Two young men came into the lounge and took seats over by the tall french windows which led out onto the hotel gardens, and, presumably, down to the river.
“What brand of disinfectant do you use on your remains?” the mayor asked.
“‘Universal 62’.”
“That’s efficient. Though the most efficient of all is the earth itself.”
“True, true. But there are cases when the earth itself has proved unable to fulfil that function.”
“You have found bodies still intact?”
“We certainly have!”
“Yes, so have we.”
“It’s extremely dangerous.”
“Yes, though the danger of infection is constant of course. The bacteria can sometimes resist destruction for many years and then suddenly recover all their virulence the moment the grave is opened.”
“Have you ever had any, er, unfortunate accidents?”
“Not so far.”
“Will you take coffee with us?” the lieutenant-general asked.
“Thank you, but no. I am going up to bed now,” the priest said.
“I must go up now too,” the mayor said. “I still have a letter to write.”
They wished the two generals good night and disappeared up stairs which were carpeted in a velvety crimson. The lounge was quiet. The only sound was that of the two young men talking in the far corner, fragments of whose conversation could occasionally be heard.
The general glanced over at the french windows and the darkness beyond.
“We are already worn out, and yet who knows what difficulties still lie ahead?”
“It’s rough country.”
“Very rough. I make use of the time we spend travelling by studying the terrain and applying it to some tactical problem of modern mountain warfare. But I always run into some obstacle or another that I can’t see any solution to. Yes, it’s rough country all right!”
His companion seemed to have no interest at all in the subject of mountain warfare however - rather to the general’s amazement.
“It’s strange,” the lieutenant-general began, “almost every day in that stadium, the football stadium where we’re excavating at the moment, I see a girl who comes to watch her young man training. When it rains she wears a blue raincoat, and she just stands there, not making a sound, tucked away between two pillars by the players’ entrance, gazing out at the footballers running to and fro on the grass. The empty stadium has a sad, you might even say a lugubrious, look about it, with all the curving tiers of those concrete stands glistening in the rain and the edges of the pitch all hacked about with our trenches. There’s nothing pretty there to look at except her, in her blue raincoat. All the time she’s there I spend my whole time just staring at her, while the workmen go on digging a few yards off - and that is the one and only distraction I have found in this town.”
“Wasn’t she horrified, seeing the remains being dug up?”
“Not in the slightest,” the other said. “She simply turned her head away towards the pitch and fixed her eyes on her young man running after the ball.”
The two men sat for a long moment, sunk in their armchairs, smoking their cigarettes, without exchanging a word.
Finally the general broke the silence with what was almost a laugh:
“We are the world’s most skilled grave-diggers. And we shall find them, those dead soldiers, no matter where they’re buried. They can’t escape us.”
His companion looked at him and said:
“Do you know, for several nights now I’ve had the same nightmare.”
“Ah yes, I have bad dreams too …”
“I see myself in that stadium where we’re digging now,” the lieutenant-general went on, “only it seems much bigger, and the stands are packed while we are digging up the field. Among the crowd I can see that girl in her blue raincoat. Every time a new grave is opened up the whole crowd of spectators cheers so loud I expect the place to come tumbling down, and the whole stadium gets to its feet and starts chanting the soldier’s name.
I listen and listen in the hope of being able to identify the dead man, but their cries sound muffled, and the noise is so loud I’m quite unable to catch any name. Just imagine - this happens pretty well every night.”
“It’s understandable enough. You’re just obsessed at the moment with identifying your dead.”
“Yes, yes, it must be that. It is a very worrisome business.”
The general was recalling a similar recurrent dream of his own. He was old and had been made curator of a military cemetery back in his own country, the very cemetery in which all the remains he had brought back from Albania were now buried. It was a large cemetery, immense in fact, and there were thousands of people walking to and fro along the paths between the graves, all carrying telegrams in their hands and looking for the graves of their kinsfolk. But none of them seemed to be able to find the grave they were looking for, because they all began shaking their heads in the most menacing way and he was filled with an icy terror. But just at that moment the priest rang his bell and all the people went away. Then he would wake up.
He was about to tell this dream, then suddenly changed his mind because it occurred to him that the other would think he had simply made it up.
“The task ahead of us is certainly no easy one,” he said instead.
“Agreed,” the other replied. “What we’re being asked to do is a sort of carbon copy of the war!”
“And perhaps it is even worse than the original.” They were silent for a moment.
“Have you been the object of provocations at any point?” the general asked.
“No. Or rather yes, but only once. Some children threw stones at us.”
“They attacked you with stones?” the general exclaimed, then, leaning over towards the other’s ear, he continued teasingly: “Had you put your foot in it?”
“It was a complicated business,” the lieutenant-general said. “We had mistakenly opened several Albanian graves under the impression that they were some of ours.”
“Oh, I see.”
“Yes, an unfortunate business all round. I’d really rather not think about it. Let’s have another coffee.”
“We shan’t sleep a wink if we do.”
“As if that mattered! It just means we shan’t have to dream those dreams of ours. And like anything that is repeated often enough, they do become really very boring.”
“True, verytrue.”
They ordered two more coffees.
Chapter without a Number
WHAT ELSE IS THERE FOR ME to write? What remains but a monotonous chronicle of recurring details. Rain, mud, lists, reports, a variety of figures and calculations, a whole dismal technology of exhumation. And besides, just lately something strange is happening to me. As soon as I see someone - anyone at all - I automatically begin stripping off his hair, then his cheeks, then his eyes, as though they were something unnecessary, something that is merely preventing me from penetrating to his essence; and I envisage his head as nothing but a skull and teeth - the only details that endure. Do you understand? I feel that I have crossed over into a kingdom of bones, of pure calcium.
7
“IT ALL HAPPENED TOWARDS the beginning of the war,” the I café-owner began in broken English, with a slight stammer.
He had worked for many years in a New York bar and his odd speech was reminiscent of the sounds and silences of a nighttime bar. The general himself had insisted on being told the prostitute’s story by an actual inhabitant of the old, stone-built town, and no one, he was assured, knew all the details better than the café-owner.
Never mind if he butchers the language, the general decided; the whole story evolves under the sign of slaughter.
They had read the prostitute’s name only that morning, in the military cemetery on the outskirts of the town. Of all the remains they had located up to now she was the first woman they had come across and, when he was told something of how she came to be
there, the general was curious to hear her whole story.
The general had in fact noticed the white headstone from quite a distance. It inevitably caught the gaze among all those twisted, blackened, rotting wooden crosses that in contrast seemed only the more crookedly set, and all those rusty helmets.
“A marble headstone!” the general had exclaimed. “An officer? Perhaps even Colonel Z.?”
They went straight over to the grave to read what was carved on the slab: “For Leader and for Country”. It gave a woman’s surname and Christian name, then her place of birth. She was from the same province as the general, though he did not tell anyone so.
“Yes, it happened right at the beginning,” the café-owner said in the tones of someone addressing a large audience. (For since he had told this story many times he had developed a particular narrative style for the purpose, introducing frequent parentheses enabling him to insert his own comments on the events. And with it a slightly rhetorical tone that nevertheless stopped short of actual grandiloquence.) “I was one of the first to hear the news. Not that I have any particular interest in such matters, you understand but, because I was always here in the café working, I naturally tended to be one of the first to learn of any event affecting our town. And that was how it was on that particular day. The café was full when the rumour first started, and we never did find out who started it. Some said it came from a soldier who’d spent the night in our hotel here and got blind drunk before leaving for the front in Greece. Others claimed that it originated from a certain Lame Spiri, who was always positively obsessed with such things. Not that it really mattered one way or the other. We were so amazed and shaken up that we didn’t really care whether it was the soldier or that blackguard Lame Spiri that the news actually came from.
“I ought to add here that it wasn’t easy to surprise us at that time. It was wartime for one thing, and we were hearing incredible, fantastic stories every day. And we all thought there was nothing left in the world that could surprise us after that day when we saw the anti-tank guns and the anti-aircraft guns with their long barrels rolling through our streets for the first time, making such a terrible din that we all thought the entire town was about to come tumbling round our ears. And we were even more convinced when the aeroplanes started fighting right over our heads, not to mention a lot of other things that happened after that.
“And then for a time the whole town talked about nothing but the English pilot who was shot down just outside the town. I saw his hand with my own eyes, it was all there was left of him. I saw it when they showed it to the townspeople, out on the main square, with a scrap of his burnt shirt. It looked just like a piece of yellowed wood, and you could even see the ring on his ring finger, they hadn’t got round to taking it off.
“So we were used to hearing about things of that kind, and even the most unexpected events no longer had much effect on us. And yet, somehow the news that they were going to open a licensed brothel here shattered everyone no end. We were prepared for anything - but not for that. In fact the news was so surprising that a lot of people refused to believe it at first.
“Our town is a very ancient one. It has survived through many different times and many different customs but how could it ever have foreseen anything like this? How could it suffer such a terrible shame in its old age, our town that had always been a byword for honour all through the years? What was to be done? It was a terrible problem, and one that threw us all into distress and confusion. Something strange and new and terrible was creeping into our life, as if the occupation, the barracks crammed with foreign soldiers, the bombings and the hunger weren’t a heavy enough burden upon us already. We didn’t understand then that this was just another side of life in wartime, no different really, no better and no worse, than the bombings, the barracks, and the hunger.
“The day after the news first went round a delegation of elders walked in a group to the town hall; and that night another group met in my café to prepare a petition to the Fascist emperor’s lieutenant-general in Tirana. For hours they sat there, round this very table, writing page after page, while a crowd of others stood around nearby, drinking coffee, smoking, wandering off on some business of their own, then coming back to ask how the letter was getting on. A lot of the women began to get worried and sent their children to make sure their husbands weren’t a drop too many. For there were not many of us who realized that writing a letter, even one addressed not to the king in person but to his lieutenant-general, could be such a difficult thing to do.
“I had never closed the place as late as I did that night. At last the letter was finished and someone read it out. I don’t remember too well exactly what they’d put in it. I only know that it said how for a great many reasons, all listed at length one after the other, the honest citizens of our town begged the Duce’s lieutenant-general to reverse his decision to open a licensed brothel here, in the name of the honour and the prosperity of our ancient town with its noble traditions and its origins lost in the mists of antiquity.
“Next day the letter was despatched.
“Of course there were some people who didn’t want anything to do with a petition like that, and who disapproved of any kind of letter or request at all being addressed to the occupying powers. But we ignored them. We clung firmly to the hope that something would be done for us. You must remember that this was still the beginning of the war, and there were still many things we hadn’t quite cottoned on to as yet.
“But of course no heed was paid to our request. A few days later a telegram arrived: “Brothel to be opened for reasons of strategic order stop”. The old postmaster who was the first to read it didn’t grasp the meaning of the message immediately. Indeed, some people said that it was written in one of those coded languages they were always using then, and that always did seem to be incomprehensible. In the telegram were the words “ethnic Albanian” which was deemed to mean the mayor’s fat wife, and so forth. Someone even said they were all wrong to be making a fuss about the opening of a brothel, that it was all to do with the opening of a second front. But such comforting thoughts did not last for long and everything became clear: it wasn’t a second front that was about to be opened but, beyond a shadow of a doubt, a brothel.
“A few days later further details filtered through. The brothel was to be opened and run by the occupying forces themselves, and foreign women were to be specially brought in.
“It was the sole subject of conversation in our town. The few men who had been abroad for any length of time pandered to the curiosity of the others, clustering wide-eyed around my tables, by telling them all manner of things on the subject. It wasn’t hard to tell that they often supplemented genuine incidents in their lives with others that were less so. To listen to them talk about Japanese brothels and Portuguese brothels, you would have thought they must know those countries like the backs of their hands, and that they were on first-name terms with every prostitute in the world.
“Their listeners, especially the ones with grown-up sons, became increasingly worried and kept shaking their heads with more and more anxious looks. And the women, at home, were even more tortured by anxiety, and it was hard to say whether it was for their husbands or for their sons that they were most concerned. The older inhabitants regarded the promised event as the most fateful of omens and were now waiting, their hearts gripped by the darkest forebodings, for an even more terrible punishment to descend upon us from on high. It has to be admitted, of course, that there were some who were delighted, because as you know it takes all sorts to make a world; but no one had the face to actually display his pleasure openly. There were a number of husbands who didn’t get on with their wives, for instance, and also a number who had always been given to skirt-chasing by nature. But above all there were the young men, the ones who weren’t married yet, reading love stories all day long and hanging about all evening with nothing to do. Some people tried to console themselves and reassure everyone else by arguing that from now on
the foreign soldiers wouldn’t bother our girls any more because they’d have their own. But people weren’t that easily pacified.
“At last they arrived. They were brought in by a camouflaged army lorry. I can recall the scene as though it was only yesterday. Dusk had just fallen and my café was full. At first I couldn’t understand why so many customers were getting up from their tables and going over to the windows, peering out towards the main square. Then several of them rushed out into the street, and the customers still sitting down began to ask what it was all about. A lot of the tables were suddenly empty. It was the first time so many people had left without paying. So then I went outside myself, unable to restrain my curiosity. People were coming out of the café opposite too, and out of the hunters’ club, and quite a crowd had already formed to watch the scene. The lorry had drawn up just by the town war memorial, opposite the town hall, and they had just clambered out of it. Now they were just standing looking around them with astonished eyes. There were six of them, and they seemed tired, numbed from the long journey. The circle of bystanders was gazing at them with popping eyes, as though they were some sort of rare animal, but they, as they stood there exchanging comments with one another, merely returned our stares with calm and indifferent smiles. Perhaps they were a little taken aback at finding themselves so unexpectedly in this strange place, all carved out of stone, for it is true that our town does take on a slightly phantasmagorical look in the dusk, with the buttresses of the citadel and the dreaming minarets with their metal-covered spires gleaming in the setting sun.
“By now the square was filling up with people, in particular with a horde of children, who began hurling a few of the choice foreign words they had picked up from the occupying soldiers at them. The grown-ups stood observing them in silence. It was difficult for us at that moment to know exactly what it was we felt in our hearts. The only thing we did realize clearly that evening was that all the things we’d been told about the brothels in Tokyo or Honolulu bore very little relation to what was now meeting our gaze, and that the reality was something very different from all the stories we had been told, something much deeper, sadder, more pitiful.