The General of the Dead Army (24 page)

The feast gave promise of being a very successful one and of continuing far into the night. But just at the moment when the dancers were returning to their places a howl pierced the hubbub in the room. The general felt a sort of pinching inside his chest.

The noise hadn’t stopped and yet, strangely, everyone had heard the cry. No one would ever have thought old Nice could howl like that.

She sobbed as more tiny, high-pitched cries forced themselves from her throat. The silence that suddenly descended was so deep that you could hear the convulsive hiccups that were punctuating the old woman’s moans. But the silence lasted only a second. The general saw people rush towards the old woman and fuss around her. Someone was called over, and the poor woman who was now weeping hot tears, though heaven knows why, was quietened down a little.

If the old woman had really quietened down, as the general and those who were not close to her supposed, everything would have settled down again and perhaps the general would have stayed there very late, until far into the night, but old Nice began to weep again. It was evident that nothing they did succeeded in calming her, quite the contrary in fact. She began howling again; other voices rose around her, but they were quickly subdued by the power of her lamentation, which sliced through the general joy like a sharp blade. More people hurried over to surround the old woman, and the general had the feeling that the more fuss they made over her the more ear-piercing her lament would become. The musicians started to play again, but when old Nice uttered a fresh cry even more strident than any of her previous ones the instruments fell silent, as though intimidated. The general saw the cluster of people around the old woman shift and stagger as though before some violent assault; then Nice, escaping at last from the grasp of those restraining her, burst through and hurled herself towards him. For the first time the general was able to take a close look at the pale, emaciated face, the staring eyes swollen with tears, and the tiny, frail body. “What has happened to her? What does she want? Why is she crying?” the general asked, suddenly sober again. But no one answered his questions. They rushed after the old woman;

two women grasped her arms and tried to coax her away, but she simply began howling again and advanced till she was standing face to face with the general. He looked down at the hate in those twisted features, but had no idea what the cause of it could be. She managed to shout a few words at him, to wave her arms at him in fury, to shriek in his face; and he just stood there in front of her, pale as wax. It lasted only a few seconds, then they took the old woman away, dragging her backwards by her arms. Then, fighting free, she rushed over to the door and vanished.

The general stayed standing where he was, and no one attempted to explain what old Nice had said to him. No one knew that the priest could speak Albanian. Everyone had clustered now around the weeping bride and her mother, the mistress of the house, who was standing looking very pale and crossing herself.

“I warned you,” the priest said. “We ought not to have come.”

“What happened?” the general asked.

“This is hardly the moment to tell you. I’ll explain later.”

“You were right,” the general said. “I went too far.”

The groups of people who at the beginning of the evening had seemed to him like a rustling, multicoloured thicket were now transformed in his eyes into a dark winter forest. Heads, arms, hands, long fingers, were all waving, bending this way and that like branches and twigs stripped by the storm wind, and over their sombre agitation, with a dry croaking, anxiety hovered like a black bird.

“What right have they to come to our weddings?” one of the young men said.

“Hush! You mustn’t say things like that.”

“Why not?” another young man said. “They even have the gall to get up and want to dance.”

“We couldn’t turn them away, could we now? At a wedding all are welcome, it is the custom.”

“What a custom! And what does poor old Nice say about a custom like that?”

“Hush! You don’t want them to hear you.”

“Don’t worry,” someone else put in, “there’s far too much noise, they couldn’t hear, even if they understood our language.”

And it was true that the general and the priest were unable to hear anything that was being said. They simply stood looking round at the encircling faces, the general’s eyes resting only briefly on those of the men and boys but dwelling longer on the women, who in their great black shawls had the air of a chorus in an ancient tragedy.

Then suddenly he was filled with alarm. Why had he come? What insane whim had brought him here? Up until now everything had gone off more or less smoothly. He had been escorted and protected by the laws everywhere he went. But this evening he had taken a great risk. Whatever could have got into his head to make him come to this wedding feast tonight, alone with just the priest? Here he was outside the protection of laws and regulations. Anything could happen to them here without anyone being held responsible.

“Let us go,” he said abruptly. “Let us leave immediately.”

“Yes,” the priest said. “Yes, let us leave. We have been grossly insulted. That old woman made the most offensive allegations about us.”

“Then we ought to refute them before we leave. But what did she say exactly, the old woman?”

The priest was about to tell him when the master of the house came over.

“Sit down again,” he said, gesturing towards the big table. Then he made a sign to the women who were waiting on the guests and they brought raki and meze.
³

The general and the priest exchanged glances then turned back to the master of the house.

“These things will happen,” the old man said. “But please stay, I beg of you. Be seated again.”

Embarrassed at standing there, feeling all eyes upon them, they both sat down again. They felt somehow that people would pay them less attention seated.

A certain order seemed to have returned to the big room now, and the guests had resettled themselves at the tables. The general found the same man beside him as before, the one who had attempted to translate the complicated toasts earlier, and this neighbour now explained to him that Nice was a slightly half-witted old woman who had been widowed during the last war, her husband having been hanged during the reprisal operation carried out by Colonel Z.’s “Blue Battalion”. The general also learned that the colonel had subsequently ordered the wretched woman’s daughter to be brought to his tent at night. She was scarcely fourteen, and at dawn, on her way home from his tent, she had thrown herself down a well. And it was in fact the very next night that the colonel had disappeared. Unaware of the girl’s death, he had apparently gone to her home with the intention of seeing her again. He had left a soldier outside to guard the house and remained inside a long time - much longer than seemed necessary in fact, but the soldier had been given orders not to move till dawn. Next morning there was no one at all to be found inside the house and no one had any idea what had happened to the colonel. Some said that he had received an urgent summons to return to Tirana, others explained his absence in a variety of ways, but the officers of his own battalion were silent on the matter. Two days later the troops left the district.

All this information was conveyed in snatches, in broken and disconnected sentences that struck at his temples like hammer blows.

Meanwhile the music had begun again, though no one got up to dance for a while. Eventually, however, a few women decided to do so, and at last everyone began to feel that the incident with old Nice was over and done with, forgotten by all except the old woman herself. The general remained where he was, sitting at the table, in a state of stunned paralysis that prevented him from concentrating his thoughts on anything at all. Then his eyes met the priest’s once more.

“I still want to know what the old woman said.”

The priest’s grey eyes stared into his, and the general felt uncomfortable.

“She thinks you are a friend of Colonel Z. And the mere sight of you puts her in a frenzy.”

“Me, a friend of Colonel Z.?”

“Those were her words.”

“And what put that idea into her head? Perhaps because we spent the evening enquiring about Colonel Z.,” the general said musingly, as though talking to himself.

“Very possibly,” the priest answered curtly.

The general’s black mood grew still deeper. He no longer saw or heard anything that was going on around him.

“I shall stand up and tell them,” he said suddenly. “I shall stand up and make a public statement here and now that I am not a friend of Colonel Z.’s, and that as a soldier I abhor his memory.”

“Why ever should you want to do that? As an apology to these peasants?”

“No. For the good name and the honour of our army.”

“And will the good name of our army be sullied because one old Albanian woman has insulted it?”

“I want to explain to them that all our officers did not stoop so low, to the point of getting themselves killed by a woman!”

The priest’s eyebrows flicked.

“We are not here to pass judgements of that kind,” he said slowly. “Judgement is the prerogative of Him who is above.”

“They really look as though they do believe I was a friend of his,” the general went on. “Can’t you see how they’re looking at me? Just look round you. Look at their eyes.”

“Are you afraid?” the priest asked.

The general threw him a furious glance. He was on the point of making a savage reply, but then he felt the thunder of the drum against his temples, and the words were frozen on his lips.

The general was afraid in fact. He had gone too far that evening. He had yielded to impulse. Now what he must do was make a cautious retreat. He must immediately assert the gulf that lay between Colonel Z. and himself. He must somehow rid himself of the colonel, as he would of a lump of mud stuck to his boot.

The situation, it is true, now seemed to be settling down to normality again; but that was only on the surface. He sensed that inside this amorphous organism there was something still simmering. It could be seen from people’s eyes, it could be sensed from the whispering that was going on. And then, behind the door, out in the passage, alongside the thick cloaks and the coats, hanging on a row of nails in the wall, were the guests’ rifles. The priest had told him that murders frequently occurred at Albanian weddings.

They must act now, before it was too late. If they left too abruptly, then some drunken guest might very well shoot them in the back. Dogs always chase a fleeing quarry with redoubled fury. They must contrive some means of effecting a cautious retreat. The general stared in a daze once more at the whirling, dancing, laughing crowd all around him; then his eyes came to rest on the line of old women who had not moved from their seats since the beginning of the evening, with their silent faces and their slightly bowed heads, eternal chorus on the sidelines of that eternal scene; and abruptly tired of it all he let his head sag forward and was silent.

The drum sent out its muffled thunder through the room again, the clarinet pierced the heart of the feast with its raucous and heart-rending cry. The men, sitting at their tables, had broken into a song, and the general was back in the mountains seeing the dusk creep down from the peaks; now he was listening to the piercing voices of the women as they sang with lowered heads; it was an oppressed song, cut into short phrases by the urgent interruptions of the male singers; like the panting of a woman in the embrace of the man she loves.

“I think it is high time we left,” the general said.

The priest nodded.

“This is a good moment.”

“We must get up quietly.”

“Yes of course.”

“The main thing is not to draw attention to ourselves.”

“You get up first. I’ll follow.”

“The thing is to take it easy.”

It was nearly midnight. The feast was at its height and everyone, or almost everyone, had totally forgotten old Nice when suddenly, just as the two foreigners were preparing to leave, she reappeared. It was perhaps the general who was the first to become aware of her return. He suddenly sensed her presence the way an old huntsman senses the approach of a jungle tiger. Seeing people beginning to buzz and whisper around the doorway he immediately heard a voice crying in the depths of his being: “She is there!,” and felt himself go pale. This time the old woman was not weeping, nor could her voice even be heard; yet everyone could sense that she was there, at the centre of the group by the door. The band went on playing, but no one was listening to the music now. The group at the door increased in size. People were trying to puzzle out why old Nice had come back. And then, possibly influenced by her appearance, possibly by her supplications, the people by the door moved aside to let her pass, and she moved forward into the room amid general exclamations.

She was drenched through, covered with mud, her face as pale as death; and she was carrying a sack on her back.

The general rose mechanically to his feet and moved to meet her. He did not need to be told that he was the person she had come to see. He walked towards her without being asked, like one of those animals that become spellbound by a predator’s presence as soon as they scent it, and run towards their fate rather than attempting to flee from it.

The guests clustered around them. Everyone was tongue-tied.

The old woman took her stand in front of the general, fixed him with a slightly uncertain gaze, as though it was not him she was seeing but his ghost, and in a cracked voice punctuated by coughs she delivered herself of a very short speech that was obviously intended for him but of which he understood only the one word
vdekje-
death.

“Tell me what she is saying!” the general cried, like a dying man calling for help.

His plea was met with silence. Whereupon he threw a glance around him and met the eyes of the priest. The priest came over. “She claims that she once killed one of our officers and wishes to know whether or not you are the general who has come to collect the remains of the soldiers killed in the last war,” the priest said.