  He waited for the other to show some curiosity, but as the general seemed to have his mind on other things, he repeated: “A very ugly scandal.”

  “You don’t mean he’s misappropriated funds intended to finance your search?” the general eventually asked. “Worse. What’s befallen is a great deal worse.”

  Then the general listened as the other described all that he had been suspecting for a good while: the promise given by the families to reward those who unearthed the remains of their nearest and dearest; the greed of the workers involved, who wanted above all to feather their own nests; the fraud practised on the first skeleton which had been falsely identified, then the second, then a whole string of others. Until one fine day …

  Little by little the general continued to winkle the whole story out of him.

  “Yes? What happened then?”

  His colleague made a gesture as much as to say: what was bound to happen.

  “The inevitable happened,” he went on. “Apparently it was one of the families that discovered the original substitution, and you know how such things snowball. In no time at all the slightest hint of such a thing becomes an absolute avalanche of suspicions, enquiries, reporters agog for scandal, the opposition which …”

  “I’ve got it,” said the general without showing a hint of sympathy. “If I’ve understood you correctly, you’ve rebaptized the bones of unknown soldiers with the names of those men they had been particularly requested to look out for.”

  “Not me, the others!” the lieutenant-general broke in.

  “Of course.”

  “The mistake arose because instead of doing as you did in collecting up your soldiers - I mean their skeletons - so as to send them off all together, we sent them a few at a time. If we’d done as you have, none of this horrible mix-up would have occurred.”

  “One hell of a mix-up,” the general agreed.

  He let his imagination run away with all that might constitute any general’s nightmare: the dispersal of his troops. The first signs of disbanding, the privates going absent, the officers tearing off their shoulder insignia to avoid recognition, and eventually, a general rout. He had thought that such a thing could only befall an army of the living, ne
ver one in a deep freeze. Well, this is precisely what had happened to his colleague.

  He remembered his last press conference, when he was still back home, during which the flashbulbs simply accentuated the provocative nature of the reporters’ questions: “We’re told, general, that you’ve been furnished with the most precise data enabling you to achieve your mission at every step. Do you personally trust the accuracy of those lists and data on each soldier’s height?” They kept repeating the words “lists” and “data”

  to make quite clear their own scepticism as to the insensitive, bureaucratic temper of the top brass in charge of the exercise. Time-servers, bar flies! he fumed as he called them to mind.

  It was thanks to those lists and data that I suffered not a single casualty to my army! There they were, all present and correct, officers, men, runners, scouts, chaplains, and of course the signals boys who were shouting “Hello! Hello!” even as they fell, as though answering Death’s own call.

  “A really nasty business,” commented the general after a long silence.

  The other kept watching him in a daze.

  “I begin to be very weary of the whole business. And I’m entirely on my own. How I envy you leaving tomorrow!” The general lit a cigarette.

  “It’s in the evening especially that the hours seem interminable.

  It’s even more depressing than all that rushing around and sleeping under canvas.”

  “But what can you do about it!”

  “To think that for a year and a half we’ve done nothing but hop from one mountain or valley to another as though we were geologists or something. And now, just when the end is in sight, we have this mess to face.”

  “Like geologists, yes, that’s well said.”

  “And think what strange deposits we’ve been searching for,” the lieutenant-general said. “What should we call them, geologically? Mortuary intrusions?”

  The general smiled, then looked at his watch.

  “You must excuse me,” he said, “I have a very full day ahead.”

  “Well, general, I mustn’t keep you. I look forward to seeing you again this evening.”