They were coming to the end of their last and most arduous tour. Because of the bad weather at this season the remoter regions were even harder to reach. Here and there small villages cropped up, perished with cold; they seemed impatiently waiting to crouch down again in the mist.
The high mountains carried tragic scars whose menace the snow, rather than attenuating, only served to accentuate; the mountains pretended to withdraw only to rear up again a little further on. In spite of everything, they were becoming less steep. Crags ever more spaced out were coming away from the main summits. At the foot of these crags boys and girls were clearing the ground for planting. Here and there the snow cleared only to reappear further down; it looked bland enough but still flashed wickedly.
The Alpine troops who had gone looking for death amid familiar snows had found it. The snow was not the way it looked at first sight: noble, easy on the shovel, no - the snow proved every whit as intransigent as the terrain. Just as it had tormented the last hours of the victims, twenty years before, it was now tormenting those who had come seeking them out, just as badly if not worse.
It had carefully covered everything up, as though refusing to let anyone seize what it protected in its bosom. The general found this more and more natural, accustomed as he was by now to this mute resistance. What did not, in his view, conform to a natural order was his stubborn purpose in wresting from the earth or from the snow these remains with which they were by now familiar.
Let’s be gone, dear Lord, before we’re landed in some nasty surprise, he would sometimes pray inwardly. He had come from afar to disturb the sleep of an entire army. Equipped with map and lists, he had used metal tools to strike the ground that covered them, and had no idea whether they themselves actually wished to be disturbed.
The road snaked and twisted, coiled round each hilltop and dropped down again; he had the impression of going round in circles. It seemed to the general that he was going along exactly the same stretch of road as he had the day before, he had the feeling sometimes that this road was unfailingly going to bring them back to where they started, without ever letting them come out.
He began to distrust the figures he read on the milestones - some of these were truncated, others had been pulled out and stuck back in any old how, even upside down. Indeed, just as his mission was nearing its end, the general sometimes, especially at dusk, had the feeling that he was never going to get out of these mountains again.
They had spent the last two nights in villages swarming with dogs who kept howling. Then came the day when they were to exhume the very last soldier. The general was filled with a sombre premonition. He wondered whether they were not in duty bound to leave this one at least in the ground. He had almost persuaded himself that after all the snags and reverses he’d been obliged to endure these last two years, this much compensation was due.
He was so far persuaded that had he not felt a bit embarrassed by the priest and the Albanian expert, he would have dreamed up some pretext to cut and run without opening up this Alpine soldier’s grave.
With drawn features he watched the workmen breaking open the frozen earth with their pick-axes. He kept rubbing his hands and took note of the fact that it was with these hands and these tools that they had unearthed an entire army.
The final stroke of the pick-axe sounded in his ear like a detonation. A moment later the expert shouted from a distance: “Five foot three! Exactly as listed!”
His regret at not having shown himself better disposed towards the earth was tempered by the idea that, after all, it was a kindness that the earth could maybe do without. The earth still kept back dozens of soldiers who had never been found and, whatever happened, even if several further missions were to be despatched, it would nonetheless keep hold of its share.
Thus he strove to set his mind at rest, but all it took was a panel at the roadside with the words “Caution: Rockfalls” to remind him of his fear. Neither the music nor the news broadcast from the car radio managed to stir him to the point of banishing the most far-fetched of these imaginings. Of these the worst was the thought of being required to hand back this entire army that he had assembled at so great a cost. Then he and his priest would have to resume their journey from hill to hill, from one ravine to the next, like sombre pilgrims, and replace each skeleton, one at a time, at the exact spot from which they had removed it.
He shook his head to free himself of this oppression. No, the story is absolutely at an end now, he told himself, almost out loud.
It was in fact their final day. They were coming down. The hard snow which hitherto had given no sign of softening was starting to give place to the softer snow of the lower slopes, and lower still, in the villages, they were awaited by their old acquaintance, the rain.
Before long he would be home again. Others would take charge of the remains and finish off the task. With this tour his whole mission was coming to its end. Now it was for representatives of the local government association and accountants from both countries to meet around a table and draw up their accounts of the work that had been done. They would start producing great heaps of complicated debit and credit sheets, there would be masses of bills and receipts to be dealt with, and lastly there would come the final, the ultimate report. After that a little banquet would be given, a few brief official speeches made, and after the banquet a solemn Mass for the Dead would be celebrated for the souls of all those dead soldiers. The press agencies would announce that his mission had been brought to a successful conclusion, and once again he would be obliged to answer the questions of a multitude of infuriating journalists at a variety of press conferences.
Meanwhile, unnamed carpenters would have finished making up the thousands of tiny coffins to the precise dimensions stipulated in the contract. Clause 17 a and b: Coffins in half-inch ply, 70 × 40 × 30 cm. White-painted and numbered in black.
In the shed, in the midst of that waste land on the fringes of Tirana, Charon in his long, threadbare overcoat would blow on his fingers and open his thick ledger for the last time. The big dog would stand truculently outside the door while the workmen carefully placed the appropriate blue bag in each coffin.
Companies, battalions, regiments, divisions, and all such categories would blur and melt away in that multitude of coffins. And even the solitary woman would merge indistinguishably into that mass of soldiers, for she was to be treated as a “soldier” too with all the rest, since it takes an anatomist, after all, to distinguish between a woman’s skeleton and a man’s.
The convoy of lorries loaded with the coffins would rumble down towards Durrës. There they would all be loaded onto a big ship, and the ship would manoeuvre heavily out of the harbour, bearing home a whole army now reduced to no more than a few tons of phosphorus and calcium. Then, on the far shore, they would be unloaded, so that each coffin could be despatched to its given address. Some families would perhaps be waiting for their dear ones’ remains on the dockside. But at all events, on that dock the army would finally be disbanded. The “Olympia” bags, loaded into postal delivery vans, into lorries, into buses, into big limousines or little cars, onto the racks of motor bikes or bicycles, or simply a man’s back, would all departin various directions never to be assembled again.
As for those they had failed to find, they would remain in Albania. Later, perhaps, another expedition might come, with another general at its head, to search and excavate again. For there were still about two hundred to be found - with Colonel Z. still heading the list. The new expedition would make the circuit of these same dismal and interminable itineraries in its turn, until all the remains of those poor soldiers were collected one by one. And who knows what thoughts would go through the mind of the officer leading them? Would he cast indirect aspersions on him as people tend to do on their predecessors, or would he meekly bow his head? Listen, he would sometimes say inwardly to the colonel or captain in question (it certainly wouldn’t be a general. They couldn’t send a general for only forty-odd men, a
fter all), listen, my boy, forty lost corpses are quite capable of achieving what proved too much for an army of 40,000 men!
The road was still descending, winding back down all the snaking curves around the mountains that he remembered from the ascent. But the bends were constantly growing wider, and the general had begun to feel that everything was finally untangling itself again, that calm was at last returning to his soul.
During the descent he turned to look back from time to time. The mountains were further away each time. Their jagged outlines were becoming blurred, their threat was fading. The general stared back at them as though to say: “It’s finished, your tyranny over me. I’ve escaped you, escaped you, do you hear?”
Then, as he dozed, he was suddenly gripped by a vague sensation of alarm.
But he wouldn’t be going up there again. Never!
He felt his last moment of fear precisely at the point when he thought they had finally reached the plain. The rumble of the engine dragged him out of his torpor and he was horrified to realize that instead of the plain he was expecting, a steep escarpment stood in front of them. Instead of keeping on down, the car was climbing painfully up to the gorge. He nearly shouted at the driver: Stop! Where are you taking us, back up into the mountains? But he was dissuaded by the peaceful face of the priest sitting beside him. Bewildered as he was, he could not take his eyes off the steep valley slopes he was making for as for an egress.
Calm down! he told himself two or three times. On the roads of Albania sudden climbs and abrupt drops are common currency.
As they penetrated this side-valley, he reckoned once again that this is how it was. From above he noticed the houses of a large village on the mountainside, and they were rapidly dropping down towards it.
So the short interval since he woke had proved sufficient to draw up before him the final torment of this pilgrimage, and it had happened in a flash, the way nightmares come: after pretending to let him go, the mountains at the last moment, right on the border of their territory, had sought to force him back. Perhaps he had somehow wronged them while he was among them, perhaps he had infringed some age-old ritual. Perhaps he now had to do something by way of reparation. Like hand back a part of the army that had been recovered? Or perhaps stay behind as hostage himself to allow this army to …
My nerves are at breaking point, he told himself as he gazed at the village chimneys. He had the feeling that these chimneys would have the power to restore his serenity better than any tranquillizer.
“A village,” observed the priest, who was also watching the scene attentively.
“A large village,” the general corrected him. “My impression is it’s where we’re to spend the night.”
They came upon a village as night fell. For the first time in ten days the general’s face lit up with a smile. It was over, really over at last. They would sleep here this evening and leave next morning for Tirana. In a few days they would be home again. The general had regained his good humour. A warm tide of wellbeing, hesitant at first but rapidly becoming bolder, began to flow through him.
The lights were not on yet in the village. Escorted by a mob of children the car made a stately progress along the extremely muddy main street. He could see the little running legs in front of them, through the windscreen, and then, turning round, he saw the other children running after them, and he smiled again. As far as he could make out he seemed to be the one the children were most interested in, while the priest apparently left them fairly indifferent. He couldn’t help feeling flattered at this, even though he knew perfectly well that he owed their interest solely to his uniform.
The desire for greatness and acclaim that had never quite died inside him was stirring weakly to life again.
Having traversed the village in this way, the noisy procession finally came to a halt outside the building occupied by the cooperative council. The expert and the driver disappeared briskly up the steps and into the entrance. A moment later the lorry drew up behind the car and the workmen began jumping down. Neither they nor the lorry seemed to excite much interest in the children however. Instead they were glueing their faces to the car windows in order to peer in at the two men sitting so calmly on the dark seats inside. One of them was smoking a cigarette. From outside that was all the children were able to make out, but they kept milling and circling around the vehicle, continuing to flatten their questing, wide-eyed little faces against the glass from time to time.
“It was probably in this village that Colonel Z. disappeared,” the priest said.
“Quite possibly,” the general replied.
“We must make enquiries,” the priest said. “We must do our best to find out if anyone knows anything.”
The general took two or three draws at his cigarette before saying slowly:
“To be honest, I’m not particularly anxious to find him. This evening I have no urge to find any dead men at all. For my part I just feel utterly delighted to have reached the end of our ordeal. And here you are wanting me to set off on some new quest.”
“But it’s our duty,” the priest said.
“Oh yes, I know, I know, but just now I just don’t want to have to think about it. This is a tremendous evening for us. I’m amazed you don’t feel that too. It’s an evening for celebration. All I want is peace and quiet. A good hot bath! That’s my main concern this evening. My kingdom for a bath!” he added with a chuckle.
The general was in good humour, very good humour. The long and arduous pilgrimage that he saw in his mind as a vision of terror was at last at an end. But it wasn’t a pilgrimage. It had been a march through the valley of the shadow of death. As the old song sung by the Swiss soldiers has it: “Our life is but a winter journey, a journey through the dark!” The general rubbed his hands.
He was safe. He could look back at them in the distance now, those sheer and hateful peaks, with calm indifference.
“Like a tragic and lonely bird…” Was that it? Was that what she had said to him, that great lady wishing him good luck on his journey, so long ago now…?
The expert re-emerged from the council building. “You will be sleeping in that house over there,” he said, and pointed to a bungalow with a verandah.
Ten minutes later the general emerged onto the verandah and leaned his elbows on its wooden balustrade. The priest was in the bedroom unpacking. There was a little garden all around the bungalow, and a view of a section of the village from the verandah.
The general could hear the clinking of a bucket and women’s voices from a nearby well, the lonely lowing of distant cattle, the sound of a radio that had just been switched on, and the cries of the children still at play, running to and fro across the square.
The village lights had been switched on now, and the monotonous hum of the generator could be heard on the outskirts.
That night would have gone by like all the others, without leaving them any particular incident to remember, ifthe general had remained content just to stand there breathing in the characteristic Albanian village smell, the subtle, almost imperceptible aroma that had by now become so familiar to him that he could have picked it out unerringly from any number of others. The priest had gone out hunting for information about Colonel Z. and so the general just stayed there, leaning on the rail of the verandah, watching the women as they took their turn to draw up water from the well. It was a routine village evening, even though in the distance, from the centre of the village, there could be heard the beat of a drum and the song of a violin, combining to cast a further spell of mystery over the night.
The general recognized the drumbeats as being the usual prelude to a wedding feast in that district. Had it not been late autumn he would have found it out of place, jarring on the nerves.
But he had known in advance, from his book on Albania, that Albanian country folk almost always celebrate their marriages in autumn, after the work of harvest has been completed. This was the second year in succession that the priest and he had been going from
village to village at precisely this time of year. But now it was the beginning of winter and only the very last marriages were being celebrated, those that for one reason or another had been put off, whereas at the start of their tour they had come across them almost every day.
Often, during the night, through the sound of the falling rain, the general had caught the sound of drum rolls and the song of a violin alternating between sprightly joy and soulful revelry. And listening to them, his head buried under the bed-clothes, his thoughts would go to the lorry that was always parked outside, standing all night with the rain falling onto its black canvas cover.
He would muse on how very much one is a stranger in foreign lands. More of a stranger than the trees planted along the edges of the roads, he would think, and they, after all, are only trees.
Certainly much more of a stranger than the sheep, or the sheepdogs, or the calves whose bells you hear clinking as the evening falls.
And this particular evening too would have passed off like all those others, if the general, after having stood there thinking of all these things on the verandah, had not had to listen to the priest telling him about Colonel Z., about how he, the priest, had gone to the club and sat down at a table with some of the villagers, about what they had to say concerning the colonel’s disappearance, and about the suspicions that their remarks had aroused in him. But the general’s attention was not on what the priest was telling him. He was in a good mood.
“Enough,” he said to the priest for the third time. “Enough of all that. What we need now is a little relaxation, a little entertainment. Don’t you think?”
The priest did not reply.
“It’s a beautiful evening. A little music, a little glass of brandy … “
“And where will we find them?” the priest said. “There is no café here, only the co-operative club. And you know what that will be like … “
The General of the Dead Army Page 17
