“I shall be somewhere around. I shall come back here to the hotel when it’s all over.”
The general threw away his cigarette and set off towards the lifts. But at the last moment he turned about and walked back towards his colleague.
“Is there nothing that can be done about those eleven you took of ours?” he asked.
The lieutenant-general shrugged.
“Difficult, very difficult,” he said.
“But why? You must have the addresses of the families you sent them to.” The other smiled bitterly.
“That’s easily said, but just think of the consequences. Think what a shock it would be for those families suddenly to be asked to send back the remains!”
“Is that sufficient reason?”
“Possibly not, but there is even more to it than that,” the lieutenant-general said, “The mind boggles at the legal complications it would lead to. But in any case, let’s talk it over more fully this evening.”
“Agreed,” the general said, and walked off again towards the lifts.
24
IT WAS A QUARTER PAST FIVE when the banquet came to an end. The general waited until all the guests had left and only he and the priest remained. Then he drank two glasses of brandy straight off one after the other and walked out himself, without a word to the priest.
One more formality over and done with, he thought to himself with relief once he was outside on the boulevard again. You could hardly say the atmosphere was anything but lukewarm, but at least it’s all over!
He had thanked the Albanian authorities, on behalf of his people and the thousands of mothers concerned, for all the facilities that had been made available to them in their search. To which an Albanian politician, the same one who had originally met them at the airport, had replied by saying that they had done no more than fulfil a humanitarian duty towards another people with whom it was Albania’s wish to live in peace. At which they had all touched glasses and drunk a toast - and beneath the crystalline tinkling of the glasses it was as though a distant rumble of guns could be heard. No one can get rid of it, that muffled thunder, the general had thought to himself, and all of them here are aware of it, even though they refuse to admit it.
Now he walked slowly on among the crowds packing the streets, his ears assailed from every side by the babble of their foreign tongue against the deep background hum of the city. In Skanderburg Square an open-air concert was in progress. He advanced a little through the human sea then stood on his toes in order to get a better view. From the balcony of the Executive Committee building behind him two spotlights were beaming down their light onto the backs of the crowd, and from a little further off he could just catch a distinctive whirring sound. They must be making a film.
The general, his mind elsewhere, stood watching the dancers move and turn up on the stage.
The thunder was there, I know it was there, he said to himself again, that thunder beneath the transparent tinkling of the glasses. And not just the thunder of the big guns but the crackling of the machine-guns too, and the clicking of bayonets, and the clinking of mess-tins in the evening queue for hash. It was all there in the tinkling of those glasses, they were all aware of it, they could all sense it.
He felt a stab of pain in his eyes from the white glare of the spotlights. Thousands of human heads were patterning the square with their bizarrely projected shadows. The general felt a shiver go up his spine and began to fight his way back through the crowd. The spotlights were continually on the move, sometimes brandishing their blinding beams just above the crowd’s heads, sometimes just below them, sometimes on them, so that all the heads turned round, becoming uneasy faces, and making their shadows shift on the ground.
The general freed himself from the crowd and turned into the avenue that ran alongside the park towards his hotel. He was still seeing the representatives of two peoples, two states, sitting face to face and separated only by a few bottles and a few bowls of fruit.
Is that all that stands between us? the general had asked himself as they had touched their glasses the first time. Nothing but those brightly labelled bottles and those beautiful fruits freshly picked in the orchards and the vineyards along the coast? Then he had remembered those vineyards and those orchards plunged in the growing dusk, lining the roads that gleamed so pale and bright in the moonlight, and from which he could just make out the distant, lonely barking of a dog, and further off still the brightness of a shepherd’s fire.
“There is a telegram for you,” the hotel receptionist told him as he handed over the key of his room.
“Thank you.”
On the yellow envelope he noticed the word urgent in tiny letters. He opened it and read: “Have heard your noble mission accomplished stop Please send news colonel stop Z. family.”
He felt the blood rushing to his head. His temples were throbbing as though they were about to burst. He nevertheless made a great effort to keep control of himself, walked slowly over to a lift and almost fell into it. Whatever possessed you to get mixed up in this business anyway? he asked himself in the mirror. He observed the pallor of the skin, the drawn features, the irreversible wrinkles on the forehead, those three deep furrows, the middle one slightlylonger than the others, calling to mind the three lines that typists type at the bottom of a report.
“You’re washed out,” he told himself. “Emptied.”
He walked into his room and switched on the light. The first thing his eye encountered was the little porcelain figure beating its drum on top of the heap of letters and telegrams piled up on the bedside table.
He lay down and tried to sleep.
Outside, fireworks sputtered and exploded. The multicoloured lights came through the blinds and lay in stripes across the ceiling and walls of the room. He was back once more in that long room in the barracks, twenty years before, sitting with the rest of the recruiting board along one side of the big table. He saw the hands repeatedly unrolling the X-rays, then holding them up to the light, displaying the pale ribs against the ceiling; then came the verdict, a weary and disillusioned “Good!” They almost always said “good” even when there was a slight patch between the ribs. It was only when the patches were too obvious to be ignored that they murmured: “Rejected”. And it went on like that all day, every day. And the conscripts with their shaven heads were taken straight from there to the barracks, and from the barracks to the front, where the war had just begun.
The light from outside, filtered into stripes by the blinds, kept whirling round and round in his head. He shut his eyes to shut everything out. But no sooner were his eyelids closed than the long, stark barrack room reappeared even more clearly, with those bewildered recruits standing in front of the long table, completely naked, like pale, pale candles. The general got up again. It was dinner time. He went out into the corridor with the intention of finding the priest. A passing chambermaid told him the priest had gone out. He went back to his room and phoned down to the desk to ask if the lieutenant-general was in the hotel. Then he walked out into the corridor again and saw him approaching. They walked slowly and in silence down the marble stairs. The lobby below was still as full of bustle as it had been earlier and the two telephones were still ringing non-stop.
In the lounge they had difficulty finding a place to sit. Through the nearby window, looking out onto the boulevard, they could see the sight-seers walking past, and up in the sky the rockets’ blazing sheaves of light, opening and falling back down, like thick multicoloured snow, towards the crowd and the dark trees of the park, only to die after a moment and plunge everything back into a darkness that seemed even deeper than ever.
The lieutenant-general ordered raki, the general brandy.
The sounds of the dance band in the basement came wafting up to them, and the wooden stairs leading down to the taverna were constantly creaking beneath the feet of the customers arriving and leaving.
They touched glasses and drank. Then they sat there for a long while without spea
king. The general refilled their glasses. It seemed easier than starting up a conversation.
Outside, the rockets continued to explode, and from time to time their reflections starred the window.
“They are celebrating their victory!” the general said. “Yes, as you say.”
They watched the sky light up as though a gigantic flaming helmet was sinking earthwards from it, glittering with innumerable sparks, only to pale suddenly, lose its warmth, and vanish back into the womb of night. “A pretty mission, ours!”
Once more he was wondering which was the worse, the war or this funereal pilgrimage that came after.
The general looked at the empty sleeve tucked into the tunic pocket.
Yes, we can all see you’ve been in battle all right, he thought.
“Yet in a way it is war, what we deal with,” the lieutenant-general went on. “The remains we dig up constitute war’s very essence, you might say. What remains when it is all over; the precipitate after a chemical reaction.”
The general gave a bitter smile. “Poetry!” he muttered to himself. He filled the glasses again.
“I’m sure you’ve heard that pearlfishers’ lungs sometimes burst when they dive too deep. Well, that’s what happens to your heart with this job of ours.”
“It’s true. Yes, it’s sad enough to break your heart.”
“We’ve reached our limit,” said the general. “We’ve been defeated by the shadow of their arms,” said the other. “What would have happened if we had really had to fight?”
“If we’d fought here? Perhaps it would have been better if we had!”
They spoke further of the war and its double, without ever concluding which of the two they opted for.
The music was still coming up from the basement night club, and the coffee machine occasionally emitted a hissing jet of steam like a miniature locomotive.
“Do you remember the football stadium I told you about that first evening we talked together?” the lieutenant-general said.
“The one where they wouldn’t let you start digging till the football championship was over?”
“Yes, that’s it.”
“Yes, I remember it, vaguely. You’d begun excavating round the edges of the field, as I remember, and you told me about the rain, how it streamed down the grey concrete tiers of the stands.”
“Yes, the graves ran all round the football and basketball fields like a sinister black dotted line, and the rain did cascade down the stands. But that wasn’t what I was thinking of.”
“What then?”
“Didn’t I tell you - I think I did - about the girl who used to come and wait for her young man every afternoon, while he was training?”
“Yes, you did tell me something about her, but I’m afraid I don’t remember exactly what.”
“Well, she came there every afternoon. And when it rained she used to pull up the hood of her raincoat and just stand there, in one corner of the stadium, under the pillars by the players’ entrance, just following her young man with her eyes as he rushed about on the pitch.”
“Ah yes, now I remember,” the general said. “The raincoat she wore was blue, wasn’t it?”
“Yes, that’s right,” the lieutenant-general said. “She wore a pretty blue raincoat, and her eyes were an even lighter blue. They were a little cold, perhaps, but I’ve never seen any more beautiful. So there she came and stood, every day, and we for our part just kept on digging, until in the end the field was totally surrounded by open graves.”
“And what happened then?” the general asked without much interest.
“Nothing, nothing in particular. As evening approached the young men stopped training, and then one of them would throw his arm round her shoulders and they’d go off together like that.
And at that moment every day, believe me, I felt such an emptiness all around me, I felt my heart so heavy that the whole world seemed to me as abandoned and as meaningless as that dark, empty stadium. Would you believe it? At my age!”
It’s true he doesn’t look like a great lover, the general thought.
“But life is like that,” the other continued. “Just when you least expect it a crazy, senseless dream begins to take root in your mind - like a flower growing on the edge of a precipice! I was a foreign general, and what’s more a middle-aged cripple, I told myself; my only reason for being in this country was to collect the bones of my fellow countrymen, so what could there possibly be between me and that young, foreign girl?”
“Nothing. Nothing of course. But as far as thinking about her goes - well there was nothing against that. We all of us have wild dreams sometimes, especially where women are concerned. Why, one summer not so long ago, at the seaside … “
“There were times,” the lieutenant-general went on, paying no attention, “there were times when I attributed my nervous exhaustion entirely to her, to the fact that my thoughts were so totally obsessed with her; but even then I knew it didn’t really explain my depression. It wasn’t so much the girl herself troubling my mind as something else, something vague, more abstract, something that was attacking me indirectly, through her. Do you understand?”
“I think so, yes. What disturbed you in her, it seems to me, was her youth, the fact that she seemed such an absolute manifestation of life. It’s such a long time now that we’ve been running up hill and down dale sniffing for death like hyenas, trying to find ways of coaxing it or smoking it out of its lair, that we have almost forgotten that beauty still exists on this earth … Listen, last summer on the beach, as I told you, I myself…”
“At my age!” his colleague broke in again. The general almost gnashed his teeth. He couldn’t stand people who were so wrapped up in themselves. That’s how he’d been listening, with clenched jaws, while the other went on and on about the football stadium and the stands and the girl in the blue raincoat.
Some suitor! he mused.
Once he realized that this adventure he had been through … the summer before last, on the beach … even if the other gave him the leisure … he no longer felt the slightest urge to speak of it (for a moment he had really believed in that little adventure he’d supposedly experienced that summer on the beach, but it had been so gossamer-thin that it only took his interlocutor’s obvious lack of interest for it to turn to vapour, like dew); once he had lost all hope of getting it off his chest he felt a sullen fury.
Now I’m going to let you have it! he muttered to himself. You’d like me to listen to your little vapourings but you don’t give a toss for anyone else’s feelings … He hadn’t wanted to listen to the little story of the beach? Right, then he’d find another way to galvanize him. The old woman at the wedding, with her mud-spattered black bag and her remarks, he still had them in the forefront of his mind.
“One evening I went to one of their wedding feasts and stood up to dance with them,” the general broke in.
But the other did not allow him to continue.
“And do you know what I did?” he went on himself. “Despite my grey hair and my missing arm, do you know what I did when we went back to that town a month later? I went alone to the stadium one afternoon, just at the time I knew the players would be training. But the ground was shut, they weren’t doing any training that day after all. I asked to be allowed in all the same, and the groundsman opened the gate for me. The stadium was more dismal and deserted than ever. The graves had been filled in again but you could see where they’d been, like scarred-over wounds all over the surface of the ground. I walked round the edge of the ground till I came to the pillars near the players’ entrance, the spot where the girl always used to stand. And at that moment I felt a despair well up inside me that was so deep, so overwhelming that I thought somehow the life was just going to be crushed out of me by those long, wet, curving tiers, those empty grey stands rising in endless circles up to the sky. Are you listening?”
“Yes, yes, I’m listening,” the general said, while inside what he was saying was: “Bully fo
r you!”
He waited, seething, for the right moment to take his revenge. Old Nice now seemed to him to belong to the ghosts’ punishment battalion. Let us confront him together, he thought, just as we confronted the mud and the rain!
“I was speaking to you about the wedding where I got up to dance … “
This time what interrupted him was a knock at the door.
Which did not prevent him, as he got up to open it, from darting a reproachful look at his colleague. Another telegram.
“They send one missive after another,” he said emphatically.
“They imagine they can sort things out with a telegram! Do you know what an old woman in one of the villages here said to me one night at a wedding feast?” the general asked. “That I’d come here to see how they married off their sons so that I could come back one day and kill them.”
“A terrible thing to say.”
“A terrible thing to say? Ah, you think that’s a terrible thing to say, do you? Then I wonder what you’d think if you knew what happened then!”
“I don’t know,” he conceded. “Better to leave it that way.”
“Drink up, soldier,” the lieutenant-general put in. “Your good health! Here’s wishing you a safe journey home. How I envy you!”
“Thank you, soldier,” the general replied.
He could feel the drink gaining the upper hand. His irritation had subsided, although not completely. He was about to revert to the topic of Nice when, oddly, it was the infected workman he spoke of instead.
“We had a workman who caught an infection,” he said. “Yes, so you told me.”
“He died.”
“Yes, I know,” the lieutenant-general said, looking him straight in the eye, as much as to say that he took this sort of thing in his stride.
“So you told me, so you told me,” the general brooded. But what about you, boring me with your talk of stadiums, and I let you carry on.
The lounge was slowly emptying and the stairs down to the night club were creaking less often, though the music was still wafting up them.
The General of the Dead Army Page 22