The General of the Dead Army (7 page)

And this was the first time they had run into them again since that day.

“There they are,” the general said as he and the priest entered the restaurant.

They acknowledged one another with nods of the head.

The newcomers sat down and ate in their turn, mostly in silence. The expert and the priest did exchange a few words now and then, but the general, a hint of a scowl on his face, seemed put out about something. As soon as they had finished eating the expert went up to his room.

The general and the priest left the restaurant and went out into the lounge where the other general and the mayor were sitting smoking.

“We sit here like this every evening,” the mayor said. “We’ve been in this town a good week now, and this is how we’ve spent all our evenings. Where is one to go? They tell us that the place is very pleasant in summer, that there are various places of entertainment open; but at this time of year there are no foreign tourists, and also there’s this icy wind blowing off the river day and night.”

“We could have come here before,” the one-armed general said, “but the football championship was still going on, and they wouldn’t give us permission to excavate inside the stadium boundary until all the championship matches were over.”

“Can you imagine a more bizarre obstacle to have put in your way?” the mayor asked.

“Oh, it was reasonable enough really,” the other put in. “I know we could perhaps have begun by digging around the edges, not touching the actual field; but it wouldn’t have been very pleasant.

Imagine listening to all those spectators cheering their heads off at every goal while we were hunting for bones.”

“And what about the spectators?” the general said. “I don’t suppose they would have enjoyed the sight of graves gaping everywhere during the match.”

“Perhaps not,” said the one-armed general, “but I wouldn’t risk my hand in the fire on it.”

The general’s eyes dropped to the hand, the remaining hand, with which the other was holding his pipe. Then to the empty coat sleeve tucked into the right pocket.

Odd expression, he thought. And then: The arm must have been amputated at the elbow by the look of it.

“I don’t understand how they were allowed to build a football stadium on top of a military cemetery,” the priest said. “It is contrary to all the international agreements. You ought to have put in a protest.”

“We have,” the lieutenant-general told him, “but apparently our men’s bodies weren’t buried by the locals but by our own forces. And what’s more the job was done during the night. So no one knew anything about it.”

“I must say, however, that I don’t really believe that explanation,” the mayor put in.

“It doesn’t exactly convince me either,” the lieutenant-general said, “but again, I wouldn’t risk my hand in the fire over it.”

The general stared at the empty sleeve again.

“We have been fortunate. We have never encountered anything of that kind,” he said.

“Where are you excavating at the moment?” the mayor asked.

The general told him the name of the village. “You have extremely accurate lists at your disposal, I believe. Whereas ours are based solely on verbal testimony.”

“You might say that we are hunting in the dark,” the mayor put in.

“Difficult for you.”

“Extremely,” the lieutenant-general said. “We shall probably find no more than a few hundred or so sets of remains. And even then we shan’t be able to identify most of them.”

“Identification must indeed be a problem without accurate lists.”

“You, I assume, have full details as to the height and dentition of each of your bodies?”

“Yes,” the priest said.

“And moreover all your soldiers wore a medallion, isn’t that so?”

“Yes indeed.”

“Whereas our lists do not even give the heights of the dead we are looking for, and that scarcely facilitates our task.”

“Fortunately there are the metal buckles on the belts. They help enormously,” the mayor said.

Two young men came into the lounge and took seats over by the tall french windows which led out onto the hotel gardens, and, presumably, down to the river.

“What brand of disinfectant do you use on your remains?” the mayor asked.

“‘Universal 62’.”

“That’s efficient. Though the most efficient of all is the earth itself.”

“True, true. But there are cases when the earth itself has proved unable to fulfil that function.”

“You have found bodies still intact?”

“We certainly have!”

“Yes, so have we.”

“It’s extremely dangerous.”

“Yes, though the danger of infection is constant of course. The bacteria can sometimes resist destruction for many years and then suddenly recover all their virulence the moment the grave is opened.”

“Have you ever had any, er, unfortunate accidents?”

“Not so far.”

“Will you take coffee with us?” the lieutenant-general asked.

“Thank you, but no. I am going up to bed now,” the priest said.

“I must go up now too,” the mayor said. “I still have a letter to write.”

They wished the two generals good night and disappeared up stairs which were carpeted in a velvety crimson. The lounge was quiet. The only sound was that of the two young men talking in the far corner, fragments of whose conversation could occasionally be heard.

The general glanced over at the french windows and the darkness beyond.

“We are already worn out, and yet who knows what difficulties still lie ahead?”

“It’s rough country.”

“Very rough. I make use of the time we spend travelling by studying the terrain and applying it to some tactical problem of modern mountain warfare. But I always run into some obstacle or another that I can’t see any solution to. Yes, it’s rough country all right!”

His companion seemed to have no interest at all in the subject of mountain warfare however - rather to the general’s amazement.

“It’s strange,” the lieutenant-general began, “almost every day in that stadium, the football stadium where we’re excavating at the moment, I see a girl who comes to watch her young man training. When it rains she wears a blue raincoat, and she just stands there, not making a sound, tucked away between two pillars by the players’ entrance, gazing out at the footballers running to and fro on the grass. The empty stadium has a sad, you might even say a lugubrious, look about it, with all the curving tiers of those concrete stands glistening in the rain and the edges of the pitch all hacked about with our trenches. There’s nothing pretty there to look at except her, in her blue raincoat. All the time she’s there I spend my whole time just staring at her, while the workmen go on digging a few yards off - and that is the one and only distraction I have found in this town.”

“Wasn’t she horrified, seeing the remains being dug up?”

“Not in the slightest,” the other said. “She simply turned her head away towards the pitch and fixed her eyes on her young man running after the ball.”

The two men sat for a long moment, sunk in their armchairs, smoking their cigarettes, without exchanging a word.

Finally the general broke the silence with what was almost a laugh:

“We are the world’s most skilled grave-diggers. And we shall find them, those dead soldiers, no matter where they’re buried. They can’t escape us.”

His companion looked at him and said:

“Do you know, for several nights now I’ve had the same nightmare.”

“Ah yes, I have bad dreams too …”

“I see myself in that stadium where we’re digging now,” the lieutenant-general went on, “only it seems much bigger, and the stands are packed while we are digging up the field. Among the crowd I can see that girl in her blue raincoat. Every time a new grave is opened up the whole crowd of spectators cheers so loud I expect the place to come tumbling down, and the whole stadium gets to its feet and starts chanting the soldier’s name.

I listen and listen in the hope of being able to identify the dead man, but their cries sound muffled, and the noise is so loud I’m quite unable to catch any name. Just imagine - this happens pretty well every night.”

“It’s understandable enough. You’re just obsessed at the moment with identifying your dead.”

“Yes, yes, it must be that. It is a very worrisome business.”

The general was recalling a similar recurrent dream of his own. He was old and had been made curator of a military cemetery back in his own country, the very cemetery in which all the remains he had brought back from Albania were now buried. It was a large cemetery, immense in fact, and there were thousands of people walking to and fro along the paths between the graves, all carrying telegrams in their hands and looking for the graves of their kinsfolk. But none of them seemed to be able to find the grave they were looking for, because they all began shaking their heads in the most menacing way and he was filled with an icy terror. But just at that moment the priest rang his bell and all the people went away. Then he would wake up.

He was about to tell this dream, then suddenly changed his mind because it occurred to him that the other would think he had simply made it up.

“The task ahead of us is certainly no easy one,” he said instead.

“Agreed,” the other replied. “What we’re being asked to do is a sort of carbon copy of the war!”

“And perhaps it is even worse than the original.” They were silent for a moment.

“Have you been the object of provocations at any point?” the general asked.

“No. Or rather yes, but only once. Some children threw stones at us.”

“They attacked you with stones?” the general exclaimed, then, leaning over towards the other’s ear, he continued teasingly: “Had you put your foot in it?”

“It was a complicated business,” the lieutenant-general said. “We had mistakenly opened several Albanian graves under the impression that they were some of ours.”

“Oh, I see.”

“Yes, an unfortunate business all round. I’d really rather not think about it. Let’s have another coffee.”

“We shan’t sleep a wink if we do.”

“As if that mattered! It just means we shan’t have to dream those dreams of ours. And like anything that is repeated often enough, they do become really very boring.”

“True, verytrue.”

They ordered two more coffees.

Chapter without a Number

WHAT ELSE IS THERE FOR ME
to write? What remains but a monotonous chronicle of recurring details. Rain, mud, lists, reports, a variety of figures and calculations, a whole dismal technology of exhumation. And besides, just lately something strange is happening to me. As soon as I see someone - anyone at all - I automatically begin stripping off his hair, then his cheeks, then his eyes, as though they were something unnecessary, something that is merely preventing me from penetrating to his essence; and I envisage his head as nothing but a skull and teeth - the only details that endure. Do you understand? I feel that I have crossed over into a kingdom of bones, of pure calcium.

“I
T ALL HAPPENED TOWARDS
the beginning of the war,” the I café-owner began in broken English, with a slight stammer.

He had worked for many years in a New York bar and his odd speech was reminiscent of the sounds and silences of a nighttime bar. The general himself had insisted on being told the prostitute’s story by an actual inhabitant of the old, stone-built town, and no one, he was assured, knew all the details better than the café-owner.

Never mind if he butchers the language, the general decided; the whole story evolves under the sign of slaughter.

They had read the prostitute’s name only that morning, in the military cemetery on the outskirts of the town. Of all the remains they had located up to now she was the first woman they had come across and, when he was told something of how she came to be there, the general was curious to hear her whole story.

The general had in fact noticed the white headstone from quite a distance. It inevitably caught the gaze among all those twisted, blackened, rotting wooden crosses that in contrast seemed only the more crookedly set, and all those rusty helmets.

“A marble headstone!” the general had exclaimed. “An officer? Perhaps even Colonel Z.?”

They went straight over to the grave to read what was carved on the slab: “For Leader and for Country”. It gave a woman’s surname and Christian name, then her place of birth. She was from the same province as the general, though he did not tell anyone so.

“Yes, it happened right at the beginning,” the café-owner said in the tones of someone addressing a large audience. (For since he had told this story many times he had developed a particular narrative style for the purpose, introducing frequent parentheses enabling him to insert his own comments on the events. And with it a slightly rhetorical tone that nevertheless stopped short of actual grandiloquence.) “I was one of the first to hear the news. Not that I have any particular interest in such matters, you understand but, because I was always here in the café working, I naturally tended to be one of the first to learn of any event affecting our town. And that was how it was on that particular day. The café was full when the rumour first started, and we never did find out who started it. Some said it came from a soldier who’d spent the night in our hotel here and got blind drunk before leaving for the front in Greece. Others claimed that it originated from a certain Lame Spiri, who was always positively obsessed with such things. Not that it really mattered one way or the other. We were so amazed and shaken up that we didn’t really care whether it was the soldier or that blackguard Lame Spiri that the news actually came from.

“I ought to add here that it wasn’t easy to surprise us at that time. It was wartime for one thing, and we were hearing incredible, fantastic stories every day. And we all thought there was nothing left in the world that could surprise us after that day when we saw the anti-tank guns and the anti-aircraft guns with their long barrels rolling through our streets for the first time, making such a terrible din that we all thought the entire town was about to come tumbling round our ears. And we were even more convinced when the aeroplanes started fighting right over our heads, not to mention a lot of other things that happened after that.