The General of the Dead Army (9 page)

“As the afternoon drew on, so the queue would grow shorter. The last soldier would finally vanish, and the street would relapse into its usual calm. And most mornings after those overworked days
they
would appear looking sallow-skinned and even more haggard than usual. It was as though their soldier-clients back from the front were unloading onto those poor girls all the weariness, the rain, the mud and the setbacks that they themselves had suffered in the trenches; so that they could then get up and go on their way refreshed and satisfied, relieved of a great burden, while
they
must perforce stay on here perpetually, in our town, a few miles back from that front, waiting for yet another batch of weary soldiers to arrive, interminably soaking up the bitterness of their retreat.

“And perhaps everything might have gone on for a long while in exactly the same way, perhaps nothing extraordinary would have occurred - for as we all know life must go on. Perhaps they would have spent the whole of the war here in our town, watching their dreary days fade into dusk with the singsong call of the
hodjas
, and receiving those long lines of soldiers before fate scattered them - who knows where? Yes, things might perfectly well have turned out that way, if Ramiz Kurti’s son had not suddenly broken off his engagement one fine day.

“Our town, as you see, is not a large one, and incidents of that kind cause a great stir. For it is a fact that there are very few towns or villages anywhere in the country where fewer divorces occur than here. So that the break between Ramiz’s son and his betrothed was a very shocking matter. Several nights running all Ramiz Kurti’s relations met in solemn conclave at his house in order to discuss the affair and bring pressure on the son, with all kinds of threats, to renew the engagement. But the son obstinately refused. Nothing in the world would make him give in to his family’s demands. But worse still, he also refused to reveal the reason for his change of feelings, and all his relations’ attempts to extort it from him were in vain. He spent every day in a state of prostration, not speaking, just lying thinking, and growing visibly paler and thinner as though under some evil spell.

“And meanwhile the girl’s family were demanding explanations. All her relatives - and she had just as many as the boy - were also meeting in order to deliberate on the affair. And twice they sent messengers to Ramiz Kurti to ask him the reason for the rupture. But the motive had not yet been discovered, and both emissaries in turn left again very much put out, letting it be understood that they would not tolerate their family’s honour being spurned in such a way. Which meant that they intended to exchange words for weapons before very long. And indeed shots were fired, but in circumstances very different from those now generally expected and feared.

“But it was at that point, just as the representatives of the two families were holding their final discussions, just as the feeling was growing on both sides that the ancient friendship between the two families, sealed by the betrothal of the two young people in their cradles, was turning to hatred, that the true reason for the rupture was discovered. It was simple but shameful: Ramiz Kurti’s son had entered into a liaison with one of the prostitutes in the brothel.

“Later we often racked our brains trying to guess the true nature of the boy’s relationship with that foreign girl. Did he genuinely love her? Or was it she who had fallen in love with him? God alone knows what there was between them, for we never learned the truth.

“But on the evening of the very day we all heard the rumour, as dusk fell so Ramiz Kurti came down from the upper town, whitefaced, bareheaded, stick in hand, and made his way towards the brothel. His gaze was frozen like ice as he walked, and he must certainly have been partly out of his mind. And you can imagine the surprise they felt at seeing this whitefaced old man pushing the gate of their little garden open with his stick and walking in like that. They were sitting out on their verandah, and as the old man climbed the steps up to it one of them let out a burst of laughter. But the amused comments of the others were suddenly frozen on their lips, and a deathly quiet fell over the whole company. The old man pointed with his stick at the one his son came to see (apparently he recognized her by her hair) and the girl obediently trailed off upstairs to her room, assuming him to be just one more customer. The old man followed her. Then, as she was beginning to undress, the girl looked up and saw the old man’s face, abnormally still, a staring mask, and she shrieked in terror. Perhaps the old man wouldn’t have used his revolver if she hadn’t cried out. Her shriek seems to have somehow jolted him out of his half-stupefied state. He fired three times, threw the gun down, then walked out like a man drunk, completely ignoring the screams of the brothel’s inmates.

“Three days later Ramiz Kurti was hanged. His son just vanished.

“It was October, and there was a cold wind blowing day and night down from the passes all around. Despite the circumstances of her death, despite the weather, a funeral with flowers, wreaths, music, and rifle salvoes was laid on for the victim. The Fascists managed to round up a fair crowd of people from the streets and cafés and forced them to swell the cortege. We walked in silence with the wind flaying our faces. She had been placed on the back of a small army lorry in a fine red coffin. The military band played her funeral march, and her companions wept as they walked.

“The people of our town had never followed a foreigner’s coffin before, to say nothing of the coffin of a woman from her walk of life. We felt somehow stunned, with a sensation of emptiness in our hearts. I looked up at the clouds, high in the sky that day, and as I walked I thought about her life and her fate. Who could say what destiny had driven that poor woman to follow so far in the wake of those helmeted soldiers, and then, after wandering from place to place in the hinterland of war, to arrive at last in our town - where she had been fated to end her days and drag down others with her, into ruin and even death?

“She was buried in the military cemetery, the ‘cemetery of brothers’ as they called it, and over the grave they put up that marble slab you saw this morning. Then they carved the standard inscription on the slab:
For Leader and for Country
. The same words you see on all the soldiers’ graves.

“A few days later an order arrived from the capital and the brothel was closed. I remember it as though it was only yesterday, that cold morning when
they
came out into the main square again, their cases in their hands, to wait for the lorry that was coming to take them away. All the people passing stopped to watch them. They stood huddled together, their coat collars turned up against the cold, rootless, more adrift in life than ever.

“They clambered up into the truck, and as it began to move off so some of the people watching raised their hands and timidly waved. The girls in the lorry acknowledged those farewells; but in a way that bore little relation to what we might have expected from women of their calling. Their gestures were something very different, movements of the hand and arm that conveyed their bitterness and their lassitude. We stood there watching them go, yet without any sense of liberation. We had always assumed that we could mark their departure with some kind of celebration; but it was all turning out very differently. And what were we going to gain by their going? True, they were leaving, but nothing else had changed.

“God knows where those unfortunate creatures were sent. Undoubtedly to some other small town near the front, some place where the troops moving up to the fighting and those returning from it would be halting for the night. And once again, no doubt, their existence would be filled with those long lines of tired and mud-spattered soldiers who would pour out upon them all the dank bitterness of their life at the front.”

T
HE GENERAL STOOD IN
the opening of his tent and gazed at the grey horizon. Sheets of mist alternately rose and fell across the steep slopes opposite, perpetually blotting out one area only to reveal another.

The cemetery had no clear-cut boundaries. The streams winding around it had gnawed away the earth, one on each side, and washed it away, down the slope into the valley.

Little flags marked the places to be dug out. From time to time a group of men would form at one particular spot, and the general knew that another soldier’s remains had been unearthed. The youngest workman would bring over the disinfectant canisters. Now, he sensed, they were disinfecting the recovered bones, and the expert was bending down to measure the skeleton’s length, while the priest, standing at the expert’s side, was marking a name with a cross, and also, if the height failed to correspond to that given on the list, with a question mark.

When the group took a long time to break up, the general said to himself: They’re measuring him again. That means another question mark on the list, I suppose.

The young workman, the one in the pullover, would hurry over to his tent and come back with a nylon bag, a pretty blue bag, made to order, with two white stripes across it, black binding around the edges, and the discreet trademark “Olympia”. The expert would take up the medallion with tweezers held between those long thin fingers, then drop it into a metal box.

One day there was an inspection to make sure we all still had our medallions. Someone had reported my mate for having chucked his away. “What have you done with your medallion?” the lieu-tenant asked him when he’d made him undo his battledress. “I don’t know, I must have lost it.” “Lost it? You know as well as I do that you threw it away. You useless idiot! Now you’ll die like a dog and no one will be able to recognize that carcass of yours. And then well come in for it again, as usual! This man, take him to the guardhouse!” And two days later they brought him another medallion
.

But when the group dispersed, on the other hand, it meant that the remains had been duly inserted into their nylon bag, then a label attached to it inscribed with the soldier’s service number and the number on their list. Then the same workman would carry the bag back to the lorry, and the heavy, rhythmic blows of the picks in the damp ground would begin again.

The general was dropping with fatigue. Who is it they’ve found now? he wondered as he watched the little group form yet again in the middle of the cemetery. And with every fresh body disinterred he saw once again, in his mind’s eye, that crowd of silent and sombre faces in his drawing-room, so far away, in his home, during those wet and stormy days when he had just come back from the seaside. All those who had come to see him talked about the relatives they had lost. Some seemed to never stop, others were less talkative, still others brought photographs with them, useless for the most part: as children, betrothal pictures, or sitting at a table with their friends. Others brought thick bundles of letters, while some carried nothing at all, except their brief telegram from the War Office.

The general huddled down inside his greatcoat and glanced towards the north-east. It’s over there, their memorial, he thought to himself, at the crossroads, just where you hear the splashing of the mill-race running down to that deserted mill.

As the veils of mist slid across the slopes he expected to see it emerging from them at any moment, that tall, very tall, slender monument with its facing of white stone, and then, beyond it, the ruined arches of an old house, piles of rubble, heaps of scorched stone, and further away still, just outside the village, the burnt-out and deserted mill with the water babbling down on its way, the only thing that had not been burned or destroyed.

On the face of the monument, in clumsy capitals, were carved the words:
Here passed the infamous Blue Battalion that burned and massacred this village, killed our women and children, and hanged our men from these poles. To the memory of its dead the people of this place have raised this monument
. The village had now been moved to a spot lower down, near the bottom of the valley, and only the telephone poles, their bases thickly tarred, with an oblique supporting strut here and there, remained. The same poles from which, the story went, Colonel Z. had hanged men with his own hands. Their height varied according to the contours of the ground, their wires still stretched taut through space.

But today even the telegraph poles were swathed in the deep mist, and from where he stood the general could see nothing. It was as though an immense white sheet had been spread over everything below, over the memorial, over the poles, over the old mill and the crumbling arches, as though in readiness for some grand inauguration.

“You’ll catch cold,” the priest said as he passed the general and entered the tent. “It’s very damp.” The general followed him inside. It was lunchtime.

“Well, how did things go?”

“Quite well,” the priest said. “If the people from the co-operative come out to help us tomorrow on the far side of the stream, we shall be able to move on in four days.”

“I think the men will come. But the women may not. They feel that it’s an act of desecration to open up graves.”

“I should say that the women will probably come too. I rather suspect they derive a sort of secret satisfaction from the work.”

“You amaze me,” the general said. “Is it possible to derive satisfaction from opening up graves?”

“For them it’s a sort of belated vengeance.” The general shrugged his shoulders.

“And as a bonus it is also very remunerative work,” the priest continued. “We pay them well enough for it to be worth their while to drop everything else. With what they earn working just a few days for us they can buy themselves a nice little radio. They’re very fond of radios.”

“I’ve noticed,” the general said, yawning. “I’m beginning to be sick of living under canvas.”

“And the weather is getting steadily colder every day. Let’s hope this is the last camp we shall have to make in this area.”

“As I recall there’s still one more place in this direction we have to investigate. Somewhere up in the actual mountains, near a disused military supply route.”