The general wheeled around in surprise.
“Oh, hello,” he replied.
It was the lieutenant-general, standing outside the hotel on the pavement. He still had the left sleeve of his greatcoat tucked into his pocket, and the remaining hand still held a pipe. “How are you?”
The lieutenant-general drew on his pipe, then removed it from between his lips and watched the smoke curling up out of his mouth.
“Before anything else, though it’s a long time ago now of course, I do want to apologize to you over that nasty business last year. We did receive your complaint. I hope you will believe that I was in no way responsible, and that I was genuinely distressed at the incident.”
The general let his gaze rest on the other somewhat absently.
“Who was to blame then?” he asked.
“My second-in-command. He was behind the whole hideous mess. But why don’t we go and sit down somewhere, then I can explain the whole thing properly.”
“I’m sorry, but I really haven’t the time just now. Can’t we just talk for a while here?”
“In that case it would be better if we postponed it till this evening. But tell me first, how are you getting on with your work here?”
“Badly, as I told you,” the general answered. “The going is pretty tough.”
“Indeed it is.”
“And then on top of everything one of our workmen died.”
“Died? What of? Did you have an accident?”
“No, it was an infection.”
“How did he get it?”
“No one is quite certain. A bone perhaps, or a sliver of metal.”
The lieutenant-general looked duly shocked.
“You will have to compensate the family of course?”
The general nodded. Then after a brief silence he added:
“I’ve never seen so many mountains!”
“And there are still a lot to come!”
“No, we’ve finished. We’ve just come back from our final tour.”
“You’ve finished! You’re damned lucky then! I’ve got a lot more mountains ahead of me.”
“Mountains everywhere. And those young people everywhere terracing them into fields, have you seen them too?”
“Of course. They’re always up there digging away.”
“They’re clearing new land to grow cereal crops on.”
“In one place I noticed they’d sown wheat beside a railway track right up to the very edge of the ballast.”
“They’ll sow any scrap of land they can find. Presumably their present fields just aren’t sufficient for their needs.”
“They’re in a state of blockade, remember. The U.S.S.R. has refused to let them have any more wheat.”
“They’re certainly delighted to see the back of our soldiers, that’s for sure.”
“Indeed they are. The cemeteries are sown almost before we’ve emptied them. Instant deconsecration it’s called.”
The general laughed.
“But your work, how is that going?”
“Very badly indeed,” the other replied. “We’ve been rushing up hill and down dale all over Albania for eighteen months now, but the fact is that we’ve got very little to show for it.”
“You’ve had a great many setbacks, I take it.”
“A great many,” the lieutenant-general agreed with a sigh. “And as if that weren’t enough it now looks as though we’re going to have a very ugly scandal on our hands.”
“What do you mean?”
“Oh, it’s a nasty business. Haven’t you noticed that I’m on my own? By the way, I was about to ask you: where is your colleague, the reverend father?”
“Up in his room, I imagine.”
The other chuckled.
“I’m afraid a nasty suspicion crossed my mind,” he said. “Because you see my mayor is probably in very hot water just at this moment.”
“Oh? What has happened to him then?”
“He received an urgent recall,” the lieutenant-general said. “It’s several weeks now since we suspended our operations on his account.”
He waited for the other to show some curiosity, but as the general seemed to have his mind on other things, he repeated: “A very ugly scandal.”
“You don’t mean he’s misappropriated funds intended to finance your search?” the general eventually asked. “Worse. What’s befallen is a great deal worse.”
Then the general listened as the other described all that he had been suspecting for a good while: the promise given by the families to reward those who unearthed the remains of their nearest and dearest; the greed of the workers involved, who wanted above all to feather their own nests; the fraud practised on the first skeleton which had been falsely identified, then the second, then a whole string of others. Until one fine day …
Little by little the general continued to winkle the whole story out of him.
“Yes? What happened then?”
His colleague made a gesture as much as to say: what was bound to happen.
“The inevitable happened,” he went on. “Apparently it was one of the families that discovered the original substitution, and you know how such things snowball. In no time at all the slightest hint of such a thing becomes an absolute avalanche of suspicions, enquiries, reporters agog for scandal, the opposition which …”
“I’ve got it,” said the general without showing a hint of sympathy. “If I’ve understood you correctly, you’ve rebaptized the bones of unknown soldiers with the names of those men they had been particularly requested to look out for.”
“Not me, the others!” the lieutenant-general broke in.
“Of course.”
“The mistake arose because instead of doing as you did in collecting up your soldiers - I mean their skeletons - so as to send them off all together, we sent them a few at a time. If we’d done as you have, none of this horrible mix-up would have occurred.”
“One hell of a mix-up,” the general agreed.
He let his imagination run away with all that might constitute any general’s nightmare: the dispersal of his troops. The first signs of disbanding, the privates going absent, the officers tearing off their shoulder insignia to avoid recognition, and eventually, a general rout. He had thought that such a thing could only befall an army of the living, never one in a deep freeze. Well, this is precisely what had happened to his colleague.
He remembered his last press conference, when he was still back home, during which the flashbulbs simply accentuated the provocative nature of the reporters’ questions: “We’re told, general, that you’ve been furnished with the most precise data enabling you to achieve your mission at every step. Do you personally trust the accuracy of those lists and data on each soldier’s height?” They kept repeating the words “lists” and “data”
to make quite clear their own scepticism as to the insensitive, bureaucratic temper of the top brass in charge of the exercise. Time-servers, bar flies! he fumed as he called them to mind.
It was thanks to those lists and data that I suffered not a single casualty to my army! There they were, all present and correct, officers, men, runners, scouts, chaplains, and of course the signals boys who were shouting “Hello! Hello!” even as they fell, as though answering Death’s own call.
“A really nasty business,” commented the general after a long silence.
The other kept watching him in a daze.
“I begin to be very weary of the whole business. And I’m entirely on my own. How I envy you leaving tomorrow!” The general lit a cigarette.
“It’s in the evening especially that the hours seem interminable.
It’s even more depressing than all that rushing around and sleeping under canvas.”
“But what can you do about it!”
“To think that for a year and a half we’ve done nothing but hop from one mountain or valley to another as though we were geologists or something. And now, just when the end is in sight, we have this mess to face.”
“Like geologists, yes, that’s well said.”
“And think what strange deposits we’ve been searching for,” the lieutenant-general said. “What should we call them, geologically? Mortuary intrusions?”
The general smiled, then looked at his watch.
“You must excuse me,” he said, “I have a very full day ahead.”
“Well, general, I mustn’t keep you. I look forward to seeing you again this evening.”
“I shall be somewhere around. I shall come back here to the hotel when it’s all over.”
The general threw away his cigarette and set off towards the lifts. But at the last moment he turned about and walked back towards his colleague.
“Is there nothing that can be done about those eleven you took of ours?” he asked.
The lieutenant-general shrugged.
“Difficult, very difficult,” he said.
“But why? You must have the addresses of the families you sent them to.” The other smiled bitterly.
“That’s easily said, but just think of the consequences. Think what a shock it would be for those families suddenly to be asked to send back the remains!”
“Is that sufficient reason?”
“Possibly not, but there is even more to it than that,” the lieutenant-general said, “The mind boggles at the legal complications it would lead to. But in any case, let’s talk it over more fully this evening.”
“Agreed,” the general said, and walked off again towards the lifts.
I
T WAS A QUARTER PAST FIVE
when the banquet came to an end. The general waited until all the guests had left and only he and the priest remained. Then he drank two glasses of brandy straight off one after the other and walked out himself, without a word to the priest.
One more formality over and done with, he thought to himself with relief once he was outside on the boulevard again. You could hardly say the atmosphere was anything but lukewarm, but at least it’s all over!
He had thanked the Albanian authorities, on behalf of his people and the thousands of mothers concerned, for all the facilities that had been made available to them in their search. To which an Albanian politician, the same one who had originally met them at the airport, had replied by saying that they had done no more than fulfil a humanitarian duty towards another people with whom it was Albania’s wish to live in peace. At which they had all touched glasses and drunk a toast - and beneath the crystalline tinkling of the glasses it was as though a distant rumble of guns could be heard. No one can get rid of it, that muffled thunder, the general had thought to himself, and all of them here are aware of it, even though they refuse to admit it.
Now he walked slowly on among the crowds packing the streets, his ears assailed from every side by the babble of their foreign tongue against the deep background hum of the city. In Skanderburg Square an open-air concert was in progress. He advanced a little through the human sea then stood on his toes in order to get a better view. From the balcony of the Executive Committee building behind him two spotlights were beaming down their light onto the backs of the crowd, and from a little further off he could just catch a distinctive whirring sound. They must be making a film.
The general, his mind elsewhere, stood watching the dancers move and turn up on the stage.
The thunder was there, I know it was there, he said to himself again, that thunder beneath the transparent tinkling of the glasses. And not just the thunder of the big guns but the crackling of the machine-guns too, and the clicking of bayonets, and the clinking of mess-tins in the evening queue for hash. It was all there in the tinkling of those glasses, they were all aware of it, they could all sense it.
He felt a stab of pain in his eyes from the white glare of the spotlights. Thousands of human heads were patterning the square with their bizarrely projected shadows. The general felt a shiver go up his spine and began to fight his way back through the crowd. The spotlights were continually on the move, sometimes brandishing their blinding beams just above the crowd’s heads, sometimes just below them, sometimes on them, so that all the heads turned round, becoming uneasy faces, and making their shadows shift on the ground.
The general freed himself from the crowd and turned into the avenue that ran alongside the park towards his hotel. He was still seeing the representatives of two peoples, two states, sitting face to face and separated only by a few bottles and a few bowls of fruit.
Is that all that stands between us? the general had asked himself as they had touched their glasses the first time. Nothing but those brightly labelled bottles and those beautiful fruits freshly picked in the orchards and the vineyards along the coast? Then he had remembered those vineyards and those orchards plunged in the growing dusk, lining the roads that gleamed so pale and bright in the moonlight, and from which he could just make out the distant, lonely barking of a dog, and further off still the brightness of a shepherd’s fire.
“There is a telegram for you,” the hotel receptionist told him as he handed over the key of his room.
“Thank you.”
On the yellow envelope he noticed the word
urgent
in tiny letters. He opened it and read: “Have heard your noble mission accomplished stop Please send news colonel stop Z. family.”
He felt the blood rushing to his head. His temples were throbbing as though they were about to burst. He nevertheless made a great effort to keep control of himself, walked slowly over to a lift and almost fell into it. Whatever possessed you to get mixed up in this business anyway? he asked himself in the mirror. He observed the pallor of the skin, the drawn features, the irreversible wrinkles on the forehead, those three deep furrows, the middle one slightlylonger than the others, calling to mind the three lines that typists type at the bottom of a report.
“You’re washed out,” he told himself. “Emptied.”
He walked into his room and switched on the light. The first thing his eye encountered was the little porcelain figure beating its drum on top of the heap of letters and telegrams piled up on the bedside table.
He lay down and tried to sleep.
Outside, fireworks sputtered and exploded. The multicoloured lights came through the blinds and lay in stripes across the ceiling and walls of the room. He was back once more in that long room in the barracks, twenty years before, sitting with the rest of the recruiting board along one side of the big table. He saw the hands repeatedly unrolling the X-rays, then holding them up to the light, displaying the pale ribs against the ceiling; then came the verdict, a weary and disillusioned “Good!” They almost always said “good” even when there was a slight patch between the ribs. It was only when the patches were too obvious to be ignored that they murmured: “Rejected”. And it went on like that all day, every day. And the conscripts with their shaven heads were taken straight from there to the barracks, and from the barracks to the front, where the war had just begun.