The General of the Dead Army (8 page)

“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.

“Escorted by a few foreigners, a town hall official, and a gaggle of children, the little flock made its way meekly over to the hotel. It was there that our town’s strange hostesses were to spend the night.

“Next day
they
were installed in a two-storey house, surrounded by a small garden, right in the heart of the town. A notice giving the hours allotted to civilian and military clients respectively was put up on the door, though none of us actually saw it until later, since for the first few days the street remained as deserted as though it had been struck by the plague. It was particularly awkward for the people who lived along the street. Those who could moved out; those with a back garden would go out the back way onto the adjacent street. Willy nilly the rest had to put up with the misfortune. Only the elderly, especially the entrenched old women, stayed resolutely at home, and sent messages to their friends to say, I can’t come to see you and don’t you come calling on me. They had taken an oath never to leave the house again except in their coffins to be carried to the graveyard. And that’s how it would have been were it not that another coffin came to disrupt matters. But there you are.

“So the street seemed to be profaned in our eyes. Such was our disgust that later on, when the business was at an end, each time we needed to take this street, it seemed quite alien to us, just as a fallen woman is haunted by the traces of her shame even long after she first fell.

“Those were dark and worrying days for all of us. Our town had never known any women of ill repute before, and even family scandals caused by jealousy or infidelity had always been rare. And now, so unexpectedly, there was this black spot in the very heart of the town itself. The shock that people had felt when they first heard the news was as nothing to their utter disarray now that the brothel was actually open. The men all began going home very early, and the café was always empty quite early in the evening. If husbands or sons did stay out late then their mothers or wives became frantic with anxiety.
They
were like a kind of tumour right in the centre of the town. It was noticeable that everyone’s nerves were very much on edge, and a lot of the men and the youngsters were not always able to conceal a certain guilty look in their eyes.

“At first, I need hardly say, no one ever actually went into the brothel. And probably
they
found that rather surprising. They may have thought to themselves that these people they’d landed up amongst must be an odd lot if their men were so uninterested in women. But perhaps, on the other hand, they understood that they were foreigners here, and that they were looked upon with the same eyes as the troops occupying us, whom we considered as being wholly our enemies.

“As was to be expected, the first to visit the brothel was that good-for-nothing Lame Spiri. And that afternoon of his first visit the news got round so fast that by the time he came out again all the windows of the nearby houses were crammed full of people staring at him, their eyes popping out of their heads as though Christ had just risen again. And Lame Spiri just walked on arrogantly down the street without seeming in the least bit embarrassed. He even waved goodbye to one of
them
as she leaned out of her window and watched him walking away. It was just then that an old woman threw a bucketful of water down at him from her window; but she didn’t manage to hit him. The other old women all made sour faces and cursed them with that gesture so characteristic of the women in our country: the arm stretched out, the hand raised, the spread fingers sighted on the person they are cursing. But the occupants of the brothel apparently didn’t understand what was meant and just burst out laughing.

“That’s how it was in the beginning. But then people began to get used to the situation. There were even some men, on suitably moonless nights, who began to pay secret visits to the house and its occupants that had caused us all so much distress. You might say that they were beginning to become part of our lives.

“Quite often, in the evenings, they used to appear out on their verandah. They would sit smoking their cigarettes and gazing up with absent eyes at the mountains all around them, doubtless thinking of their own country so far away. And they would stay there for a while, quite quiet in the half-darkness, until the muezzin had finished his singsong call to prayer from the minaret and the town’s inhabitants had gone home.

“So that after a while our animosity against them faded. There were even those who felt sorry for them.

“Little by little we seemed to have got used to their being there. People were no longer mortified when they encountered them by chance in a shop, or in church on Sundays - except for the old women, that is, who were still praying night and day for a bomb “from the English,” as they put it, to fall and destroy that accursed house.

“And I think there were days when
they
longed for that to happen too.

“The Italian-Greek front wasn’t far away, and at night we could hear the rumble of the guns. Our town was used as an overnight rest-point both for the units being brought up to relieve the battle-worn troops at the front and for the latter coming back from it.

“Quite often a notice would appear on the door of their house reading:
No civilian clients accepted tomorrow
, and then everyone knew there was a troop movement due next day. Though in fact the notice was quite pointless, since no civilian ever went near the place during the day, and would be even less likely to do so if there were soldiers there. With the exception, of course, of Lame Spiri, who came and went as he pleased at all hours of the day and night.

“On those days we sometimes used to walk along the brothel street simply to have a look at the soldiers just back from the fighting, filthy and unshaven, standing in line outside. They never broke ranks, even when it began to rain, and it would undoubtedly have been much easier to dislodge them from their trenches than from their places in that dismal queue winding its interminable length along that street. To make the waiting in the rain bearable they made silly jokes, scratched at their lice, hurled foul language at one another, and squabbled about the number of minutes they were going to spend inside. It can’t have been very gay for
them
inside - though of course they had no choice but to grin and bear it, because when it came down to it, they were under army orders too.