The General of the Dead Army (16 page)

“You speak with great passion on the subject,” the general observed.

“I have given a great deal of thought to these matters,” the priest answered. “Oscar Wilde said that people of the lower classes feel a need to commit crimes in order to experience the strong emotions that we can derive from art. His epigram might well be applied to the Albanians, if one were to substitute the words “war” or “vengeance” for “crime”. For if we are to be objective we must admit that the Albanians are not criminals in the common law sense. The murders they commit are always done in conformity with rules laid down by age-old customs. Their vendetta is like a play composed in accordance with all the laws of tragedy, with a prologue, continually growing dramatic tension, and an epilogue that inevitably entails a death. The vendetta could be likened to a raging bull let loose in the hills and laying waste everything in its path. And yet they have hung around the beast’s neck a quantity of ornaments and decorations that correspond to their conception of beauty, so that when the beast is loosed, and even while it is spreading death on every side, they can derive aesthetic satisfactions from those events at the same time.”

The general listened attentively

“The life of the Albanian,” the priest continued, “is like a theatrical performance governed by age-old customs. The Albanian lives and dies as though he were interpreting a role in a play, with the one great difference that the scenery is provided by the plateaux or the mountains where he and his kind pass their lives in such harsh penury. And when he dies, it is often because certain customs must be respected, not for objectively valid reasons. The life that succeeds in subsisting on these rocks amid so many ordeals and privations, a life that has never succeeded in eliminating either cold, or hunger, or the avalanche, is snuffed out suddenly as the result of an imprudent remark, a joke that went a little too far, or a covetous glance at a woman. The vendetta is often set in motion without the slightest passion behind it, solely in order to conform with tradition. And even when the avenger kills his victim he is doing no more than obeying a clause of unwritten law. And so these time-honoured and unspoken rules go on twisting themselves around these people’s legs throughout their lives, until the day comes when they inevitably trip them up. And once they are down they never rise again. So that it is true to say that for centuries now the Albanians have been acting out a blood-thirsty and tragic play.”

They heard footsteps behind them. It was the expert.

“I went looking for you at the hotel,” he said.

“Why, is something the matter?”

“No, but tomorrow we have to go through some reports with the representatives of the local government association.”

The priest was observing the expert closely, trying to decide whether or not he had overheard the end of their exchange. “We were talking about your national customs,” he said. “They are so interesting.” The expert smiled to himself.

“He was telling me about the vendetta,” the general added. “It seems to be of great psychological interest.”

“Nonsense, it is of no psychological interest at all,” the expert contradicted. “I know there are some foreigners who have the idea that our vendetta and various other pernicious customs are to be explained by the so-called Albanian psychology, but the whole notion is too absurd.”

“Ah!” the priest said.

“Yes. There are certain foreigners who come here and study our vendetta with what appears to be enormous enthusiasm; but they do so with a predetermined intention.”

“They study it because the question is one of scientific interest, surely,” the priest put in. “I disagree. Their real aim is to spread the notion that the Albanian people is doomed to annihilation, to make people familiar with it and accept it.”

“Oh, I hardly think so, I hardly think so,” the priest said with a forced smile.

The expert walked a few more steps with them, but then took his leave of them.

“Just listen to that!” the priest remarked. The general resumed their discussion.

“You explain the matter of their customs solely on psychological grounds,” he said, “but I think that one cannot altogether exclude certain other motives from any such explanation, objective motives of an historical and military order for example. Do you know what the Albanian people remind me of? They remind me of the sort of wild beast that at the approach of any danger, before leaping or charging, freezes into immobility in a state of extreme tension, muscles coiled, every sense on the alert. This country, I feel, has been exposed to so many perils for so long that a state of alert like that has become second nature to it.”

“Yes, that is precisely what they mean by their much vaunted vigilance,” the priest said.

He continued with the subject, but the general was no longer listening to him. After a while he broke in:

“Have you noticed how much we talk about them? After all, what do we really care about their affairs? All we ask is that they should exterminate themselves. And the quicker the better.”

The priest gestured his agreement with spread fingers and a shrug.

“We would do better to put our minds to our labours,” the general went on, “our wretched labours that have exhausted us and that we cannot seem to bring to any successful conclusion. There is even a sort of evil spell, something sinister anyway, dogging this work of ours.”

“I cannot agree,” the priest rejoined. “I am aware of nothing of the sort. Our mission is a sublime one.”

“I have the feeling that we wander across this country like an ambulatory tumour. We just get under the feet of all the inhabitants and hinder them in their work.”

“You are referring, I take it, to the incident when the work on the aqueduct was delayed a few days on our account?”

“No,” the general said. “I am not thinking only of that. There is something queer and maleficent in our work altogether.”

“There is nothing of the kind,” the priest said.

“Has it ever occurred to you that the unhappy creatures we are hunting out so zealously might prefer to be left in peace where theyare?”

“That is absurd,” the priest said. “Our mission is a noble and humane one. Anyone would be proud to be entrusted with it.”

The general thought that the other was going to bring up the purification of the spirit, the light of the afterlife that enlightens the kingdom of the departed. But his interlocutor’s expression was rather sombre.

“And yet there’s something not quite right about it, a certain irony, however slight.”

“I do not accept that,” the priest said. “There is no such element in our mission. But perhaps there are other motives that affect your emotion, motives concerned with your profession as a soldier.”

“What motives of that sort could I have?”

“Perhaps it would be better not to talk about them. It may be that you do not even wish to admit them to yourself.”

The general produced a forced smile.

“More psychology?” he said. “Apparently you are a devotee of psychoanalysis. It is something I have heard a great deal of talk about but that I don’t, to be honest, really understand. We soldiers do not go in much for that brand of hair-splitting.”

“Yes, I realize that,” the priest said, obviously meaning “everyone to his taste”.

“But leaving that aside, what is this explanation of yours of my uneasiness about this mission of ours? I should like to hear your arguments; it’s always a pleasure to hear you talk. And I promise you not to take umbrage at whatever you say.”

“Very well, since you insist, I will give you my opinion,” the priest said with the greatest possible calm. “The reason you are suffering from this sense of oppression is that in the depths of your soul you regret not having led our divisions in Albania yourself. And you tell yourself that under your leadership everything might perhaps have gone differently, that instead of leading our troops to defeat and destruction you would have ensured that they emerged with honour from that great test. That is why you are constantly spreading out those maps of yours, hunching over them for hours on end, scribbling battle plans on your cigarette packets. You lament over every failure, you relive every setback as though they were realities, and you see yourself retrospectively in the place of those ill-starred officers who commanded our troops then; and you have begun to entertain an utterly irrational dream: that of transforming our defeats into victories …”

“That is enough,” the general said. “Am I a psychopath that you should start burrowing into the secrets of my soul like this?”

The priest simply smiled.

The general’s face had clouded over.

“No,” he said slowly, “there is no secret reason. I am not an ignorant young girl, after all, imagining that a search for the bones of soldiers fallen in battle could even remotely resemble a sentimental journey. I had always assumed that the task ahead was an arduous and sinister one.”

He spoke truly. He had a sense from the start that this task awaiting him was quite unusual. He knew, as the Minister said, that he would be helped by love and hate. As he was returning home from the War Office, that day when he was first entrusted with this mission, he felt music echoing in his heart. Solemn, funeral music. And then, when he began opening the files and looking through them, and he felt that those interminable lists were breathing out great gusts of vengeance, he had gone to the globe and looked for Albania. And when he had his finger on it he felt a sadistic satisfaction at seeing just how small it was - no bigger than a dot. But then he had felt the hatred flood through him again. This pinprick on the map had filled the mouths of his country’s brave, beautiful children with dust. He felt he wanted to get to this savage, backward country (as the geography text books all called it) as soon as he possibly could. He wanted to walk proudly among these people that he envisaged as a wild barbarian tribe, looking down at them with hatred and contempt as if to say: “Savages, look what you’ve done!” He pictured to himself the solemn ceremonial as the remains were borne away, the troubled and bewildered look in the Albanians’ eyes - the guilty look of the lumbering lout who has smashed a priceless vase and stands there feeling dumbly sorry, looking askance at the fragments. “And yet,” the general resumed wearily as he pursued his thought, “I felt proud. We would bear our soldiers’ coffins proudly through their midst, demonstrating to them that even our deaths are nobler than their lives. But when we got here it all turned out differently. I don’t need to tell you that. Our pride was the first thing to go; then before long it was clear there was nothing solemn left in the whole business, my last illusions gradually faded, and now we have to keep on and on amid general indifference, observed by mocking, enigmatic eyes, pitiful clowns of war, more to be pitied in the event than those who once fought and were defeated in this country.”

The priest made no answer, and the general was sorry he had spoken.

They walked on a short way in silence. The last leaves continued to fall onto the pavement. They passed other pedestrians. The general was aware of distress and loneliness inside him. He found it distasteful talking about such subjects. Better to walk on and recall those dark days they had spent on the road and in their tent, when the rain soaked them daily and they shivered in the wind, those enigmatic looks cast at them by the sombrely clad peasants in their coarse woollen clothes, that night when the priest - trapped in God knows what nightmare - shrieked with terror in the dark; the battlefield now drowned beneath the artificial lake of a hydroelectric dam; the graveyards lying beneath the deep waters, and the red, bright red reflections from their surface as the sun sank; and that skull too, its golden teeth all gleaming in the sun as the workmen unearthed it, seeming to cast a sarcastic smile at everything around it.

On both sides of the path the ditches were full of dead leaves, and the statues in the great park seemed to be shivering beneath the stripped trees.

Having reached the summit they were able to look down the far slope to the artificial lake lying at its foot, surrounded by small hills and insinuating its variously shaped inlets among them.

On the curving brow of the hill itself there stood a church, and beside it an open-air café. All around the café’s dance-floor, tall cypresses quivered in the keen wind. In one corner, apparently abandoned, stood a big pile of crates with the words
Birra Korça
printed on them in black.

They turned their backs on the lake and gazed out across the city. The general’s raincoat flapped loudly in the wind.

Their eyes came naturally to rest on the line of the main boulevard that bisected the city. A poplar swaying in the wind would conceal now the Presidency building from their view, now that of the Central Committee. When there was a particularly strong gust, a branch would move across in front of the tall clock tower apparently stuck to the minaret of the mosque, then conceal a portion of Skanderburg Square, stretch across the facade of the Executive Committee building, and just manage to brush the State Bank.

“In my book on Albania it said that the buildings along the last section of the main boulevard, when viewed as a whole, form what looks like a giant Fascist axe,” the general said, extending his arm in the direction of the buildings in question.

“Look more closely,” the priest said, stretching out an arm in his turn. “The boulevard is the handle of the axe, that big building there, the Rectorate, is the head of the handle protruding beyond the blade itself, the opera house is the back of the axe, and the stadium” - and here the priest made a sweep of the hand to the right - “represents the curved cutting edge.”

“In a word, one could make a sort of gigantic brand burned into the very heart of their capital.”

“It was after the war, when they flew over the city for the first time, that the Communists noticed the effect. And they immediately gave orders that the image of the axe must be removed in some way.”

They continued along the wide asphalt path beside the church. A young man and a girl were sitting side by side on one of the benches spaced along it. The girl, a dreamy look in her eyes, had lain her head on her companion’s shoulder while he gently stroked her knees.