The General of the Dead Army (14 page)

At about noon the groom’s men got up from the table, slung their guns over their shoulders and jumped up onto their horses. Christine’s horse was white. She was crying. Aunt Frosa too. The miller kept his tears back. Then they kissed their daughter goodbye. I wanted to say goodbye to her as well, but I didn’t have the courage to go over to the horses, because of the distant attitude of the men on their backs. I kept in the background. Djouvi, their big dog, staggered slowly about among them, his neck stretched out. I envied him. Christine bent down and kissed him. No one thought of me.

They set off. The horses disappeared from our view first, then the black caped coats, and lastly the long barrels of their guns.

August

For several nights now there has been a continual coming and going of troops along the Gjirokastër road. I can only suppose that something important is going to happen quite soon. The peasants coming to the mill say that the countryside is filling up again with people who have fled from the towns. They also say that the

“Blue Battalion” has moved into the district. The nights have become gloomy again. I sleep badly and am constantly getting up to make sure everything is all right. The longing to see Christine again obsesses me.

September

An autumn wind is blowing. I am often overcome by a profound feeling of sadness and I begin to be very afraid I shall never be able to leave here. I sometimes sit on the bank of the canal, the canal feeding the race. It’s my favourite spot. I watch the water flowing past, so smooth and tranquil, sometimes carrying a leaf on its surface, sometimes a twig, sometimes nothing but reflections.

I think back to the time when I was still with my division, advancing across the Albanian countryside. I remember the canals we came across then. I don’t know why they disturbed me so, those still canals in those Albanian villages, dug out by the peasants with just pick-axes. I know that nothing else ever evoked for me in quite such a clear and concentrated way what the flavour of peacetime had been like. I walked along their banks, rifle slung on my back, with a feeling of unease. Something was stirring deep inside me. I felt they were awakening some atavistic instinct in me, that they were urging me on to something. They were calling me. I felt their eternal murmuring was coming from inside me as well - and certainly it was while walking along a canal that I first began to have the idea, very vaguely at first then more and more clearly, of becoming a deserter.

Afternoon

Djouvi is dead. We are all genuinely heart-broken. The miller’s eyes are red. He must have been weeping in secret.

5 September

Calm. The leaves have begun to turn yellow. This morning, very high in the sky, hundreds of planes flew over us towards the north-west.

Who knows what part of the world they’ve come from and what other part they’re on their way to bomb? There are no barriers in the sky.

T
HE NOTES STOPPED THERE
. The date 7 September 1943 had been written after the last entry, but then crossed out. Apparently he had decided not to continue the diary. Perhaps he had nothing in particular to say, or had simply grown tired of it.

The general tossed the exercise book onto the seat with a grimace of distaste.

“Anything interesting in it?” the priest asked.

“The diary of a sentimental idiot, and a self-pitying one to boot.”

The priest picked up the exercise book and opened it at the first page.

“You won’t find his name in it,” the general said. “Only his height: six foot one.”

“Really? Exactly Colonel Z.’s height!” the priest said.

Their eyes met for a moment then disengaged.

“No other indication,” the general added. “He wrote down the dog’s name, but not his own.”

“Strange!”

“And there are one or two mentions of the ‘Blue Battalion’ too.

But nothing about Colonel Z.”

The priest began reading the diary.

The general, remembering the old miller’s story, sat trying to imagine how the story in the diary might have ended. The “Blue Battalion” had passed through the district, raging under the sting of defeat; some of them had suddenly appeared at the mill one afternoon, having no doubt been informed that there was a deserter hiding there, and they’d searched until they found him, hidden under the sacks, white under his white covering of flour, as though already wrapped in a shroud. They had taken him outside, pushing him ahead of them with the barrels of their sten-guns, and like that, backing, backing, he had reached the mill-stream. He would have fallen backwards into it, but when he was two steps from the edge someone fired: he had fallen backwards, and only his head had slumped backwards into the water. Then a little eddy had formed around it, as though it was a big stone, and the gentle current had spread his hair downstream, waving like strange black weed.

And that must have been that, the general said to himself, drawing on his cigarette.

“Well?” the general asked about an hour later, as the priest closed the book in his turn.

The priest shrugged.

“A diary no different from a hundred others,” he said. Although each of them was conscious that the other was turning over in his mind what he had just been reading, they both kept silent for a good while.

“Have you read what he said about the canals?” the general eventually asked. “He was looking to them for safety though it was death that was stalking him there.”

The priest did not answer.

The driver sounded his horn vociferously. A long flock of sheep was crossing the road in front of them. Two shepherds armed with long crooks were trying to make an opening to let the two vehicles through.

“They’ve brought them down from the mountains for the winter,” the priest said.

The general looked out at the tall mountain men with the hoods of their thick, black, sheepskin cloaks pulled up over their heads.

“Do you remember those two lieutenants who were reduced to looking after sheep in that Albanian village? What division were they from? Weren’t they from one of the alpine regiments?”

“I don’t remember,” the priest said.

“What an odd phenomenon that was,” the general mused. “And it happened right through our forces in Albania. Really curious. Or rather shameful, I should say!”

“Absolutely,” agreed the priest. “Some ridiculous things happened.”

“We ourselves have come across instances of this kind. The times we’ve blushed for shame as we heard stories of our troops being reduced to washing clothes or minding the poultry for Albanian peasants. Just two hours ago some shepherd or miller, I can’t recall, had my blood boiling …”

The priest once more nodded assent.

“You say ridiculous things happened. But they are worse than ridiculous, these incidents, they are worrying.”

“In war it is always difficult to say exactly what is tragic and what is grotesque, what is heroic and what is worrying.”

“Some people try to explain such things away,” the general said. “They try to justify the attitude of our troops when they were left behind here, marooned after the capitulation. ‘There were no ships,’ they say, ‘there was no way of crossing the sea. What were the unfortunate fellows to do? After all, they had to survive somehow.’ Survive, yes! But surely they could have done that without dragging the dignity of their country in the mud!” the general cried angrily. “An officer in a great army like ours, even in defeat, agreeing to look after chickens! It’s unheard of!”

“In the beginning many of them sold their weapons,” the priest said. “They sold them or sometimes bartered them for a little sack of maize or beans.”

“Were you here then?”

“No. But I’ve been told all about it. Apparently revolvers were given away for just a hunk of bread and a little wine, because the Albanians set much less store by pistols than by rifles. The rifles fetched much more - sometimes as much as a whole sack of bread.

As for machine-guns, sten-guns, grenades, they were given away almost for nothing - for an egg, a pair of torn
opingas
, a couple of onions, or if they were lucky a pound or so of curd cheese.”

“How contemptible!” the general said.

The priest was about to go on, but the general spoke again:

“And it’s the reason the Albanians are so ready to jeer at us. You saw how that shepherd or miller, whatever he was, insulted me.”

“They worship weapons. They can’t conceive how anyone can sell his rifle for a piece of bread.”

“And the heavy weapons?”

“The heavy weapons were not all that easy to put to use, they were picked up wherever they were left lying. At the time nobody was surprised at the sight of an anti-aircraft gun being towed by a donkey.”

“Contemptible!” repeated the general.

“And you know there were more really appalling accidents in Albania that year than ever in the past,” the priest went on. “The children were using real weapons as toys, and sometimes, after a quarrel, they would blow their brains out with a grenade. Sometimes the women in a street would squabble during the day and end up abusing one another from their windows, the way women do, but then at night the men would get up into the windows or the lofts with their machine-guns and there would be a blood bath.”

“You must be exaggerating.”

“Not in the slightest. Everyone here was in the grip of a terrible psychosis. The Albanians behaved as though they were drunk in some way; all their ancestral instincts were allowed to run completely wild, and they became more dangerous than ever.”

“Perhaps because they were caught in the crossfire of battle, and wounded what’s more,” the general said. “Tigers go crazy like that as soon as the first bullet hits them. And besides, at that time the Albanians were presumably very much on the alert for new dangers. Their neighbours could perfectly well have rushed in and overrun them at any moment.”

“The Albanians always exaggerate the dangers that are threatening them,” the priest said.

“There’s one thing I really don’t understand though,” the general said, “and that is why they didn’t just tear us to pieces after the capitulation. Because in fact they did the exact opposite; they protected our wretched troops against our former allies, who were shooting our men on the spot whenever they could lay their hands on them. Do you remember?”

“Yes, I remember,” the priest said.

“What a deplorable epilogue to our army’s period of occupation in Albania,” the general went on. “All those soldiers in uniform, with their weapons, their badges of rank, their braid and medals, transformed into domestic servants, menials, farm labourers. I feel myself blushing when I think of the tasks they were reduced to doing. Do you remember how they even told us in one place about that colonel who did laundry and knitted socks for an Albanian family?”

“Yes,” the priest said. “I have sometimes wondered whether perhaps Colonel Z. too didn’t go into service with a peasant family somewhere. Perhaps he is still with them, guarding a flock of goats somewhere.”

The general could not believe his ears. The priest, who up till then had been exasperating him with his moderation, no longer concealed his own exasperation at the thought of the dead man. “I wonder what Betty’s reaction would be, seeing him like that,” the general persisted. He expected the priest to weigh in further against his rival but, no doubt regretting his sally, he held his peace.

Most of their journey was passed in silence. The roads were strewn with yellow or rotting leaves. The yellow ones flew up, fluttering to and fro in the wind of their passing, but the others stirred only sluggishly then sank back into inertia, weighed down presumably by their burden of water and mud, scattered over the road, withered, as though waiting patiently for death.

THE CAR AND
the lorry were nearing the outskirts of the capital.

Modern farm buildings began to appear now and then on the sides of the road, then a small aerodrome with a few helicopters standing on its tarmac, then the aerials of a radio transmitting station.

Suddenly the two vehicles turned off the main road and continued more slowly along a muddy secondary road to the right. The landscape changed dramatically. They were crossing an area of flat, waterlogged waste land sparsely dotted with bushes. Sticking up out of this bare expanse stood a long shed roofed with grey asbestos tiles. The two vehicles drew up outside it. A long-haired dog outside the door began barking.

The door slowly opened and a tall man dressed in a long threadbare overcoat emerged coughing. He was the storekeeper.

The workmen unloaded the big crates from the lorry. The expert walked inside the shed with the storekeeper. The general and the priest climbed out of the car and followed them.

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.

S
EVERAL 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.